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4 Advent 2019: A Dirty Sermon – as in earthen

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This sermon is kind of dirty.
I don’t mean obscene,
I mean muddy – as in, earthen.
You will be happy to know
it is kind of short too’

I am looking forward to Christmas Eve this year,
when I can just kind embrace the readings
instead of feeling as though
I need to reach in and unpack them.
But then, that is the difference
between Advent and Christmas.

What we just heard from Isaiah
is not about a virgin
nor is it about Jesus.
On the other hand,
we do not know exactly what it is all about.

Here is the historical context
down and dirty.

After King Solomon there was a civil war
in which Israel went one way
and Judah another.
Israel was the northern section of what we
think of as Israel today,
and it had all the good stuff:
farm land,
water,
pastures
and a fairly strong military.

Judah was the southern end
and it had Jerusalem,
and deserts and wild places
where no one could survive,
as well as the Dead Sea
in which nothing much lives.

Israel never stopped wanting to take Judah back.

Time pressed on after the split
until Israel made a pact
with neighboring Aram,
which had its capital in Damascus.
Aram was also a vassal state
of the growing Assyrian empire.
Together Israel and Aram agreed to attack Judah
and then divide it up between themselves.

Ahaz was the king of Judah
and understandably, he was freaking out.
Isaiah was the prophet-poet
who tried to assure Ahaz
to stay the course.
Isaiah promised Ahaz
he would live to see the day
when God proved faithful to Jerusalem.

Isaiah tells the king to ask for a sign,
any sign, for God to show Ahaz
that God will protect Judah.

For some reason the king won’t do it.

So, Isaiah GIVES him a sign:
A woman, who shall remain nameless –
as most women of the bible and history have been –
will have a child, also nameless.

That child will be a peasant child
indicated by his diet of honey and curds.
By the time the child is old enough
to judge between right from wrong –
6 to 10 years old, maybe –
Ahaz will be able to see
that the kings of Israel and Aram
rule over an empty bunch of nothingness,
while Judah will be okay.

Oddly, that is a long time to wait for a sign
when you have two armies at your door.
That is what I mean that we don’t really understand
this passage –
other than its context.

Unlike scientists and engineers,
prophets and poets, like mystics,
are allowed to be cryptic
when they want to be.

But what we can be sure about,
is that this passage from Isaiah,
which was written 700 years
before Jesus was born,
is not about Jesus.

Rather, it was about something
that had to do with Ahaz
and the crisis he was facing.

Even so, Matthew comes along
almost eight centuries after the fact,
and tries to use Isaiah
as evidence or proof that Jesus is
the long-expected messiah.

Matthew constantly uses Hebrew scripture
written three-to-eight-hundred years before Jesus
as if it were written about Jesus.
It was his attempt to “prove” his Gospel claims.

I have no doubt
that Matthew believed what he was writing,
but it is also clear the vast majority
of first century Jews took no stock in it.
Especially the learned Jews
of Matthew’s generation
who understood how far-fetched
Matthew’s use of their text was.

The truth is, we get no proof for things like messiahs.

Heck, we don’t even get proof for love,
so the whole idea
that there is textual or historical evidence
or any kind of proof about things like messiahs,
is just absurd.
It is not our business anyway.
And actually, that is the larger point
of Isaiah’s big poetic prophecy to Ahaz:
trust God because you do not get to know.

Maybe D.H. Lawrence was onto something
when he wrote,
“Jesus was never Jesus
till he was born from a womb, and ate soup and bread
and grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus, with a body and with needs,
and a lovely spirit.”

Incarnation,
which is actually what the Christmas story is about,
has to do with body-ness.
Everything we can know
can only be known from inside a body.
No body? Then no mind –
no-thing without a body.
Even an atom has a body – an electron shell.

We are embodied creatures
and everything we know about
is embodied in some way, somehow.
And what we are really saying
with Christmas
is that God is embodied too.
God is embodied in creation.
God finds a way to be embodied, somehow,
even in human flesh.

That is a big idea
that can’t be proven, of course,
except for those
who have experienced
the embodiment of God’s presence.

But those folks can’t prove it to anyone else,
any more than you and I
can actually prove we love someone –
no matter how deeply
or passionately we love them.

But then, that is what
our hands and feet are for – for embodying love
so that others can see and feel
what is otherwise not seen.
Our love requires embodiment
in order to be experienced.
Without embodying our love
it would just be an idea,
or something we say
but which has no real-world imprint.

Christmas,
when we take off all the baubles and wrapping,
is earthen, simple,
and practical.
For all the religious talk
about spirit
and Pentecost
and other-worldly mystical-stuff,
our religion is really quite earthy.

It is dirt-bound
gravity-held
and physically embodied
in flesh and blood.
It is then delivered with hands and feet –
and occasionally
with words that make a difference.

Using our bodies to make a difference,
to literally, get down in the mud
and create a new world
that looks
and acts
and feels like one rooted in love,
is our religion.
That is what we are, or are supposed to be.

The rhetoric of creeds and hymns is,
well just rhetoric
until the moment
we embody some of it.

So, like I said, it is not too complicated
or even spooky
in any kind of religious way.
Rather, it is about what we do
with our hands and feet.

