The Second Coming of Christ Advent 1C

 The Second Coming of Christ

Beverly Gaventa, one time Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis at Princeton Theological Seminary, and at Columbia Theological Seminary, writes about the apocalyptic language in Luke 21:25-36 saying, ‘One way of summarizing this passage might be to say that “things are not necessarily what they appear to be.” To look only at things that seem to be close at hand is to miss the larger picture.’ [i] 

The larger picture being what all four Gospels recall Jesus’s primary proclamation was, is, and will always be, “The Kingdom of God is at Hand.” Which I have always taken to mean that if one places one’s arm outstretched in front of one’s face, where your hand ends up is just how close, or far away, the kingdom of God is from us at any given time. Suggesting, of course that it is nearby, much closer, than we might imagine; closer than even folks like Jeremiah and Luke could possibly imagine. 

What Jesus and Ms. Gaventa are saying is that so many other “things” like family issues, political issues, nations at war, what Jesus describes as “dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life,” tend to dominate our day-to-day consciousness. The result being that it becomes all too easy to forget what is perhaps the most important truth Jesus proclaimed, proclaims,: the kingdom of God is at hand. Lower case, as I am thinking that making kingdom of God upper case leads to our putting off much thinking about this core proclamation to some other day, some later or latter day, with so many other concerns pressing in on us literally begging for our full attention. 

We may notice that Jeremiah, that sixth century BCE reluctant prophet of the Lord, who upon learning that he was to be a prophet replied, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” [ii] No my son, says the Lord, since before the birth of time I have appointed you, and “you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you… Now I have put my words in your mouth.” This seems to be a “Day of the Lord” for Jeremiah, who later writes in 33:14-16 says, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” 

Two things we might take away from this: It is the Lord himself who promises “days,” not a day, but days of the Lord when the promises of God’s kingdom will become manifest. And that Jerimiah addresses a divided country, for at the time of his speaking on God’s behalf Israel was still divided into two regions, Israel in the north, and Judah in the south. Just as Jesus addresses a divided Israel, Pharisees, Essenes, Sadducees and others all claiming to know for sure what God desires from all of us. 

For anyone asking what all this apocalyptic language means to us today, we might just need to admit that much of the world is as divided as Israel was at the time of Jeremiah. Think of Israel vs Gaza and the West Bank, Global North vs Global South, Ukraine vs Russia, Red US vs Blue US, just to name a few. This is not to forget the divisions between and within the Church of Christ itself. We may want to pay closer attention to Jeremiah and Luke’s “little apocalypse” than we do to the “dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life.” Things are not simply as they appear to be, there is a larger picture that Jesus has in mind when he says elsewhere that he will come again, and when he insists that the kingdom of God is a lot closer than we think. If we think of it at all. 

In some committee decades ago, it was thought that these musings on the days of the Lord and the second coming of Christ are just the texts with which we need to grapple on the First Sunday in Advent. A season fraught with misunderstandings since it is not just a season to prepare us to remember that first advent of the Christ Child lying in a manger, but to also look forward to what has been called his second coming as well. All of the preparations of the next four weeks have become devoted to making a big deal out of his first advent, with scant attention at all in our decorations, manic purchasing of gifts beginning not just on Black Friday, but even the weeks before that have become Black Friday addenda! How does one even decorate for the Second Coming? What kind of gifts are appropriate to point us toward that Second Coming Jesus himself proclaims is “at hand.”? 

Borrowing, as I often do, from Fredrick Buechner, an author of over a dozen novels, and himself a seminary trained Presbyterian minister, we might begin where the Christian Bible ends: a prayer, in Revelation (Not “revelations”): “Come, Lord Jesus.” [iii] Quite possibly the shortest prayer in our tradition, and one that ought to be prayed every day at least once among the dissipations, drunkenness and worries of this life. [iv] Buechner first observes that Jesus’s first advent was rather unobtrusive. Except for Mary and Joseph of course, and perhaps a handful of shepherds, “nobody much knew or cared.” So how will we know when he comes a second time? What, when, or where will he appear? Even he says, “Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matthew 24:36). People in search of a timetable try to crack the coded language of the Book of Revelation are on a wild goose chase. People who claim that only those who join their sect will be “saved,” whatever they may mean by that, and all others lost are wrong. Jesus himself says in Matthew 25:31-46 that those who will know are those of us who feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick and prisoners. “If you love, in other words, you’re in. If you don’t, you are out.” It does not matter to him if you are a Jew, Muslim, Christian, Jehovah’s Witness, Catholic, Episcopalian, Taoist, or an Atheist! No one can say what will happen when those “days” come, but that it will be a day to remember. These days come upon all who live upon the face of the Earth. 

