It's Not About the Wine Epiphany 2C

 

Epiphany 2C 2022 - John 2: 1-11

It’s Not About the Wine

It was Kurt Vonnegut in a Palm Sunday Sermon years ago who observed, “Leave it to people to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.”

 

This is true of the wedding at Cana in Galilee. As Father Guido Sarducci observed, it should be called the wedding reception at Cana. Wedding receptions in ancient Israel could carry on for as much as a week-long celebration.

 

Jesus’s mother nudges him, “They have no wine.” Jesus essentially says, “So, what? This does not concern us. Besides, it’s not time” Mary then tells the servants, “Just do whatever he tells you.” They do, and the results are off the charts!

 

A lot of wine can be consumed at a week-long party. This suggests that the family is probably pretty well off. And they have six large, expensive stone water jars holding 20 to 30 gallons each. Unlike healing and feeding people, this is less about addressing a need. It’s more of a luxury. We’re talking roughly 180 gallons of wine. Good wine at that!

 

The chief steward thinks the bridegroom arranged this, saying, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This is pretty funny, making this more in the vein of Henny Youngman than say Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr! The bridegroom thinks he just hit the lottery! What is the steward talking about? This is the first moment, writes John, that Jesus has done anything to reveal just who he is. And he does this?  

 

Of course he does. After all, he is The One everyone has been waiting for. He is the bridegroom who comes at an unexpected hour. He’s The One who will eventually tell us that drinking wine makes us one of his disciples for ever and ever. That is, the salvation God gives us in Christ is more than just redemption and healing, but is also meant to be about enjoying the fullness of life and the extravagant Love of God! God in Christ who says, “I come that you may have life and have it abundantly!” [John 10: 10]

 

This is surprising good news: God saves the best for last! You’ve heard Elijah. You’ve heard Isaiah. You have been down to the river with John. But our God has saved the best for last! The party is his. He’s the bridegroom. It’s our time to be wedded to God. No one is excluded from this party. And there is enough of everything for everyone!!

 

There have been those who look at the contemporary life of the church and question whether or not we really understand this and other gospel stories of extravagance. Soren Kierkegaard Once wrote, “Whereas Jesus turned water into wine, the church has managed to do something even more remarkable; it has turned wine back into water.” That’s pretty funny for Kierkegaard, who was not known for his humor.

 

The point being: Jesus comes to make all things new, and issues a radical call to change one’s life and get about the business of sharing this new extravagant, abundant, life of God’s Faith, Hope and Charity with the whole world, everyone, with “all!” The Church, on the other hand,  often behaves as if Christianity is about being comfortable and happy with the way things are and have been. This is a problem.

 

 

A problem that prompted C.S. Lewis to say, “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want religion to make you really feel comfortable, I certainly do not recommend Christianity.” Lewis wants us to remember that Jesus, the night before he dies, calls us to a deeper understanding of the good news when he says, “Pick up your cross and follow me… You will do the things I do, and greater things than these you will do.” [John 14:12]

 

The Gospel, the Good News, is about transformation and service, both of which take hard work. Christians are meant to be those people who sustain the virtue of Hope in a world that rarely provides much evidence that such Hope is justified.

 

This is why at Noonday Prayer, Monday thru Friday, we are reading The Book of Hope, in which Jane Goodall says this about Hope: "Hope is what enables us to keep going in the face of adversity. It is what we desire to happen, but we must be prepared to work hard to make it so."[1]

 

To remind me what this hope, this future, and this hard work looks like, I have kept the following text pasted in the back of my Book of Common Prayer as a constant reminder:

 

Les Arbres dans la Mer by Father Didier Rimaud, SJ

Look, the virgin has a child, a man from God, Heaven is with us,

mankind is not alone any longer. If you only had a little faith, you would see trees in the sea, beggars become kings, the powerful made low, the treasures that we share.

 

Look, the water changes into wine, the wine becomes blood, the bread multiplies,

the people aren’t starving any more. If you only had a little faith, you would see trees in the sea, the desert full of flowers, harvests in winter, granaries overflow.

 

Look, the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, the people aren’t ill any longer.

If you only had a little faith, you would see trees in the sea, executioners without work,

handcuffs rusty, prisons useless.

 

Look, the cross is empty and bare, your tombs have fallen and man stands. The people are not afraid any longer. If you only had a little faith, you would see trees in the sea, guns buried, arms put away, mountains dance.

 

This is what Christianity is meant to look like. Our Hope is about what we desire to happen; that which we must be prepared to work hard at to make it so. It’s not about 180 gallons of good wine – it is about the extravagance of God’s Faith, Hope and Love, in Christ offered to all. Everyone. Now. Forever. And ever! Amen!  

