... to see the branch that begins to bloom;
in great humility is hid
all heaven in a little room.
(Carol Christopher Drake, 1971)
Well, OK, I did NOT intend this to be a monthly blog but a weekly one! Yet in the past month I’ve been on the road:
- A November retreat at the Benedictine Sisters of Erie – a large, active, welcoming, inspiring community, home to Joan Chittister. They ran a high school for many years, but now have a variety of inner city projects in
- Thanksgiving in
Finally, a prayer for Advent, which was read tonight at the sublime Service of Advent Lessons and Carols at St. Margaret’s Convent:
Isaiah 2:1-5 Psalm 122 Romans 13:8-14 Matthew 24:37-44
Watch out!
It’s “watch out!” Sunday – the shout of rampart guards surround us – harps and cymbals swell the sound – the thrilling voice – the solemn warning: Watch out! Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake!
You might think this Sunday is about the future, about what will happen to us if we don’t watch out. The collect does tell us to look forward to "... the last day, when [Jesus Christ] shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, [when] we may rise to the life immortal..."
Terrible things can happen to us in the future, but I think Advent is about today, the present, the church of what’s happening now: "Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light..." What we are asking God to give us is the grace to live in the present aware of the reality of Jesus Christ in our lives. On Advent Sunday we pray to God to be re-committed to the great adventure of being “On the Way.” It’s a dark world out there, and Advent is the time we get suited up, in the armor of light, for the journey of being a Christian. In Advent, we prepare to greet our God, “the One who Comes,” the God who is with us, when we remember that to be a Christian means to live in this world on God’s terms, not ours.
The medieval mystic Bernard of Clairvaux talked about the Three Comings of the Lord. Tod
ay’s readings are about the Second Coming, the terrible and fearful day of the Lord. It’s Christ as the great tsunami, with no early warning system. We’re living on the beach, with no Weather Channel and the mother of all storms brewing out at sea. In the words of one of my favorite Advent hymns, the world IS wrapped in fear. These days, reading a psalm about going up to
But as Bernard put it in his Advent sermon hundreds of years ago, we are living in the time of the Middle Coming. In the First Coming, Bernard said, God came “in our flesh and in our weakness.” In the Second, God “will be seen in glory and majesty.” In this Middle Coming, Bernard says, God “comes in spirit and in power.” This intermediate coming may be a hidden one, Bernard says, but “in case someone should think that what we say about this middle coming is sheer invention, listen to what our Lord himself says: If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him.” And what do we do when we keep God’s Word? We feed God’s sheep, care for the poor and forgotten, feed the hungry, open the doors of our hearts so that they, and God, can come in. There is much to do between the day when we could hold Jesus in our arms and when the Son of Man knocks us off our feet. In this Middle Coming, we know God is here, because he is right by our side when we are doing all those things.
Celebrating Advent reminds us that we do not have to remain stuck in this dark and fearful place; we are the people who already have one foot in the new way of being, in that new kingdom that will come with God’s reign. I know that can sound kind of airy-fairy, but listen to this from Peter Maurin, who along with Dorothy Day started the Catholic Worker movement: “The future will be different if we make the present different.” That’s what Advent people believe, that’s what this season – this Middle Coming of Christ -- reminds us, that we cast away those works of darkness – of fear, anger, greed, of negativity and militancy and neglect – for we are Children of the Day.
Proper 29 C Nov. 25, 2007
For some Christian congregations it is always Easter. Or always Pentecost. Some Christian congregations stay right here in this lesson, this story of the crucifixion, and of Christ’s triumphant reign as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. In the Gospel of Luke, especially, Jesus’ confidence reigns supreme: this event, gruesome as it is, apparent failure that it is, is one more sign of God’s peaceful reign of mercy and forgiveness. Even in death, the human leader of this movement says, “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing,” and “Truly I tell you, today, you will be with me in
Some Christian congregations have no liturgical year, no beginnings or endings, no ups or downs. Everything in their services points to this event, this Christian high, and here they stay. There is something to be said about this approach: after all, the lives we lead are full enough of ups and downs, failures and setbacks, slings and arrows – too much drama and we do not yet know the ending. The Christian story, on the other hand, encapsulated like this one of Jesus’ death and triumph, always has a happy ending. We can leave our trials and troubles at the door, for here Christ reigns supreme. It’s Easter, and only Easter, every Sunday.