“Things are not necessarily what they appear to be.” Beverly Gaventa remarks that the signs of the future Jesus speaks of have become, in fact, signs of the present day. Just as the coming of new leaves always and inevitably indicates that summer will soon be at hand, so it is that the kingdom of God, indeed, lies close at hand. I wonder. In a world in which so many well-meaning Christians believe they have broken the code, if the fact may be that Jesus always comes to us a second time here and now, if, when he knocks on our door, as depicted in the third chapter of Revelation, we for once open the door and let him in. What it is like when we do that is no doubt difficult to put into words – words which inevitably begin to sound strange to others. In trying to do so myself, I find I get lost in metaphor every time. Yet, when Jesus comes to Paul on that road to Damascus, who had spent a career arresting followers of Jesus, he says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made great in weakness.” [v] I take that to mean, if Paul can be saved, there’s hope for me. For all of us. For it will come upon all who live upon the face of the earth. If only we watch. Wait. Be alert. Open the door. It is in that hope only that we dare say, “Amen,” to the prayer that brings all scripture to a close.

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[i] Texts for Preaching Year C, Cousar, Gaventa, Brueggemann, et.al. (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville:1994) p. 8-9

[ii] Jeremiah 1:6-10

[iii] Revelation 22:20

[iv] Buechner, Fredrick, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (Harper & Rowe, San Francisco, 1988) pp.101-102, with apologies to the author!

[v] 2Corinthians 12:9

What Is Truth? Christ the King B 2024

 What Is Truth?

This is what Pilate really wants to know. It is the central question in this passage assigned to us for this Christ the King Sunday from John 18:33-37, but we would not know that given verse 38 was left off. Verse 38 is the climax in this story of Good Friday, the Day of Preparation for the Passover in Jerusalem that year Pilate’s day has been interrupted as he tries to get some idea from Jesus as to why there is such a commotion among the Temple authorities. Pilate seems to understand what all of us come to know at one time or another: we live in a world of competing truths, competing world views or narratives if you will. It’s early in the morning. Pilate has yet to finish his first cup of coffee and what he promises will be his last cigarette. Every year, the city is awash with people from all over the ancient world; some to celebrate the Passover, others curious to see just what this Festival of Freedom and the God of the Jews is all about. 

Pilate asks Jesus if he is in fact king of the Jews. Jesus says his kingdom, that is, his Father’s kingdom, is not of this world. It’s not at all like this world in which there are competing kings and emperors all claiming to be anointed by some god or another, or, like Caesar, claiming to be god themselves. Jesus makes the point that were he a king, his followers would be “fighting to keep me from being handed over” to the authorities. That is how unlike Caesar’s Rome the kingdom of God is. And as we hear from John the Revelator, his Father’s kingdom was, is, and will always be very different than Rome, or Judea, or Egypt, or Babylon, or Syria. And from every kingdom throughout history to this day. [i] 

To Pilate, who has successfully risen up the ladder of the Roman power structure to be the fifth governor of the province of Judea, all this sounds pretty much like blah, blah, blah. Why can’t these so-called messiahs give a straight answer. “So, you are a king,” he says, taking another slow drag on his last cigarette. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Exhaling, Pilate says in a voice half-interested and half-sarcasm, “What is truth?” This is the missing verse 38. Jesus is silent. There is nothing else to say. For Truth stands before Pilate in the flesh. The God of the Passover, the truth, who was, who is, who is to be. Truth is everything from Alpha to Omega; or, as we might say, from A to Z; all that is seen and unseen; all that has been, is, and is yet to be. 

In his novel Desert, Noble Laureate author J.M.G. Le Clezio writes about the desert: “Out there, in the open desert, men can walk for days without passing a single house, seeing a well, for the desert is so vast that no one can know it all.” [ii] As it is with the desert, so it is with Truth, with  God.  The vastness of it all. No one can know it all. What more is there to say? Truth stands in the silence. If only Pilate, if only the rest of us, could see that; know that; feel that. 

