Epiphany II
January 17, 2010
Can’t you just see her?
A little woman, late 40’s, standing with her son and his friends, at the wedding reception.
Having a good time, but suddenly sensing a disturbance. The servant waiters, anxious, whispering to the steward.
She whispers to her son, “They’re just about out of wine.”
Jesus looks at her, startled. “Is that any of our business, Mother—yours or mine?” (The Message)
In the way of mothers, she keeps on looking at him—silently but significantly—you know that look!
Jesus says, “What?! I’m just here as a guest with you and my friends. It’s not the right time. My hour has not yet come.”
Mary knew all about “the right time.”
She knew all about making plans—like getting married to Joseph and having children who would grow up and settle down near her, and give her grandkids.
But she also remembered how one fine day an angel broke roughly into her cherished plans. How he said, “You shall conceive and bear a son.”
How she tried to send him away by answering, “But I’m not married yet.” In other words, “it’s not the right time, “ or, “my hour has not yet come.”
And how suddenly she forgot about “her time,” “her hour”, and said “yes,” and felt all her plans come toppling down around her.
But 30 years later, as she stood there in Cana next to her son, she had no regrets. None. She had exchanged her time for God’s time, her plans for her God’s surprising plans, and she had no regrets.
She called the servants over and told them, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Jesus looked around and saw the bride and groom radiant, talking to friends.
Then he looked at the men around him, his new companions, Peter and Andrew, Philip and Nathaniel.
He knew they were waiting for a sign that God was with him. A miracle. Something big, something memorable—not changing water into wine at a simple wedding reception..
It didn’t matter. His mother was right: “Fill the jars with water.”
So often we insist on waiting for our own “hour” to come.
We’ve got our plans, we’ve got our lives all mapped out. Then –snap!”—God, in the form of the people and situations around us, intervenes, and our plans lie broken on the floor around us.
God’s voice doesn’t usually boom out of the heavens, nor, usually, does God send an angel to dismantle the lives we imagined we would live.
No. Most commonly God calls us through what’s happening around us.
That’s what happened to Martin Luther King.
He was on the trajectory for success. He had his PhD, a wife and kids, and at the age of 26 had just been called a pastor at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.
He had plans. But on Dec. 3rd, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man and was arrested. The African American community gathered to plan their strategy. All the other black leaders had had a contentious history with the city government. Martin Luther King was new in town. No one knew him yet. So King was asked to lead a boycott of city buses.
I suspect he might have been tempted to answer, “Not now. My hour is not yet come.”
But Martin Luther King realized that whatever timetable he himself had in mind, God’s hour had come. In this hour an opportunity was opening for the black community to act and it was his hour to lead it.
He said, “Yes.”
This week we’ve been following the unspeakable events in Haiti.
What is God calling us to do in this hour?
It seems so little that most of us can do. Later on, there may be a call for volunteers, but in the chaos there now it seems better to let the people already there and the international forces get to work. For now, we can give our money to relief efforts and our hearts to prayer.
You see that we have an insert today from Episcopal Relief and Development. ERD is already very active in Haiti. Food and medical relief is already on its way to Haiti through the Dominican Republic.
When Wavell returns from his trip, we will make a significant donation to ERD from the church. In addition, I urge you each to respond to the request in the insert and make a personal contribution to ERD or some other organization.
But beyond financial aid, this hour of the tragedy in Haiti calls us to prayer.
This is the sort of situation where we might very well feel overwhelmed. What difference can our prayers make to all that suffering?
I believe that even though it is a mystery, prayer changes us and changes the situation for which we are praying. I believe that my prayers, your prayers, for the people of Haiti may directly ease a child’s, a man’s, a woman’s physical or psychological suffering, may give a jolt of extra energy to a searcher or relief worker, may bring a moment of consolation to someone whose misery we can’t even imagine
We’ll never know the results of our prayer. That’s ok—we will know that in this hour, we’ve taken time out of our own concerns to hold the people of Haiti up in prayer/
Let us now pray: Quiet your minds. Let yourself be aware of God’s presence. ……… In your hearts, your imaginations, hold up to God the people of Haiti. You may have a particular image in your mind from television or newspaper reports. That’s fine. .. Now see God’s love surrounding, embracing, enveloping those broken people . . . You can imagine God’s love as light, as warmth, as calm. . . .Hold this image in your heart and mind. …….Let God’s love flow through you to them …….. Give them to God. . . Amen.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Christmas 2 January 3rd, 2010
Christmas 2
January 3rd, 2010
In today’s Gospel we come face to face with the dark side of Christmas.