---

[1] Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams, The Book of Hope, Celadon Books, 2021: p.8.

Feast of Our Lord's Baptism C 2022

 

Feast of the Baptism C 2022

Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, Have Mercy on Us, Your Beloved.

 

Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior.

 

Jesus prayed after he was baptized by John. Today we pray to keep our baptismal covenant, and to become confessors of his name. Names, really. Throughout the New Testament Jesus accrues so many names. No doubt because whoever really meets Jesus has one’s own experience of what that is like. And of course, there were those who had ideas about him before he really comes onto the scene down by the River Jordan. As did John.

 

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." Luke 3:15-17

 

People were looking for a Messiah, a Christos, whatever they might think that means: a judge, a warrior, a king, all of whom would restore Israel and free them from being an occupied backwater colony of the Roman Empire. Or, perhaps a prophetic figure like John who reminds them of earlier prophets in their history, like Elijah and Elisha. John, on the other hand, suggests a powerful almost Satanic figure – a winnowing fork in hand, separating us out and burning the “chaff” with unquenchable fire. Instead, he gets a gardener and a shepherd who tends to the lost, the lonely, the blind and the lame – a new kind of Messiah who teaches us to love everyone, even our enemies. How will we get Rome off our backs by loving them, they must be thinking?

 

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." Luke 3: 21-22

 

The first thing one might notice is that for such a momentous moment in the overall narrative, the description is rather brief. But be not deceived. For instance, notice that this is one of the few occasions when all three main characters are on stage at once: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Whatever the people and John might have been expecting, surely it was not this! YHWH, the God of creation, whose spirit-breath blew across the chaotic waters of creation speaks, sends the spirit-breath again, and declares this country boy from Nazareth to be God’s Beloved Son. This would have been an awful lot to take in. Let alone have any idea just what that means.

 

Rather than someone who might cast Romans and any other bad actors into unquenchable fire, we hear about nothing but Love, with a capital “L”. It’s embedded in the Father’s very name for his Son: Be-loved. You are my Beloved. I am well pleased with you.

 

This is where our baptism and the covenant we pray to keep comes in. As our Prayer Book states, “Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body, the Church. The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluable.”  (BCP 298)

 

Like the story of Christ’s baptism, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all present as we are incorporated into Christ’s Body.

 

I have long imagined that seraphim and cherubim are also present, singing in our ears, “You are God’s Beloved! God is well pleased with you!” over and over again. It is the first thing we hear as the Holy Spirit and water incorporate us into the Body of Christ – that is, we hear what Christ heard that day in the River Jordan.

 

As we grow up, as we navigate good times and bad times, joyful moments and challenging moments, it is easy for us to forget what God said to us: You are my Beloved; I am well pleased with you! We are the Body of Christ as we emerge from the waters of Baptism. We are all God’s Sons and Daughters. We are Sisters and Brothers in Christ. We are God’s Beloved.

 

Whatever else Luke, Matthew, Mark and John might mean as they narrate the story of Christ’s baptism by John, we need only remember this: I am God’s Beloved; God is well pleased with me! Say it when you wake up in the morning. Say it when you go to bed.

 

We must do whatever it takes to remember and accept our Belovedness. It is who we are. It is who we are meant to be, created in the image of a Loving and Compassionate God.

 

Oh yes, down by the river, whenever he saw Jesus walking by, John would turn to anyone who would listen and describe Jesus in these words, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

 

Which is why I usually begin every day with the words,

 

Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, Have Mercy on Us, Your Beloved.

 

For we are God’s Beloved. God is well pleased with us.

 

Amen.

Whose Voice Do We Hear? Christmas 2C

 

Whose Voice Do We Hear?

Christmas 2C  -  Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Amidst all the packages, wrappings, ribbons, get togethers, cookies and whatever is left of the puddings and roast beast, Matthew’s story of the first Christmas turns suddenly dark and foreboding. Above all the comings and goings of Magi and shepherds, Matthew, and only Matthew, calls us to pause in our celebrations and listen to a voice wailing and weeping throughout the ages. There is an urgency in how Matthew tells the tale that calls the listener to stop and listen. And yet, we can see that something is missing. Part of the story has been left out that means to connect this infant Jesus to the long history of his people, Israel.

