Clear the road

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Canticle 9
Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18

A week ago Friday we had the cable company in to the parish office to upgrade our internet service with some new hardware that is supposed to make everything move faster.  And, as always seems to be the case with these technical improvements, there were unexpected complications.  We came in on Tuesday to find that the Treasurer’s computer, which is plugged directly into the new router, was working just fine, but the computers that connect wirelessly from the other offices were unable to get internet access.  Fortunately, we had Scott the Information Technology guy coming in that day to work on another problem, so while he was at it he managed to straighten out the bugs in the wireless networking. 

At least, that is what we thought he done.  But it turns out one problem still remains, which only became apparent after Scott had gone.  You see, my laptop doesn’t only connect wirelessly with the internet router in the Treasurer’s office, it also connects to a wireless printer on the filing cabinet next to my desk, and while my computer can now communicate quite nicely to the internet, it is somehow no longer on speaking terms with my printer.   Now, I’m no geek, or at least not that kind, but I can sometimes figure these things out on my own, so I gave it a shot.  But after a couple of hours the best I could come up with was the printer’s network configuration utility telling me over and over that my computer and my printer were connected to different networks.  And as many times as I re-tried the process, entering the names of all the different wireless networks that were available, I kept getting the same result.  So I guess we’ll have to get Scott back out here again to see what he can do.

In the meantime, this image of two different, incompatible networks has stuck with me, because that is kind of like what the Gospel of Luke describes at the outset of chapter three.  First, it tells us about the network of political and religious power that dominates the world of the story it is about to tell—the Roman Emperor Tiberius, his governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, the sons of Herod the Great, who are the proxy rulers of the Judean hinterlands, and the High Priests at the top of the temple hierarchy in Jerusalem.  It is an uneasy set of alliances that binds these men together, one that rivalry, ambition, and mistrust continually threaten to break apart, but all of them are, in a sense, on the same wavelength.  They have a common interest in maintaining the network that keeps them in power.

But these political figures are not the main players in the drama that is about to unfold.  Some of them will play minor parts in the story later, but just at the moment they are only here to set the historical stage for John, the son of Zechariah, who has no throne, no territory over which he rules, no place in the structure of empire.  John is out in the wilderness.  But it is out there in the desert that something comes to John that connects him to a network of power and information entirely different from the one we just heard about.   The word of God comes to John, just as it came to Isaiah and the other prophets who were before him, with its revolutionary message to the world.

I don’t know about you, but there are few things that frustrate me more than a computer problem.  It throws off the pace of my working routine, and puts a drain on my productivity.  I want to get it worked out as quickly as possible, and have a hard time concentrating on my other tasks until I do.  But there is no simple fix for the disruption caused by the word of God, no quick resumption of business-as-usual.  Because the message of prophets like John is that we have to repent.  We can’t just get the printer and the laptop talking to each other again, and get back to work.  There’s a stream of data we’ve been ignoring, and people we’ve never heard of, hacking into the system we thought was secure.  They say it’s time to connect to a whole different network, time to make a complete change of plan, because God is on the move. 

God is on the move, and if there’s anything more frustrating than a computer glitch it’s a traffic jam.  We will go miles out of our way, even if takes just as long to get where we’re going, if it means that at least we can keep moving.  And what John the son of Zechariah says is that God doesn’t like traffic congestion either.  God’s not going to put up with lanes closed for road construction, or blocked off for an accident, with cars slowing down to rubberneck at the scene. 

God isn’t planning to take any detours, either.  God is coming, so it’s time to clear the road.  It’s time to fill in the potholes, and shave down the speed bumps, and open the carpool lanes.   Not so that we can go where we want to more quickly and conveniently, but so that God can come speedily to save us.  And when God does come, the prophets say, we’re going to want to be ready, and waiting, to have our heads up and our eyes open and our ears pricked, ready to see the signs and hear the words of our salvation. 

I used to argue for waiting as long as possible to decorate our house for Christmas.  It isn’t a matter of procrastination, but of principle, part of my quixotic quest to preserve the religious calendar, and minimize the intrusion of Christmas into Advent.  I’m also concerned for Christmas itself, that if we bring it on too soon it would go stale before the traditional twelve days of Christmas are done.  But I am outnumbered in this opinion, as in many things at my house nowadays, and either my resistance is wearing down, or I’m just learning to pick my battles.  So yesterday afternoon I went with my family to pick out a Christmas tree. 