It is the first instance of many during Jesus’ life when human violence tried to destroy the presence of God in our midst.
The story of Herod and the flight into Egypt is the first hint that the Christmas story leads step by step to the Cross.
Why, after all, did the angel come to Joseph in the first place? Because King Herod, a Jew but a jpuppet ruler bought and paid for by the Romans, has given orders that all the baby boys in and around Bethlehem should be killed, because he wants this baby “king of the Jews” the wise men told him about to be exterminated.
Because of a vicious ruler who is willing to do anything at all to retain his power, Jesus becomes a refugee child. Jesus is the precious bundle of new life his parents will do anything to protect.
When I first read today’s Gospel, I was struck by one phrase, one phrase repeated twice.
When the angel came to him in warning, Joseph, the Gospel says, “got up, took the child and his mother, and went to Egypt.”
And when the dream angel told him he could take his family back home, Joseph “got up, took the child and his mother” and went back to Israel.
He didn’t question, he didn’t argue, he didn’t beg for time He got up and did what he has to do to keep Mary and Jesus safe.
Fleeing in fear for your life isn’t pretty; it’s not the stuff of Christmas cards. A California poet, William Everson, who knows his desert and has seen first hand the plight of economic refugees from Mexico, describes the “flight into the desert” this way:
The last settlement . . .
Cold and acrid and black.
It’s so easy to indulge in the Christmas story as a lovely bit of fantasy, G-rated, suitable for children and a relief for adults. But today’s Gospel takes us by the shoulders and turns us firmly back toward the world as it really is.
Think of all the fathers around the world, even this Christmastide, even this morning, who don’t need an angel to come to them in a dream to know that they too have to “get up,” take their children, and flee across national or territorial borders for safety.
Think of fathers in Afghanistan this morning after the volleyball bombing—wondering, where can they take their families where might they be safe? Fathers in the border regions of Pakistan—where can they be safe? Fathers in Palestine—where can my children grow up safe?
Fathers in all the war zones of the world or in the places where tyranny creates a false peace, telling themselves, “I must get up and take my wife and children and go . . . where?” Somewhere—is there a place?—where bombs don’t fall from the sky or burst out of car or explode from the earth itself.
No angel comes in a dream to tell them, but, like Joseph, they don’t hesitate, they get up, hold their wives hands, wrap their babies in blankets, and go.
Joseph got up and did what he needed to do.
The angel didn’t make him safe. God didn’t make him and his family safe, didn’t throw a cordon of fire or swords around them to protect them.
God needed Joseph’s collaboration. God needed Joseph that night in Bethlehem to spring up out of bed, help Mary throw together what little was absolutely needed for the flight.
Joseph couldn’t just lie there and pray and God would make it all right. In fact, the paradox, the total mystery of Christmas, is that the One Joseph needed to save was the Savior himself.
This is an amazing God we have!
To give himself to us in the pure vulnerability of a child. To deliver himself over to the care of Mary and Joseph, mere humans like ourselves.
To rely on us for food and safety.
To give himself over into a this terrible mixed up world where innocents are killed, where good men and women are targets of violence.
And yet where men and women are willing to say “yes” to God and “get up” and collaborate with God and with each other to make a world in which children aren’t threatened, oppressors don’t win, and families can live together in peace and safety.
Where you can make a difference, and so can I and how we live matters.
Over the campfire the desert moon
Slivers the west, too chaste and cleanly
To mean hard luck. The man rattles the skillet
To take the raw edge off the silence;
The woman lifts up her heart, the Infant
Knuckles the generous breast, and feeds.
January 3rd, 2010
In today’s Gospel we come face to face with the dark side of Christmas.
It is the first instance of many during Jesus’ life when human violence tried to destroy the presence of God in our midst.
The story of Herod and the flight into Egypt is the first hint that the Christmas story leads step by step to the Cross.
Why, after all, did the angel come to Joseph in the first place? Because King Herod, a Jew but a jpuppet ruler bought and paid for by the Romans, has given orders that all the baby boys in and around Bethlehem should be killed, because he wants this baby “king of the Jews” the wise men told him about to be exterminated.
Because of a vicious ruler who is willing to do anything at all to retain his power, Jesus becomes a refugee child. Jesus is the precious bundle of new life his parents will do anything to protect.
When I first read today’s Gospel, I was struck by one phrase, one phrase repeated twice.
When the angel came to him in warning, Joseph, the Gospel says, “got up, took the child and his mother, and went to Egypt.”
And when the dream angel told him he could take his family back home, Joseph “got up, took the child and his mother” and went back to Israel.
