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4 Advent C, 2018: Bite into Hope

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Oh, Anne Sexton, I do love you so:

“…The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it…

There is hope…Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.” (Anne Sexton, “Snow”)

It’s all about hope.

Micah was a prophetic oracle
of both judgment and hope,
and he announced the coming destruction of Israel –
which would have seemed obvious
for those not in denial.

But then Micah locates hope for the future
in someone to come from Bethlehem –
which would have seemed a likely choice
to his contemporaries also.

The Matriarch Rachel,
died in Bethlehem and
her grave was a place of pilgrimage.

Bethlehem was the setting for the Book of Ruth,
itself an eloquent oracle of hope.
King David was born in Bethlehem.
So it was an auspicious location to posit the future of hope.

Then in Luke, two pregnant women connect
and a gusher of hope rushes out
like a heart pumping blood.

So, just to put a fine point on it,
Anne Sexton bites into a snow cone of hope.

Standing on the 4th Sunday of Advent,
Christmas Eve a day away,
many people with several days off of work,
families coming together for the first time in a long while,
special rituals, meals, gift-giving
and maybe even some quiet time,
hope seems palpable –
ready to bite into.
Just as in Micah’s day,
the bigger picture might not seem so hopeful at the moment,
but within that grainy image
there is a thumbnail vision
with a clear aura of hope around it.

There are always beacons of hope.

I think of the Bielski brothers
and the twelve-hundred elderly men and women,
and hundreds young children,
they helped survive the Jewish Holocaust in Poland.
With only about a hundred and fifty armed fighters,
the brothers found ways to live in the wilderness forest
of what is now Belarus,
for two years – which was long enough
to survive the Nazis.

In the end, in addition to those who lived
and died in freedom in the wilderness,
they saved more than twelve hundred fellow-Jews
from certain cremation in Auschwitz
and other extermination camps.

What made any of them have hope
they could make it into the wilderness,
let alone survive there, escaping Nazi pursuit
and creating sustainable community?
It should have seemed an impossible hope.

I think of a ninety-something year old grandmother I met,
who in 1980 witnessed several generations of her family
gunned down at the Sumpul River on the border
between Honduras and El Salvador.
Three to six-hundred unarmed refugees,
many children among them,
fleeing the Salvadoran civil war,
were murdered by government troops and militia.
Yet, in the new millennium,
she was an active participant in an agricultural
cooperative creating a new future,
and she was eloquent in her hopefulness
for the new generation that surrounded her.

I think about what happened in Bonn, Germany this fall,
after our current administration
opted out of the international emissions goals
set by the global community in Paris in 2015.
15 states,
455 cities,
1,747 businesses
and 325 colleges and universities
formed an alternative national delegation to represent
the United States, and committed
to the Paris emission standards anyway.
All those states and organizations represent
fifty-percent of the U.S. economy and much of the pollution.

Biting into hope is a choice we make,
or refuse to make.

There is always, always, war
famine
genocide
environmental degradation
human cruelty
and tragedy
to witness. Always.

If we give them the last word –
if the lasting image in our brain
is of the horrendous
and the painful
and the dark –
we will dissolve into lives of meaninglessness.

Despair and cynicism
enervate the human soul.
They cut the throat of our vitality
and make our lives limp with irrelevancy.
We are unable to see ourselves
or anything we do
as meaningful
in the face of all that is stacked against us.

But hope is a choice
to bite into something different.

Hope is a choice
to resist the dark and painful forces we recognize
are everywhere in the world alongside of us.
Hope is a choice
to DO something,
and to keep DOING something
that creates the possibility of joy…not only sorrow;
of kindness…not only cruelty;
of light…not only darkness;
of healing…not only injury;
of opportunity…not only demise.

These are things we choose,
not because we make them up
in a fantasy world within our mind,
but because hope lives
as a parallel universe
right alongside all that shadows it.

If we write-off hope of as wishful thinking
then we will be cutting off
an entire universe of possibilities.
To do that is a severe
and cruel deprivation
to the fullness of human life.

My friends, hope is a choice
just as cynicism is a choice.

The message on the 4thSunday of Advent –
just like it is on Christmas day
and just like it is every day
in a Christian spiritual community, is: hope is a choice.
If we wish to be powerful in the world,
it is the choice we will continue to make.

It is not a choice that feels natural all the time.

Some days it is a choice that eludes us,
but the next day when we wake up
we have another choice to make.

Some days it is a hard and painful choice
to bite into hope
in spite of all we have known
or been through.
Other days it is a joy
and we can bite into that fruit
with abandon.

