Memory of the light-burst

Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44
Psalm 122

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.

      

Who is the true ruler of the world?

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Canticle 4 or 16
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43

It’s a familiar trope in TV and the movies.  The hero appears defeated: the boxer has taken a brutal beating and is on the ropes; the plucky underdogs put up a good fight, but the heavy favorites went on a roll (probably some cheating was involved) and our guys are down by two touchdowns and the clock is running out; the spy has been caught and lashed to the mad scientist’s super-weapon, which is about to go off.  All seems lost.  And then suddenly, with a sudden swelling of the soundtrack the hero springs to action, his face set in a steely look of determination.  All the pent-up force of his righteous anger suddenly breaks like a dam and in a stirring and decisive burst of violence, he thrashes his adversaries, avenging their crimes and breaking their power forever.

The criminal hanging on the cross next to Jesus may not have seen any of these movies, but he seems familiar enough with the script.  “Are you not the Messiah?” he cries, “Save yourself and us.”  This Jesus had done wonders that were the talk of the nation, giving the blind their sight and the dead their life.  The authorities had been pursuing him for months and he had eluded them every time, even coming to Jerusalem to flaunt his defiance openly.  But why now, after all that, this helpless passivity?  Isn’t he going to   finish what he started?

This criminal is not the only one sneering at Jesus.  The leaders of the people, who conspired against him and handed him over to the Roman enforcers, taunt him.  So do the soldiers who are carrying out the execution, and in the same way.  “If you really were the Anointed chosen one of God or the King of the Jews, you would save yourself.”  These men, who would see themselves on either side of a deep cultural and religious divide, are actually thinking with the same mind.  They believe in the same kind of power, the kind that is first and foremost concerned for itself.   This Jesus had spoken with such authority and done such deeds of power that many had been led astray, thinking that he was a new David, anointed by God to liberate Israel from bondage.   Seeing him now, unable even to save his life from their hands, they feel the strange fear that he had awakened in them subsiding.  Seeing him submitting to the death they chose for him, they imagine that his story is over, and the future belongs to them.

And yet even then, there is something about this man.  The criminal, the religious leaders and soldiers could not see it before, and they cannot see it now.  But there is one who can, one who hangs on the other side of Jesus.  This criminal is another in a long line of characters in the gospel who encounter Jesus and in that meeting find their lives suddenly opening out into a new possibility they had scarcely known they hoped for.  Even here, hanging on the stake, he finds the freedom to accept the truth about himself, and to know that love is still possible.  This is perhaps the greatest of Jesus’ miracles, that one man being tortured to death awakens repentance, devotion and hope in another.  He does nothing, and says nothing but to assure his new friend that he will not abandon him, that even in that moment they have a future in God.

Like the repentant criminal, we acknowledge this Jesus as the Christ, the Anointed Savior and Lord not in spite of his refusal to save himself, but because of it. He was, as we are, in a body, under the condemnation of death and at the mercies of the world’s rulers.  But who is the true ruler of this world—the person who is Godlike in bending others to his will, in defending his winnings and taking life; or the one who is Godlike in loving others, in forgiving them and blessing their every impulse toward healing, wisdom, and service?  We have to answer this question for ourselves, and if we do not someone will answer it for us, for the general drift of human affairs is what is has always been—the worship of force and the service of self.

This past Monday, on my way out to coast to go surfing, I listened to an interview with a journalist named Charles Bowden who has recently written a book called Murder City, about Ciudad Juarez, the sister city of El Paso, Texas.   Juarez is descending into an inferno of senseless violence fueled by corruption, poverty, and the insatiable desire of North Americans for illegal drugs.  Bowden told a story about an incident that took place last January 31^st when a group of working-class parents organized a fiesta for their high school age children to celebrate their victory in a soccer tournament.  They held it in a private house rather than a public place because the city is too dangerous, but gunmen showed up at the party anyway and machine-gunned fifteen children. 