I wish I could tell you something more elegant
or spectacularly mystical
and spiritual,
but honestly,
our religion is dirty
just like our hands and feet
are supposed to be.

Christmas too,
is not all that elegant.
It has all the dirty, smelly, joyful things
that bodies do.

Thanks be to God for that!

 

 

3 Advent, Year A, 2019: Is this sermon about hope?

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If I can be personal for a moment,
I want to echo Wendell Berry’s poem about trees:
“They are the advent they await.”

Advent, an arrival or emergence, or
as we say in church-speak, a coming.
Trees are and do Advent –
they arrive without notice,
a seed in the soil
as anonymous as an infant
born into poverty at night
hidden from sight.
Trees are the thing they await,
both the recipient
and pure embodiment
of light.

Trees are that “light come down to earth”
consumed and processed
and transformed into more and greater tree.

Truly, we do not think of them as such,
but they are channels of sunlight
absorbed and changed into
bark and stem and leaf.

You likely think I am nuts now,
but truly, trees are perhaps
the most heavenly creatures on earth –
their very life a benediction (or blessing)
to the rest of us.
As Berry says, we “walk on (their) radiance
(and are) amazed.”
But they are also “a benediction said
over the living and the dead” –
literally granting comfort and shade
above our graves.

They bless us in life and death.

We pray for light and life
every dang time we open a prayer book,
and there they are –
trees all around us,
life and light blessing us while
we all but ignore them.

Trees are so god-like,
and our ignorance and negligence,
and at times downright belligerence toward them,
is just so darn human.

Jesus was hung on a tree,
one that itself had been tortured into wood.
We make that ragged wood of the cross
our symbol of holiness
instead of the tree from which it came –
also very human of us.

I don’t want to over-do this metaphor
but trees are potent symbols of life,
and the veritable incarnation of light
and its presence among us even on a cloud-filled day.

Why am I talking about trees?
Glad you asked.

I once read a quote in an interview
with the aging folk singer, Joni Mitchell.
The interviewer asked Joni if she ever got disillusioned.
“No,” she immediately replied,
“because I never have any illusions.”

You see, it is illusions that, in the end
cause us to become cynical and disillusioned.
What we need is VISION, not illusion
and many people – especially many idealistic people –
confuse those two.
Isaiah is all about vision
rather than illusion.

It is an easy and common mistake
to imagine that Isaiah
is creating a specific set of criteria
by which to discern
God’s presence in the world.
“When the desert gets to be like this,
then we will know God is with us.”
But that is what his poem says
only if we read it as a formula
or the directions for a how-to manual
instead of as poetry.

First of all, we are not wilderness people.
We do not live in a desert –
in fact, just the opposite.

We live along or near a lake,
a giant blue lake
fed by roaring tributaries
pouring off dramatic waterfalls
and adorned with vineyards,
forests, and orchards.
We are Hobbits
who live in the lush green Shire,
not denizens of Isaiah’s desert –
or John the Baptist’s wilderness,
or any of the Biblical dryness metaphors.
Using desert metaphors for us
is like referring to Jesus as the bread of lifein Japan,
where rice is the staple.

The VISION in Isaiah’s poetry
is not embedded in topography
or geological features of the land.

They are metaphors, like Wendell Berry’s trees.
They are metaphors
mouthing to us in whispers
about when we can be sure that God is
present and at work
in the world about us.

Here is how I translate his metaphors.

God is present and at work
where the hawks of war
fall in love with the doves of peace
and their progeny is hope.

God is present and at work
when power is used to raise up the powerless
and make vulnerable
those who are steadfastly arrogant.

God is present and at work
when our economy is driven by the invisible hand
of fairness and equity
instead of moved by the clutch of scarcity
pr the suction of gluttony.

That to me, is the substance of Isaiah’s vision.
But our vision generally does not come from Isaiah,
instead, we get our vision
from CNN…FOX…MSNBC…Brietbart…NPR
or any other electronic sieve
that filters the universe
into small enough particles
that they can be transmitted by electrons
into 15 second sound-bytes,
or 30 second streaming images,
or a “generous” two-minute expose.

Our news…our vision…our very perspective on the world,
is filtered into manageable sound bites
and polished into a lens
by businesses, organizations, and platforms
driven by profit,
rather than a prophet of God.

It is as if we are presented
with a daily paint-by-numbers world
with a few stray dots
we are directed to color in
and told which colors to use, and then,
we are told what the image is
we are supposed to see.

You and I do not actually know
what is going on in the world.
We only get briefings
from people who want us to see the world
in a particular way – theirway;
the way that is best for them
to have us see it.

But here is the laughable part.
They do not know
what is happening in the world either.

The idea that anyone has the right perch
and a good view
of what is actually taking place in world is an illusion.

The idea that there is a constellation of facts out there
that can be gathered,
and that once pulled together for us
can be added up like an equation…
to give us “Reality”
with a capital R – is an illusion.

We do not get to see “reality”
we only get to see very small snippets
of life as we experience it;
and then we get to salt it
with a conglomeration of information,
some of which is helpful
but a preponderance of which, is not.

So, let’s back up,
and back away from CNN and FOX
and that barrage of information,
whatever its source.
Let’s instead, go sit by the lake.