But ultimately, spiritually,
it doesn’t really matter
whether or not it feels good to make that choice,
it is the choice we need to make anyway.

So, standing here a day away from Christmas Eve
and doing everything we can to keep-in-waiting
as is our Advent discipline,
let’s remind ourselves
that hope is a choice,
and that it is a core element of our spiritual practice
to make that choice…
to bite into hope.

 

 

 

 

3 Advent C, 2018: It’s A Wonder

by

Angkor, Cambodia 2009

You hold a baby in your arms and rock her or him,
and their fat little face
looks up into yours.

You look into that sweet face…and wonder.
You wonder.
You wonder about what she will be
when she grows up.

You wonder about what he will think of you
when he grows up.
You wonder about what the world will be like
when he or she is older
and you are dead and gone.

You wonder.
We can’t help but wonder.

But then, when we take that child to preschool
or Head start, or kindergarten,
or Middle School, or even to their first day of High School –
or worse, when we have to leave that child at college –
we really wonder.
We wonder if others will love him or her,
if they will be kind to that child.

We wonder if other people will understand them,
appreciate them,
care about them
as much as they should be understood, appreciated
and cared for?
Will the world be afraid of them,
will they lose their way among those in the world?

We wonder and fear and hope.

I wonder about my mom.
She died in 1998 at the age of 82.
I think about what her mom and dad
must have wondered.
You see, my mom was adopted at birth.

It was a secret back then,
and the fact that she was adopted
filled her with so much shame
it was kept from her own children,
my brother and sisters and me.
We didn’t know she was adopted
until a couple of my adult sisters figured it out.
We didn’t know her birth name until she died,
when our dad finally told us.

To think about that makes me sad,
but such shame was consistent with a time and a culture
that feared difference…lack of conformity…standing out…
sex and sexuality.

I wonder about what her parents wondered:
Her birth parents and her adopted ones?
When they looked into her fat, round face,
what did they wonder?

My mom was brilliant,
and also very different.
She grew up in rural Michigan
driving at the age of 12 because her dad
was a country doctor,
and her mom would not drive.
So, my mom, not yet a teen,
drove her dad on rural gravel roads
and dropped him off at homes
where he would spend the night
delivering a child
or sitting with a sick person through dark hours.

(Imagine that kind of medical care – half pastoral, half medical, and totally personal).

She skipped two grades in school
and graduated from high school
only 2 months before turning 16.

She was different.
Terribly introverted, I would say, and yet
her brilliant mind compelled her to vent
what she knew
and thought
and believed – often not well filtered.

My mom was socially awkward and odd,
what people might call a first-rate character.
Mostly, when I was growing up,
I was embarrassed by her
even though my friends like her.
To my chagrin, they loved to talk to my mom
because she treated them like adults –
she, who did not know how to calibrate
any difference between people.

She was oddly different
but did not treat anyone else with difference.
Looking back on it,
it was probably because she did not know how
to treat people differently.
I see it now for what it was
but at the time I hated it.
I never wondered about it.

It takes a lot of time and distance
for children to wonder about their parents,
to wonder about them the way their parents
wonder about us, their children.

In the brutally honest gospel stories,
Jesus and his mother
don’t get along.
They have a raw, painful relationship.
Mary, it says in Luke’s birth narrative,
ponders in her heart
all that the shepherds and angels tell her.
Maybe she did, but as an adult child,
her son, Jesus,
keeps Mary at a distance.

It is only in Church mythology, not Scripture,
that there is any kind of special relationship
between Mary and Jesus.
In the few references to his mother
that appear in the Gospels,
he calls her, “Woman” –
as in, “Woman, what have you to do with me?”

We like to look back at that birth
through the eyes of everything we imagine
we know about Jesus,
and we like to wonder about his birth
and his mother
and his childhood,
because we see and hear him as a man
who changed the course of history –
who in fact, whether we know it or not,
acknowledge it or not,
change your life and mine.

As a result of his laterimportance,
we look back through the wrong end of the telescope
and see Jesus through all the mythology and stories,
and we imagine
that Mary and Joseph would wonder
as his birth, all about his future.

We imagine the holy family,
on the holy night with shepherds and wise men,
would wonder about his greatness;
about all the things he would come to do.

But we would not wonder that if we looked
through the proper end of the telescope
knowing what we know now.
Instead, we know that infant mortality was nearly 60%
in those days,
among those people, in that place.

We know that his life expectancy, at best, was 30
in those days,
among those people, in that place.

