The visitation

Micah 5:2-5a
Canticle 3 or 15
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45

One night last week, after our daughter had fallen asleep, my wife Meg and I went out into our hot tub.  The previous owners threw it in at the last minute when we bought the house a couple of years ago, and the hot tub has become a frequent part of our relaxation ritual at the end of the day.  It was a cold, starry night and I was submerged up to my neck, gazing up at the sky, when I saw something streaking across it in our direction.  For half a moment I thought it was a shooting star, but then I saw it was a bird, and no sooner had I taken that thought than it came swooping down upon us.  It stalled in the air above us, not five feet from our faces, for a couple of beats of its wings, and then shot noiselessly over us into the night.  An owl, I’m pretty sure, out hunting.   

In the moments that followed I found myself wondering what a Native American or one of my ancestors in ancient Britain, or indeed a member of any traditional society might have made of this nocturnal visitation.  Not just as a random phenomenon of animal behavior but as a message from the world of spirit.   This is a way of wondering about the world that is lost to us, that sounds kind of silly and new-agey to our skeptical and materialistic ears.  But maybe the approach of Christmas gives us permission to open our hearts and minds a little to perceive the miraculous in the ordinary.  And what could be more ordinary, and the same time more miraculous, than pregnancy, and the anticipated birth of a child? 

The Hebrew scriptures are full of stories of women who conceive unexpectedly and against the odds.  These pregnancies are not random biological phenomena, but messages from the world of spirit, signs that God still lives, that God still acts to save his people.    The movement of a fetus in its mother’s womb is an ordinary miracle, a moment of joy and wonder at the presence of the unknown that is a universal human experience.  But in the Gospel of Luke, when Elizabeth feels the fetus leap in her womb at the sound of Mary’s voice, she is filled by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that brings good news of God and God’s workings in the world. 

Elizabeth understands that she has received a message from her unborn child, who knows what no one could know except by the Spirit—that her young cousin Mary, also improbably pregnant, bears the promised Lord of his people.  And in the Spirit Elizabeth blesses Mary, knowing by a leap of faith what she otherwise could not have known.  For Mary’s greeting is the echo of another voice, the greeting of the angel Gabriel who brought the Spirit’s news to her, saying “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you.”  Mary is blessed not just because she has conceived a child, but because of her faith, because she has believed that what was spoken to her by the messenger of God would be fulfilled.

And then it Mary’s turn to speak, or rather, to prophesy.  For Mary now sings talks about who God is and what God is doing.  She speaks of these things in the past tense, because for the person who believes, what God wills is already done.  Mary’s song is about the love, and the faithfulness, and the generosity of God who is only doing what was promised.  And the promise is not only for her alone.  Her song is a message from the Spirit What Mary knows, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is that that through her, through the child she will bear, God is fulfilling his promise to Israel, and through Israel to all humankind.  Her child is the one whom God has always promised to be.  Her child will do what God has always promised to do, and that what God does is to set us free. 

The Magnificat of Mary evokes other inspired songs of victory by other women—women of the Hebrew scriptures, women like Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, and the warrior Deborah from the book of Judges, and Miriam, the sister of Moses, who sings and dances with the women of Israel on the other side of the Red Sea.  Their songs are songs of survival.  Not just the biological survival of the family, the tribe, or the race, but the survival of God’s mission in the world.   

Israel is a people with a particular responsibility to live the justice of God, to make it manifest in the world so all the nations can see.  She is a poor people, a marginal people, scratching out a living on some marginal land in the borderlands between the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia.   Israel is a people that knows what it is to be poor, to be enslaved, to be invaded and occupied and dispersed among the nations.  But she is a people that wills to survive, that must survive, for the sake of her special responsibility for God’s mission in the world.   