I did console myself with a practical rationale, which was this: the trees we usually pick up the weekend before Christmas are all dried out from sitting around the lot so long, so my thinking is that if we get one now, cut a little off the bottom of the stem and kept it watered, it may actually last longer into the Christmas season before it starts turning gray and dropping needles all over the floor.  I guess we’ll see.  And I can report that, in a small victory for my side, we agreed not to decorate the tree immediately.  So for the time being it is standing in its pot of water in the corner of our living room, dark and fragrant, waiting.  Which, as it is, now strikes me as a beautiful symbol of Advent.   So I’m secretly hoping I can stall for a little more time before we pull out the lights and the box of cat toys, otherwise known as ornaments.

But I also have to admit to experiencing something yesterday that took me by surprise, which was that as were out and about getting the tree we saw many other families in the tree lots, doing the same, or driving home with trees in the backs of their trucks or on the roofs of their cars.  And here and there in our neighborhood they were out in their yards, stringing lights on the eaves, and hanging shiny objects on shrubs and doors and fences.  And I had the happy sense of taking part in a collective ritual, two weeks too early though it may have been, a ritual of getting ready.   Which is, after all, what Advent is supposed to be about—getting ready—so I’m not going to say that it’s wrong.

But the prophet in me still does have to ask—what is it we are getting ready for?  Are we simply hanging the scenery, gathering the props, and assembling the costumes, for an annual performance called Christmas, in which we will be the actors and the audience?   If that were the case, would not Tiberius Caesar and Pontius Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas, feel right at home?  Or are we preparing for something far more beautiful and dangerous, something announced by a strange voice crying out in the wings of the stage—the entrance of God?         

 

Turning of the years

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

As some of you already know, my birthday is this week.  I’ll be turning fifty, which is one of those nice round numbers that lends itself to being thought of as a milestone.  It also makes for some easy computations.  For example, because I was ordained to the priesthood on my fortieth birthday, I will soon be able to say that I have spent one-fifth of my life as an Episcopal priest.  Or, since I came to Petaluma five years ago in August, I can already say that I have spent one-tenth of it in the service of St. John’s Church.  But, of course, the calculation that carries the most weight on an anniversary like this is the one that is impossible to make—the one that asks what proportion of my span of life remains to be spent.  I can’t know, but the odds are low, and diminishing quickly, that the answer is greater than one half.

When I was a child, or a young man, the time I have left seemed endless, because I couldn’t imagine it.  But now I know how long thirty years, or forty, or even fifty years is, because I’ve already lived it—and I know it’s not long.  So during this past year, as I have contemplated turning fifty, I have sometimes felt afraid: afraid of losing my social cachet, and my hair, and my mental and physical faculties; afraid of dying, certainly; but most of all afraid of running out of time, afraid that what remains of my life will run through my fingers as quickly and heedlessly as the life I have already spent.  My time is getting short, and at moments I am afraid I will come to the end of it with regret that I did not use it well.

But as my birthday’s gotten closer I’ve come to see that hidden in that fear there is a gift.   The fear itself is a gift, because it motivates me to ask some very important questions.  When I face the truth of my mortality, and do not look away, I cannot help but question the way I am living, the work that I’m doing, and the quality of my relationships, in the light of their ultimate significance.  How well am I lining up with my highest values?  What unfinished work can I still realistically hope to accomplish in the time that remains to me?  Am I creating the legacy I want to leave behind me when I’m gone?     

And within the fear of failing to live in a manner worthy of the best I hope to be, is the recognition that my time in this body, in this world, is a precious gift.  I did not create this life, I did not earn it, no one asked I deserved it, it just came to me, and along with it came all the other gifts, of love, nourishment, companionship, protection, teaching, solace, and support that have enabled me to carry it thus far.  When I appreciate the miracle of having had these fifty years to live the life that I’ve been blessed to have, I’m not so afraid anymore.  I’m grateful.  I am deeply thankful, and I aspire to make each day that’s added to the blessing I’ve received, my own modest way of saying “yes” to such unmerited abundance.

The Bible encourages us to think about the whole world in much the same way I’ve been thinking about my own fiftieth birthday.  We tend to assume that the world is going to go on and on pretty much the same as it is now for such a long time, it might as well be forever.  But one of the recurring themes in the Bible is that we need to keep in mind that it is going to end, maybe sooner than we think.  Maybe immediately.   

And if you take seriously passages like the one in Luke about how "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations” it is only natural to be afraid.  But making us afraid is not the intent behind these words.  The passage goes on to say “people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world;” so it does acknowledge that what it is talking about is frightening.   But its purpose in warning us about these things ahead of time is so that we will not cower in fear, ducking for cover, but so we will confidently raise our heads and look for what is coming after.