In a time not unlike the first century world of Rome, Judea, Galilee, Greece, and the rest of the ancient world, after World War I, Pope Pius XI saw a world of authoritarian-strongmen, fascists, dictators, who sought to rule like kings, espousing extreme nationalism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, racism, and anti-immigration and anti-democratic policies throughout Europe. Recognizing the falseness of these ideologies, Pius instituted Christ the King Sunday in 1925 to refocus us all on why we are here – to be icons of God’s love in this seriously broken world. Originally set as the last Sunday of October, in 1969, Pope Paul VI moved it to the Last Sunday before Advent and called it, “The Solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.” Pius noted that while there had been a cessation of hostilities, there was no true peace. He wrote, “Christ reigns over the minds of individuals by his teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one's life by … imitating His example…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… [so that in] the words of the Apostle Paul, [we might serve] as instruments of justice unto God.” [iii] 

What is the truth Christ and his followers lived? What kind of king is Jesus, if he is to be a king at all? These words from a pamphlet at Bath Abbey, Bath, England, tries to sum it up like this:

“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, political 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 Christ, 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.” [iv] 

This is why the Church is here at all: to follow Christ; to heal, gather, repair, restore, and unite everyone and everything in this broken world. To be icons of God’s love to all the earth, and everything therein. To be a community of God’s Love. 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 a full experience of God’s love and compassion; that in all that we say and all that we do, we may become God’s Truth, a community of Love, Justice and Freedom for all peoples, all creatures, and all the Earth. This is Christ, the Truth that stands silent before us. Amen.

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[i] Revelation 1:4b-8

[ii] Le Clezio, J.M.G, Desert (David R. Godine, Boston: 2009) p.142.

[iii] wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Christ_the_King

[iv] Reproduced from the Abbey pamphlet by permission

The Widow Proper 27B

 The Widow’s Mite

That’s what the church traditionally calls the story in Mark 12:38-44. Which is to overlook at least half, if not all, of what this little episode may really be about. Appearing in what we euphemistically call “stewardship season,” when we not only urge but honestly need people to reconsider their annual support of the local church and its mission to the world in which it lives and moves and has its being, we have tend to trumpet the extravagant, if not downright foolish, generosity of this poor widow who puts he only two coins into the Temple Treasury. I say “trumpet” because evidently in the Court of Women in the Jerusalem Temple there were a number of large trumpet-shaped containers in which people would place monetary offerings to support the administration of the Temple and its system of sacrifices – burnt offerings believed to make the One God of Israel happy and therefore continue to send rain and sunshine to produce an abundance of crops, and good luck in dealing with neighbor countries which often sought delight in plundering Israel’s good fortune. 

The general arc of sermons in this season often say something like, “Look, if this poor widow can give everything she has to the Temple, you can certainly increase your pledge to your local congregation so we can keep the lights on and to heat and air condition our buildings to keep ourselves cozy and comfortable – which surely must be an important component of being God’s covenant people in today’s world.” I will confess to being guilty of turning this poor widow into a hero of sacrificial giving to support the institutions we love to think of as ours; as our own little real estate holding in the emerging Kingdom of God. 

Upon closer review, this turns out to be a fumble that ought to be recovered by the other team. And yes, that other team would be Jesus’s team – those seeking, as he will say later in the Passover week ahead, a kingdom “not of this world,” much to the bafflement of one Pontius Pilate, representative of the Emperor Caesar, whose face was on all the coins of the empire proclaiming, “Caesar is God!” Which of course raises the question already raised earlier in chapter 12 of Mark’s Gospel – why would the administrators of the Temple, the Chief Priests and Sadducees, and of course the Scribes, those arbiters of what the Torah scrolls say and mean, why would these folks be so insistent on gathering as much of these Roman coins as possible if indeed said coins proclaim that a mere mortal like Caesar is God? 

Again, just a few verses earlier in Mark chapter 12, Jesus is asked by a Scribe what is the greatest of all the commandments, of which in Torah there are 613 – 365 “thou shalt nots,” and the remaining 248 “thou shalts”. Jesus answers correctly, reciting the one prayer recited several times a day, the Shema, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30 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.” And then adds, from Leviticus, “The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” The Scribe is impressed, and goes so far to say, “…this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” After that no one dared to ask him any question. This Scribe represents the critique of the Temple’s sacrificial system lodged by all the prophets of the previous six or eight hundred years! That to put all our energy into sustaining this sacrificial institution is to imperil the neighbors we are meant to be loving as God loves us – especially for those who by circumstance and no fault of their own have no male patriarch to look out for them, no pater familias as the Greeks and Romans would have it.

