The Star Was the Father's Stare Christmas 1C 2021

 

The Star Was The Father’s Stare                          Christmas 1 C 2021

I was driving up the Jarrettsville Pike on my way to Christ Church Forest Hill, Rock Spring Parish for my first Christmas morning there. Just past Hess Road and Royal Farms, in a field on my left, sitting on the ground and facing me – watching as if somehow expecting me to drive by at just that instants – was an American Bald Eagle. I slowed down. We sized one another up.

 

The Eagle is the sign, the symbol, for John the Evangelist, he of the Fourth Gospel – a story of Jesus unlike the other three in so many ways. I will be reading the opening cadences of John in just a short while, I thought. And he seems to be asking, in the surprise appearance of this majestic bird, if I am up to the task. It was intimidating and exhilarating all at once. The eagle in the field seemed to possess an ancient wisdom. Just like the storyteller of the Fourth Gospel who means to take us back to a time before time itself. “In the beginning…”

 

We have heard this before. They are the opening words of Hebrew Scripture, and thus of the Bible itself: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

 

John is a poet, and is pointing us all the way back to the time before time, a place before there was space. There was formlessness, emptiness, a void, lurking in the darkness that covered everything, when all of a sudden, the breath, the wind, the spirit from God hovered, swept, was brooding over the face of the deep waters of chaos.

 

John’s first audience recognizes this. Their world was factions against factions; a foreign presence of brutality sucking all the resources and money out of the local economy; Roman crosses lining the sides of the famous Roman roadways, via Romana, as reminders of what happens to anyone who challenges the Imperial God Caesar and his bureaucratic and military minions. The world as it had been was broken. Formless. Without sense. So utterly unlike the resulting world God had imagined and created “in the beginning.” A world of light.

 

This is poetry. John imagines it is time to begin again. To start over. To go back to the beginning. John imagines that Jesus is the new beginning. Jesus is the light. That Jesus sets out on a mission of what the Jewish people would call tikkun olam – repair of the world. It is at times like those which John inhabited, and times like these which we inhabit, that the world needs the poetic imagination – which is why enormous swaths of Hebrew and Christian scriptures are written in poetry. It is why the entire Quran is one long poem. All this sacred poetry is meant to be recited in public, often sung, in the original languages so that it sounds like poetry once again.

 

We need not understand the original Hebrew, Koine Greek and Arabic – for just the sound is enough to work on our imaginations; to inspire us to find new ways, better ways to repair the world. As we heard on Christmas Eve, Jesus leaves us with only one job to repair the world: Love. Love God. Love Neighbors. Love Ourselves.

 

Poets, poetry, and repair of the world. Joseph Brodsky, self-exiled from the Soviet Union, the first U.S. poet to become a Nobel Laureate in Literature, and then Poet Laureate of the United States, used to write a Christmas poem every year:

In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than

to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain,

a child was born in a cave in order to save the world;

it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart.

 

To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast,

                                                                                    the steam

out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior – the team

of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar.

He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.

 

Keenly without blinking, through pallid stray

Clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away –

From the depth of the universe, from its opposite end – the star

was looking into the cave. And the star was the Father’s stare.

                        December 24, 1987/translated by the author

 

Somehow Brodsky captures what John is urging us to imagine: before there was anything at all, Jesus, the word become flesh was always there – the strange way in which God the Father from 14 billion light years across the universe looking into the cave as the star. Stars – from which we are all made – we are stardust. The starlight travels from the source of all creation to see its story begin again as a baby. A story of setting out to repair the world with one singular strategy: Love.

 

When sentenced to five years in a Siberian labor camp, Brodsky was asked by a judge what his profession was? Brodsky responded: a poet. Who recognizes you as a poet? No one. Did you study this? This? How did you become a poet? You didn’t even finish high school? I didn’t think you could get this from school. How then? Brodsky: I think that it…comes from God.

 

This is what John was saying nearly 2000 years ago: it all comes from the Word, from God, from the Word become flesh to dwell among us. It’s not a matter of how this happens, but rather what does it mean. It means to repair the world we have only one singular job: Love.

 

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. … From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” From the depths of the universe, from its opposite end, the star looks into the cave of our hearts. The star is the Father’s stare. Does it find the Love God’s Son gave us to tend? To share?

To give away with abandon? John imagined this is what we would all be doing by now. Perhaps that’s what the Eagle I saw that first Christmas morning wanted to know: Where’s the love John and the Word become flesh came to announce? The eagle seems to know: like poetry, Love comes from God. It only needs to be accepted into our hearts. Amen.

Christmas Spirit Year Round Christmas Eve 2021

 

Christmas Spirit Year Round        Christmas Eve 2021

We come from Love. We return to Love. And Love is all around. For God is Love.