We know that poverty
limits wondering
and focuses life on the moment, here and now.

We might imagine that there was
a whole lot of wondering going on
as Mary and Joseph stared into the face of that infant.

But in fact, there would have been
a whole lot of desperation going on.
There was no food security;
there was horrendous vulnerability
to arbitrary violence;
there was radical uncertainty
about tomorrow or the next day;
in short, there was deprivation
of food, shelter, clothing
and basic human rights
on a scale you and I can barely imagine
even in our darkest moments.

So, I truly doubt that Mary and Joseph
could afford to wonder.

I truly doubt that Mary and Joseph
were anything but afraid.

I truly doubt that Mary and Joseph
were thinking beyond how cold,
and dirty, and hungry they were,
and instead, were focused on
how they were going to keep that baby alive.

Okay, I bring it up because at the center
of the Christmas story
we have constructed
an astoundingly romantic scene at the birth of Jesus.
So romanticized in fact,
it distorts the entire life of Jesus.

Now notice please, I do not say such things
on Christmas Eve.
I am my mother’s son,
but I have a slightly improved filter – only slightly.
But 3 Advent is fair game.
Here is why I bring it up.

Moses was an abandoned slave child
raised in Pharaoh’s household
and as an adult, rejected his privilege
and at God’s command
led a slave rebellion.

The young Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama,
was a prince raised in utter opulence who,
upon observing the extreme brutality of poverty
on the other side of his walled and gated community,
abandoned his privilege
and became a mendicant.

Mohammad was of very modest means
but benefited from being surrounded by benefactors,
and he himself became a savvy and successful
businessman that nonetheless
rejected personal affluence
and embraced simplicity
and generosity.

Jesus was born in stark and utter poverty,
desperately poor and vulnerable
and considered a miscreant
by the oppressive empire surrounding him.
He never traveled very far,
nor accomplished very much,
and indeed, did not live very long.

We should recognize a theme here:
a golden thread
running through the spiritual wisdom of the world –
not just our own.

Staring into these stories
it might cause us to wonder
if we are looking for God in all the wrong places?
Are we seeking affirmation from empty sources?
Are we relying on comfort and security
from sources that cannot truly give it?

Sure we are, that’s what we do.
We are human beings and we likestuff.

We like to make a nice big soft nest
to snuggle in and enjoy.
It’s natural.
We like comfort,
we like security,
and we like pleasure.
We need not feel guilty about it,
or ashamed of it.
That is who we are.

But the question is, can we do better than that?
We know, somewhere deep inside us anyway,
that if we do not better,
then we are going to kill ourselves.
Maybe not you or me personally:
but corporately,
communally,
globally, eventually…soon.
Unless we change we’re dead.

It is not a new message;
God keeps sending it, for crying out loud,
via those who have lived painfully
on the other side of affluence.

It is an ancient message,
sent to the kings and queens of the ancient world
on the lips of prophets.
It is a message sent to the ancient world,
the medieval world,
the modern world, and now,
the post-modern world.
It is a message sent to every culture
and to the captains of every society.
It is a message about the hazard of living for stuff
at the expense of the truly important things
that generate and preserve Life.
It is a message about the kingdom of stuff
draining and killing Life.

That is what the Christmas Story is really about
when all the mythological and romantic elements
are peeled away to reveal the fruit.
The Christmas story is kind of like my mom that way,
embarrassing and socially awkward at the moment
but amazingly smart and wise in retrospect.

God has delivered to us a message
over and over and over and over again.
It is a message that Moses
and Buddha
and Mohammad
and Jesus echo like a broken record:

We’ve got issues with stuff.
There is nothing wrong with us for liking stuff
or wanting it,
it is very natural.

But building our lives and our world around stuff,
basing our economy on it,
that will kill us – all of us.

The message is getting old, very old.
The question is whether we are going to hear it
and one of these days,
if we are going to change our behavior.

The Christmas story, like Jesus who is at the center of it,
is that kind of a baby –
a baby with a face only a mother could love.
God, who is at the center of all our important stories,
is that kind of a child,
looking up at us with a fat face
into which we are left to ponder.

So, as we close in on Christmas 2018
I invite us to ponder it –
this embarrassing and awkward Christmas child of ours.
On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day
we can ogle and smile and feel the joy,
but for the last two weeks of Advent

I invite us to ponder in our hearts
the challenge God has issued to us in this story
about our allegiance to the kingdom of stuff
when God offers us
a much different kind of kingdom.