The President of Mexico, on a visit to Japan at the time, announced from Tokyo that the victims were all gang kids involved in the drug trade, clearly implying that they deserved what they got and that, like the 5,000 other murders that have taken place in Juarez in the last two years, there would be no investigation of the crime and no prosecution of the perpetrators.  This caused a huge uproar in Juarez that would not die down, so a week or so later the President flew to the city to address the population.   He secreted himself in an auditorium in a hotel, surrounded by Mexican army troops, to speak to a hand-picked audience and the TV cameras.  But a poor woman named Luz Dábilo, the mother of two of the murdered boys somehow got into the room and suddenly, in the middle of his remarks she stood up. “Mr. President,” she said, “you’re not welcome in this city.  What you said about my sons is a lie.  If your son were murdered you’d turn over every stone in Mexico to get justice.”  And then she turned around and stood, with her back to the President of Mexico, for the rest of the press conference without saying another word.

Where did Señora Dábilo get the strength and courage to take this action that almost certainly will lead to her death?  According to the letter to the Colossians, from the glorious power of God the Father, the true sovereign of the world.  It is he who “has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his Son.” As a citizen of that kingdom, Señora Dábilo knew that that she had the authority over the false power whose only concern is to save itself.  In the face of its army of lies and fear, she raised the banner of her king, which is truth and the loving memory of the victims.  In a nation in the grip of total despair, she raised the possibility of repentance, and the hope of the king’s justice.

At  its worst the church has been just another institution bent in obedience to lesser powers, claiming for human rulers an omnipotence and infallibility that they do not have.  But at its best, it has been what it was at the beginning, a community of resistance.  This little building on the corner of 5^th and C is meant to be an outpost where it is spoken and remembered, celebrated and enacted with joy and thanksgiving that the true ruler of the world has visited us.  He has shown us the things that make for peace, and has washed us clean from lies and the denial of death.  He nourishes us with his blood, that we might know that he remembers us and has given us the Spirit of the Father with its glorious power.  We do not lose hope, even as our people fall before the power of addiction, unemployment, violence, and greed, but we endure with patience, because he has promised to visit us again with perfect compassion and liberating justice.  We joyfully give thanks and we raise his flag, because he has the first place in everything, and we are his glorified body.

Holding the world in balance.

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

This morning’s gospel lesson is one of those passages that people who say that every word in the scriptures is to be understood and applied in its plain and literal sense never seem to quote.  Maybe it’s because, like us, they know that, in relative terms they are rich, well-fed, and highly thought-of.  Taken as practical advice for living, these words seem assured to leave us broken, bruised, and naked.  Indeed, by themselves, out of context, they have been shown to be deadly—applied as rules, they have instructed women to stay married and subservient to abusive and controlling drunks; they have told enslaved peoples to submit without revolt to their exploitation.  So while they express the highest moral truth, and absolutely mean what they say, I think I am not off base in saying that these are words of poetry.   And the work of poetry is making connections, making things whole that our ordinary, limited mind has broken apart. 

These words affirm that the imagination of God holds the world in balance.  They tell us that there is always another side to the story we tell ourselves about the lives we are leading and the worlds we inhabit.  These are words that speak to us when times are hard, reminding us that life itself is a gift worth celebrating.   They trouble us when everything seems flush and rosy, reminding us that nothing in this world lasts.  They urge us to see through our anxieties about other people, about how they might mistreat or humiliate us, abuse us or rip us off, and see that they can never deprive us of our freedom to meet them on terms of respect.  When we choose to believe that other people are like us, sharing our weakness and our dignity, we find new possibilities in the experience of what unites us, even with those who are mired in denial. 

This freedom to act on the truth is the nonviolent power that Jesus wielded.  His teachings are not abstract rules from on high, but they have real meaning because they were lived.  He refuses to let his enemies, trapped in inhumanity by their fear and blindness, to define his own course of action and spur him to retaliation in kind.   Grounded in the imagination of God, he keeps offering them the whole truth about himself and them, which is also known by the name of “love.”  

Jesus speaks from the imagination of God and people can hear and see the power of God because they can see and hear him.  Again, it’s like poetry, which is able to sing of the invisible because it breathes with what is sensed and thought and felt.  We do not want to be poor, or grieving, or hungry, we do not want to be struck, or robbed, or defamed.  We are afraid of these things, and of what we imagine what they would be like for us.  But because Jesus spoke these words, and because he lived them, our fear is balanced by a totally new possibility—a joy that is not diminished by other peoples’ injustice.  Because he himself was naked, broke, and bruised, and showed that no one really has the power to destroy us or separate us from God, we have come to trust Him more than our terror of loss or dreams of happiness.  And instead of a dreaming of a place on the right side of a world permanently divided into poor and rich, weeping and laughing, hungry and satisfied, we learn to hope and work and sacrifice for a world of one united people—God’s people. 