 

“I was asked to contribute to an Advent booklet of daily meditations,” said Nancy, as we stood in Clark’s Ace Hardware in Ellicott City. When she’s not holding down the front desk at Fairhaven, a Life Care community, she works at Clark’s part-time. The Advent booklet is for the residents at Fairhaven where she welcomes visitors, distributes packages and mail that does not fit into the resident’s mailboxes, answers the phone, and other duties as assigned. When my mother lived there Nancy and my mother were best friends. Nancy would make sure the dining room knew that my mother would not be coming down – ever. And Nancy was interested in my mother’s presentations on art, art history and architecture, as she had done on behalf of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was a volunteer and had at one time been a student in the museum’s art school. Nancy does anything and everything for all the residents at Fairhaven – a true model of God’s love for others – all others. She is the Love that is all around.

 

“So, I was given the story of the Angels appearing to the shepherds for December 24^th,” said Nancy. “I thought I would try something new, putting a modern look on it. When they are told to leave their flock and go see the baby in Bethlehem, they start asking themselves things like: ‘What kind of gift should we bring? It’s got to be better than any other baby gifts. And who has a credit card that’s not maxed out?’ Some of the residents read the whole booklet at once and stopped by to tell me how much they enjoyed a fresh look at how the birth of the Christ child might take place today!”

 

I can see them now: seasonal farm workers leaving the fields, piling into their Ford F-150 with 286,000 miles on it, heading into Bethlehem to find a working ATM machine. Then it’s off to the nearest Safeway to purchase some gift cards and anything else that the first-time parents Mary and Joseph might need. It being Christmastime the check-out lines were long and moving slowly. Finally, they are only two shoppers from check out when it happens. Later, the baby they were going to honor would turn their miracle into a parable.

 

“The Kingdom of God is like four seasonal workers standing in line, waiting to purchase some much-needed groceries, when a man at the head of the line turns and asks, ‘Does anyone in line have a Safeway shopper’s card and use the gas points?’ We do, they say, and hold up a red card. The man then proceeds to check out over $400 dollars of gift cards and other items, putting all those gas points on their card! That was enough for them to drive home to Guatemala and back for the holidays to see their families. They were beside themselves with gratitude and thanksgiving, tears rolling down their faces, thanking the man over and over again. How faithfully did this man’s generosity reflect the Love of the Christ child – the Love that is all around?”

 

Actually, that just happened to me at the Enchanted Forest Safeway in Ellicott City. Talk about enchanted! The Spirit of Christmas breaks in on us when we least expect it.

 

Back to Nancy. She then told me that several Christmases ago, she was walking through Clark’s Ace Hardware and noticed something strange with the Creche that was on display. In the manger, instead of a Baby Jesus was a lamb. Who would put a lamb in the manger, she thought to herself? When she found whoever set it up, he told her that there was no Baby Jesus in the box so he put the lamb in there instead. She then went through every box of the Creches and so it was: no Baby Jesus, only lambs! “Someone in the factory had only one job,” said Nancy, “to put Baby Jesus in the box with the rest of the Nativity characters and failed to do it. And someone else had one job to inspect the boxes before they left for Ace Hardware stores all across America. What an incredible fail!” We laughed about it.

 

Later I had two thoughts about the case of the missing Baby Jesus. First, I recalled that John the Baptizer in John’s Gospel is forever pointing to Jesus down by the River Jordan and telling anyone who would listen, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” He points to the end of the story of Jesus where, unlike the other three gospels, Jesus is crucified on the day of preparation for the Passover – the day the Paschal Lambs are slaughtered, to re-enact the night the slaves in Egypt used the Blood of the Lamb over their door posts to save them from the Angel of Death. Jesus, suggests John, is the Paschal Lamb whose body and blood saves us all.

 

Which points to the second truth of the Incarnation of God in man who comes to dwell among us: the wood of the manger is the hard wood of the cross. That is, he came into our world a fully formed human baby, with all the vulnerabilities and dangers, as well as the joys and love of human life as we all live it and know it. He would grow up to give us one single commandment: to love one another as God in Christ loves us; to love God, love neighbor, and to love ourselves. That’s it. Like the two people in the factory who had only one job, to put Baby Jesus in the box, we are given one single job: to Love.

 

I started reading a book by John Pavlovitz, an Evangelical Pastor, blogger, speaker, and hilarious proclaimer of the Good News of Jesus Christ. In a new, book John writes, “As a long time Christian, by aspiration (if not always in practice), I often envision an exasperated Jesus coming back, and the first words out of his mouth to his followers as his feet hit the pavement being, ‘You had one job: Love. So, what happened?’ I wonder what massive wave of excuses and rationalizations would come flooding from the mouths of the faithful multitude in front of him, how they might justify their mistreatment of the assailed humanity in their care, the verbal and theological gymnastics they’d attempt to avoid culpability for their cruelty.”[i]

 

That made me think that perhaps a lamb in the manger is just right. The Lamb of God who left us with only one job the night before he died, as we all will one day: Love. People like my friend Nancy and the man I had never seen or met before at the Safeway got it. They know how to Love others as effortlessly as a fish breathes under water. So does my friend Pamela Pruitt, who at an Advent workshop I recently led wrote a poem that pretty well sums up why it is each year we gather on this night to remember who we are and whose we are. So that we can begin again to tackle the one job Christ left for us all: Love.

 

Hymns

If Jesus is born

Again

Each year

At Christmas time,

 

He never

Grows old

Like the rest

Of us;

 

He does not

Need to learn

Our lessons.