 

 

2 Advent C: God is Manna

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Well, preparing for today
was humbling and challenging.

Last week, inspired by the birth of my grandson,
I reached for the intangible.
I sought to capture an experience
rather than define or describe
a theological idea
or liturgical season.

Like any effort to capture an experience
for someone else, it failed;
but it failed pretty well.
It wasn’t a laser pointer
but it did hover poetically enough
in the vicinity of the experience I wanted to evoke,
at least according to those who stayed for the discussion.
And if Facebook is any indicator,
it reached about two-hundred more viewers
than an average sermon post.

So, it’s like that old preacher’s adage:
If you take your shirt off to make a point one Sunday,
what are you going to do the next?

Staring at the readings for today,
I just did not want to fall back into the usual –
which is taking an archeological pick and brush
to carefully remove some top layers
of historical soil and theological detritus
so we can see the context
around which the original text was written.

Don’t get me wrong,
I still think that is important.
In fact, I went back to see how I had
addressed these readings in the past.
Since they come up every three years,
I took a peek at 2 Advent, Year C,
all the way back to the year 2000.
I was not impressed.

So I want to lean on T. S. Eliot some more,
even though we do not have a reading from
the Four Quartets this week.
I want to stick our fingers
into the wet glob of goo
his poetry does, with its notion of the unity
of past, present and future.

The unity of past-present-and future is oh-so abstract
in comparison to talking about
John the Baptists’ historical relationship to Jesus.

It’s also not as concrete
as what we know about those two heroes
as we gaze back through the haze
of the Jewish-Roman war
that buried both of them
beneath a historical layer of sand.
The unity of past-present-and-future
is the stuff that cotton candy is made of
and can easily leave us with nothing
but a sugar high.

That’s the risk, but here goes.
In a culturally historic interview with Bill Moyers,
the academic, Joseph Campbell,
who specialized in comparative mythology,
offered us a brilliant metaphor
about the evolving lenses
through which human beings have viewed
life, meaning, and hope.

He pointed out that the tallest buildings
in the great centers of power,
were icons that reflected the central myth-making
power in each epoch of human history.

At first, temples to the gods and massive cathedrals
took the place of pride
as the focal-point of past civilizations.
But at some point,
at least in Europe if not elsewhere,
those religious buildings
become dwarfed by citadels of political power
and governance.
Great domes, palaces,
and massive governmental plazas
replaced cathedrals as the central focus of cities.

But then, beginning in the twentieth century,
even those most prominent government complexes
are made to look shabby
by huge modern towers of concrete, glass, and steel
built by corporate multi-national conglomerates.
Campbell didn’t live to see it,
but the grandest icons of that world now
are the huge sprawling campuses
of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and
other Tech companies.

It is a visual, even visceral example
of how past-present-and-future
live side by side in the same moment.
In cities both large and small,
these icons of human myth-making
live with one another.

In Geneva, we have 19thcentury
Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist Church buildings
on the hill looking down on
at a 20thcentury prominent City Hall in the middle of town.
But we do not have a dominant commercial building
because the economy is diffused
between small business, retail, and campus.

The point is this:
John the Baptist and Jesus
live side-by-side in the 21stcentury
with Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson –
and between them are all the highfaluting theologians,
criminal priests,
saints, martyrs, and black preachers
that have filled the air
with their ideas and witness.

It is simply impossible
to lift up the Biblical text
as if it were a photographic negative
we could hang to dry in a darkroom
so that we can see what it all really looked like.
Emperors Nero and Constantine;
Doctrines Nicene and Trinity;
theologians Augustine, Aquinas, and Niebuhr;
scandals Galileo, Inquisition, Colonialism,
witch-burning, and sex-abuse;
movements Reformation, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Fundamentalist, and Monkey-Scopes;
not to mention Evolution, Industrial Revolution, Einstein, Hubble, and landing on Mars;
all live side-by-side
in the same moment
with John and Jesus.

We are a jumble.

You and I cannot know Jesus and John
without the presence of Karl Marx,
Madam Curie, and Frederick Douglas.

Just think about that…
All that past is folded into this present moment.
And the future?

We know the likelihood
that a comet of enormous proportions,
like the one that blotted out the dinosaurs,
is in our future.
We may not be alive to suffer it,
but we know it is out there – just a lottery pick away.

We also know that the chickens of our decadence
are coming home to roost too –
environmental degradation caused by
our willful neglect, waste, and denial
is piling up and may soon swoop over us
with accelerating speed.