Mary and Elizabeth enter into a conspiracy on behalf of God’s justice—“Con-spiracy”—from “spire” meaning “breath” and “con” meaning “together”—and the breath they breathe together is the Spirit of God.  Theirs is the story of two ordinary women, actually two marginal women, one older and thought to be infertile, the other, young and scandalously unwed.  But these two women experience a visitation that makes their meeting a conspiracy of the Holy Spirit.  They will pass this conspiracy on to their sons— John, called the Baptist, and Jesus, called the Christ, and so they will ensure the survival of God’s mission of liberating justice in the world.  In fact, they will bring it to fulfillment, in the sense that what God wills is already done.  And that conspiracy of John and Jesus has indeed survived, extraordinarily and improbably survived.  It has spread like a great wind over the whole world.  It has even come to Petaluma, California.  It has survived even the end of a long cycle of the Mayan Calendar, and now stands on the threshold of the year 2013 since it began.

It is this contagious conspiracy of freedom and justice that we hope to catch anew this Christmas.  On the fourth Sunday of Advent, in the wake of the slaughter of the innocents at Newtown, we are asked to remember that, among many other things, the gospel conspiracy means this—that every child is, so to speak, an owl in the night.  Every child is a visitor from the spiritual world, bearing the seed of a holy purpose and a divine identity.  That this is especially true for the sons of Mary and Elizabeth should not blind us to the truth that each one of us is a child of God. 

Every one of our children comes into the world bearing gifts, gifts that are for all of us, and for those who come after us, who will carry on the work of God when we are no longer in the world.  This is the true of measure of justice, and the very heart of our responsibility as adult human beings, to ensure that every child gets to give those gifts, and to have them received.  This is as true for the children who are fair to middling, as the world accounts talent and promise, as for the exceptionally gifted.  It is as true for the disabled, and those born in poverty, and those whose lives will be spent in obscurity, as for those marked with a great destiny.  For it is not our place to judge the worth of any human being, but only to open our hearts and wonder, “What is the message?—what gift does this child of God bring?”

Speaking to the unspeakable

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

“Senseless.”  

“Incomprehensible.”  

“Unspeakable.”   

These are the words that people have been using to talk about the mass shooting on Friday at an elementary school in Connecticut.  And as I worked on this sermon yesterday in our kitchen while my third-grader painted with watercolors and sang Christmas songs next to me at the table, I knew what they mean.  I think we all do.  But we human beings are meaning-makers, and so it is only natural that we would immediately start trying to make sense of the senseless.     We start making psychological profiles and sociological analyses and calls to political action.  We observe moments of silence at sporting events.   We give sermons like this one.  We cannot hear about something like this and just go on with our lives as if nothing happened. 

And because we are in church we have to ask what, in particular, we should do?  Is there some way of speaking to the unspeakable that we, as a community of faith, are especially called to?  Well, certainly we can pray.  We can pray for the victims of this violence, and for their families.  We can pray for those affected by similar incidents in the past, whose memories of horror and grief have been reawakened.  As Christians we are commanded to remember that the perpetrator of this crime is also a victim of his actions, and to pray that it is not too late for him to be released from his torment. 

 

Yesterday morning I spoke with a young woman named Sally who recently moved to the Bay Area and who called our church because she is from Newtown, Connecticut and attended the Sandy Hook Elementary School.  She spoke of her home town the way I have sometimes heard Petalumans talk about the abduction and murder of Polly Klaas, of the pain of knowing that from now on it will be the place where that school shooting happened.  So we can pray for that whole community, and Sally asked in particular that we pray for Kathie Adams-Shepherd, the Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, and all the religious and political leaders in Newtown who now must bear their people’s anger and horror and grief, and stand for God’s healing and hope.

But there is another thing that Christians are supposed to do in times like this.  It is work that the gospel calls us to in no uncertain terms.  When we are faced with evil, with the meaningless and incomprehensible, it is our responsibility to repent.  This is an assignment that comes down to us from the Hebrew prophets, who saw the corruption of Israel’s rulers, and the barbarity of her enemies, who saw cities fall and the bodies of children lying in the streets, who saw the land laid waste by locusts and by invading armies, and who said that these are not random, meaningless, disconnected events. 