 

But,

He allows us

To sing

His songs

.At our leisure,

Until

We know

All the words

 By heart.

                                             -  Pamela Pruitt,  Dec. 4, 2021

We come from Love. We return to Love. And Love is all around. That third one is us. We are created to be the Love that is all around. This is the heart of Christm

 

That’s it. Three points and a poem. In the immortal words of Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim, “God bless us, everyone.” Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Good Night!

Amen.

---

[i] John Pavlovitz, If God is Love Don’t Be a Jerk, Westminster John Knox Press, p.2. The book is subtitled, Finding a Faith that Makes Us Better Humans.

Together We Are One with The Holy One of God Advent 4C

Together We Are One with The Holy One of God                                                      Advent 4C

It is that time of year when a female skunk, who otherwise leads a solitary life much of the rest of the year, leaves the cushy den she has established with leaves and grasses to go join another three or five or nine females, ball up together into a single ball of black and white stripes, to keep one another warm in the coldest days of early winter. What matters most is not whose nest, but togetherness. Each shares her body heat with the others so that thick or thin, they all preserve enough body fat to get through to spring time. Fat is their only food, and tucked into the huddle, what each has goes further and longer. She does this not only for herself, but for there to be enough of her come spring to bear several new lives. So, for now, as her body shrinks along with the others, they wrap the ball tighter and share the warmth that together, they are one. i

It is a similar need for togetherness that urges the unmarried Mary of Nazareth to make the 80- or 90-mile trip down to the Judean hill country to visit her kinswoman, Elizabeth. Like Mary, Elizabeth finds herself surprisingly with child after years of being the barren wife of a Temple priest, Zechariah, who currently is unable to speak. Mary has no husband as of yet, and Elizabeth has no one to speak with. They need one another to ponder just what God has instore for them and for the children they will give to heal a broken world.

God entrusts God’s own future to these two, otherwise, ordinary women. They each carry a dimension of God’s promise and hope that “however dark the moment or days may be, the redemptive impulse of God is ever present in human life.” Their respective conceptions suggest, writes Howard Thurman in his book, The Mood of Christmas, “… that the growing edge of human life, the hope of every generation, is in the birth of a child. The stirring of a child in the womb is the perennial sign of humankind’s attack on bigotry, blindness, prejudice, greed, hate, and all the host of diseases that make … life a nightmare and a holocaust.” ii

As soon as Mary arrives, the child that is to become John, the prophet who calls all Israel to repent, gives a good kick in Elizabeth’s womb signaling that the One who is to come is already here. [Luke 1:39-55]. It seems that when the world is at its darkest, God chooses two women to carry God’s hope of turning the world right-side-up again.

Each woman becomes a poet, putting into verse just how they understand their respective predicaments. Elizabeth sings out loud as the one to become John dances with joy in her womb! All tidings of comfort and joy! No one else but Mary and Elizabeth can understand just what is happening within them. They need to be together in their shared miracles.

Then Mary sings a response of her gratefulness at being God’s chosen mother, spinning a vision in which the hungry will be filled with good things; the rich sent away empty; the mighty will be brought down from their thrones; the lowly will be lifted up. The irony of that last vision cannot possibly be known to her: that to be lifted up from death in a tomb, first her child will be lifted up upon a Roman Cross. Yet, promises will be kept as they were to Sarah, Hannah, Ruth, and all those strong women of faith who when faced with the promises of God asked, “How shall this be?” When given God’s total trust, each in her own way says, “Yes! Let it be to me according to your Word.”

How shall this be? This is the question for all of us. Because at the end of the day, as Jesus would say to Nicodemus, a leader of the Pharisees, we all need to be reborn of the Spirit, the Spirit of the Word; the Word that was with God; the Word that is God; the Word that comes to dwell among us! Emmanuel – God with us! But I am getting ahead of our story.

Like Nicodemus, we find this still difficult to understand. Yet, as Maggie Ross (nee Martha Reeves, not of the Vandellas!) recalls, certain Cistercian monks believe we all must be taken into Mary to be born again with Christ. The paradox being, that only then can we bear the Word, the Christ, as well. That is, Mary teaches us to say “Yes,” just as Sarah said, “Yes,” and Elizabeth said, “Yes,” as Jesus said, “Yes,” to the cup that did not pass from him that night before he was lifted up. Just as we say, “Yes,” each time the bread and the cup is passed to us. iii

And who knows, perhaps one day each of us will become poets and prophets like Elizabeth and Mary. Perhaps like Joy Cowley, a storyteller from New Zealand, we might find new ways to sing our love of God and God’s vision for repairing a broken world:

A Modern Magnificat

by Joy Cowley

I’m dancing in the mystery of God.

The light of the Holy One is within me

and I am blessed, so truly blessed.

This goes deeper than human thinking.

I am filled with awe

at Love whose only condition

is to be received.

The gift is not for the proud,

for they have no room for it.

The strong and self-sufficient ones

don’t have this awareness.

But those who know their emptiness

can rejoice in Love’s fullness.

It’s the Love that we are made for,

the reason for our being.