I imagine that all of us
have had the experience
of sitting by a lake or pond –
one small enough
to have an apron of trees around it.

Seated there at the water’s edge,
we see the surface of the of lake or pond
and the tangle of trees
stretching up and out toward the sun,
and in the midst of it all,
we see the chaos of textures and colors
and we can probably hear a cacophony of sounds.
If we sit there long enough,
and wait patiently enough,
our eyes will actually adjust to the abundance.

Think about that – our eyes
will adjust to the abundance
and we will see more of what is there.
In the same way as we wait for our vision
to adjust to the dark,
if we are patient at the water’s edge
we will see a stunning array of detail emerge.

We will see the dance of light upon the carpet of shadows.
We will see the complexity of grasses
and an almost wasteful variety flowers and plants –
especially if we are there in the growing season.
But even in winter,
we can see a reckless variety of once green bodies
poking out of the snow
or leaning in all different directions
like a bad haircut.

We will hear a symphony of natural music
played by the freakish vocal instruments
of chitterling birds,
fractious insects,
undulating amphibians,
chortling mammals,
and even the strings of the wind.

If we sat there long enough,
this intricate canvass of life will change by season
over and over and over and over again.
Autumn with its subdued colors and receding hairline;
Winter with its purity and milk of God;
Spring with its scent of life and squeal of green;
Summer in all of its full-bodied shapeliness.

Were we patient enough,
were we very good listeners,
were we to have the studied vision of a cat,
we would see this year-long scene
as one whole turn of the page.

If we had the vision,
instead of looking upon its minion of component parts
and seeing them as separate and discrete activities,
we would see it as a rolling and rippling whole.

But even if we had the patience and vision of a tree
to see the wonderful wholeness of lake and seasons,
we still would not actually see it.
That is because there is so much else going on within it.

We still would not have seen the microbiology;
not have witnessed the microbes at work
in the moist wet soil along its banks.

We would not have perceived
the interaction of worms and acid and decay
within the blankets of leaf-strewn mud on its icy bottom.

We would have
witnessed the trees changing color,
but hidden from our sight would be
the thickening liquid sucked up from their roots
and pumped like blood to the vessels in their leaves.

We would have enjoyed the sparkling surface of the water,
but never have guessed
the presence of a water table
resting beneath the green stubbled earth,
and that even that invisible body of water
ebbs and flows up and down by a connecting aquifer
that roars like a river
still deeper in the soul of the earth.

Standing by the exquisite elegance of the lake,
and having even an inkling
of how much life
and how many relationships
form the matrix of that exquisite web,
we understand CNN and FOX give us a 100-mph view
and call it the world.

But that view is not the world.
It is a view. It is a profit-driven and power-hungry view.

We know instead,
and Isaiah is telling us so,
that the world is composed of billions,
perhaps trillions of lakes and ponds– and please,
that’s a metaphor –
each with their own ecosystem
and yet inter-connected
with every other ecosystem
and forming a magnificent, single wholeness.

We could sit and study for an entire year
just one pond,
just one amazing day
just one moment in our lives,
and still we would not have the vision to see it.
The idea that we see it or know it,
is an illusion.
The way to keep from being DISillusioned
is to abandon the arrogance of illusion.

Is God present and at work in the world about us?
It does not seem so
if CNN, Facebook, or FOX is our lens.
But those who take the time,
who have the patience,
whose curiosity will allow,
and who have the eyes to see,
will know that God is present
and at work even here…even now.

If we are looking in the newspaper
or on television
or in our favorite online sources
for where God is carpeting whole nations
with peace and cures and prosperity,
then our ability to see God is diminished.

If we are waiting for the power-mongers in Washington
or Albany or the county or city
to suddenly speak with honesty
and act with integrity,
then we will become cynical.

If we are following our own vision
and insisting that WE KNOW
what the world is supposed to be like,
as if it had a script that follows a plot
and arrives at a happy ending
penned to our own liking, then we will be crushed.
If we are holding God
to the exact words that appear in Isaiah
or Matthew,
or to some mystic poet we read somewhere,
then we will become rigid
and encrusted
like anything else that has been dead that long.

To see the movement of God
here and now,
present and at work in our own lives,
we must be prepared
to look without expectation,
to listen without talking,
to observe without planning,
to feel without protecting,
To study without proving.

As we approach the Big Day of Christmas
and tell the story of Jesus born in a barn,
consider how many years
Nelson Mandela was in prison
before the world ever heard of him!
Think about how many seasons that tree lived
before you ever noticed it.

As we approach Christmas
and assume it is about a baby being born
late at night under a star
instead of a poem about God’s presence
here and now in our midst,
consider how many acts of kindness,
how many small acts of love,
how many life-changing encounters,
how many transforming moments
will never get one bit of ink or airtime,
and how few of them you or I will ever know about.

Consider how knowing about them
might change our vision
or at the very least, subvert our illusions.

Coming up through the roots of the tree
and feeding its leaves;
deep in the soil where death is refashioned into life;
and under the surface of the water
where a universe thrives,
God is present and at work.

There are 16 days left in this worn-out old year
and instead of rushing to the end,
I invite us to slow down,
take a deep breath,
and observe the small, the ordinary
the neglected elements, moments
and people
in our busy lives.