 

There is a whole pattern here, say the prophets.  There is a judgment to be made about all of this.  We have a choice to make.  We could just give thanks that these calamities have not fallen upon us personally, and say a few sympathetic prayers and then keep going on the way we have been.  Or we can wake up and see that unless we do something collectively to turn our way of life around and bring it back into harmony with God, this kind of thing, and worse, is going to keep happening and we will end up destroying everything.

If we take the prophets seriously we have to consider the possibility that we really are all connected, and so we are all responsible.  The violence that erupts now and then, here and there in America, at places like Newtown, and Aurora, and Virgina Tech, and Columbine, is only meaningless if we believe that the young men who carry it out have nothing to do with us.  But if we see them as a prophet would, we know they are symptoms of a disease that afflicts us all.  They are the eruption on the surface of the virus of violence that is so embedded in the everyday operation of the world in which we live that we don’t see it anymore.    When we have the courage and the honesty to look at it that way, to say that we are implicated, we call that repentance.  Which is another way of saying that is that we keep alive the hope of transformation.

Repentance, as the prophets talk about it, is a positive act.  It affirms the existence of God, and God’s covenant with us.  It is a way of looking at the crimes and catastrophes of history and insisting that they do have meaning.  For if we acknowledge that we all bear at least some responsibility for the way things have gone wrong, then we can never completely cast aside the hope that God is just.  We can’t merely say to everything bad that happens that it’s somebody else’s fault.  We affirm that things don’t just happen the way they do without any cause, but that there are lessons for us to learn even from the unspeakable. 

And there’s hope in that.  There is the promise that if we really open our hearts to see others’ suffering as our own suffering, and if we can open them even more, and see other’s evil as our own evil, we will understand something of the true goodness, and mercy, and faithfulness of God.  We will no longer be simply victims of bad people, or helpless pawns of cruel fate.  We will be responsible, and if we are responsible we are also free.  We are free to choose a different kind of future.

This season of Advent is about hoping that God will come and open the eyes of our compassion.  It is about longing for God to come and teach us that we are free.  It is about waiting for God to come and help us choose a different kind of future, one where school shootings don’t happen anymore.  John the Baptist shows up in the Gospel readings every year at this time to wake us up, to get us ready for God to come to us in just this way.  And the first thing he tells us we have to do to get ready is to repent.  John says that the one who is coming after him is only interested in one thing—that our lives bear fruit, the fruit of repentance.

The one who is coming is less like a king, says John, or a warrior, than he is like a farmer.  He doesn’t wear boots, he wears sandals.  He’s coming to work, and his work is us.  There are trees in us that don’t bear—and he’ll clear them out, letting in air and light.  He’ll make a big bonfire, and the eggs of the boring beetles and the larvae of the codling moths, and the spores of the blight and the rust will be destroyed, and the ashes will fertilize a bumper crop of sweet and healthy fruit.  Or you could say that there is wheat in us, according to John, but it’s just kind of strewn around on the threshing floor, mixed in with the straw and the husks, and so the one who’s coming has his winnowing fork in his hand and he’ll toss us gently and let us fall, and the wind will blow away the chaff leaving only the grain which he will gather into his storehouse.  And the chaff he will burn in the unquenchable fire of God’s truth and love. 

Every year at this time John the Baptist stands by the banks of the Jordan and asks us what we really want.  Do we really want God’s justice to prevail in the world?  Do we really want to live in peace as brothers and sisters in a single human family?  Do we really want our lives to bear spiritual fruit?  Do we really want to be free?  Have we waited long enough?  Then we have to stop acting like the suffering in the world is somebody else’s problem.  We have to repent.  We have to be ready to be thinned, to be winnowed.  We have to understand that it may sometimes feel like part of us is being taken away and burned. 

But if we do want it, and we are ready, the farmer is on the way.  And we can trust him, because his whole life is repentance.  Because he identifies so completely with the suffering of humanity that he will take personal responsibility for it all.  His whole life will be turned back toward God, as our priest, his whole life a burnt offering of repentance so that we can choose a different kind of future.  So that we can at last be free.     