It fills our inmost heart space

and brings to birth in us, the Holy One. iv

Advent. What matters most is togetherness like Mary, Elizabeth and the female skunks. And to be filled with awe at a Love, whose only condition is to be received. Amen.

---

[i] Gayle Boss, All Creation Waits, Paraclete Press, p.50

[ii] Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas, Friends United Press, p.16

[iii] Maggie Ross, The Fire of Your Life, Paulist Press, p.20

[iv] Borrowed from John Shelby Spong’s website “A New Christianity for A New World” 19 Dec 2007 

Bearers of the Light Advent 2C

 

Bearers of the Light  -  Advent 2C/ Malachi 3:1-4, Luke 3:1-6

Do you ever think the world is upside-down? Malachi did. Malachi, the unknown prophet from an unknown era was hoping and waiting for the coming “day of the Lord” to set things right-side-up once again. The Hebrew prophets in general agreed that the world which God created “is good,” with all the resources necessary for all people and all creatures to thrive, but had ended up with most of these resources in the pockets of a few powerful people through theft and hoarding leaving little else for everyone else. Malachi was particularly hard on the Temple priests who he thought had become corrupt and lazy. Malachi is confident that will all change on the day of the Lord, and that a messenger shall come first to “prepare the way.”

 

The question is, says Malachi: “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” When he appears to turn things right-side-up again with the “goods” of creation falling out of the hoarder’s pockets to rain upon the poor, the widow, the orphan and the resident alien. To return to those days when the world was “good.”  Many still wait for that day!

 

Centuries later, Zechariah, a priest in Jerusalem during the time of the Roman occupation, is going about his priestly duties one day in the Temple when an angel appears to announce that his wife, Elizabeth, heretofore barren, shall bear a son, name him John, Yohanan, “YHWH is gracious.” John will be filled with the Holy Spirit and will “make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” The old man stutters in disbelief. The angel assures him it is true, but for his disbelief Zechariah will be mute until the child is born. [Luke 1:1-80]

 

 Elizabeth bears a son. On the eighth day at the babe’s circumcision they are asked for a name and Elizabeth says, “John.” But you have no relatives named John, the people say. You should name him Zechariah, they say. The mute priest takes a tablet and writes, “His name is John!” Immediately his tongue is loosed and he begins to sing and praise God for showing “mercy to our fathers” and to us. “This was the oath he swore to our father Abraham, to set us free from the hands of our enemies,” and turn the world right-side-up again! “You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way, to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.” Suddenly, after months of silence, the old man is a poet and a prophet himself.

 

The text concludes, “The child grew and became strong in spirit, and was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel.” It was in the wilderness that YHWH, the God of the Exodus, forged a disparate band of slaves into a new people, a people of God, strong in spirit. The wilderness will be that place that the young man Jesus will go, “driven by the Spirit,” to become discern what it means to be God’s Beloved as the voice proclaims at his baptism by John.

 

At the appointed time, when hoarders of fortune and power like Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanias were ruling over Israel, and Annas and Caiaphas were the Temple priests, the people heard “Thunder in the desert!” John, like his father before him, began to speak. And the first words out of his mouth were those sung centuries before as Isaiah announced the liberation of God’s people from the wilderness of Exile in Babylon:

“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God!” John proclaims real power and truth against the so called “rulers of the age,” the thieves and hoarders of the Empire and the Temple. The very Temple priests whom Malachi had called upon to reform their ways.

 

We are told all the people left the city and the towns to stream out into the wilderness to be with John, the man filled with the Spirit, preparing the people and the way for the one who comes to set the world right-side-up again. The one who will shower the people with God’s Mercy – a mercy so wide you cannot get around it, so high you cannot get over it.

 

Mercy comes and calls us all to join in a life of mercy for all people; a life of enough resources for all. And the Malachi’s question remains: “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” Zechariah had sung that this mercy will consist of teaching and forgiveness – that to prepare for the day of the Lord’s arrival is to become a people schooled in the ways of YHWH’s Love and Merch, and who know how to forgive as God forgives. Forgiveness is love, love is forgiveness. John knows all about this Way of the Lord.

 

John was emptied in he wilderness so as to be filled with God and the Spirit; so that he might become, as Jesus says after John’s death, a lamp to shine on the path, the way, for us to welcome the coming of the Lord. John wants us to be prepared to welcome Mercy, Love and Forgiveness as he comes to greet us. John knows that sometimes this Mercy and Love can be unbearable. We all know what it is like to be in a supermarket as a child, having a tantrum and our mother’s or father’s arm around us, loving us at our worst, writes Maggie Ross: “We remember the rage, not only the anger at being thwarted, but the even greater rage at being loved all the same. It is the hardest thing in the world for that little kid to pass through the terrible loneliness from rage, to the grief that burns the anger from us so that we can accept our parent’s love. Or, Gods… The wrath of God is his relentless compassion, pursuing us even when we are at our worst. Lord, give us mercy to bear your mercy.” [i]

 

Malachi, Isaiah, Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary and Jesus all lived in an upside-down world. They all spent time in some kind of wilderness. They all heard and accepted words like, “prepare the way of the Lord,” “do not be afraid,” “make the rough places smooth.” Malachi envisions that God’s wrath, God’s love, God’s mercy are all the same thing – and that the Lord is like a “refiner’s fire … he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify” us and refine us like gold and silver, until we present offerings of Mercy, Love and Forgiveness to the Lord in righteousness.