If we do, I suspect we will be able to see that
God is present and at work.

But you don’t have to take my word for it,
go out and touch the bark of a tree
and feel the naked little stems on its branches,
and poke around to notice a hint of its roots.
Realize what you feel
and what you see
is light. Sunlight.
Present, right there with you.

 

2 ADVENT C 2019: Christmas Subversion

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Alright folks, this is the Second Sunday of Advent
so it is time to get honest.
That’s a consumer warning.

Second Advent
is far enough away from Christmas Eve
that we can open the book on Christmas
and read the margin notes.
If you didn’t know it,
the Christmas narrative is a prophetic story.

By prophetic, I mean a story
that wants us to see something
that is right in front of our eyes
but that we need a different lens
in order to perceive.
Prophets offer that kind of a lens,
and Christmas is that kind of a story.

But we know the nativity story so well
that its very familiarity works against us.
So let’s work backwards,
from the United States in 2019
back to Matthew in the year 85 or so,
of the first century – who, remember,
is telling us a story that took place
fifty years before him.

Actually, before go back that far,
let’s take a stop around the turn of the 20th century.
JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie,
and John D. Rockefeller –
the Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos,
and Mark Zuckerberg of their day –
controlled oil,
railroads,
and banking monopolies.

They also concluded
that the Women’s Movement
and religion
had become too mettlesome in politics.
They actually colluded with one another
and their peers,
to take both the Women’s Movement
and the Churches
out of the public square.
They were quite clever about how they did it,
and more to the point,
it is a strategy that was copied by titans
of the last decades
of the twentieth century as well.

What those earlier robber barons did
was to use their money and influence
to raise up leaders within Christianity
and the Women’s Movement,
who divided them, and eventually
redirected the energies of both
toward private morality
instead of public policy.

Today we don’t think of feminism and Christianity
as allies, which is a measure of how successful
the robber barons were.

But feminism and Christianity
were a powerful social force
focused with passion on issues of public policy:
the distribution of wealth,
addressing the ravages of poverty,
creating fair labor and child labor laws,
fighting to break up and limit
the power of monopolies,
and counter-acting the growing
nationalism and war-mindedness.

The robber baron’s strategy shifted that energy
so that the Women’s Movement and the Church
became obsessed with
alcohol and drug consumption,
sexual behavior,
and, what else, teenagers.

Christianity was diverted
from being a passionate advocate
for social justice
to a watchdog of private morality.

The obsession with private morality continued
from the Temperance Movement on,
until slowly the churches became enmeshed
in the Civil Rights movement of the sixties
and then the anti-Vietnam war Movement.

But then again in the late 20thcentury,
millions of dollars from very wealthy,
politically and economically minded patrons,
began funding
theologically conservative leadership
in all of the mainline Protestant churches,
including The Episcopal Church.

What we have witnessed as the moneyed invasion
of political parties
actually began in mainline Protestant Christianity
and to a lesser but significant extent
in Roman Catholicism.*

It was a guided effort
that succeeded in fracturing
and weakening Protestantism,
which was also just beginning to stumble
under the weight of pervasive secularism.
Long story short:
Just because you are paranoid
doesn’t mean someone is not out to get you.

The sweep of the Biblical narrative
and the Christmas story in particular,
are radically corrosive to the self-interests
of those who wield power and wealth
and seek to control culture.

I am not making this up –
it is not some political spin
I am putting on the gospel:
it has always been there
right in front of our eyes
if we had the lens to see it.

When Matthew tells us
the word of John appeared in the wilderness,
his narrative is obsessed with King Herod.
Likewise, when Luke begins his story
of Jesus’ birth
it is with telling us who the politicians were.
From the beginning of Matthew and Luke,
the two Christmas gospels,
we know it was in the reign of Tiberius,
under the local dictatorship of Pontus Pilate,
and within the tetrarchy of Herod.
Here is why the Christmas story
is enmeshed with the narrative of political power.

History is told
from the point of view of the winners –
more precisely, by the winner’s historians.
The chemists of culture
tell us how it happened and why,
and they tell us what they want us to know.

So if you are telling a story
in the midst of a culture hostile to you,
as Matthew and Luke were doing,
and you want your story to be remembered,
then you have to peg the events
to milestones that the winners care about.

We have been in this position for a very long time.
Almost all of Biblical theology
is told from within a hostile culture,
and told subversively against the winners.

From the very beginning,
when we were slaves in Egypt
we have understood that God’s people
are in a hostile environment
and that by banning together
we are creating a counter-cultural movement.

There have been times in our history,
from Mount Sinai in Egypt
to Mount St. Alban’s in Washington DC,
when Christians acted
more like Pharaoh than Moses
but it never takes very long to be dramatically
reminded about which one is our spiritual path.

From the very beginning
our spiritual tradition
has been composed of prophets
that warned the kings
and religious authorities in Israel
of truths they could not see in front of them.

They warned that royal policies and culture
dedicated to self-interest,
maintenance of power for the elite,
and consumerism
would come to insure national ruin.
We have long understood
that such prophetic witness
is required of spiritual people.