He didn’t question, he didn’t argue, he didn’t beg for time He got up and did what he has to do to keep Mary and Jesus safe.
Fleeing in fear for your life isn’t pretty; it’s not the stuff of Christmas cards. A California poet, William Everson, who knows his desert and has seen first hand the plight of economic refugees from Mexico, describes the “flight into the desert” this way:
The last settlement . . .
Cold and acrid and black.
It’s so easy to indulge in the Christmas story as a lovely bit of fantasy, G-rated, suitable for children and a relief for adults. But today’s Gospel takes us by the shoulders and turns us firmly back toward the world as it really is.
Think of all the fathers around the world, even this Christmastide, even this morning, who don’t need an angel to come to them in a dream to know that they too have to “get up,” take their children, and flee across national or territorial borders for safety.
Think of fathers in Afghanistan this morning after the volleyball bombing—wondering, where can they take their families where might they be safe? Fathers in the border regions of Pakistan—where can they be safe? Fathers in Palestine—where can my children grow up safe?
Fathers in all the war zones of the world or in the places where tyranny creates a false peace, telling themselves, “I must get up and take my wife and children and go . . . where?” Somewhere—is there a place?—where bombs don’t fall from the sky or burst out of car or explode from the earth itself.
No angel comes in a dream to tell them, but, like Joseph, they don’t hesitate, they get up, hold their wives hands, wrap their babies in blankets, and go.
Joseph got up and did what he needed to do.
The angel didn’t make him safe. God didn’t make him and his family safe, didn’t throw a cordon of fire or swords around them to protect them.
God needed Joseph’s collaboration. God needed Joseph that night in Bethlehem to spring up out of bed, help Mary throw together what little was absolutely needed for the flight.
Joseph couldn’t just lie there and pray and God would make it all right. In fact, the paradox, the total mystery of Christmas, is that the One Joseph needed to save was the Savior himself.
This is an amazing God we have!
To give himself to us in the pure vulnerability of a child. To deliver himself over to the care of Mary and Joseph, mere humans like ourselves.
To rely on us for food and safety.
To give himself over into a this terrible mixed up world where innocents are killed, where good men and women are targets of violence.
And yet where men and women are willing to say “yes” to God and “get up” and collaborate with God and with each other to make a world in which children aren’t threatened, oppressors don’t win, and families can live together in peace and safety.
Where you can make a difference, and so can I and how we live matters.
Over the campfire the desert moon
Slivers the west, too chaste and cleanly
To mean hard luck. The man rattles the skillet
To take the raw edge off the silence;
The woman lifts up her heart, the Infant
Knuckles the generous breast, and feeds.
Christmas 2009 “What Child is This?”
Christmas 2009
“What Child is This?”
Will and I hang our Christmas cards on red velvet ribbons hanging from the door frame to our parlor.
I love looking up from the dining room table which tends to be the center of Christmas wrapping and writing and list-making, and spotting the rows of cards, remembering the friends who sent them.
I can happily distract myself from whatever I’m supposed to be doing by focusing on one or two cards, remembering the friends who sent them.
Among them of course are cards made from photos proudly featuring kids and grandkids.
This year in one perusal I spotted a family I didn’t recognize at all. A proud mother and father flanking a gorgeous little guy about six months old. “Who are they?,” I wondered.
They turned out to be friends of my son’s fiancée, people I’d never met.
But what struck me was how they fit right in with all the regular Christmas cards surrounding them, the ones depicting Mary, Joseph, and the baby.
On one level, the Christmas story is so simple, so simple that toddlers can understand it, especially toddlers who have new little brothers or sisters.
Because on one level, the Christmas story is a birth story about a mother, a father, and a new baby.
Our Christmas cards this year featured a painting by Botticelli of Mary and Jesus. Except for the haloes, Mary and her baby are depicted as a healthy, happy mother and a plump little baby staring into his mother’s eyes.
The expression on Mary’s face looks just like the young mother of the family I didn’t recognize.
The Christmas story, the reason we’re all here tonight, draws us into celebration partly because birth itself always calls for celebration.
The fact of birth itself, the coming into being of a new human life—isn’t that holy enough, isn’t that sacred enough, to bring us together tonight in wonder and awe.
Just below the photograph of the familiar unfamiliar family is another very different image.
It’s an ancient depiction of Mary and Jesus from the Eastern Orthodox tradition called “Our Lady of the Sign.”
You may have see it: Mary is facing us, eyes looking at us. She’s holding up her hands like this—in the ancient position of prayer.
Here’s what’s surprising: It’s as if you have x-ray vision. You can see through Mary’s robes right into her body. And there is the Christ Child, sitting with great dignity, looking out right at us.