I got a call this week from a friend of mine who is the Associate Rector at a large Episcopal Church in a wealthy suburb in the Diocese of California.  His parish had applied for a zoning variance so they could regularly host a vanload of homeless men as part of a rotating shelter program shared with some 15 other congregations in their area.  He was calling me for moral support because these plans had touched off a violent storm of protest in the community.  Neighbors of the church have been sending alarmist emails around town about plunging property values and the imminent prospect of unsupervised mentally-ill drug-addicted sex-offenders wandering their tree-lined streets.  Legal action has been threatened, and the Rector and vestry are weighing whether or not to pull their application.  Incidentally, the same thing happened last year, and they were hoping that emotions might have cooled off enough that they could get it done on the second try, but no such luck. 

It is tempting to see this situation in terms of good guys and villains, loving compassionate Christians vs. hard-hearted elitist haters, and to want to marshal the forces of good for a decisive victory.  But I think the approach that my friend and his church are taking is closer to the New Testament vision of holiness, which is to stay in the painful heart of the conflict.  Members of their congregation have been converted to their need to do this ministry by their experience of serving the clients of this program at other churches and synagogues.  Their imagination has expanded beyond their fears and stereotypes by meeting real homeless people.  Similarly, they have not sought to meet the resistance to their plans with superior force, but to keep opening the door to actual face-to-face encounter with the aggrieved neighbors, looking for the opportunities for actual communication.  This kind of patient, vulnerable, when necessary even suffering, witness has always characterized the truly great saints of the church.  It speaks of hope that is grounded in the imagination of God, that sees beyond the tragedy of human divisions, conflicts, and contradictions to the divine comedy of Christ, the sacrificial victim enthroned above every rule and dominion.

This truth that is love, that sees and speaks the world whole, is the enduring power that orders and sustains the universe.  It is the power that Jesus refers to as “The Kingdom of God.” When the prophet Daniel sees a terrifying vision of monstrous beasts, each more terrible than the last, arising from the sea to dominate the world, he turns to an attendant in the court of heaven who explains: these are the empires of the earth that rise and then fall prey to another, “but the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever.”   This is the kingdom that already is, already ruling in the lives of those who live not for the praise and worship of empires, but for the glory of God.  But it is also the kingdom that is coming, the kingdom of the Son of Man.  This Son of Man is Everyman, the common representative of what it really means to be human.  But he is also what comes next, the one who shows us what we will be when the imagination of God is enfleshed in us completely, with love, and will, and power.  To follow him is to journey deeply into the fear and longing that are at the heart of the space between ourselves and others.   To trust him is to find there, in those very particular spaces, the wisdom to bring everyone together at last, the revelation of an end to misery and violence and injustice, and the power to do something about it.

A tree beside the crowded street

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Who really knows whether Zacchaeus ever did what he said he would do?  He seems like an impulsive character—his decision that he must go and get a look at this Jesus who is passing through town must have been made at the last minute, because when he gets there the way is already thronged with people.  He certainly is a man of action—we can picture this short fellow jumping up and down at the back of the crowd, trying and failing to see what’s happening and getting more and more frustrated but also more and more determined.  Looking about he gets an idea—way down the street there he sees a tree.  And he doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of him, not just because he is chief of that universally despised class of people, the tax collectors, but also because here he is running through the streets of Jericho and clambering up a sycamore tree like a scared cat.

  So he’s impulsive and devil-may-care and maybe even a little crazy, so when he says that he is going to give half of his money to the poor, and that he will pay back any that he got by fraud or extortion at 400% interest, it’s hard not to ask ourselves whether he ever really did.  It’s hard not to wonder if, when the next day came, and Jesus was gone, or after word got back to Jericho, as it no doubt did, that when Jesus got to Jerusalem not only did he not throw out the Romans and set himself on the throne of his ancestor David, but he was arrested and handed over to the Romans and was crucified as a rebel and a terrorist; maybe after all that, impulsive, who-cares-what-anyone-thinks Zacchaeus changed his mind about what he’d said in the heat of the moment and just went back to doing the same things he’d always done.