There was a brief time in the history of our own civilization when some of us, at least, could imagine we were building a world that would last forever.  The continuous advancement of science and technology, capitalism and industry, liberal democracy, and the so-called Rights of Man, would just go on and on and on until we arrived at an earthly paradise.  And yet, the fear of the sudden end, the abrupt and unexpected crash, has continued to haunt our civilization, even in circles where its religious basis is denied.  Nuclear war, asteroid collision, bird flu, global warming, fanatics with dirty bombs populate our nightmares, even as we continue to praise the magnificence of our dreams. 

But I think it is ridiculous to think that first-century followers of Jesus envisioned our moment in history, and issued warnings about our specific circumstances, but their timing was just two thousand years off.  There were signs enough in their own century that the world they lived in could not last.  Falsehood, injustice and violence so riddled its social, religious, and political order that it could not help but fall.  They saw that this was not simply true of the institutions that they knew--the Judean temple-state and the Greco-Roman Empire--but that any new power that might rise to take their place would share the same spirit and so meet the same fate.  

What the authors of the Bible understood is that we human beings keep trying to create an order in the world that will last forever, because this is how we cope with our fear of death.  We think that if we can be part of something greater than ourselves, a set of norms and symbols, of customs, laws, and institutions with their monuments and histories, if we can improve a little on this legacy and pass it down intact to succeeding generations at least we can feel like our lives meant something.   And if we have to cut some corners, and turn a blind eye to certain uncomfortable truths, and sacrifice some victims to maintain the present order of the world, we consider the price worth paying.  But the hard message of the Bible is that this effort is still futile, because the world you and I live in, and any other we could make, is coming to end. 

Because we cannot take the anxieties and aspirations of our mortal lives and make from them our own ultimate meaning.  It lies beyond them.  We cannot derive the transcendent values by which to steer an eternal course from the conventional wisdom of a world that is passing away—they come from somewhere else.  But here is what the Bible says that is heartening and liberating, beyond what we have any reason to expect—that help has come, and more is on the way.  We may already have one foot in the grave, but Christ has emptied the tomb of its power.  The world may be coming to an end, but at that end we’ll find the world’s true beginning.  Because God wants greater things for us than we know how to want for ourselves.

Which means that through all the troubles we encounter, in the face of all the things that cast a pall of fear and helplessness over our lives, we hold an unbreakable lifeline of hope.  And I don’t mean a passive, “well, maybe someday” kind of hope.  The hope that the writers of the New Testament urged on their communities was an active readiness, a way of living in expectation that God’s inconceivable deliverance is close at hand.  It is very close, closer than we think, liable to break into the world and transform everything we thought was impervious to change, or wouldn’t change for a long, long time.  The grace to know what, out of all the things the world has conditioned us to want, we really need, has come to us, is coming to us, will come to us, even as we hope for its coming.  And the true desire of the nations, which spells their doom and their deliverance, is God’s desire too.

Son of David

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
 Canticle 15
Romans 16: 25-27
Luke 1: 26-38

Twenty years ago I made my first and only trip to Europe.  I spent about a month-and-a-half in Germany, but on the way there my girlfriend and I laid over for about five days in London.  We stayed with a friend of hers in a council flat in Camden Town and I walked for miles all over central London taking in the sights.  On one of these excursions I went along The Strand to Westminster to see the houses of Parliament and the Abbey church where the English monarchs have been married and buried and crowned since the Norman Conquest.

My parents had a coffee-table book about Westminster Abbey that I had loved as a child, so I it was one of the few tourist attractions in the city that I actually tried to go into, and not just admire from outside.  But when I entered the great West Doors of the church I found there was a large barrier across the nave, and you couldn’t go any further without paying an expensive admission fee.  So I remained near the entrance, with the other casual tourists, gazing over the barrier at what I could see of the high vaulted ceiling and the clerestory windows and the great rows of columns marching into the distance. 

And as I stood there contemplating, something stirred in my heart.  Maybe it was some kind of racial memory passed down to me from my English ancestors on my father’s father’s side.   Because I’m not one to go gaga for royal weddings or Diamond Jubilees, or to care one bit for what the Duchess of Cambridge was wearing on her recent visit to New York.  But in that church in that moment twenty years ago I understood the awe and reverence of my ancestors for their King.  Not as a celebrity, but as a symbol of the soul of the nation, of the land and the people, bound together in unity of blood, history and religion.  In England the sacred power of that symbol has a house, a shrine where it peculiarly dwells, and there I was, in that house. 

