How questions

·  Isaiah 35:1-10

·  James 5:7-10

·  Matthew 11:2-11

·                      Canticle 15

I’ve never been in prison.  The closest I’ve come was a couple hours on a school bus full of protesters with a zip-tie around my wrists, waiting to be processed by the National Park Police.  But that’s a story for another day. My point is that I don’t really know what it is like to be confined against my will, forced to do nothing but wait and see when and if I will ever go free. 

John the Baptist, in our gospel story, is in prison, and he doesn’t know how long he must wait, or what he’s waiting for, and it’s not likely to be pleasant when it comes.  But John is not concerned about this.  Because God has given it to him to see that the kingdom of heaven has come near, that one is coming after him who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  This is the waiting that matters to John—the long waiting of his people for the redeemer promised to them through the prophets.   And this is the wait that John believes will soon come to an end—but the question is: how soon?

The conditions of John’s imprisonment mustn’t be completely harsh, because he can have visits from his disciples.  That is how he catches wind of the activities of Jesus of Nazareth, who once came to him to be baptized in the Jordan.  At that time, according to Matthew’s telling, John recognized Jesus’ spiritual stature, and protested that Jesus should baptize him, and not the other way around.  Jesus insisted, though, that John do it, and maybe that made John doubt whether Jesus was the one foretold.  In any case, when we next meet John he is in his prison cell and sending his disciples to ask Jesus a question.

Now, the author of Matthew sets the stage for this story by using the word “Christ,” “Messiah.” It’s the first time this word appears in the Gospel since wise men came from the East, and Herod asked his priests and scribes where the scriptures said the Christ would be born.  “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing,” Matthew writes, “he sent word by his disciples and said to him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’”  So for us as readers of the Gospel, the answer to John’s question is known before he asks it.  There is no doubt or suspense about it at all. 

For us the question that really counts is the one that Jesus chooses to answer.  It is not the question of “when?” because we know that the answer is “now.”  It is not the question of “who?”—the answer is, “Jesus.”  But the question that Jesus answers is “how?”: “how do we know that he is the Messiah?” or “how does the Christ act when he comes?”  And this morning I want to submit to you that the “how” questions are the ones that really matter to us, too. 

Christians through the centuries have enjoyed speculating about what theologians call “eschatology,” that is to say, the “when” question.  I guess maybe we’ve found it reassuring to think that there’s a definite date upon which history will end, and that we might even be able to foretell that date, even if in only a general, ballpark-guess kind of way.  And we’ve had even more fun speculating about what theologians call “Christology”—the “who” questions.  Maybe it give us a sense of confidence to be able to define in precise and technical terms who Jesus is and what exactly is his unique relationship to God and his role in the plan for the creation and redemption of the universe.   But if we’re going to be completely honest with ourselves, I think we have to admit that our answers to these questions are always going to be no more than speculation, because they are questions to which, by definition, only God can give the answer.

And it’s the “how” questions that really meet us, as they say, where we live.  Jesus’ answer to John’s question suggests that we can answer the “how” questions, right here on the human level.  We don’t need to wait for someone else to come, in the future end of time.  We don’t need to confess that Jesus is Lord and Savior, or the only-begotten Son of God, or load him up with all kinds of other lofty Christological titles.  What really matters to Jesus, is that we put our faith in what he did when he was here on earth, in his human life.  John the Baptist’s disciples come to ask “who?” and “when?” and Jesus answers, “tell your master what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” 

This answer of Jesus is a kind of pastiche of quotes from the prophets, from their inspired visions of what it will be like when Israel’s waiting is over, and the anointed one finally comes.  But it’s a very selective set of quotes.  He doesn’t say anything about slaying the wicked, or destroying the enemies of God; he doesn’t talk about restoring the dynasty of David, or rebuilding the might of the nation, or reforming the worship of the temple, though he could have found passages in prophecy to support making these the planks of his messianic platform.  But again, he’s not answering John the Baptist’s question with promises of what he will do, if everyone accepts his claim to be the Christ, and joins his insurrection, and supports him in a bid to take power.  He’s talking about what anyone can see and hear—the work that he is already doing, with the power he already has from God.