We Episcopalians, however, are members of a liturgical church. We follow a calendar of the church year developed long after the Bible was written, traditions influenced by the cold, dark winters of northern
One way to think of this liturgical calendar of the year is that we work out the dramas of our lives in church. At this time of year, especially, we are reminded that being a Christian is not just one smooth high. This Sunday’s gospel pulls us back to the triumph of Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, and then next Sunday we are yanked into the preparation for his birth. This is just not a Jesus in the present tense, a God who relates to us only in the light of triumph and perfection, but a Jesus with a past and a future. Jesus is rooted in God’s prophecies from long ago, prophecies which acknowledge what is wrong with the world, and which draw us into the future when those wrongs will be righted and God’s justice and mercy will reign.
For the church to read this passage from the ancient prophet Jeremiah side by side with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion shows us how the early Christians began to make sense of Jesus. To speak of shepherds was one way people in ancient
This is the picture Luke gives us of Jesus on the cross: Jesus faces his trials calmly and with confidence. The God of peace would not lash out even in the face of violent persecution. As he goes to his death, he brings all of us with him. In the end, the triumph of God is not like some great army, not like a righteous version of the hated
Next week the church has us start this whole cycle over again. The one in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” will be born of a poor mother in a stable. The righteous branch raised up from David will be raised in obscurity in a back-water town on the edge of an empire run by an occupying army. The one through whom all things were created, and all things hold together, will be celebrated as one small enough for us to hold in our arms. King of kings, Lord of lords: not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with an embrace.
Proper 28 C Nov. 18, 2007
Isaiah 65:17-25
For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
When I was on retreat last week, I was praying in front of a tabernacle containing the Blessed Sacrament – the bread and wine which had been consecrated as the body and blood of Jesus. It’s the place we sit in prayerful vigil, from the end of the Maundy Thursday service, through the long darkness of Good Friday, in hopeful anticipation of the resurrection of Easter. Such a vigil, it struck me last week, is like pregnancy. Thinking of Jesus lying in the tomb, silent and dark, and thinking of a child, curled up, not yet born. The child is not waiting to be born, but we, the father or mother, wait, for the pregnancy to end, for the child to appear. It cannot be hurried. It cannot be slowed.
These weeks before Christmas, like those days before Easter, are like that image of pregnancy, that tomb that holds the still, dark body of Jesus. In two weeks we will enter the season of Advent, when we officially “wait” for the birth of Jesus. But today’s Old Testament and Gospel lessons are full of prophesies of what will come when Jesus comes among us again, when the reign of God is fully here, when the new heavens is over our heads and the new earth is under our feet.
I bet this chapel is not where most of you want to be this morning. I bet most of you want to be in the church. You might even feel that today’s apocalyptic gospel, about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem – the very temple the Jews returning from exile had just rebuilt when prophets like Isaiah, from today’s reading, or Haggai, from last week’s reading, were writing. But for the time being, this chapel is where we are going to be. This is where we will wait. The texts about the Jews going into and coming back from
Like last week’s reading from Haggai, Isaiah is trying to encourage the flagging energy of the people trying to rebuild
For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
The Hebrew word for “create” is barah, a word that applies only to God. Only God can create, and what God is about to create here will have no resemblance to what came before. Isaiah goes on to describe this new creation of God – a creation built right in existing history – there is no apocalyptic destruction of the world about to happen for this new world to appear. What God will create is the peaceable kingdom. The holy mountain. The place of homesteads and victory gardens, of justice and mercy, and most of all, of joy and delight.
So often in history the people of God have been in this position of waiting – of hearing the words of the prophets and waiting, in faith and hope. We are in a very biblical place here, in this little chapel, this little place where we will wait for what God will create here.
The task before us is not mine. The task of rebuilding is a communal one, done by the people of God. The very temple it took the people of
“Now hope that is seen is not hope,”
Our God is a God of new things: a new heaven and a new earth; a new church and a new
Proper 27C Nov. 11, 2007
Haggai 1:15b-2:9
When the Jews were able to return from their exile in
What good words for Veterans Day. You know this day was originally called Armistice Day, to commemorate the armistice, the end of war. It was declared by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, who had declared the war that just ended “the war to end all wars.” On this 11th day of the 11th month,
It is very hard to imagine that future, given the world we live in. In the Gospel lesson, the Sadducees, who were kind of like Biblical fundamentalists, thought they could trick Jesus with their superior knowledge of the details of Biblical law. They thought they could expose Jesus and the Pharisees, who they also disliked, believing in the fallacy – in their eyes – of the resurrection of the dead. They trotted out a long what-if, which they believed would end in their victorious, AHA! We caught you, Jesus, in a heresy, an untruth.
