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

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