The work that Jesus is doing is healing human beings who have been deprived of the full flourishing of their lives by illness or disability, by poverty or premature death.  He’s not solving all their problems, or giving them keys to a house on Easy Street, but he is restoring their dignity and their hope.  He is showing them what they can do and be, when they believe that they, too, are sons and daughters of God.  He is renewing their faith that there is meaning and purpose to human existence, and that they have been called to play their part in God’s mission in the world. 

To be sure there are those who are disappointed in Jesus because they hope for bold slogans and grandiose pronouncements and instantaneous change.  There are those who are resentful because, being accustomed to power and privilege, they assumed the messiah would reserve a first-class place on his bandwagon for them.  But then there are those who see that in Jesus God has come to us to heal our bodies and souls, not because we have any special rights, but because of our special needs.   We are broken, seemingly beyond repair, and still God cares for us, and chooses us to be ambassadors of heaven.  When we welcome this Messiah who shows who he is by restoring wounded human beings, we are already blessed, no matter who we are, or who we have been.

You and I may not have the supernatural gift of healing that Jesus had.  But that doesn’t mean that the power of God can’t work through us to change our lives, or even change the world.  It can, if we accept that it is in the lives of ordinary men and women like us, that God has chosen to manifest redeeming power.  If we accept that this transformation is not something that will begin any day now, when we’re good and ready, when we’ve kicked that bad habit and started doing yoga, and the holiday shopping is done, or the kids are in college, it has in fact already begun.   

For Christians the supreme model of this kind of acceptance has always been the mother Mary, who magnified the greatness and power of God in her own lowly soul.  Though she cannot possibly be ready, she consents to conceive the promised child.   And then it’s up to her—to her ordinary human powers of gestation and giving birth, of maternal care and love, of patient instruction in the way of life commanded in the Torah.  She has accepted her role in the coming of the Messiah, and that in itself has scattered the proud and thrown down the mighty.  That in itself has lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things, as surely as if the job were already done.   

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.

Songs of Justice

1 Samuel 1:4-20
1 Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

On Thursday morning I got a text message from Kate Klarkowski that her daughter Diana, who lives back in New York, had gone into labor.  Kate has checked in with me regularly as Diana’s pregnancy has come along, and each passing month has brought with it mounting excitement, but also relief.  Diana and her husband Kevin have been down this road before, only to end up in sorrow and disappointment.  But when I returned to from a walk to the store to get some things for my lunch, Jerry in the office had a message for me: Kate has her first grandchild, an 8 lb., 2 ounce baby girl named Frances Delaware.

This news made me think of another woman who finally got the baby she wanted—Hannah, the mother of Samuel.  Hannah’s husband tells her not to worry that year after year she is unable to conceive a child.  He loves her and favors her and thinks that this should be enough for her, but that is easy for him to say—he has two wives and the other has given him plenty of daughters and sons.   In those days people believed that the gift of children was in the hands of God, so Hannah goes to the sanctuary at Shiloh and prays fervently for the child she longs to have. 

She vows that if God will only grant her what she asks she will dedicate the child back to him, to live a life of special holiness and renunciation.    So Hannah gets her first born son, but this gift is not simply hers to enjoy.  If we read on in the story we find it is not a heartwarming family drama about Hannah and Elkanah and their cute little boy.  It is about Samuel, who goes as a child to live in the sanctuary of God, and his call to be a prophet, who goes on to anoint the first kings of Israel.

And Hannah’s Song is more than a psalm of thanksgiving for the granting of a woman’s personal request—it is a universal anthem of human liberation.  The God whom Hannah praises is not above caring about ordinary human beings, and Hannah’s heart exults in his strength, who in giving a child has restored her strength.  But beyond that she doesn’t make a lot of claims for herself.  She doesn’t thank the Lord for answering her prayers, or her rewarding her patience.  It’s more like she praises God for revealing once again just who he is. 

It’s not personal—God doesn’t play favorites.  This is just how he deals with the whole world, which he created and over which he rules with providence and justice.  Hannah is on top now, but that’s because she was on the bottom before, and she has to watch out not to get arrogant.  The Lord kills and brings to life, lifts up and lays low, makes poor and makes rich, and his justice is as immovable and as perfectly balanced as the pillars that hold up the earth. 