 Of these neighbors in need, it was understood that God had repeatedly commands that widows, women who had lost their pater familias, as well as orphans and aliens - sojourners, strangers in the land fleeing poverty, warfare, or any number of conflict and problems in their own countries - were all to receive the same love, sustenance, and care as one’s own family and fellow Israelite neighbors. All of these particular circumstances – widowhood, orphanhood and migrant worker-hood– had no benefit of a pater familias, and therefore are to be cared for by the community at-large.   

Admittedly it is strange, that after Jesus had such a meaningful encounter with a Scribe who was understood that the Kingdom of God means to care for these marginalized groups of people like the widow in our story, that Jesus would then rip into the Scribes for wearing long robes, saying long prayers, and demanding preferred seating in synagogues and banquets. I confess, every time I read this and similar instructions from Jesus not to wear two tunics, etc, I tremble each Sunday morning as I put on long robes to lead our worship, to sit in front of even the front row week after week, and recite long prayers over our sacred meal we share – a meal that calls us to care for those without resources like our widow and her fellow orphans and resident aliens. Indeed, this story is meant to hold a mirror before each and every one of us. Most especially me. 

For the central question in this would be: to what degree do we participate in sustaining institutions that allow there to be individuals in our society that have nothing more than these two little coins which even in today’s world would be worth a little less than two dollars? 

As we were sharing in Holy Communion at Diocesan Convention on Friday, I found myself jotting down in my notes: Just what kingdom do we support and serve? The Kingdom of God? Or, the kingdom of presidents; the kingdom of Congress; the kingdom of Wall Street; the kingdom of corporations; the kingdom of Church? Or, the kingdom of those in need? 

The Widow’s Mite. I suspect Jesus does not mean to make her the hero of the story, or even a role-model for disciples of his. The widow is, and ought to be, an embarrassment for the Scribes and all of the rest of us who fail to honor her need and follow in the Way of Jesus. She and her cohort of orphans, and sojourners in the land, the homeless, the hungry, and any and all who have no source of family and friends to offer them sustenance, support, and a place to rest their weary bones should not exist if we were to honestly love God and love neighbor.

 Every day on social media I read scathing and even hateful critiques of “the church” and religion, and religious institutions. Yet, it is a fact, that in The Episcopal Church, a percentage of each dollar one gives to the local church goes to the Diocese, and a percentage of that goes to The Episcopal Church Center, to support programs that serve those in need at home and abroad, programs that no local congregation could sustain on its own. We are a mutual aid society. Our official corporate name is: The Foreign and Domestic Missionary Society. We serve people in our community, across the state of Maryland, and throughout the world with each dollar we pledge right here in Rock Spring and all Parishes. And this is for all of us and our small and mighty parish, Good News – the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God according to Mark.

All Saints Day 2024B

One day a parishioner from a nearby parish cornered me in my office on All Saints Day and asked, in all sincerity, “Why do we pray for the dead?” I was taken aback. And mumbled something like, “Because they are no longer dead, but alive in Christ. And they pray for us.” He was unimpressed and unmoved. 

All Saints Day is part of at three-day Christian festival and mediation on death and new life. It begins with All Hallows Eve, with little munchkins demanding treats, feigning tricks, and giving us ample permission to laugh at that which we try so hard to forget and transcend. Death. The one certainty like taxes we all must face. As when Saul, fearing death, sought refuge with the Witch at Endor. She was scared since the king sought to put an end to her kind. Yet, here he was, asking her to help him to speak to the dead. Surprisingly, she knows what he really needs: care, in the form of rest and food – hospitality, or what the Bible calls love of neighbor – even the most unlikely of neighbors. It’s a story meant to remind us that God is never far from us at such times. It has been suggested that fear is that singular point of vulnerability through which God actually reaches us, touches us, to transform our fear into hope. 