We know that in the future artificial intelligence
and robotics will eliminate nearly all the jobs
and many of the professions
that were elements of the Industrial Revolution
and Age of Information.

If Da Vinci’s drawings of helicopters,
tanks, and flying machines
are an example of the human imagination
wandering centuries ahead of its ability to actualize it,
consider the implications of movie narratives
such as Star Wars, the Hunger Games, and the Matrix.

You see?
Past, present, and future
are all folded into the dough
and we cannot separate it.
It all gets baked together
and is in us.
But do you know who or what
lives only in the present?
The one thing
that is neither past or future
is God.

While we can fiddle with past descriptions of God,
and read copious predictions about God,
the experienceof God
is once and only
in the present – now.

God is manna – that divine food
given to the escaped slaves
to sustain them in the wilderness.
Remember its properties?

It could be eaten
but not stored or hoarded.
It could be harvested at that moment
but never left to the next day.

God is our manna,
available in the moment
but never truly grasped in the past
or predicted in the future.

At Christmas,
we can tell the story of baby Jesus
but we cannot re-create the moment.
At Easter,
we can re-tell about the empty tomb,
but we cannot duplicate it.
At communion,
we can remember what Jesus did
but the experience of that love
is only available
in any given moment we are in.
You see, that is what I think we are,
as church in the 21st century.
We understand now,
that those lenses
which claimed our fidelity
are only blurred glass through which we see darkly.
Whether temple,
state house, or bank,
none of them hold the truth about God,
and only God holds the truth about whosewe are,
and whatwe are,
and, most importantly,
what it is we can genuinely hope for.

So, we come here, around this Wayfair altar,
seeking an experience with God,
and sharing our experiences
as we try to figure out with one another,
what they mean.
We have all this past –
these human geological layers of time and history
stacked one upon another –
and we have to sift through it.
And for some reason, it is better done together, with others.

We know sifting through history won’t give us
the experiencewe’re looking for,
but maybe it will open us up
to the experience of God we seek?

And we have all this fear, anxiety, and blindness
about the future –
it is in the air all around us like dust particles
filling our lungs, hearts, and minds with confusion.
By coming together
and sharing Eucharist and food
and the questions on our hearts,
maybe it will open us up to the experience of God we seek?

Maybe that is why we come here in the 21stcentury –
that’s my guess anyway.
We come here,
whether we can name it at the time or not,
to get open.
We come here
to use the past to soften us,
and to look into the future to rattle us,
all so that we might be open
in the moment –
which is the only place where God lives,
and moves, and has being.

If you were to ask me why I come here,
to church, to Eucharist,
to hanging out with fine people like you,
that is why.
A place like this…is one of the few places we can come
where other people gather,
with the potential
to open us up to God
who is present only here
and only now,
only in this moment.

1 Advent 2018: Quivering over the unity of past, present, and future

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Well, there is nothing to bring on Advent
like waiting for a baby to be born,
and nothing harder than trying to write a sermon
than when your daughter is in labor.

Young Declan Miller-Uueda was born on Thursday morning –
which is my sermon-writing time – a healthy boy
with a happy, healthy mom and dad holding him.
Needless to say, gramma is there now,
and I will be soon.

I want to say, “Thank you!”
for the incredibly thoughtful surprise grandparents shower
you gave us in anticipation of his birth.
My daughter, Anne, and her husband, Dan,
were also touched by the kindness of people
they don’t even know
extending the love of community across the miles.
Thank you.

Now, Advent.

T.S. Eliot had a thing in his poetry about the unity of time –
it was a theological thing.
Eliot was deeply theological, an Anglican’s Anglican.
In fact, when I was in seminary
I took a semester course just on Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”
The only other semester course devoted to one person,
at least that I can remember, was to Paul.
I don’t think Jesus even had one whole semester
devoted just to him!

Anyway, Eliot had this notion of the unity of time –
that past, present, and future
are or will be one.
He plays with that idea over and over and over again.
It is, what I call, “a thoughtwall.”

Now, just so you know,
that piece from Little Gidding we heard this morning,
Eliot wrote with Pentecost in mind.
But his quivering over TIME speaks of Advent too.

Advent is a thoughtwall,
because both the beginning
and end of TIME
are thoughts that seem impossible
to climb over or to peek over to the other side.

That strain of eschatology that runs through the bible,
some of which we call apocalyptic –
like that passage we read from Luke this morning,
and even the eye-squinting prophecy
from Jeremiah that imagines the future –
finger and fiddle with TIME
like a knot of fishing line.
From way, way back in human history,
we have been mesmerized by TIME
and tried to make sense of the relationship
between past, present, and future.