What you have to squint your eyes to see is that all around Jesus is a velvety darkness and twinkling in that darkness, stars.
Stars. Because of course the story of Christmas is not just about the miracle of all births, but also about one particular extraordinary birth.
And here’s where the Christmas story becomes wild and crazy It’s a story about a human birth, yes, but at the same time it’s bout a God who out of wild explosive love created a universe—stars and galaxies and planetary systems and quarks and black holes— out of nothing, and then stayed around long enough to realize that at least in the vicinity of earth and specifically of human beings, things were quickly going downhill.
It’s a story about a God who grieved for the lost goodness of the earth, whose heart was so pierced by the suffering caused by human resentments, selfishness, cruelty, greed and all the sins you and I know only too well—whose heart was so pierced by alienation from the children who had drifted so far away, that God in the person of Jesus Christ—and this is mystery so I can’t describe it too clearly—chose by an immense creative leap to take a human journey starting in a woman’s womb.
St. Paul tried to express the wonder of God’s crazy self-exile: “[Jesus Christ] had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless death.”
Can we entertain one wild notion together, just for a moment?:
That God loves us, each single one of us millions and billions of us—so crazily as to want to be with us, to be one of us?
I find it so hard to grasp. I suspect because we’re so used to being loved partially—for the spiffy parts of us, for the things we do well. For what makes us “successful.”
So the greatest miracle of all is when someone knows everything about us, absolutely everything—and still takes delight in us, loves us extravagantly, as if we were the most special person in the universe. When someone will do anything, sacrifice anything, to be with us.
That’s the ultimate Christmas gift, the one that never wears out or gets out of date—God’s wild, exuberant love.
I invite you tonight as we celebrate that first Christmas together, as we sing and pray and receive Communion together, to hold your cares and worries, your frustrations and griefs loosely—they are part of you but not all of you. And then let yourself be loved extravagantly by a God who journeyed to earth to be near us, and who will never let us go.
“What Child is This?”
Will and I hang our Christmas cards on red velvet ribbons hanging from the door frame to our parlor.
I love looking up from the dining room table which tends to be the center of Christmas wrapping and writing and list-making, and spotting the rows of cards, remembering the friends who sent them.
I can happily distract myself from whatever I’m supposed to be doing by focusing on one or two cards, remembering the friends who sent them.
Among them of course are cards made from photos proudly featuring kids and grandkids.
This year in one perusal I spotted a family I didn’t recognize at all. A proud mother and father flanking a gorgeous little guy about six months old. “Who are they?,” I wondered.
They turned out to be friends of my son’s fiancée, people I’d never met.
But what struck me was how they fit right in with all the regular Christmas cards surrounding them, the ones depicting Mary, Joseph, and the baby.
On one level, the Christmas story is so simple, so simple that toddlers can understand it, especially toddlers who have new little brothers or sisters.
Because on one level, the Christmas story is a birth story about a mother, a father, and a new baby.
Our Christmas cards this year featured a painting by Botticelli of Mary and Jesus. Except for the haloes, Mary and her baby are depicted as a healthy, happy mother and a plump little baby staring into his mother’s eyes.
The expression on Mary’s face looks just like the young mother of the family I didn’t recognize.
The Christmas story, the reason we’re all here tonight, draws us into celebration partly because birth itself always calls for celebration.
The fact of birth itself, the coming into being of a new human life—isn’t that holy enough, isn’t that sacred enough, to bring us together tonight in wonder and awe.
Just below the photograph of the familiar unfamiliar family is another very different image.
It’s an ancient depiction of Mary and Jesus from the Eastern Orthodox tradition called “Our Lady of the Sign.”
You may have see it: Mary is facing us, eyes looking at us. She’s holding up her hands like this—in the ancient position of prayer.
Here’s what’s surprising: It’s as if you have x-ray vision. You can see through Mary’s robes right into her body. And there is the Christ Child, sitting with great dignity, looking out right at us.
What you have to squint your eyes to see is that all around Jesus is a velvety darkness and twinkling in that darkness, stars.
Stars. Because of course the story of Christmas is not just about the miracle of all births, but also about one particular extraordinary birth.
And here’s where the Christmas story becomes wild and crazy It’s a story about a human birth, yes, but at the same time it’s bout a God who out of wild explosive love created a universe—stars and galaxies and planetary systems and quarks and black holes— out of nothing, and then stayed around long enough to realize that at least in the vicinity of earth and specifically of human beings, things were quickly going downhill.