 

We all live together in the wilderness of an upside-down world in need of repair. We do not flee this wilderness, we go into it as John did, or we are driven into it like Jesus. We go into the wilderness to be empowered to bear the Word, as the Spirit empowered the prophets bear God’s Word; as John proclaimed his coming; as Mary bore him. We pray: Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One, have Mercy upon us. Wherever and whenever we are in the wilderness with John, we become like John, “bearers of the light, lamps in the windows of God’s house, fired with the oil of repentance, keeping us burning as we wait for him. Jesus, Son of the living God, to be borne in us today.”[ii] Amen.

---

[i] Maggie Ross, The Fire of Your Life, p 136-137.  

[ii]  Ibid, p 141

https://www.genocidewatch.com/

Just Breathe Advent 1C

  Just Breathe

“…cast off the works of darkness…put on the armor of light…” (Collect for Advent 1)

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise…” (Jeremiah 33:14)

“To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul; my God, I put my trust in you…”  (Psalm 25:1)

“…stand up and raise your heads…Look at the fig tree and all the trees…Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life…Be alert at all times, praying…”  (Luke 21:25-36)

 

Lots of imperatives on this first Sunday of Advent – New Year’s Day for Christians around the world! On top of the busy-ness that marks life between Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, it appears as if there is a lot of work to be done in Advent to. With cards to get out, presents to purchase, trees to decorate, cookies to bake and all the rest, how on Earth are we to have the time to cast off, put on, lift up our heads, look at trees, be on guard, and be alert? Oh yes, all the time praying?

 

Or, as Paul neatly sums it up, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing…” (I Thess 5:16-17)

 

All the while, as Jeremiah and Luke’s Jesus point out, “The days are surely coming,” and indeed, already seem to be here with all kinds of calamities in the heavens and on earth seeming to surround us on all sides, every minute of every day. Why, even gift giving is under siege. Every year we believe it is our patriotic duty to purchase more and more gifts so that at the end of the Christmas Season when we hear that this year’s purchases surpassed the previous year’s, we can feel proud. But we are already being prepared for disaster even in our rush to snatch up all good gifts around us because the very merchandise we need to purchase to eclipse that sacred number are stranded on cargo ships for which there are not enough laborers in the field to unload them; not enough trucks and drivers to deliver them; not enough stockroom workers to put them on the shelves.

 

Do we even have time to hear what Jesus is saying? “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.” Dissipation: the squandering of money or resources, often in the pursuit of happiness. Is it possible that being urged to shop until we drop ultimately does not lead to happiness? That it may even lead to missing that day, that moment in time when Jesus will return, to fulfill the promises made to Israel and the House of Judah, and to you and to me? To return in glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead, and raise us to eternal life immortal?

 

Advent, it seems, is to be a time of prudent preparation and joyous expectation! All the usual holiday hustle and bustle simply diverts us from the true gifts of the season: an awareness of the nearness of God and God’s love, and compassion for all the world. All the rest, he says, is a trap!

 

The Good News lies in “Being Alert.” Which means praying. Praying without ceasing. It seems like that may be difficult to do. Yet, we are those people who pray week in and week out for the “inspiration of the Holy Spirit.” To inspire means to breathe in. Each time we breathe in, we inspire the breath, the spirit, the ruach of God. The same breath that hovered over the face of the waters in the beginning. The same breath that God breathed into a handful of moist dust to give life to the first person – a person created in the image of God. The most basic form of prayer is what we all do without ceasing: breathe.

 

The most basic form of prayer is to be attentive to our breathing. Breathing in, I dwell in the present moment. Breathing out, I know it is a wonderful moment. Present Moment/Wonderful Moment. Letting go of dissipation, letting go of worry, just breathing is the prayer that helps us to be attentive to the very spirit of God, the Spirit that is in us which gives us life and inspires us. Attentiveness to our breathing can bring us the very happiness and joy we seek from all the dissipations and distractions of the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

 

In 2015, Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent a week in dialogue with the Dali Lama at his exiled home in India. The Dali Lama has been a displaced person since fleeing the Communist Chinese as a child. Their dialogue is recorded in their book, Joy. Near the end of their time together Bishop Tutu offered the following blessing which pretty well sums up all the imperatives we are given for Advent:

“Dear Child of God, you are loved with a love that nothing can shake, a love that loved you long before you were created, a love that will be there long after everything has disappeared. You are precious, with a preciousness that is totally quite immeasurable. And God wants you to be like God. Filled with life and goodness and laughter—and joy.

“God, who is forever pouring out God’s whole being from all eternity, wants you to flourish. God wants you to be filled with joy and excitement and ever longing to be able to find what is so beautiful in God’s creation: the compassion of so many, the caring, the sharing. And God says, ‘Please, my child, help me. Help me to spread love and laughter and joy and compassion. And you know what, my child? As you do this—hey, presto—you discover joy. Joy, which you had not sought, comes as the gift, as almost the reward for this non-self-regarding caring for others.’”       [Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, Generosity of Spirit, 11/29/2018]

 

This Advent may we so continually and ceaselessly be attentive of each breath with which God makes us, wants us and needs us to be like God: filled with life, goodness, laughter and joy, so that we may always be those people who help God to spread love, forgiveness, compassion and joy to others – all others - all the time. Amen.