If we think about it,
even the mythology of heaven and hell and morality
is simply playing different notes on the same keyboard.
We try to make sense of the relationship
between what is happening now,
with what happens after we die,
and how all that hangs together
with the entire communion of saints.

Our ideas and theories
about the Afterlife
are only one of many unsuccessful human efforts
at understanding,
reconciling,
and making peace
with the past, present, and future.

T. S. Eliot was trying to do the same thing
in his poetry,
and I confess,
this sermon is a similar quivering.

But all of our speculations about TIME
are wrapped up with our smallness
as we huddle beneath the vast expanse of interstellar space.
We want toknow,
and we want to understand
and we want to have some sense of influence or control,
but we are just so very small.

My little grandson, Declan,
is cradled beneath a huge, impenetrable cosmos
of powers and forces,
elements and dynamics
before which he is completely powerless.
And truth be told, sixty years into the future
when he will be a full-grown man, God-willing,
that powerlessness before the cosmos will still be true.
That is a truth, a fact of our very existence,
and if it changes at all over time,
it is only infinitesimally.

Did you see the news articles
about the object hurling through space
from another solar system,
and passing by Earth
on its way to yet another solar system?
It was an oblong shape
measured to be 750 feet long
by 115 feet wide, reddish in color,
and made of metal.
In fact, some Harvard scientists
are speculating it is a “light sail” –
literally, a probe sailing on solar power
sent from intelligent sources
from another solar system.

Meanwhile, I look out at the oak tree
at the edge of my yard,
squirrels unselfconsciously poking around in the snow
scratching for nuts without an inkling
of solar probes in the vast reaches of space beyond us.
The difference between those squirrels and us
is not all that great
when we start widening our perspective
outward onto the universe.

Or my dog,
sitting at the window staring at the squirrels
with not one bit of an inkling
that TIME extends beyond that moment,
or that space lengthens
into billions of light years beyond her yard.
You and I, in the grand scheme of intelligence,
are not that much more sophisticated
than my dog or those squirrels,
and not that much more capable
of unpacking what is
and is not
out yonder.

If we can crawl up to that truth,
the hard and scary fact of our smallness,
we can begin to feel authentic humility,
and what it means to be in awe–
or as the ancients called it,
standing in the “fear of the Lord.”

By fear, they did not mean afraid, exactly.
They meant something more like that shaking,
shuttering joy I felt
even hundreds of miles away
from where Declan was born.

What I am trying unsuccessfully to point to,
to help us actually touch,
is a feeling –
or maybe it is more of a moment.
It is that moment of being awakened,
when something opens us, and out rushes…amazement.

Advent is best appreciated
as an embrace with that feeling – or experience –
rather than as an explanation
or idea
or some concept.
It is like Eliot’s effort to unify past, present, and future –
we can’t really do it
but trying to wrap our minds around it
brings us, sometimes, if we are lucky,
into that experience.

Maybe, it is more like looking
at a candle flame or the fire-light in the dark.

We can sit there thinking about fire,
and what we know about the physics and chemistry
that makes it possible
for wood or wax or wick to burn.
We can explain it
or we can enter the light –
literally, allow our thoughts to enter the flame
and experiencelight.
We can encounter the light
within the darkness and experienceit,
or we can miss that encounter and simply
remain in the explanation of it.
That is what I mean about embracing Advent.

This is where the church-thing we do
and spiritual community, is subversive.
We operate on a different level
but we do so in plain sight.
We begin a new year
and we start a new season
while everyone around us is still in ordinary time –
just going about their business
as if nothing had happened.
But we know something has happened,
and it is beyond rationality.
Something has happened,
and it is beyond normal awareness.
We are too small to see it
or hear it
or understand it,
but on some intuitive, maybe even musical level,
we know it is happening.

So we ritualize it –
and then we wait to see if, suddenly,
we will be forced open
and something like a wind will rise up from within us
and blow out in what can only be called amazement.
It sounds whacky and crazy, I know,
but that is what we are doing here
on an ordinary Sunday in this former wine bar
sharing prayers, song, and Eucharist.

So, I invite you into Advent,
not as an idea
or with some twenty-five cent theological explanation.
But as an experience.
Allowing ourselves to become open
to our smallness,
open to awe and joy
and unutterable amazement
before the window on deep space
or in the presence of a new born.

It brings a clog to our throat
and a stinging tear to our eyes
and somewhere inside we call out,
or quietly whisper,
“Thanks be to God.”