From the very beginning,
when we were healers
for people who had been marginalized
because of illness and woundedness;
and then when we too had become marginalized
because we dared to embrace them;
we understood that subversiveness
is required of spiritual people.

From the very beginning,
when we were messiahs and disciples
who sought to reform our own religion
because it had become fat and corrupt,
and a rigid hierarchy of men who were enmeshed
in economic and military power,
we understood
that rubbing salt into the wounds
of those powerful elites
is what it means to be spiritual people.

From the very beginning
even though our religious leaders
and our religious institutions
often became the prostitutes and pimps
of economic culture,
strong currents in Christianity
have always remembered
that being the yeast of justice,
advocates of mercy,
and lovers of peace
is the ordinary work
of spiritual people.

It is the Christmas story,
perhaps even more graphically than all others,
that holds these reminders
of what spiritual people do.
And this is why we need to take the story back
from the chemists of culture
who have neutered it.

Week by week in Advent,
until that moment on Christmas Eve,
we tell a story from the margins of society
that holds a profound and poignant reminder
that being spiritual people
requires us
to always be swimming against the current.

Then, on Christmas eve –
like American slaves
worshipping under the watchful eye
of their masters –
we tell the more polite and socially acceptable
version of the story,
which also has a kind of truth
and so we can still tell it with integrity.

Being spiritual people,
it should excite our anger and indignation
that our story,
the Biblical one about Christmas,
is never authentically told in the public square.
All that Christmas stuff we hear on the radio,
see in those manger scenes,
read about in the newspaper,
images on Facebook or watch on television,
are sentimentalized and stripped
of any true spiritual content.

That Christmas
has been appropriated by the chemists of culture
in order to reinforce the story
they want us
to spend our money on.

Being spiritual people,
we understand that the Biblical story of Christmas
is counter-cultural,
and we share in the joy of surprise
when those who never knew it
stumble into its subversive wisdom.

So here it is,
a little whisper of truth for spiritual people
in the midst of a culture hostile to it:

“In the reign of Donald Trump,
when Cuomo was Governor;
Francis was pope;
and Michael, Presiding Bishop;
the Word of the Lord
came to a strange and motley group
huddled around a Wayfair altar
on the northern shore of Seneca Lake
located in the upstate region
known as FLX, or the Finger Lakes.

‘Prepare the way of the Lord:
God is coming into the world
incarnate in the vulnerable flesh
of a human infant,
surrounded by the brutality and violence
of poverty inflicted upon it
by those who hold the reins of power
and those who look the other way.
God is coming to speak truth to power.
So get ready.
Be that truth.
Subvert that power.’”

Now in case you never heard it put quite that way,
this is the Christmas story – the Biblical one.

But please, let us also take care.
This is a tough season for spiritual people.
We see things
and we know things
that weigh heavy on our hearts and minds.

We understand what is going on
and we recognize the motives of people
that are led by profit more than justice.
It is a weary season for spiritual people
because we are by nature
and by desire
healers.

We see and we feel
the woundedness of others,
even as we experience most acutely
our own wounds.
So take care.
Spiritual people need to be nurtured
especially in such a difficult season.

Allow yourself
to be held in the arms of community.

Allow yourself
to find the arms of those
who love you most closely.

Allow yourself
to stop and breathe and remember
there is a bigger picture,
a deeper hope,
a greater love
than any we see named or evoked
in the culture around us.

Allow yourself
to rest and be touched
by the peace of God
that surpasses all understanding –
that strange whimsical and mysterious movement
of the Spirit
that winnows through
our ordinary days.

Allow yourself
to stop and look around
and see the marvelous people
in the world around you –
even right here
even right now –
and reckon them as a gift.

Who would have thought,
given what we have been told
by all those who are hostile to Christianity,
that a religion could be so spiritual
and that being spiritual
we could be so counter-cultural and subversive –
even to our own self-interest?

Welcome to the season
and take good care.

 

1 Advent 2017: Birth or Death?

by

TEXT FOR PREACHING

Isaiah 64:1-9

Oh, that you would rip open the heavens and descend,
make the mountains shudder at your presence—
As when a forest catches fire,
as when fire makes a pot to boil—
To shock your enemies into facing you,
make the nations shake in their boots!
You did terrible things we never expected,
descended and made the mountains shudder at your presence.
Since before time began
no one has ever imagined,
No ear heard, no eye seen, a God like you
who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who happily do what is right,
who keep a good memory of the way you work.
But how angry you’ve been with us!
We’ve sinned and kept at it so long!
Is there any hope for us? Can we be saved?
We’re all sin-infected, sin-contaminated.
Our best efforts are grease-stained rags.
We dry up like autumn leaves—
sin-dried, we’re blown off by the wind.
No one prays to you
or makes the effort to reach out to you
Because you’ve turned away from us,
left us to stew in our sins.

Still, God, you are our Father.
We’re the clay and you’re our potter:
All of us are what you made us.
Don’t be too angry with us, O God.
Don’t keep a permanent account of wrongdoing.
Keep in mind, please, we are your people—all of us.
Your holy cities are all ghost towns:
Zion’s a ghost town,
Jerusalem’s a field of weeds.
Our holy and beautiful Temple,
which our ancestors filled with your praises,
Was burned down by fire,
all our lovely parks and gardens in ruins.
In the face of all this,
are you going to sit there unmoved, God?
Aren’t you going to say something?
Haven’t you made us miserable long enough?