 

 

 

Christ the King Sunday 2021 B

 

What Kind of King is This, Anyway?

In one corner, wearing the black trunks, is Pilate, a political bureaucrat representing Tiberius Caesar Augustus, the second Emperor, King and God of the Roman Empire, exercising all the forms of institutional power at his disposal: domination, violence, economic exploitation and capital punishment to keep the Israelite colony calm, subservient and profitable for the folks back home. [John 18:33-37]

 

In the other corner, wearing the white trunks, is the Nazarene, Jesus, first born of the dead, ruler of the kings of the earth, representing his Father in heaven, the Alpha and the Omega, the One who was, and is, and is to come, who loves us and frees us, and makes us a kingdom of priests to serve his God and Father, to whom be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen! [Revelation 1: 4-8]

 

All of which sets before us on this Last Sunday of the Christian Year two very different understandings of power, and the central struggle for power between earthly kingships that rule by force over against the power of love, justice and freedom that is the way, the truth and life. In the scene that spans from John 18:28-19:16, Pilate is overmatched by one who comes to us to testify to the truth. All Pilate can respond to Jesus’s testimony concedes the match: “What is truth?”

 

But first, Pilate wants to know if Jesus is a king, By the Last Sunday of the year we are those people who know that like any good rabbi, Jesus responds with his own questions: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” To which Pilate replies, “I am not a Jew, am I?” Technically, No, he is a citizen of Rome – but we know in the end he allows himself to be cornered by the Jewish authorities to do their bidding. In the end, Pilate is a Little Man who is eventually relieved of his duty in Jerusalem and recalled to Rome to live out the residue of his small life.

 

So, what kind of king is Jesus? After all this is Christ the King Sunday, established by Pope Pius XI in 1925 in response to growing nationalism, authoritarianism and secularism. Pius XI wanted this feast to inspire the laity, writing, “The faithful, moreover, by meditating upon these truths, will gain much strength and courage, enabling them to form their lives after the true Christian ideal ... He must reign in our minds…in our wills…in our hearts…in our bodies and in our members, which should serve as instruments for the sanctification of our souls, or to use the words of the Apostle Paul, as instruments of justice unto God.” [i]

 

Given the state of the world today, this still seems like a justifiable feast to observe and to ponder just what sort of king Jesus is – is being the operant verb. Personally, I find myself recalling that day years ago that I entered the Bath Abbey in Bath, England, where one finds alongside the Roman era ruins a simple brochure that offers the best answer to this central question of faith I have ever experienced.

 

 

‘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 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. People believed, and do to this day, that he can lead us to a full experience of God’s love and compassion. 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 Bath Abbey exists. 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 can lead us all to heal and repair a broken world.

 

“May your time in Bath Abbey be a blessing to you, and also to us in the church.”

(used with permission & thanks)

 

In the end, it was a Knock Out in Round Three for the Nazarene in the White Trunks, on this The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe!

 

May God for us, whom we call Father, God alongside us, whom we call Son, and God within us, whom we call Spirit, hold and enliven us to see your Goodness, your Love in all that is, seen and unseen, that we may testify to Your Truth as a community of Love, Justice and Freedom for all peoples, all creatures, and all the Earth you have given us to tend and preserve as Your Creation. Amen.

---

[i] Kershaw, Ian (2016). To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949. New York

Apocalypse Now and Always 28B

 

Apocalypse Now and Always

After teaching in the Temple, Jesus and some of his companions, step outside. Someone says, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” [Mark 13:1-8] 

They and we are not meant to understand this as much as imagine the majestic Second Jerusalem Temple being razed to the ground. It was the center of the universe. The Holy of Holies surrounded the Ark of the Covenant, surrounded by the Great Hall of Sacrifices ongoing day after day after day, surrounded by Temple Courtyards with its bazars, animal booths, and currency exchanges, and finally surrounded by the Great Rampart Walls of the City on the Hill itself! It was the stable and safety physical embodiment of Torah Life, Torah Existence, Torah Identity. How can it be destroyed? And when will it happen? 

There will be wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, false prophets, false messiahs, and there will be many who will try to lead you astray. Nation against nation, tribe against tribe, families torn apart. Yet, Jesus seems to say, pay no attention to any of it. These are birth pangs of a new age, a new consciousness. Nothing but distractions. Set your minds on God. 

This is all just the beginning of what many call Mark’s “Mini-Apocalypse.” Think back to Advent 1, November 29, 2020, in the very midst of a surging Pandemic Apocalypse, before there were any vaccines, cases and deaths were skyrocketing all around us. It was on that Sunday that we heard the final verses of Mark’s mini-apocalypse: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. 