Proper 28 B 2018: Spiritual Symmetry

by

There is a phobia or syndrome
whose name I’ve forgotten,
in which anxiety is centered in the dread
of a human structure collapsing.
When looking at a bridge for example,
or a tall building,
the person will obsess
about structural weaknesses
or points of vulnerability
and what could go wrong
to make it come tumbling down.

I have a mild case of that phobia
but when I was much younger
it was more pronounced.
I could get freaked out to the point
it would sometimes cause me
to get cold and clammy.

Here is an example.

I used to have season tickets
to The Ohio State football games.
For ten years I went to the 105,000-seat stadium
where I was crammed like a sardine
in with tens of thousands of others.
The stadium was built in 1922
and sometimes as the game went on
and fans cheered and shouted with vigor,
I would look above me at those huge steel girders
with rivets the size of my fist,
and all I could think about was…the Titanic.
“Hmmm,” I would muse to myself,
“the Titanic was built in 1911
with defective steel caused by human error
in the manufacturing process…”

Such thoughts led me to think about
escape routes
should the deck above me fall
as the thousands of bodies up there
started stomping their feet and singing,
“We will, we will, rock you!”

I see the humor in my thoughts,
and I did even then.
But not so much as a kid.
When I was young,
a passenger in my parent’s car
and everyone else enjoying the five mile drive
across one of the world’s longest
expansion bridges,
spanning the straights of Mackinaw, in Michigan,
I would push my face up against the window
and inspect the cables for fraying as we passed.

Later, as an adult,
flying home from Africa with Katy,
I revealed that the source of my white knuckles
was the thought
of the those little rivets in the wings popping out.
But even more troubling to me
than the idea of the plane crashing, I confessed,
was to then be eaten by a shark.
She assured me that we wouldn’t be alive
when we met the shark.

Well, I call such thoughts, “The Jesus Syndrome.”
Of course I would – but not
because I think of myself like Jesus.
I call it that because
it reminds me there is good reason
to have limited confidence in anything human,
and to always keep the long view,
even while trying to accomplish
the short-term task.

I love the image from today’s gospel
in which Jesus is gazing upon
the amazing Temple,
whose majesty was extolled
across the Roman Empire.
“Yep,” Jesus says matter of factly,
“one of these days those babies are coming down.”

If we think about the first century
and Judean and Galilean peasants
living in those parts,
there would not have been many superstructures
for them to ogle over.

Peasants did not travel far
and they would have had no access to
a palace, Praetorium, and coliseum.
The Temple in Jerusalem
would have been a unique experience
for someone marginalized like Jesus,
because it was a rare architectural giant
they could actually walk into –
even though, once inside, they would have had
very limited access.

Calling my little phobia “The Jesus Syndrome”
also comforts me with the idea
that Jesus had crazy thoughts too.

But this story reveals
that Jesus’ thoughts weren’t all that crazy.
His fantasy about the Temple falling down
turned out to be true.
Thirty-eight years after Jesus was executed
the Roman army reduced the Temple to ruins
and all that remains of it today
is that bitter irony called the “Wailing Wall,”
which rests underneath
the Muslim Temple Mount.

But there is something else to notice here too,
and we get a whiff of it in that squib from Daniel.

Every story has an ending.
Every story has an ending but, like beginnings,
not all endings are equal.
We have been washed and dried
in the Tumble Press of Walt Disney
in which every story has ahappyending.

The United States civic culture
is spun from the threads of happy ending stories
whether old Westerns,
political mythologies,
animated folk heroes or romance.

We rarely tell a story
that does not have a happy ending.
At least not in the popular culture.

Some streams of alternative culture
do let the end come with violence,
or without resolve,
but they are perceived to be dark,
cynical and negative.

Still, every story must have an ending.
We tend to think of the Gospel
as ending with the resurrection –
a kind of tortured happy ending, I suppose.

But that is not how Jesus
chose to end the story of his public ministry
in gospels of Mark, Luke or Matthew.
His last public story, in each of those Gospels,
is the one we heard in part today.
It is a story about the endof time
and it is a pretty dog-gone dark story.

In all three Gospels, the last story Jesus tells,
is provoked by some knuckle-headed pilgrim
ogling at the Temple
and exclaiming how beautiful it is.

Something about that sends Jesus
into his darkened depths
to forecast what is going to happen
at the end of time,
when God runs out of patience
or humans run out of options.