Hallows Day, or All Saints Day, then arrives and presents itself as a time to look back at those who in our tradition have experienced that presence and touch of God in difficult time, and allow their experiences to fuel our collective imagination to move us beyond our greatest fears to believe that a hopeful future is real, and even within our reach! Perhaps the first example of a saint as we think of them would be Miriam, sister of Moses, who celebrates after the great escape from bondage in Pharaoh’s Empire of endless toil to a newfound, and unimaginable future with God as she gets the sisters together with their tambourines to dance and sing their way forward with God: Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing.  And Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” [i] 

Try to picture that moment? Imagine the relief, the joy, the laughter, the singing, the dancing The end of generations of darkness into a new world of light. A world, as Psalm 24 declares, is God’s world, not ours: The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world and all who dwell therein. This world does not belong to the endless number of Pharaohs and their empires of bondage and toil for all but a handful of elites. This is God’s world, where wonders never cease – only if we refuse to let our remembrance of things past and our prophetic imaginations dwindle and fade. 

This is why we recall the words of that prophet of the exile, Isaiah and his companions, who though God’s people had been swept away to yet another faraway empire, a long way from home, imagined a great homecoming as a feast: “a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” The death dealing of Babylon and Pharaoh shall be swept away forever. “Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.” [ii] And it is the imagination of Isaiah that envisions that one day the God of Israel would make straight a highway from Persia back to Jerusalem, the City of Peace, and once again the people would dance and sing their way home once again. 

In the midst of yet another occupation under yet another brutal empire, comes another man of the Lord to reinforce the prophetic imagination among an exhausted, lonely, and beaten-down people. He was good friends with sisters Martha and Mary. They called for him when their brother Lazarus was dying. After a delay of several days, word comes to them that Jesus is at the edge of town. The sisters are sitting shiva, the days of mourning. Martha, ever the more practical of the two, marches out to the edge of town and lets Jesus know her frustration that he had not come when they called. “Our brother might still be alive!” she shouts at him. “He will live again,” he says. “Do you believe this?” She says, “I know he will rise again on the Last Day, the day of resurrection, but we want him now.” Says Jesus, “I am resurrection, and I am life. Do you believe this?” That’s when it happens. Martha is transformed on the spot. She forgets all her anger and her fears, “Yes, Lord, I believe you are the Christ coming into the world.” 

Mary joins them. The crowd at the house sitting shiva comes along. At the tomb Jesus weeps. The crowd murmurs, “See how he loves him!” Yet, others complain in the midst of his weeping. Jesus prays to his father. Jesus calls Lazarus to come out. Out he comes, wrapped in the funeral cloths, not unlike Jesus was wrapped in swaddling-cloths “in the beginning.” “Unbind him, and set him free!” Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty Lazarus and we are free at last. No doubt they remembered that first Mary, Miram and the sisters, dancing and singing the people into a new reality, a new world, a new life. [iii]

All Saints reminds us that there have been others. There is an out-of-date list in our Book of Common Prayer of others who have shed God’s light in the darkness of later times. Even in our own times. Baltimore’s own Thurgood Marshall and Pauli Murray are on that list today, who like Martin King issued a new call for their people to be “unbound and set free.” We remember them all on All Saints so that we too might follow in the Way of Christ as they once did. 

Another woman is in consideration for sainthood in the Catholic Church. Were she alive, I have no doubt she would tell them to stop it! Dorothy Day, a lay woman who cared for the working man and woman, who founded a series of houses for those in need of shelter across the country, and who founded a newspaper in the midst of the Depression, The Catholic Worker, which fearlessly advocates hope for a better future for America’s working class. She worked tirelessly for a more just society, inspired by people like Miriam, Isaiah, Jesus, and others. She wrote this in her autobiography: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” 

I wish I had known this when I faced my questioner in my office. We have all known the long loneliness, the long darkness, the long days of war, the fear of others, fear of the future, fear of one another. I might have said to him, “The only solution is love, and love comes with community.” Community with one another. Community with those Saints have gone before. Community with Christ, Miriam, Isaiah, Martha, Mary, Thurgood, Pauli, Martin, and that most imaginative of all biblical writers, John the Revelator who declares, “And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.’” [iv]  For this and for all the saints we give thanks! Amen.

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[i] Exodus 15:20-21

[ii] Isaiah 25:6-9

[iii] John 11:32-44

[iv] Revelation 21:1-6a