“The Divine Dream” by Abraham Heschel

There is a divine dream which the prophets and rabbis have cherished and which fills our prayers, and permeates the acts of true piety. It is the dream of a world, rid of evil by the grace of God as well as by (our) efforts…to the task of establishing the kingship of God in the world. God is waiting for us to redeem the world. We should not spend our life hunting for trivial satisfactions while God is waiting constantly and keenly for our effort and devotion.

The Almighty has not created the universe that we may have opportunities to satisfy our greed, envy and ambition. We have not survived that we may waste our years in vulgar vanities. The martyrdom of millions demands that we consecrate ourselves to the fulfillment of God’s dream of salvation. Israel did not accept the Torah of their own free will. When Israel approached Sinai, God lifted up the mountain and held it over their heads, saying: “Either you accept the Torah or be crushed beneath the mountain.”

The mountain of history is over our heads again. Shall we renew the covenant with God?”

Mark 13:24-37

“Following those hard times,

Sun will fade out,
moon cloud over,
Stars fall out of the sky,
cosmic powers tremble.

“And then they’ll see the Son of Man enter in grand style, his Arrival filling the sky—no one will miss it! He’ll dispatch the angels; they will pull in the chosen from the four winds, from pole to pole.

“Take a lesson from the fig tree. From the moment you notice its buds form, the merest hint of green, you know summer’s just around the corner. And so it is with you. When you see all these things, you know he is at the door. Don’t take this lightly. I’m not just saying this for some future generation, but for this one, too—these things will happen. Sky and earth will wear out; my words won’t wear out.

“But the exact day and hour? No one knows that, not even heaven’s angels, not even the Son. Only the Father. So keep a sharp lookout, for you don’t know the timetable. It’s like a man who takes a trip, leaving home and putting his servants in charge, each assigned a task, and commanding the gatekeeper to stand watch. So, stay at your post, watching. You have no idea when the homeowner is returning, whether evening, midnight, cockcrow, or morning. You don’t want him showing up unannounced, with you asleep on the job. I say it to you, and I’m saying it to all: Stay at your post. Keep watch.”

SERMON

I love that graphic image
in this morning’s translation of Isaiah:
“Our best efforts are grease-stained rags.”

The straight-talk from Isaiah helps us deal better
with that excerpt from the great 20th century American rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Christians get squeamish when it comes to
tough-talk about God.
“Either you accept the Torah
or be crushed beneath the mountain,”
is a threatening interpretation of God that modern Christians, particularly liberals, usually object to.
But Isaiah’s lament about a God that is nowhere to be found,
when a loving, faithful God should be active,
is pretty clear and understandable.

Jesus has more of the same.

In the preamble
to what we heard from the gospel this morning,
Jesus warns his buddies:
“…In those days there will be suffering,
such as has not been seen from the beginning of creation
that God created until now, no, and never will be…”

The worst suffering ever!
That is saying something,
because human beings have known an awful measure
of suffering.

Jesus is warning them that they are going feel pain,
and it is going to be awful, so watch out for the signs:
The sun will fade,
the moon will cloud over,
fire will fall to the earth,
and the cosmos itself tremble.
Not good. Welcome to Advent.
Advent, remember, is the little four-week season
before Christmas.
It is a ‘get ready’ season.
The days are surely coming,
when God will fulfill the promise,
says another prophet (Jeremiah).
And the way he says it,
it sounds a heck of a lot more like a ‘threat’ than a promise.

In the popular imagination,
that time that will surely come,
that Jesus and other prophets predict,
is known variably as
The End Time
The Apocalypse
The Rapture
or the Eschaton.

It is almost always imagined as a violent ending.

The end of human history
is also imagined by many Christians today
to be the defining moment that will reward their faith,
while punishing or condemning
the absence of faith or the ‘wrong’ faith,
in a multitude of other people.

I prefer to imagine these and other calculations
by prophets whom I hold in high regard,
as a birth instead of a death –
the first breath of bountiful air
rather than the last draw of a snuffed-out life.

To be honest, I do not expect God to suddenly
put a zipper on it and wipe us out.
I prefer Isaiah’s other image of God, read elsewhere,
that God will wipe away every tear.

On the other hand,
like most moderns who have been taught
at the knee of Carl Sagan and Neal deGrasse Tyson,
I also expect that one day,
the Earth will be reduced to a cinder cooling off in space
after our sun dies –
which all stars finally do.
Sooner or later
the end will arrive
and whoever is around in those days
will have to contend with what it all means.

But on this first Sunday of Advent,
as we receive these Biblical readings
about a violent end-of-the-world,
it is worth thinking about WHY
those ancient people expected such violence.

It is because,
when you have little knowledge about the environment,
and your sphere of control is tragically narrow,
then a sudden apocalypse
would be consistent with the rest of your experience.

Think about it:
those ancients did not get much warning
about a storm like Irma or Maria –
our satellites watched those storms sweep across the ocean
before finally crossing the threshold of human habitats.

In Isaiah’s or Jesus’ day, storms just hit – BAM!