Well, maybe he did, but I have a feeling he didn’t, and the reason is this:  Something started to happen to Zacchaeus when he made that decision to leave off his tax-collecting and go see this Jesus of Nazareth people had been talking about.  It was a sudden impulse, kind of out of the blue, and Zacchaeus was used to those—his ability to think on his feet and make spur-of-the-moment decisions was what had made him rich.  But when he got there and found he couldn’t see the man, that impulse didn’t go away, and it didn’t change into something else.  It got stronger and more focused.  That desire became a need, and a driving need at that, and it sent him running through the heat and dust of a warm spring evening in search of a tree to climb.   And when he’d done that, and it worked, and he saw what he’d wanted to, something else happened, something that revealed that the sudden impulse that had  come over him was in fact the turning point of his life and there was going to be no going back.

Because when Jesus got to the sycamore tree he did the last thing in the world that Zacchaeus or anyone else in Jericho that day expected: he stopped.  The crowd suddenly quieted, wondering what was going on.  The great prophet looked up into the tree, and for the first time people noticed that lying, cheating rich little tax collector up in the branches like a monkey.  And Jesus spoke, and the first word out of his mouth was his name: “Zacchaeus—hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.”  He spoke his name as if they were old friends, as if it was the most natural thing in the world that he should find him up in a sycamore tree in Jericho.  And before he knows it, as if it is the most natural thing in the world, Zacchaeus is on the ground, smiling and greeting his new friend in welcome.

The gospels are full of accounts of people who need to see Jesus and go to extraordinary lengths to do it: a paralyzed man whose friends tear a hole in the roof to lower him down into the house where Jesus sits, surrounded by the crowd; the woman with a hemorrhage who presses through the crowd just to touch the hem of his robe in the hope that that will heal her.  These are wonderful stories, but none of these characters are drawn quite like Zacchaeus, and in none of them do we learn their names.  And the only miracle that Jesus does in this story is to recognize him.  The one whose only desire was to see is seen, and in that seeing guilt becomes restitution, greed becomes generosity, and loneliness becomes community.  Zacchaeus must have made good on his promises, and become a faithful disciple of Jesus, a benefactor of the poor and patron of the gospel community—otherwise we would not know his name.

This Sunday we symbolically gather together our community’s intentions of generosity and faithfulness for the coming year and offer them to God. We do this remembering that we looked for Jesus only to be met by him.  We remember that he called us by name, and invited us into friendship with him. And we remember that he told us to make a place for him.  While it is true that he has promised to be there whenever two or three are gathered in his name, it is also important that he have a place to stay, a place where, by his grace, he is visibly and audibly manifest in word and sacrament and in the community of his friends.  Today we stand before him once again and offer our gifts to make this such a place for another year. 

But we do not do this only for ourselves.  Today we remember that Christ came to seek out and save the lost, and so we pledge ourselves to make this a place where he is served in the poor, whom he loved.  And we declare our intention to make this a welcoming house, a place that people look to when the desire comes over them to see the Lord, a tree beside the crowded street that others can climb to see him, a place where they can hear him calling them by name, urging them to come down and be friends with him and take him home with them.    Today we testify with our own promises that being found by Jesus Christ makes it possible for people’s live to change, for deceit to give way to sincerity, for sobriety to replace addiction, for giving to take the place of grasping, for gratitude and trust to come in where there was guilt and shame and fear. 

Today we heard St. Paul’s news to the church in Thessalonika that he prays for them, “asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith.”  This being the Eve of the Feast of All Saints’, which we will celebrate next week, we remember those words and dare hope that Paul is, even now, praying the same for us.  We remember Paul and Zacchaeus and all those men and women who were found by Jesus Christ and whose lives were irrevocably changed by the experience.  We remember the extraordinary commitments they made, and we celebrate the grace and power of God, who gave them what they needed so they were able, however haltingly and imperfectly, to accomplish what they had set out to do.  It is because of their faithful witness that we have their names to remember—indeed, it is because of them we that we know the name Jesus.  That, my friends, is the true measure of the contribution they made, and of what we do to carry it on.