It’s a story about a God who grieved for the lost goodness of the earth, whose heart was so pierced by the suffering caused by human resentments, selfishness, cruelty, greed and all the sins you and I know only too well—whose heart was so pierced by alienation from the children who had drifted so far away, that God in the person of Jesus Christ—and this is mystery so I can’t describe it too clearly—chose by an immense creative leap to take a human journey starting in a woman’s womb.
St. Paul tried to express the wonder of God’s crazy self-exile: “[Jesus Christ] had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless death.”
Can we entertain one wild notion together, just for a moment?:
That God loves us, each single one of us millions and billions of us—so crazily as to want to be with us, to be one of us?
I find it so hard to grasp. I suspect because we’re so used to being loved partially—for the spiffy parts of us, for the things we do well. For what makes us “successful.”
So the greatest miracle of all is when someone knows everything about us, absolutely everything—and still takes delight in us, loves us extravagantly, as if we were the most special person in the universe. When someone will do anything, sacrifice anything, to be with us.
That’s the ultimate Christmas gift, the one that never wears out or gets out of date—God’s wild, exuberant love.
I invite you tonight as we celebrate that first Christmas together, as we sing and pray and receive Communion together, to hold your cares and worries, your frustrations and griefs loosely—they are part of you but not all of you. And then let yourself be loved extravagantly by a God who journeyed to earth to be near us, and who will never let us go.
Advent II December 6, 2009
Advent II
December 6, 2009
One of the great themes of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, is Exile.
It was a massive historical trauma they could not forget, a nightmare they couldn’t shake.
I’ve described before how in the sixth century BC, the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem.They tore down the precious temple, the great symbol of the presence of God among them.
Then they carried off hostages into exile in Babylon, splitting up families, taking the best and the brightest away into another land.
“Displaced people”—that’s what many of the Hebrew people became.
We hear the lament of those exiles in the poignant lament that is Psalm 137:
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
When we remembered you, O Zion.
Those who led us away captive asked us for a song,
And our oppressors called for mirth:
[But] How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.
There are so many people in exile in this world of ours!
Literally millions of people displaced by war or so-called “ethnic cleansing.” At the height of the Iraq war, the number of external and internal (ethnic cleansing) exiles was estimated at close to two million men, women, and children. Exiles from Palestine, the Balkans, Congo, Nigeria—try googling the word ‘exile’ sometime. All those millions of people forced to sing their native songs in a foreign land.
Then there are economic exiles, people impelled by conomic conditions in their home countries (including many “illegals” in the US right now) where a father or mother leaves home and children to find work in more affluent countries. Gail’s work with sailors who spend months in exile on the high seas under often harsh conditions—pirates, dangerous weather==in order to support children at home whom they rarely see. They show her dogeared photos—“my child—last year, when I saw him last.”
Last week was World AIDS Day. In some places in the world, HIV positive people are driven out of towns and villages to live apart like lepers.
There are so many reasons for exile. But whatever the reasons, people like these plumb the depths of homesickness and heartache,
Those of us who’ve been around this earth for a while know that exile is not just a geographical fact. We humans can experience spiritual exile as well.
What is spiritual exile?
The symptoms of what I mean by spiritual exile are these: distance from God or a blank spot where once God was, a feeling of being lost or abandoned, a sense that nothing I do means anything, that life is just something to be slogged through.
How do we wind up in spiritual exile? What drags us away from home into an unknown, hostile place?
Terrible suffering can do it, chronic pain or the sudden or dragged out loss of a loved one. A marriage or deep friendship torn apart without warning.
Addiction and sin can drag us into exile. When that happens, Babylon, this new and pleasurable land, looks like the place to be.
For a while the place of giving into the delicious pleasures of out-of-control drink or drugs, or “unfaithful” sex (doesn’t that sound old fashioned?!), or accumulating stuff, stuff, stuff and forgetting about people, people, people—for a while it doesn’t feel like exile at all. It feels like a much-improved homeland.
Remember the old Disney movie Pinocchio? As a child the most scary part was when Pinocchio skips school and winds up with other children in an amusement park. The scary part for me was how fun it all looked, how much I bought into it myself—like Pinocchio I’d love to have lived there forever, and then how mindless and selfish and, yes, sick, it became until Pinocchio and all the other children turned into donkeys. I still feel a little nauseous when I remember that scene.
Addiction and sin can drag us into exile and for a while Babylon looks like the place to be.
But just as geographical exiles keep in their hearts a compass arrow pointing toward their place of origin, so when we’re in spiritual exile something in us keeps on calling us home, assuring us it doesn’t matter how far away we’ve wandered, how lost we are in the distorting and perverted funhouse of sin—God calls us home.