So did the Roman army – BAM!
The ancients never saw the legions coming
as they came marching ant-like over the horizon.
There was no warning about the cohort
who raped your daughter
or cut off the hands of your son
or took your bread and goats – BAM!

No warning about the Bandits who attacked;
or the lion that ate your neighbor;
or the famine that swept the population;
or the disease that only began
as a little rash
and ended with internal bleeding
that finally gushed blood from every orifice.

Our existence, yours and mine,
obscures how raw the lives of our ancestors were.
It is said that all of us here,
regardless of how much or how little income we have,
enjoys a quality of life
better than historic kings, like Henry VIII.

You and I often know about social mayhem
and natural disasters long before they arrive,
and our day-to-day existence is so sanitized and anesthetized,
not to mention protected,
that we create violence in movies, television, and video games
because somehow, scaring ourselves is entertainment.

It is little wonder that those ancients
anticipated the end of the world,
and that it would arrive with a rush of violence,
because that was their everyday experience.

Also…if God does not use the end-of-the-world
to finally reverse their fortunes,
for which they had long been on the losing end,
then when was the scale of justice going to get balanced?

And if it was not going to be God cleaning up in the 9th Inning,
then who, what, or when?

So, it is not so difficult to see why the ancients
envisioned apocalypse at the end of time –
and maybe even longed for it.
But what boggles my mind,
is that so many modern recipients of consumeristic privilege
also hope and pray for apocalypse!
I don’t get it.

But as I said, I want to put a different twist on Advent.

But let me also interject here,
that we will be missing most of our normal observation
of Advent this year.
Because we have invited the community into Trinity
for a concert next week,
and it is a Christmas concert;
and because the non-churched
and the non-liturgical churches do not recognize Advent at all;
and because that is much of the audience
we hope is here next week;
we are greening the Church for Christmas today.

We will not put up all of our Christmas decorations,
but we will do a lot of it
in the name of hospitality and welcome
to the wider community for the concert.

And…we will also miss the dramatic conclusion of Advent this year,
because the fourth Sunday of Advent falls on Christmas Eve.
So Advent is getting short shrift here this year.

Even so, we can practice the spirituality of Advent.

We do not need the color purple
or the absence of Christmas decorations,
or graphic apocalyptic threats,
to practice Advent.
We need only imagine we are awaiting a birth, not a death;
painful yes, but joyous beyond words.

In Advent, together, with one another,
we become a gaggle of slightly anxious
friends and family
watching the maternal belly of expectation
expand…waiting, waiting, waiting.

It is not even our belly,
not even our baby,
but we know that when it comes
everything
will suddenly be different.

It is not even our belly,
not even our baby
but we know that when it comes
everything
will be different.

And you know what else?
We don’t even know its name…
We don’t even know the name of the thing
that is coming,
that is gestating in the womb of the universe.

Here at Trinity we are experiencing that pregnancy
with great intimacy.

It is clear we are in a womb about to be delivered –
being born into a world we do not know yet,
and about to become a creature
we are not yet certain about.
Change is coming,
the cervix is thinning
and we know something is about to change.

It is the kind of change
about which we can never be certain what it will delivered;
the kind of change we cannot manage;
the kind of change we cannot usher.

A Harvard professor named, Ron Heifetz,
who writes about leadership and change,
has a nifty little way of distinguishing
between categories of change.
He says there is, “Continuous Change”
and “Discontinuous Change,”
and they are very different.

Continuous change is the one we like, if we like change at all.
It is the kind we can anticipate,
manage, and plan.
For example, we can plan the renovation of a building;
we can anticipate stuff wearing out
and requiring replacement;
we can manage a rainy-day fund
to pay for unanticipated events.
We can count on our body aging and so exercise,
eat right, and manage how much of the unhealthy stuff
we will allow ourselves to indulge.
All of that is continuous change,
and its main descriptor
is that is comes out of what has gone on before.
We know what to expect because of the past.

Then there is the other kind of change.
For example, we were getting so good
at anticipating and managing
the economic cycle of recession and inflation,
that many very smart people
actually began to talk about how there might
never be another
unanticipated change in the cycle.
No more recessions
or inflation, they were saying.

Then, all of a sudden,
something called the “Housing Bubble” happened.
Chaos ensued.

That is the kind of change we hate –
the chaos of discontinuous change,
or something that happens
that has never happened before.
Such change does not come out of previous experience,
it comes out of nowhere – or seems to –
and we are caught with our pants down (so to speak).

In the midst of discontinuous change,
the skills and know-how
we have used before to fix things,
does not work.

We instinctively try harder and harder and harder
using what we know has worked before,
but it does not help.

Old ways of doing things do not work
because things have really changed,
and our previous know-how
simply does not work.

We are suddenly out beyond the boundary
where we have never been before,
and we get the creeping feeling
there are things out here around us
that are very, very dangerous.

Because we get scared about not knowing what will happen,
and because we hate being out of control,
our first inclination is to reach for technology to fix it.
If we just have the right gizmo
or the perfect way of doing something
or a better program
or a new image…
But there is no fix, not yet,
and not with anything we have at our disposal.
And you know what?
Advent is a season intended to open us up
to discontinuous change –
the kind of change we hate.