  

Beginning at the end

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

Last week I told a story about my sophomore year in college, a time in my life when I was haunted by the dread of nuclear apocalypse, and about a confrontation I had at the time with a man whose job it was to plan nuclear war.  This week I’m remembering something that happened about six months after that.  It was the summer, and I was on a three-week expedition at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in Maine.  I was on a thirty-foot sailboat with about ten other teenagers and a couple of adults, and we were cruising from island to island in the coastal wilderness of Penobscot Bay.  

One afternoon we were out of the sight of land, sailing by dead reckoning in a light rain and fog.  There were some rocks on the chart with a bell buoy that we found right where we thought they’d be, and as we left them astern I looked back.  Rays of light were breaking through the low clouds, shining on the sea in the distance, and three or four black cormorants, what the Mainers call “shags,” were standing on the rocks holding their wings outstretched for the feathers to dry.  Something about the sight of those birds spoke to me, as they stood out there in the middle of that cold ocean, just doing what naturally needed to be done.  They spoke to me of the great life that moves through all things, of its indestructibility and its powers of rebirth.  I felt a sense of trust and peace, and I knew that no nuclear war or any other human evil could destroy that life, or thwart its sheer desire to become.  We could do it great harm, and ourselves along with it, but we could not kill it forever.

Last week we also heard another story, the end of another retelling of the tale of Jesus Christ.  He stood before the man who would shortly condemn him to death and bore witness to the truth, as he had come into the world to do.  And we bore witness to him, saying prayers and singing hymns that acknowledged Jesus as the abiding truth about what really matters in the world.  We acclaimed him as the world’s true ruler.  And with that we came to the end.   We turned the page on another year, as the church reckons years. 

So it is strange to say, here we are again.  Two weeks ago, we were in Mark’s gospel with Jesus looking out from the Mount of Olives at the great Temple of Israel’s God, and he prophesied its destruction, and his disciples asked about the end of the world.  Today we begin the new year, and open Luke’s gospel, and Jesus is in Jerusalem, in the Temple, speaking about the end of the world.  So why are we still here?  Why pick up again where we just left off?  Why begin at the end?

Well, maybe because we are still waiting.  We may know that Christ is the king, the true ruler of the world.  We may know that love is the almighty power that orders all things, that was before the beginning and will be at the end.  We may know it, I should say, by faith.  But that faith can seem pretty tenuous when we look around at the state of things.  It’s hard to see the cycles of violence and retribution in the Congo and the Middle-East, and say that love is the supreme law.  It’s hard to look at the greed and exploitation by which the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and the earth gets thrown further and further out of whack, and see how Jesus Christ is the ruler of this world.   And so, even though we have heard the good news, the question still hangs in the air, “How long?  How long will this go on?”

That question is at the heart of the Hebrew Bible.  And the message of the Hebrew prophets about the evil in the world and the unmerited sufferings of the innocent is that it will not continue indefinitely.   God will act.  A day will come, a great and awesome day, when God will re-assert sovereignty over creation and the whole world will see what now only the prophet can.  Because the judgment that takes place on that day will not just apply to this or that person’s immortal soul.  It will be a great cosmic upheaval, God’s housecleaning, in which the whole world will be transformed. 

Over centuries of exile and oppression, the Jews developed the promise of a coming cosmic judgment into a literary form we call “apocalyptic,” from a Greek word that means “the lifting of the veil.”   Today’s gospel text from Luke begins with language drawn from that apocalyptic tradition.  Speaking of the coming judgment, Jesus says “there will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars.”  On earth, people will faint from fear, “for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”  He goes on to quote one of the most famous passages of apocalyptic in the Bible, the Seventh Chapter of the Book of Daniel, when he says “they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory.”

But from there Jesus’ speech takes an unexpected turn.  From the oracle of apocalypse, he suddenly becomes again the teacher who sat by the Sea in Galilee, speaking simple parables of the kingdom of God.  The imagery that he uses now also resonates deeply with the scriptures, but with a far older stratum of the tradition.  He says, “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees,” and suddenly we are not at the end of the world, but at its beginning.  We are in the garden that God planted with every kind of tree that was good for food, and gave to our first parents for a dwelling.  “As soon as they sprout leaves,” says Jesus, “you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.  When you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”

“The kingdom of God is near”—this is the essential proclamation of the Gospel, the place where all the teaching of Jesus and the teaching about Jesus begins.  This is not just the threat of imminent destruction but also the promise of justice and liberation that are intimately present, intimately real.  And the signs of the kingdom are the miraculous life of ordinary things: of a sower who goes out to sow; of a woman mixing yeast into the dough, and a net full of every kind of fish.  While the nations fall into terror and confusion at the unraveling of the world, Jesus says “look—it’s almost summer.”