During Advent especially we’re invited out of exile. Advent readings and hymns are filled with images of homecoming.
Today especially: In the first lesson Baruch, a prophet in exile in Babylon, writes home to Jerusalem, “For they went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies; but God will bring them back to you. . . .“ The Gospel quotes the prophet Isaiah, telling the exiles that the journey home will be easy!: “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 made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Why Advent? Jesus will come in a few weeks—how?
God’s son, “exiled” from heaven, a tiny baby born to a couple forced away by politics from their hometown. Jesus was born in exile.
And we can look ahead in Jesus’ story and see that Jesus’ entire ministry amounted to leading people out of exile: He healed lepers who had by law to live outside the city gates—Jesus’ healing meant they could come inside go home.
A woman who’d been hemorrhaging for twelve years. By law because of her illness she couldn’t live with her husband as man and wife—Jesus’ healing meant she could go home.
The tax collector who’d been shunned as a sinner and a traitor because of his job—Jesus said to him, “Come, follow me,” and then Jesus invited himself to the tax collector’s home.
The prophet of Advent, John the Baptist, had one and only one message: “Repent.”
We often interpret that word as beating our breasts, crawling with guilt.
But that’s wrong: in the most basic way all that that saving, Advent word means is this: “Come home.”
December 6, 2009
One of the great themes of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, is Exile.
It was a massive historical trauma they could not forget, a nightmare they couldn’t shake.
I’ve described before how in the sixth century BC, the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem.They tore down the precious temple, the great symbol of the presence of God among them.
Then they carried off hostages into exile in Babylon, splitting up families, taking the best and the brightest away into another land.
“Displaced people”—that’s what many of the Hebrew people became.
We hear the lament of those exiles in the poignant lament that is Psalm 137:
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
When we remembered you, O Zion.
Those who led us away captive asked us for a song,
And our oppressors called for mirth:
[But] How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.
There are so many people in exile in this world of ours!
Literally millions of people displaced by war or so-called “ethnic cleansing.” At the height of the Iraq war, the number of external and internal (ethnic cleansing) exiles was estimated at close to two million men, women, and children. Exiles from Palestine, the Balkans, Congo, Nigeria—try googling the word ‘exile’ sometime. All those millions of people forced to sing their native songs in a foreign land.
Then there are economic exiles, people impelled by conomic conditions in their home countries (including many “illegals” in the US right now) where a father or mother leaves home and children to find work in more affluent countries. Gail’s work with sailors who spend months in exile on the high seas under often harsh conditions—pirates, dangerous weather==in order to support children at home whom they rarely see. They show her dogeared photos—“my child—last year, when I saw him last.”
Last week was World AIDS Day. In some places in the world, HIV positive people are driven out of towns and villages to live apart like lepers.
There are so many reasons for exile. But whatever the reasons, people like these plumb the depths of homesickness and heartache,
Those of us who’ve been around this earth for a while know that exile is not just a geographical fact. We humans can experience spiritual exile as well.
What is spiritual exile?
The symptoms of what I mean by spiritual exile are these: distance from God or a blank spot where once God was, a feeling of being lost or abandoned, a sense that nothing I do means anything, that life is just something to be slogged through.
How do we wind up in spiritual exile? What drags us away from home into an unknown, hostile place?
Terrible suffering can do it, chronic pain or the sudden or dragged out loss of a loved one. A marriage or deep friendship torn apart without warning.
Addiction and sin can drag us into exile. When that happens, Babylon, this new and pleasurable land, looks like the place to be.
For a while the place of giving into the delicious pleasures of out-of-control drink or drugs, or “unfaithful” sex (doesn’t that sound old fashioned?!), or accumulating stuff, stuff, stuff and forgetting about people, people, people—for a while it doesn’t feel like exile at all. It feels like a much-improved homeland.
Remember the old Disney movie Pinocchio? As a child the most scary part was when Pinocchio skips school and winds up with other children in an amusement park. The scary part for me was how fun it all looked, how much I bought into it myself—like Pinocchio I’d love to have lived there forever, and then how mindless and selfish and, yes, sick, it became until Pinocchio and all the other children turned into donkeys. I still feel a little nauseous when I remember that scene.
Addiction and sin can drag us into exile and for a while Babylon looks like the place to be.
But just as geographical exiles keep in their hearts a compass arrow pointing toward their place of origin, so when we’re in spiritual exile something in us keeps on calling us home, assuring us it doesn’t matter how far away we’ve wandered, how lost we are in the distorting and perverted funhouse of sin—God calls us home.
During Advent especially we’re invited out of exile. Advent readings and hymns are filled with images of homecoming.