This is an element of the biblical narrative
I have ignored most of my professional career.
I have dismissed apocalypse and eschatology,
along with Fundamentalist talk of Armageddon
and the Grim Reaper.
Like most liberals, I focused instead,
on the stories and sayings of Jesus,
which I like a whole lot better.

I am not proud of my self-serving cowardice
but there it is.
We could explain away
the fact that the last public story Jesus tells
in all three Gospels,
is a story about a dark and violent ending
to human history.

But recognizing it is in all three gospels,
I think we have to take it seriously
rather than explaining it away.
Whether it was actually Jesus’ last story
or it was the story-tellers
placing it as Jesus’ last public story,
it was done with intention.

In other words, Jesus was living close to the end
and he knew, even if they didn’t,
that his compatriots
were living close to their end too.
It was plaguing his thoughts
and filling his heart,
so when someone made a stray comment
about the beauty of the stained-glass windows
– oops, I mean the glory of the Temple –
it evoked all that emotion in Jesus
and it came gushing out.

One of the best funeral sermons
I ever heard, was delivered
by a seventy-something year old priest,
talking to hundreds of seventy
and eighty-year-old friends
gathered to say good-bye
to a long-time associate.

The preacher began
by saying to his contemporaries,
that it was an auspicious occasion
for all of them to think about
what they wanted their own lives to stand for.

And then, he went on to ask
specific questions designed to provoke
an evaluation of the distance
between what we say we stand for
and how we actually live our lives.

It was brilliant,
and something I could not have preached
at the time, due to my youth.

I think that may be the kind of thing
Jesus was doing
by ending the story of his life
with a reminder of even the Earth’s mortality.
What do you stand for in this world?
What does your “one small and precious life”
mean in the vast sea of time and space?
Who are you exactly?
Who are you…and what do you want
your life to be remembered for?

As crazy as it may seem,
I think that is a wonderful Thanksgiving meditation.
It connects up with what we are grateful for
because, what we are grateful for
is probably associated
with what we want to be remembered for.

Those things we value most
are probably also the things
that we should want to assist others
with enjoying.

So, as we consider what we are grateful for,
we could also ask ourselves
whether or how we have assisted others
with gaining access to them as well.

Some of that is easy and just plain obvious.
We value good, nourishing food
and as we give thanks for it,
we could also ask ourselves when and how
we have enabled others to have access
to good, nourishing food too?
That could lead to a reflection
on those who make it possible for us to eat –
farm workers – immigrant farm workers –
farmers, truckers, and folks
who work at the grocery.
We are grateful for what they produce and deliver,
so what have we done, or what could we do,
to ensure they have access
to good and nourishing food also?

You see, it is an easy equation to contemplate.

This is a great time of year
to do a gratitude inventory –
brainstorm a list of all the people and things
we are especially grateful for.
Then we can do an inventory
of when and how we might be able
to assist others to access
those very things
we have so appreciated ourselves.

It doesn’t have to be a big, complicated list,
and we certainly do not have to carry
responsibility for the whole world on our backs.
I’m talking about simple inventory of our abundance.

There is a kind of spiritual symmetry
between what we are grateful for
and what we may be able to do
to return that very goodness to others.

My guess is, when all is said and done,
we would be pleased to be remembered
for providing to others
what we have been so grateful for ourselves.

Well, like I said,
all stories have an ending,
and all sermons do too – or at least,
we hope they do.

Mine is to give thanks
for this congregation, for our communal
courage
and strength;
and so to ask, how might we,
as a spiritual community,
encourage and strengthen others around us?

May you have a blessed Thanksgiving this week.

 

 

Our Vision

Our vision…a Trinity Church known in the community as a welcoming home to everyone, responding effectively to the needs of our community, in collaboration with fellow Episcopalians and other faith communities

Our mission…to strive in our daily life and parish life to respect the dignity of every human being, and to treat each person entering our doors as if that person is Christ.

We are striving to be as open as the table Jesus hosted, in solidarity with the people of Geneva, and an accessible partner to others who share our sense of the gospel.

It also means we have opened ourselves to the future, and not only moved but adopted a new way of being church from the more traditional model. Join us at Trinity Place, 78 Castle Street in downtown Geneva, NY.

 Trinity Place, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

“Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts” means we are pointed toward a particular dimension of life, specifically that which strengthens the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. 

Trinity is a Christian community of worship and spiritual practice welcoming all, and an Episcopal Church in particular. However, we welcome all spiritual traditions and those who have no particular spiritual background but are engaged in a mission consistent with ours. We are looking for partners in mission not members (although we love to welcome new members too).

 

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