But at the end of their long, drawn-out tale of multiple husbands and who gets who in the resurrected life, it is Jesus who turns the table on them. What they cannot imagine is that the reign of God will not be a mere continuation of the here and now, with its rules about marriage and hierarchy, and women as property and children as chattel, where all that matters is who carries on the man’s name. No, Jesus says, the reign of God is not that at all. In the reign of God, the beloved of God are equal to angels – they are the very children of God, and of this new way of being. The rules of the old age are coming to an end. In this new age, God rules, and death and death-dealing are over-ruled. Jesus trumps them with a proof-text about Moses and the burning bush, when God proclaims himself to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – God not of the dead but of the living, for to God all of those who were considered dead are alive.
Today, November 11, is also the feast day of St. Martin of Tours. Martin lived in
the 4th century, and was a soldier in the Roman legions. He was from the edges of the empire, from what is now
The time came, though, when he realized that being a follower of Jesus meant he could no longer follow Caesar. “I am Christ’s soldier,” he declared, “and I am not allowed to fight.” His superiors charged him with cowardice, and to prove them wrong he stood with his comrades on the line of battle, but with no armaments. It was his own, personal armistice. His courage demonstrated, he was discharged and went to live a peaceful life, in service to the poor, to people on the margins of Roman society, and as the bishop of Tours.
In the world we live in, where now nearly 100 years after the war to end all wars we seem to live in endless war, it is tempting to see holidays like Veterans Day or Memorial Day or even the 4th of July as holidays which give us our marching orders for more wars. We rightly remember those who served, and especially those who died in that service. Like the Sadducees taunting Jesus, like the people too discouraged to rebuild the temple in
In the reign of God, Jesus tells us, that kind of a world is over. God is not God of the dead, not God of the battlefield, whether the cause of whatever war it commemorates was honorable or stupid. In the reign of God, all those who died are brought alive, and even we are like angels. Even we will live like the children of God we truly are.
All Saints 11/4/2007
Our history is a mixture of the orthodox and the pagan. All Saints' Day, for example, falls on November 1 because the ancient Celtic feast of Samhain (what we now call Hallowe'en) happened at this time in the autumn. Samhain was the time when this world and the supernatural intersected – the boundaries between this world and the next were thin, permeable. Trick-or- treaters are remnants of the goblins people truly feared would snatch them or their children on that night: give them a treat or they would take you with them to the other world. The Church, hoping to win more converts by joining the crowd, "Christianized" the festivities by moving the commemoration of All Saints' from its 4th century observance during the spring feast of Pentecost to this magical time in late autumn. If you're going to get involved in the "other world," the church seemed to say, make it the Christian "other world": the communion of saints.
This world and the other world – when God becoming human is the quintessential example of how this world and the other world meet and mingle. We speak of the Body of Christ, and mean us, our flesh and blood bodies, in the here and now. The Body of Christ also includes all those Christians who have gone before – the Communion of Saints, which we remember vividly today of all days, this day when we acknowledge just how close we are to the “other world” and to those who have gone before. Michael Ramsey, the late archbishop of
"One consequence of the mystery of Christ is that Christian people don't stand -- so to say-- on the ground of the present moment, and view past generations, or their comrades in paradise, as people some distance away from them. No, we see the present moment more clearly and bravely because our stance is within the Communion of Saints. How closely, how lovingly, they are praying with us today."
That curious place of standing in the present and the future – at one and the same time – is the place the Gospel of Luke takes us in these beatitudes. The Good News is a great reversal: those who are poor now, those who live on the margins of the rich and comfortable, those who are smug and happy, those who are powerful and mighty, those who mourn and are persecuted: all those conditions will be reversed. This is the upside-down Gospel which describes what the
If the beatitudes then describe who the people of God are, the verses just after that tell these people how God expects them to behave. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse, pray for those who abuse. Jesus sets very high standards of morality for us – go beyond reciprocity, beyond “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The people of God – and especially those of us who are hated, scorned, set aside, reviled and cursed -- are to do unto others as God would do. The way God acts toward us – that is how we are to act toward others. This is love not just as an emotion, but as an action, an attitude, in which we will good things even for those who have been mean to us.[i]
It seems very nearly impossible, but remember who is here with us on this All Saints Day: all those who have gone before. They are standing around us, cheering us on, praying for us, showing us the way. In
On this All Saints Day, at this thin time between the world as it is and the world as God would have it to be, those comrades in paradise are here to assure us how close it is, how close we are to the kingdom of God.
[i] Exegesis from Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991) pp. 105-112
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