“But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” [Mark 13:32-37] 

It’s not about when. Because “when” is always “now.” It always seems as if:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.    – Wm. Butler Yeats, The Second Coming 

Now is precisely when we need to Wake Up! Now is when we need to, in the words of Hebrews, “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”   [Hebrews 10:23-25] 

To wake up, to keep awake, is precisely when we need to remember Saint Paul and not look around us, not ask when or where, not be afraid; rather we are to hold onto faith, hope and exercise acts of charity. We are to remember that the first Temple is long gone. The Second Temple is long gone. All temples we erect to enshrine the familiar will pass away; will give way to a coming new age of faith, hope and charity – the reign of God. He who has promised is faithful! 

We meet together under any and all circumstances, not to preserve the past, but to anticipate the promised kinder and more just future for all people, all creatures and all the Earth itself. To be God’s people is to be a community of faith, hope and charity. It’s not easy. It’s always risky. The best cannot and must not lack conviction in the face of the worst who are always full of “passionate intensity.” 

We know what that looks like. And we know what the faith, hope and charity of God looks like – for we have seen it all in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. And we know we cannot persevere on our own. We desperately do need to meet together, however and whenever we can. Even if it is to be by virtual means. 

We need one another to be able to “hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life,” as we pray this twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost – that day when the Spirit flowed into and all around the very companions of Jesus who were hiding in a house from the apocalyptic death and destruction that had gathered all around them after seeing their Lord crucified, executed by the state, the Empire, the minions of Caesar. Their faith, their hope and their charity has continued down to this day – not without wrong turns and truly sinful behaviors – in Christ’s Body, the Church. 

He seems to say, look at the majestic monuments we erect for and to ourselves. Then wake up! For life is not to be found in the monuments, nor in the stones that build them. Life is from the Spirit of God which continues to blow and breathe through those who hold fast to meeting with one another, and living lives of faith, hope and charity; abide these three; the greatest of these is charity and Love for others. All others. All the time. That’s the only time that matters. Now. Right now. Apocalypse Now and Always! 

We may wish to ponder just why it is we are given these apocalyptic visions from Mark as bookends on the first Sunday of the year, and now the last Sunday of Ordinary time. Amen.

 

For All the Saints 2021 B

 

For All the Saints 2021

November 1^st, transferred to today, is All Saints Day. We pray, “Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you.”

 

Yes, we are meant to follow Jesus who calls us o’er the tumult of our life’s wild, restless sea. When we are still and listen, we can still hear his voice calling out, “Follow me.” The Saints we are to remember on this Feast of All Saints are a diverse and often unusual group of those who in the days of decision did follow Jesus.

 

One of the earliest died in Rome on August 10^th, 258 ce, at the age of 32. He was a deacon for the Pope Sixtus II in Rome. He was archdeacon in charge of the treasury and to care for the indigent and poor of the city. When a Roman prelate ordered him to turn over the treasury, he spent several days distributing all of it to those in need, then gathered his poor, widows, orphans and indigent charges and presented them to the authorities saying, "Behold in these poor persons the treasures which I promised to show you; to which I will add pearls and precious stones, those widows and consecrated virgins, which are the Church's crown." For his Christ-like care for others and defiance in the face of injustice, Laurence was ordered to be tortured and killed.

 

Another of our Saints once said, “Slavery is the next thing to hell… I grew up like a neglected weed, – ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented … When I found I had crossed that [Mason-Dixon] line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven … I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

 

That, of course, was Maryland’s very own Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), included in our calendar of Saints. She risked her life to save the lives of countless others from the very hell in which she grew up. All the while singing songs which have become familiar staples of American Spirituals such as Follow the Drinking Gourd, Steal Away and Wade in the Water – songs which conveyed coded information to those slaves attempting to escape to Freedom as they remembered that Moses had done for the slaves escaping Pharaoh’s Egypt. Herself a deeply religious Christian, Ms. Tubman was often referred to as “Moses” by those who survived their own journey to Freedom.

 

Our next Saint lived during the reign of Richard I, who said of the then Bishop of Lincoln, “Truly, if all the prelates of the Church were like him, there is not a king in Christendom who would dare to raise his head in the presence of a bishop.” Lincoln was the largest diocese in England at the time, and Hugh (1140-1200), a Carthusian monk, was not eager to become bishop. Yet, once appointed he arranged for a number of well-educated monks to handle the day-to-day church affairs while he tirelessly traveled around the bounds of Lincoln attending to the diocese’s most needy people. He would risk his own life in the streets to protect the Jewish population from the anti-Semitic riots that sought to destroy them, their homes and their businesses. He was one of the few who would minister to and touch the growing population of lepers. Of his work among them Hugh said, “St Martin’s kiss cleansed the leper’s body, but the leper’s kiss cleans my soul.” He had the courage to confront and rebuke King Richard  I, no doubt due to his Carthusian training whose motto is, “The Cross stands whilst the world revolves.” Canonized quickly in 1220, Hugh of Lincoln became the patron saint of sick children, sick people, shoemakers and swans.