I’m going to say that it’s not a mistake that these two sayings are together--the apocalyptic vision and the parable of the fig tree.   The conjunction suggests that this is where we are meant to live—in this balance point where the end and the beginning meet, this precarious place of freedom called “now.”  That is why Jesus so strongly recommends watchfulness—staying awake and alert.  Because in the presence of Jesus people experience the justice, and the truth, and the repentance and forgiveness that are supposed to be unveiled at the end, only it is happening now.  They know the freedom, and the innocence, and the intimacy with God that were there at the beginning, only now.  And yet there are so many times we meet Jesus and we don’t see what is happening.  Our hearts and our minds are closed and we miss it.

And I suppose that’s why we no sooner finish telling the Gospel story than we start all over again.  Because missed something the last time around.  We are still waiting for God to do something.  We are still asleep, as if Jesus never came, as if the troubles in the world still have no solution, as if we still don’t know what to do.  So we start the story over again from the beginning.  And we do it with a sense of hope and expectation.  We hope that this time we really will hear it, that this time it will wake us up, and Jesus Christ will not be someone who died a long time ago, or someone who will come someday, who knows when, but that the Son of Man will come and stand before us, and live with us, and work through us.  Now. 

    

What's the Takeaway?

2 Samuel 23:1-7

Psalm 132:1-13, (14-19)

Revelation 1:4b-8

John 18:33-37

There is a cartoon in last week’s New Yorker magazine that shows a family seated at a table formally laid with roast turkey and all the fixings.  Their hands are folded and their heads are bowed in prayer, and at the head of the table the father is standing with his eyes closed, speaking, and the caption says, “The takeaway tonight is ‘Thanks.’”

Today is the final Sunday of the church year, which means the end to another cycle in the lectionary readings, the end of another re-telling of the story of God’s words and deeds in Jesus Christ.  And so, it’s only natural to ask “what is the ‘takeaway’?”  “What does another year’s rendition of the Gospel all boil down to?”  One traditional way of summing it all up is that Jesus Christ is the King, the true ruler of the world.  

That seems simple enough, but, of course, it’s not.  In the Gospel text this morning we hear Pontius Pilate wrestling with this notion that Jesus is a King, trying to grasp it in some simple and definite way.  In Mark, which is the shortest and most likely the earliest of the Gospels, the conversation between Pilate and Jesus is just this: Pilate says “Are you the King of the Jews?” and Jesus answers, “You have said so.” Later Pilate asks him more questions about the charges brought against him, but Jesus says no more. 

This telling of the story is compelling in its own way.  That curt answer of Jesus is not a throwaway, and neither is the silence that follows it, but the imagination of the church wanted more.  As our apostolic ancestors kept contemplating the significance of Jesus Christ for the world, and as their own project in the world got larger and more complex, they came back to this moment, to Jesus and to this man who held the power to condemn him to death or to set him free.   Their communities kept thinking about this representative of the Roman Emperor, the ostensible ruler of the world.  They kept pondering his question, “Are you the King?” and some of those communities decided that a little more needed to be said.

And so the Gospel of John gives us this conversation between Pilate and Jesus about who is king, and what it means to be king, and what is the kingdom anyway.  It’s a curious kind of conversation because although both men seem to be talking about the same thing, one of them means something else entirely.   Jesus understands exactly what Pilate is saying, but Pilate hasn’t the foggiest notion what Jesus is.   