Today especially: In the first lesson Baruch, a prophet in exile in Babylon, writes home to Jerusalem, “For they went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies; but God will bring them back to you. . . .“ The Gospel quotes the prophet Isaiah, telling the exiles that the journey home will be easy!: “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 made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Why Advent? Jesus will come in a few weeks—how?
God’s son, “exiled” from heaven, a tiny baby born to a couple forced away by politics from their hometown. Jesus was born in exile.
And we can look ahead in Jesus’ story and see that Jesus’ entire ministry amounted to leading people out of exile: He healed lepers who had by law to live outside the city gates—Jesus’ healing meant they could come inside go home.
A woman who’d been hemorrhaging for twelve years. By law because of her illness she couldn’t live with her husband as man and wife—Jesus’ healing meant she could go home.
The tax collector who’d been shunned as a sinner and a traitor because of his job—Jesus said to him, “Come, follow me,” and then Jesus invited himself to the tax collector’s home.
The prophet of Advent, John the Baptist, had one and only one message: “Repent.”
We often interpret that word as beating our breasts, crawling with guilt.
But that’s wrong: in the most basic way all that that saving, Advent word means is this: “Come home.”
First Sunday of Advent November 29th, 2009
First Sunday of Advent
November 29th, 2009
Ah the first Sunday of Advent, the first day of the church’s new year. There’s no easing into it== as usual the Gospel is designed to sweep away the cobwebs, to shake us up!
Jesus and his disciples are at the temple. Like good tourists, the disciples are ooing and ahing over the beauties of the temple. They’re almost worshiping the temple building, assuming its solid walls will last forever.
But Jesus squelches their naïve enthusiasm with a scorching prediction that the walls of the temple will tumble to the ground and chaos take over the world.
The disciples look around them, even reach out and touch for reassurance the massive stones of the walls of the temple. But as Jesus speaks fear rises in them, and maybe one or two imagined they could feel a slight trembling in the stone.
Really? Even these stones will crumble? This magnificent temple, the secure center of the entire Jewish culture? But how? But why? Yes, it isn’t perfect: there is corruption, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, yes, there is armed revolt and a brutal occupation. But that’s just the way it is—isn’t it?”
Like the disciples, it’s hard for us to stand back a bit and look objectively at the world we live in.
It’s a good life we live, by and large. It happens that all of us here live somewhere—maybe not where we would choose, but we are sheltered. We have enough to eat.
But we just have to look around us—out into the campgrounds or cars parked in the shadows of lots around Plymouth, and we’ll find people living in tents or vehicles. The demand on our local food pantries right now is intense—and many of the people who receive that food are subsisting on it.
Our neighbors, some of them—some of us—have to choose each month between paying for rent/mortgage, food, and medicine. Hospital bills can force even people working one or two jobs into bankruptcy. And speaking of jobs how many people still cannot find even a part time job to make ends meet?
And that’s here, in small town New Hampshire. Add to this, in other regions of the country, issues of racism and immigration, and we have to admit that even in this great nation people are suffering from problems not of their own making.
But that’s just the way it is for some people in America, isn’t it?
And then there’s the world beyond our world.
In Mabvuku a bag of “mealie meal” can literally mean the difference between life and death. There not enough cash for a school uniform means no school, no education, no way out of the slum. There a violent political system makes political protest life-threatening.
But that’s just the way it is in Zimbabwe—isn’t it?
What is Jesus doing in this gospel? What is his point—just to scare his disciples? Or discourage or depress them?
No—his point is this: that none of this is the way it has to be—in Israel in the first century, in Zimbabwe and in the United States right now. It just doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s Jesus’ good news: no matter how permanent, how entrenched, how unyielding are the systems of this world, they are not the ultimate reality.
They will all collapse. The only thing in human history that remains firm and unchanging is God’s promise to be with us. The promise that God will judge the structures of this world. That ultimately God will move the world in the direction of justice and mercy. That God, that God!, will have the last word.
“Don’t give up in despair,” Jesus is saying to us this first Sunday of Advent, “Don’t give up in despair at the mess humans have made of this amazing world. Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Let’s try something, a brief meditation to begin our Advent:
Visualize something that particularly bothers you about the way the world is right now—politically, ecologically, morally. Don’t focus on something in yourself—look outward at the wider world in which we live.
Imagine those circumstances, that structure, of injustice and cruelty cracking, collapsing, going out of focus—whatever way you can best visualize it weakening and disappearing.
Imagine then the hand of God reaching down and recreating that aspect of the world. Tenderly, creatively.
Imagine as clearly and concretely as you can: the new and fresh way God has recreated the world.