In the Second Book of Samuel, David decides that it is time to build a house like that.  He has defeated his enemies and consolidated his power in his new capital of Jerusalem.  So it is only natural that now he should want to build a temple for the God who chose him to be shepherd of Israel, who favored him, and granted him victory.   And at first David’s spiritual counselor, the prophet Nathan, sees nothing wrong with the proposal.  But that same night the word of the Lord comes to Nathan that it is not David’s place to do this.  Because this is still the God of the Exodus, a God of wandering and wilderness who is not ready to settle down to live in a house.

Here the Bible uses a play on words that works as well in English as it does in Hebrew—a “house” can be a building, a palace or a temple, a dwelling place for a king, or for a god.  But “house” can also mean dynasty, royal lineage, a great and noble family.  David wants to build for God the first kind of house, a house of cedar to take the place of the portable tent tabernacle where the Israelites have worshipped and made their sacrifices since the days of Moses.  But God’s promise to David is to make him a house of the second kind, a line of descendants who will rule his kingdom for ever.   

In the context of Biblical history, this promise carries a certain freight of irony, because David’s throne turned out to be a little shakier than that.  Due to the disobedience of his descendents, their infidelity and arrogance, injustice and pride, the power of the house of David peaked in the second generation, with David’s own son Solomon.  After that the history quickly becomes one of rebellions, civil wars, and divided kingdoms, one that drags on with only a few bright moments, until it comes to what seems like a final end with the last king of Judah marched away to Babylon in chains.

But in the Babylonian exile God’s promise to David became more important, not less.  In prophecies like the ones recorded in the book of Isaiah, it became a cherished symbol of the people’s survival and hope.  The prophets told them that their Lord had not abandoned them, but was still on the move with them, and that before long he would bring them back to the land of their ancestors, where Jerusalem would be restored, and the temple rebuilt.  There a descendant of the royal line of David, God’s anointed, the Messiah, would take his place upon the throne of a new and greater kingdom, a rule of perpetual peace, prosperity, and justice.  

The New Testament is not shy about taking these prophetic promises of the Messiah and applying them to Jesus.  So in the Gospel of Luke when God sends the angel Gabriel to the one chosen to be his mother, she is the fiancée of Joseph, a man of the house of David.  And after he has spoken to her of God’s great favor for her, the angel makes a promise about the child she will conceive: “the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 

But this is not simply a national myth, about the restoration of a ruling dynasty.  Like that other story about Nathan and the building of the temple, the principal actor in this story is God.  As Mary immediately perceives, her child will not be born for the satisfaction of human ambitions and desires, no matter how natural or noble they might be.  His purpose will not be to furnish her husband with an heir, or the nation with the founder of a new royal line, but to establish a throne and a kingdom that belongs to God alone.

What kind of kingdom that will be becomes a little clearer in the subsequent scene.  Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who does her honor as the mother of her Lord.  And this is when Mary, that lowly handmaid, unexpectedly bursts into triumphant song.  The words of the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, are not the words of prophecy about the messianic king.  Instead they hearken back to an even more ancient genre of biblical literature—those songs of women who give thanks to God, the liberator of the oppressed. 

At the shore of the Red Sea Miriam, the sister of Moses, leads the women of Israel with timbrels and dancing, singing: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”  In the book of Judges the prophetess Deborah sings a victory song to God after the peasantry of Israel defeats the Canaanites and their kings.   In the First Book of Samuel, God answers the prayer of Hannah, a childless woman, with the birth of a son.  He is Samuel, the prophet who will anoint first Saul, and then David, as Israel’s king. 

But before any of that, Hannah prays a poem that is the model for Mary’s song: “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in the Lord…The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength…The Lord raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.”

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it is because Hannah’s son is consecrated to the service of the same God that Mary’s son will be.  This is a God who works through prophets and nations and kings, but his purposes are not identical with theirs.  The story that begins with the Gabriel’s greeting to Mary is about a God who also works through shepherds and fishermen, tax collectors and lepers and criminals.  This is a God who dwells in cathedrals, but also wanders through deserts, whose kingdom is found in palaces, but also turns up unexpectedly in shantytowns and hospitals, in prisons and fields of wheat, in kitchens, and tombs, and even in mangers.   On this fourth and final Sunday of Advent we look in heightened expectation for the birth of the Son of David, who will establish that kingdom, and rule it in peace for ever.