The Christian religion has at its heart the memory of an event. It was an event so surprising, so unexpected in the way it unfolded that, even though it happened a long time ago, people are still straining to understand what happened. It was an event that showed the people who witnessed it something so clear and unmistakable and at the same time so dazzling and profound that, in attempting to describe it, one of the best ways they could come up with was to liken it to a light suddenly blazing up in the darkness. It was as if they had been asleep and then suddenly there was a light that woke them up and revealed to them a whole landscape that they had only been dimly aware of before, if at all.
Like people do who have shared an extraordinary experience they formed a community to support each other in staying awake to the vivid reality that they had perceived. And one of the things they did as a community was to remember and retell the story of what the light had been like, so that others could see it, and so they would keep it shining in their faces and in their hearts. At times it seemed as if the light were growing dim, as if the darkness of sleep and the dullness of forgetting were irresistibly growing around them. And then they would remember one of the most powerful things that the light had shown them. This was the vision of how it would be when the same light that had awakened them from sleep blazed up again and woke up everyone in the whole world, all at once.
They had been given a glimpse of that vision and it troubled them. It would not let them go back to sleep, but burned in them with an awful dread and an unquenchable longing. They looked about themselves at a world thronged with people sleepwalking, as it were, unaware of the glory that was hiding its splendor among them, waiting to burst forth and suffuse the entire creation with love and beauty. They knew that for some of those people waking up would be a joyful surprise and release from a prison of misery, but that for others it would be a sudden shock that would reveal how greatly mistaken they had been. They looked at those people and they saw themselves.
And so they made it their practice to begin every year with the memory of what it is like to wait in darkness, to not know and not see, but to watch and hope for the first sign of the dawn. They would tell the stories of what it was like before the light broke in, before the event called Jesus Christ. And they would remember what Jesus himself had said about waiting, and staying awake, about not getting ahead of ourselves, and not taking anything for granted, but living always as if this moment were the moment, after which only God would be real.
Today’s scriptures offer us another set of images to place in our hearts alongside those ones. In the reading from Isaiah and in the Psalm we read about pilgrimage, about the tribes of Israel and indeed all the nations setting out on a journey to Jerusalem, to the house of the Lord. This reminds me that as we wait in the darkness, people are on the move. They are looking for spiritual illumination but also for justice, and for a safe place to dwell. The Christian religion has at its heart the memory of an event, and that event begins not just with the daybreak of the spirit, but with a man and his pregnant wife going down the road.
This couple are members of a nation with its own memories of fire and darkness. They are not a great people—in fact, they are insignificant among the powers of the world, but they know themselves to be children of a magnificent promise. The promise is that their pilgrimage, with all its twists and turns, and triumphs and disasters, is supremely meaningful. Their family history is the story of how God trains a community for teaching peace to the whole world. The life that Mary carries in her womb as she sets out on her journey is not only light in the darkness; it is also blood, the precious bloodline of the covenant community. So our hope includes an appreciation of the human vessels through whom the Christ event becomes a living reality for us, the parents and grandparents, the teachers and friends, the real historic communities, through which the bloodline of faith has come down to us.
I became a Christian at an Episcopal church in San Francisco called St. Gregory’s. I think what made St. Gregory’s work for me as a spiritual home was that it embodied more than any other church I’ve belonged to, the idea that everyone in the congregation forms the body of Christ by acting together in worship. So the music is a capella singing of the whole congregation, led by a choir that is distributed throughout the church. During the service of the word, the people sit facing each other, close to enough to make eye contact with each other and the preacher, and members of the congregation complete the sermon with stories from their own experience. The whole congregation processes in step to the communion table where the eucharist is offered in the midst of the people, and concludes with everyone dancing a hymn around it.
Worshipping in this way over time creates in the community an openness to surprise, the expectation that God will reveal herself in new and unexpected ways. And the medium of that revelation is the lives of Christ’s people. That atmosphere helped me to see myself with new eyes, and gave me opportunity to and step forward gradually, cautiously, into my vocation as a preacher, pastor and priest.
I believe St. John’s has been given a similar kind of gift, albeit in a different form and to a different purpose. The pilgrimage of this community, as painful as it has been, has allowed for a kind of Advent experience, a going back to the beginning, a willingness to watch and wait and hope for the light to break forth. This experience has also showed us how fragile and precious is the bloodline of our people, how easily it can be broken, and the consequences of forsaking it. This journey has placed in us a kind of watchfulness and expectancy for how God will act, so much so that our Diocese has committed significant support from its Emergent Ministries fund, to help you pay my salary so together we can bring Christ’s mission to Petaluma to light in new and surprising ways.
Unlike St. Gregory’s, we are not a new congregation. We do not have the luxury of building a new building to suit our preferred style of liturgy. We are a 154-year-old church start-up in a 120-year-old building, and we are a mix of people who walked in the door for the first time today, or a year ago, and people who have been coming here regularly for fifty years. We have the challenge of watching like hawks for signs of the dawn. This may include finding common ground with spiritual seekers who may be ambivalent and even suspicious where traditional Christianity is concerned. It may require being open and curious about movements in contemporary spirituality that may not seem Christian enough, to welcome sacred circle dancers and pseudo-Buddhists, to tree-huggers and devotees of the divine feminine, who also happen to be open and curious about Jesus. It may require finding common ground with those in whom we recognize Christ’s ministry of reconciliation but who have no interest in Christ at all.
And our great challenge and gift is to do this and at the same time to honor our bloodline, to find in the memory of our real, historic community, directions to the goal of our pilgrimage. We need to return to our story and appreciate our ancestors with a renewed interest and a new respect, not expecting them to be perfect, or like us, but because God was working on them just as we are worked on, disturbing their sleep, breaking in where they weren’t watching, fashioning them into a people able to bear the light.
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