 

In a dream, Joseph is warned that the infant Mary named Jesus, “He who saves,” is in grave danger. Herod is going to seek out the child to destroy him whom the Magi said is born to be King of the Jews, the very title Herod carries on behalf of Caesar.  Joseph is to take his family to Egypt, where the story of Israel began. Egypt, where Pharaoh ordered the murder of all male Hebrew babies. Egypt, where Moses was the only survivor of that first genocide to save God’s people.  We note the irony that Egypt is now seen as a safe haven as Jesus and his family become refugees, immigrants, seeking asylum from the violence and danger about to take place in their home town of Bethlehem.

 

It is no coincidence that the stories of Moses and Jesus have sustained the hope of oppressed peoples throughout the centuries: the hope that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus will act once again on behalf of endangered persons. Suddenly, however, we go directly from the Holy Family fleeing danger to receiving a new message to leave Egypt and return home. An angel of the Lord issues the “all-clear” signal. It ought to concern us when some invisible-hand edits the story – in this case to remove the part we most need to hear: the story of the danger they are fleeing in the first place:

 

“When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: "A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled,

because they are no more.”

 

Rachel is the second wife of Jacob, named Israel by YHWH. She bears two of Jacob’s sons: Joseph, who plays a key role in helping Jacob and all his children and tribes to seek refuge in Egypt from a long drought and famine. They arrive as refugees and remain as slaves. And Benjamin, whose tribe is later carried off to Babylon as servants and slaves after the Assyrians destroy the First Jerusalem Temple. Jeremiah imagines Rachel as the classic mother who mourns and intercedes for her children, praying for an end to her descendants’ sufferings and exiles.

 

Matthew, then, reimagines Rachel wailing in loud lamentation for all infant descendants mercilessly and needlessly slaughtered by Herod’s Roman Legions in Bethlehem to keep the infant Jesus from usurping his job as King of the Jews. Rachel continues to wail in loud lamentation for all persons throughout history right up to our own time who suffer similar genocidal violence and brutality of history’s endless succession of “Herods” who are desperate to preserve their personal stranglehold on power: the Hitlers, Stalins, Khemer Rouge, and all who continue to brutalize the “others” who, in their paranoic rage, they believe threaten them.

 

Matthew does not shy away from telling the whole story, as does our lectionary version of the story this Second Sunday after Christmas. Matthew relates this tale to both connect the baby Jesus to the long and storied history of his ancestors, and to foreshadow the rest of the story in his version of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

 

It seems that Matthew means for us not only to hear Rachel’s weeping, but to stop whatever we are doing and join in her lament – to weep for all refugee and asylum seekers who today, at this very moment are in mortal danger, like Joseph and Benjamin and Jesus before them, and for all those who are “no more.”

 

As Joseph, Mary and the baby return, finding Bethlehem to still be dangerous, they resettle in Nazareth in Galilee. It is easy to imagine that as Jesus grows up, he will at some point ask why he never meets his cousins and aunts and uncles in Joseph’s hometown. Surely, the story of Herod’s slaughter of innocent children, and the adults who got in the way trying to protect their infants, is told over and over again among whatever might remain of his earthly family. Jesus, like Moses before him, was saved by the hand of YHWH, a survivor of the Bethlehem genocide, so as to save us all from a sinful, broken and dangerous world.

 

Each child under the age of two represents a poem never written, music never composed, a book never written, new discoveries never made. We will never know how many children actually died in Bethlehem in an effort to thwart the will of God’s saving grace, love and compassion in the person of Jesus, while more die in refugee camps every day all over the world. That is a lot of human potential, culture and imagination mercilessly destroyed.

 

Matthew wrote this part of the story so that those children might not ever be forgotten. That Rachel’s children might never be forgotten. And to remember, that it is humans like Herod and Hitler who commit such atrocities, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus. Just as God intervened on behalf of Rachel’s descendant Jesus, so God intervened after the Crucifixion by raising Jesus from the dead. Matthew, and only Matthew, reminds us that the wood of the manger is the hard wood of the Cross.

 

We need to thank Matthew for not holding back the whole story. In telling us what happened in Bethlehem, we are called to stop whatever else we are busy with these Twelve Days of Christmas, to listen. When we do, we can still hear Rachel’s lament; Rachel’s weeping for those who are no more; wailing for all God’s children everywhere. Above the din of our holiday activities, we can hear Jesus’s voice calling us to follow and join him as he saves those who are still at risk. He promises us that we will do the works he does, and greater things than these we will do, in his name. This is the Good News of Christmas.

 

May we hear our Lord and Savior call us to take the time to stop, and in the silence, to listen. Here and now, listen. What do you hear? Amen.

 

Genocide Watch

 

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.

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[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.

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

[ii]  Ibid, p 141

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