 

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have

ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”

 

These are the words Sojourner Truth spoke at an early Women’s Rights convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851. She had escaped to freedom with her baby daughter in her arms in 1826. In 1828, she became the first African-American woman to successfully sue a white man to secure the freedom of her son. Born Isabella Baumfree, on the Day of Pentecost, 1843, she became a Methodist and changed her name to Sojourner Truth because she heard the Spirit of God calling her to preach the truth. She preached and spoke out for the rights of women and African-Americans for the rest of her life until she died November 26, 1883 (aged 86). She is the first African-American woman to have her statue in the U.S Capitol, and in 2014 the Smithsonian magazine listed her among the “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time.”

 

These are just a few of the Saints that God almighty has “knit together … in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of his Son Christ our Lord.” May we, by your grace dear Lord, always follow you as they have “in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you.” Amen.

 

 

Days of the Dead Proper 25B

 All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, means “Saints’ Evening,” the night before All Saints’ Day. Halloween begins three days during which the Church reflects on the lives of those who have gone before us – those who made significant contributions to the Body of Christ, Christ’s Church. It is thought that some of the tricks, treats, costumes and customs with which we are familiar evolved from Celtic harvest festivals.

 

All Hallows, All Saints and All Souls, like the fall season itself, is a time to reflect on the cycles of life and death. And for those who follow in the way of Christ, it is a time to remember that this fleshy, time-bound existence is itself bounded by a greater reality of hope beyond mortality represented and embodied in these saints and souls, a vast company and communion dwelling beyond time and forever.

 

Fr. Sam Portaro, in his reflections on the Saints of the Church, Brightest and Best, observes that laughter is a component of Halloween, “the crazy laughter that comes of surprise and of fear. We would rather not talk about the fear, yet it is the fear we commemorate these latter days of October, when the chill of winter wafts in and around the dying warmth of summer, when the trees and all of nature echo the theme of death. All the little hobgoblins in sheets, emulating the spirit world of ghosts and skeletons, as vampire and all manner of horrid creatures, move us to laughter, for laughter is our way of averting fear.” [Portaro p. 198]

 

Yet, laughter has been in short supply the past two years of a world-wide pandemic amidst an already divided and dangerous world of wars, economic inequalities, and all manner of mortal afflictions, of which we are even more cognizant as the evening news walks us through over-crowded hospital wards of our peers and contemporaries tied to ventilators and therapies hoping to survive; as doctors and nurses experience the very same PTSD symptoms from critical patient overload as many of our fighting men and women experience throughout the world.

 

On Halloween we attempt snicker at death and dress up to disguise ourselves as if we might possibly fool the grim reaper. But we are those people who need not run from our fears. We follow Jesus. The same Jesus who is depicted walking straight ahead to a truly fearful end in Jerusalem. In chapter twelve of Mark, his adversaries are doing anything and everything to trick him with trick questions about paying taxes to Caesar, marriage in the after-life and all manner of ridiculous things to humiliate him and discourage his followers. [Mark 12:28-34] Yet, Jesus keeps feeding hungry crowds, healing all manner of persons from all stations of life of physical, mental and spiritual dis-ease. Jesus is already living in the very kingdom and reign of God that he announces wherever he goes, calling anyone listening and watching to follow him in his fearless journey to Jerusalem.

 

A scribe, one of several groups of people trying to stop him, asks him a question: Which commandment is the first of all? Jesus responds with the Shema Y’Israel: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’[Deuteronomy 6:4-9] To which he adds a second: “And in your spare time after loving God with your whole self, the God who loves you and forgives you no matter what, you will also love your neighbor as yourself, as stated long long ago in Leviticus 19:18.”

Unlike his fellow Scribes, Pharisees and Herodians, this scribe replied, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ —this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” That is, more important than the power brokers who maintain the sacrificial cult in Jerusalem that along with Rome has monopolized the wealth and economy of all Israel. The Scribe agrees with the warnings of prophets throughout the centuries before Jesus who decried this monopoly and concentration of wealth among the very few in Jerusalem at the social expense of the rest of those who sowed and reaped the fields that fed them; those who fished and raised livestock that fed them; the craftsmen and artisans who clothed them and furnished the homes of the Empire and the Jerusalem aristocracy. This Jesus is the real thing, thinks the scribe. It’s not the rituals but what we do for others that demonstrates that we walk in the Way of the Lord.

 

The text concludes: After that no one dared to ask him any question.

 

To walk in the way of Jesus’s twin commandments of love is to walk in the Way of the Lord. It is just one way in which we seek the Lord with all our hearts. And it is one way that we live in communion with the saints and souls who in their days of decision also walked in the light of Jesus’s twin commandments of love while facing any and all fears.

 

May these days of All Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls reminds us of who we are and whose we are. As we reflect on the lives of All Saints and All Souls, may we acknowledge, as Sam Portaro urges us, just how hard it was for them, and is for us, to look death in the face and say, “I know you and I shall see you again.” But it is harder still to scan the flickering light of life’s vitality in the face of a dying friend or relative and say, “I know I shall see you again.” [Ibid p.201]

 

May All the Communion of Saints and Souls inspire us to be those people who sustain the virtue of Hope in a world that often presents scant evidence that such Hope is justified. May we dare to hope beyond the constraints of mortality that day by day we might take one step at a time into the Reign of God Jesus calls us to follow. Amen.