The Song of Hannah echoes in the words of another song of thanksgiving to God, the Magnificat of Mary in the Gospel of Luke.  And as we will soon be hearing, Mary is another a woman who has improbably conceived a child.  

But for Mary, like Hannah, this is not an occasion of merely personal joy—she sings of God’s mercy in remembering Israel, and his power to execute justice.  Somehow, Mary knows that her unborn son is an instrument of God’s judgment on the world, that in giving him to her the mighty are cast down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up, the hungry are filled with good things, and the rich go away empty.  And this is in fact who the church confesses that Jesus is, the Son not just of Mary, but in the power of the Holy Spirit the Son also of Israel’s God, who’s will it is to restore the wholeness of the world, and free it from the stain of injustice and the sentence of death. 

He is the Christ, the anointed priest, prophet, and king of the world, and he will be its judge.  And in fact, as the Song of Mary says, his holy birth has already given us a sign of God’s judgment.  We are already in the last days, because the judge of the world has already come.  He dwelt among us, offering reconciling justice in words of grace and works of mercy.  He healed the sick, fed the hungry, confronted the mighty with their hypocrisy; he brought the kingdom of God within reach, and proclaimed that it belonged to the poor. 

And the world judged itself by rejecting him.  It condemned him to die on the cross, and so erected an indestructible sign of its own perversion of justice.  The vain pretensions of the human race to be able to straighten ourselves out—to decide for ourselves who is right and who is wrong, who deserves to get what she wants out of life, and who must suffer in silence—these were nailed to the cross with Jesus and lifted high for all to see.

But God is just, and God’s justice is mercy and forgiveness.  And so she raised Christ from the dead, as we will rise with him at the last.  God has heard the cry of the poor, has seen the tears of the mothers who have lost their children to violence, to starvation and disease, to drugs and suicide—and the tears of those who could not bear children.  God remembers, and in the end all will come to light, all will be restored, all emptiness filled, and all that hurts will be healed.  This is the work of Christ, the ministry of reconciliation for which he was sent, and which we who love the world long to see completed. 

So as we come to the end of another year the question comes up again—“When?”  How long must we wait?  Sometimes it feels like the world is going from bad to worse.  When we hear about the slaughter of civilians in Syria, Afghanistan, or France, and see the misery of migrants streaming across the borders of Europe or the United States, it seems to us that inequality and injustice, violence and destruction and pollution are rising to a point where something has got to give.  Something has to change, but we’re not sure whether to be hopeful about that change or to despair. 

And that is the really important question, more important than the question of “when?” (which, contrary to popular belief, neither Mark nor any of the other writers of the New Testament really cares about, or tries to answer).  We need to know whether the long arc of history really does bend toward justice.  We need to know if there really is some great purifying work of the spirit moving through all this suffering, or whether we are just beginning our descent into hell.  We need to know if all the trouble we see around us is the labor pains of our new birth in a new creation, or the death throes of a god-forsaken world.

The children who are born today will need, even more than we do, an answer to that question, because they will come of age in a very different world from the one that we were born in.  The masters of media spin tell us to measure this difference by our children’s immersion in digital media and mobile microcomputers.   But the truth is they face far more sober and painful adaptations—to stagnant economic growth and falling standards of living, to social and atmospheric instability, both of which are prone to break out in violence.  They will have to learn to do without the profligate use of fossil energy that fueled our free-wheeling lifestyles, and to do so quickly if they wish to have children of their own in a world worth living in. 

They will need to learn things we have forgotten about the power that comes up from the bottom, and the wealth that grows out of the land, and the wisdom of deep cultural tradition, that is hidden in communities of memory.  They might want to learn again about a God who created a world in magnificent harmony, who blesses it and calls it good, and entrusts it to us to tend and keep.   It will help them if they know about the justice of that God, who does not play favorites, but whose mercy is over all his works.  And they might like to know that the judge of the world has already come.  Our judgment of him was blasphemy, treason, and death.  His judgment of us is truth and forgiveness, indestructible life and love.