See yourself helping, tending the new thing God has made.
Today’s Advent gospel, even though it intends to shake us up, leaves us with a powerful image of hope: “Look at the fig tree,” Jesus says,”tf ytand all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.”
The people of the Middle East love figs for their sweetness, of course. But they also believe that figs have the power to heal.
Such a surprising and lovely image, isn’t it?—in the midst of change, in the midst of chaos, suddenly appears a fig tree about to bloom.
A sweet image—like God’s promise through the ages that the world doesn’t have to be this way, that the world, tiny bit by tiny bit, tiny piece by tiny piece, can be healed.
November 29th, 2009
Ah the first Sunday of Advent, the first day of the church’s new year. There’s no easing into it== as usual the Gospel is designed to sweep away the cobwebs, to shake us up!
Jesus and his disciples are at the temple. Like good tourists, the disciples are ooing and ahing over the beauties of the temple. They’re almost worshiping the temple building, assuming its solid walls will last forever.
But Jesus squelches their naïve enthusiasm with a scorching prediction that the walls of the temple will tumble to the ground and chaos take over the world.
The disciples look around them, even reach out and touch for reassurance the massive stones of the walls of the temple. But as Jesus speaks fear rises in them, and maybe one or two imagined they could feel a slight trembling in the stone.
Really? Even these stones will crumble? This magnificent temple, the secure center of the entire Jewish culture? But how? But why? Yes, it isn’t perfect: there is corruption, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, yes, there is armed revolt and a brutal occupation. But that’s just the way it is—isn’t it?”
Like the disciples, it’s hard for us to stand back a bit and look objectively at the world we live in.
It’s a good life we live, by and large. It happens that all of us here live somewhere—maybe not where we would choose, but we are sheltered. We have enough to eat.
But we just have to look around us—out into the campgrounds or cars parked in the shadows of lots around Plymouth, and we’ll find people living in tents or vehicles. The demand on our local food pantries right now is intense—and many of the people who receive that food are subsisting on it.
Our neighbors, some of them—some of us—have to choose each month between paying for rent/mortgage, food, and medicine. Hospital bills can force even people working one or two jobs into bankruptcy. And speaking of jobs how many people still cannot find even a part time job to make ends meet?
And that’s here, in small town New Hampshire. Add to this, in other regions of the country, issues of racism and immigration, and we have to admit that even in this great nation people are suffering from problems not of their own making.
But that’s just the way it is for some people in America, isn’t it?
And then there’s the world beyond our world.
In Mabvuku a bag of “mealie meal” can literally mean the difference between life and death. There not enough cash for a school uniform means no school, no education, no way out of the slum. There a violent political system makes political protest life-threatening.
But that’s just the way it is in Zimbabwe—isn’t it?
What is Jesus doing in this gospel? What is his point—just to scare his disciples? Or discourage or depress them?
No—his point is this: that none of this is the way it has to be—in Israel in the first century, in Zimbabwe and in the United States right now. It just doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s Jesus’ good news: no matter how permanent, how entrenched, how unyielding are the systems of this world, they are not the ultimate reality.
They will all collapse. The only thing in human history that remains firm and unchanging is God’s promise to be with us. The promise that God will judge the structures of this world. That ultimately God will move the world in the direction of justice and mercy. That God, that God!, will have the last word.
“Don’t give up in despair,” Jesus is saying to us this first Sunday of Advent, “Don’t give up in despair at the mess humans have made of this amazing world. Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Let’s try something, a brief meditation to begin our Advent:
Visualize something that particularly bothers you about the way the world is right now—politically, ecologically, morally. Don’t focus on something in yourself—look outward at the wider world in which we live.
Imagine those circumstances, that structure, of injustice and cruelty cracking, collapsing, going out of focus—whatever way you can best visualize it weakening and disappearing.
Imagine then the hand of God reaching down and recreating that aspect of the world. Tenderly, creatively.
Imagine as clearly and concretely as you can: the new and fresh way God has recreated the world.
See yourself helping, tending the new thing God has made.
Today’s Advent gospel, even though it intends to shake us up, leaves us with a powerful image of hope: “Look at the fig tree,” Jesus says,”tf ytand all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.”
The people of the Middle East love figs for their sweetness, of course. But they also believe that figs have the power to heal.
Such a surprising and lovely image, isn’t it?—in the midst of change, in the midst of chaos, suddenly appears a fig tree about to bloom.
A sweet image—like God’s promise through the ages that the world doesn’t have to be this way, that the world, tiny bit by tiny bit, tiny piece by tiny piece, can be healed.
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