And this gives Jesus the power.  To be sure, Pilate has the power to kill and to terrorize and to force people to submit to his will.  Jesus understands this power, knows how it works, is willing to allow that Pilate has it, and even to submit to it, because he knows that in the end it is weakness.  But Jesus has the power of truth, the truth of God, of God’s sovereignty and freedom that he gives in boundless love to everyone who loves him.  Jesus has the knowledge that is the light of the world, which no darkness can ever overcome, the knowledge that is eternal life.   Pilate doesn’t have a clue.  

In 1984 I had a conversation with a man named Franklin Miller.   He was the civilian Director of Strategic Planning for the United States Department of Defense, and an alumnus of the college I was attending.  He’d accepted an invitation to a conference on campus about nuclear weapons and disarmament, which was a hot topic at the time.  It was a topic I personally was deeply concerned about, in that brooding, overwrought way that adolescents have.    The main event of the conference, on a Saturday evening in the main college assembly hall, was to be a debate on the merits of an immediate “freeze” on the production, testing, and deployment of new nuclear weapons.  A retired rear admiral, Gene La Rocque, the founder of the Center for Defense Information, was to argue for the proposed “nuclear freeze.”  Franklin Miller would be against it.

But the afternoon before the debate there were a number of workshops in various places around campus.  I signed up for Franklin Miller’s.  I didn’t know exactly what the Pentagon’s Director of Strategic Planning did until I spent a couple of hours with him on that rainy day.  It turned out that his job was to plan nuclear war.  I’ll never forget watching him write numbers on the classroom chalkboard, row after row of six- and seven-figure numbers in neat columns representing population centers in the Soviet Union that he was planning to incinerate.  Each integer was a human life—tens, even hundreds of millions of them on the chalkboard, adding up to the number we would need to kill in order to be able to say that we’d won.  The whole thing was so easy, a child could understand it.  And at the same time it was completely incomprehensible and utterly unreal.

That night, at the end of the debate, they turned on a microphone in the center of the auditorium and invited questions from the audience.  With my heart racing and my voice shaking I went the microphone and I addressed Franklin Miller.  I told him that he seemed like an intelligent and well-meaning person who loved his country.  I asked him why he couldn’t use those gifts to try to understand the people of the Soviet Union, to learn their language and history and culture and politics, what their hopes and dreams and motivations might be.  I asked him why he couldn’t work for understanding and friendship between us and them, instead of threatening to murder them all.  He didn’t answer my question, which I admit was asked with a little more disrespect and self-righteousness than I’m bringing to it now.  He told me that I was only free to stand there at that microphone because of people like him, and then it was my turn to get defensive.  “Well, God bless the bomb!” I said, and returned to my seat.

Now  I don’t want to make it sound like I did something noble that night, because Franklin Miller was certainly right about this much—whether or not he deserved any credit for it, I was free to stand at that microphone and mouth off at the United States Director of Strategic Planning and it didn’t cost me a thing.  But I do want to honor something about that moment in my life, which is that I tried to speak up for the power of the truth as truth, even if I could have done a better job of exemplifying it. 

The truth doesn’t need weapons, be they verbal or nuclear.  The truth doesn’t need to threaten or to dominate to hold its place in the world.  If we truly understood what it is like to live on the other side of the barrier that divides us from our enemies, we would start to imagine new possibilities for the ordering of the world.   If we dealt with our enemies as if both of us were able to know the truth about the good and evil, in our own hearts and one another’s, we open a space through which healing can flow into the world.   This is as true of our everyday lives with our spouses, our co-workers, and our children as it is of international relations. 

But to live with this kind of deep trust in the power of the truth is risky.  Not everyone wants to know the truth.   Pontius Pilate is a good example, and we know how his conversation with Jesus ends.  The truth might not be worth the effort and the sacrifice that it requires if weren’t for the way that it opens us to the gift of knowledge.  To be vulnerable for the sake of truth is to the only way to directly experience a power that comes from somewhere outside our existing frame of reference.  It is the power that created the universe, that keeps it in order, and sustains it in an everlasting harmony.  This power is not fear.  It is not strength.  It is not greed, or lust, or ambition.  It is not random variation.  It is love.  Love rules the universe.  There’s your takeaway.