Advent is a season
that invites us into discontinuous change
where the best thing we can do is wait…
wait and listen,
wait and observe,
wait and see what, if anything, God is doing.

Now, I know that a lot of us
do not believe God is doing anything
or ever does anything.
We inherited that kind of Deism
from Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment smarties.
It embarrasses us to talk about what God is doing
because we can’t prove it even if we knew it.

But Advent is a season to listen
and observe
and see what God is doing,
because we are in fact
surrounded by a time of discontinuous change.

We would be hard pressed
to think about an institution in this country
that is not cracking open,
falling apart,
or on its way to becoming something very different.
It is not just organized religion that is falling apart:
Health care,
Education,
Government,
Politics,
Business,
Economics,
Law,
Journalism, and Entertainment…
In all of them, the familiar scaffolding
that has held them up and made them work,
is disintegrating
well before we know what will replace it.
Those who keep applying
the same old fixes
as if doing so will make things better,
look and sound increasingly loony and even pathetic.

But nobody else is looking especially brilliant either –
as if they have the answers.
The reason is, in times of discontinuous change,
there are no experts
because the answers haven’t been named yet.

You and I may have imagined
that we were just entering the season of Advent,
the one that would take us
through the four weeks before Christmas.

But in fact, we have been entering Advent
for quite some time now,
and we are going to be in it
for quite some time to come.

There are no experts.
There are no gurus.
There are no answers.
To pretend there are,
and to follow those who promise them,
is to risk becoming deaf and blind
to what God is actually doing in our midst.

We may think we know what to hope for,
just like all those Christians who hope
for the end of the world to come.
But our vision is too small,
and our imagination is too limited,
and our hope is too flimsy
to unveil what God has in mind for us.

We need to wait instead…
wait and listen,
wait and observe,
wait and see what God is doing.

So, I invite us into a quiet little Advent
in which we wait…
wait for the baby that is coming any minute now,
next month,
tomorrow,
or years from now.
Wait for the scaffolding to collapse
and reveal the phoenix
that will rise up from the ashes.

I invite us into a quiet little Advent
in which we wait…
knowing that the best gift we can receive
is one we can’t even hope for
or anticipate
because right now,
in this time of discontinuous change,
we do not even know
what we do not know.

In invite us into a quiet little Advent
in which we wait…
wait and listen,
wait and observe,
wait and see
what God is doing – and expect
that God is doing something…even
if we do not know what.

 

 

3 Advent 2016: Midwife to the Holy

by

It is a dangerous world.

Justice is suspended slightly beyond our reach
over a precipice we cannot span.

The Earth we call fragile
will fume and crack and shake,
and likely grow and thrive and produce
eons after our species
has made it uninhabitable for our kind.
It is a dangerous world.

The dark is not darkness to God
but it is still an absence of light to us –
the activity of human evil
foment greater threats to our safety
and greater chaos at the shores of our hope.
It is a dangerous world.

The Season of Advent
is all about the dangers of the world we live in.

I know that all over of the town and city,
and throughout the country
preparations for Christmas
begin right after Halloween,
and intensify until red ribbons and white lights are everywhere.

But in the eye of that commercial storm
that has been brewing now for over a month,
in liturgical Churches like ours,
the four weeks before Christmas
are held as an important “Season” all its own.
For 14 centuries in fact,
Advent has stubbornly struggled
to hold back the tide of Christmas until,
on December 24th,
it can no longer withstand the procession of time.
Why have a season like that,
when everyone loves Christmas?
Why hold back Christmas or try to diminish its splendor.
Because, quite frankly,
it is a dangerous world.

You see, the Christmas spotlight is focused on an infant.
It is difficult for us to see past that sweet baby.
In the story of a small family
nestled around a newborn child,
need to be prepared to see and hear
what lies at the dark edges of that manger.

It’s tricky.
We receive newborns with “Ah!” and “Oooh.”
And that is as it should be.
An infant is more marvelous than we can possibly say.

But the season of Advent gazes into the gap
between the promise of what is to come –
that blessed baby –
and the chaos that is here and now.

We peer into this gap at Advent,
knowing that Christmas is just beyond us
but averting our gaze
even though we would rather stare at the promise
than at the chaos.

Even so, Advent is not a punishment;
rather, it is a method
of building spiritual muscle.

To look into the gap
between what has been Promised
and the Chaos that is here,
is to become wiser
and stronger
and more savvy
in a world that requires us to be clever not innocent.
It is a dangerous world.
Today, in Isaiah and Matthew,
we hear the promise of a different kind of Creation:
A NEW Creation.

In the NEW Creation
weak hands will be strong,
lame legs will dance,
thirsty deserts will gush,
dry sand will well up,
the exiled will come home,
and the captives will be ransomed.

The NEW Creation
will be under the reign of God instead of Chaos.

The NEW Creation
is not yet born,
but it is alive.
The NEW Creation
is a tender green shoot
still gathering shape in the dark, wet soil of winter.

But it is ALIVE.

Notice, please, that you and I are not promised
we will be alive
to see the world free of chaos,
only that the reign of God is coming.

The promise is simply
that the Creation is moving toward
an order that sustains life
in all of its mysterious complexities,
while at the same time slowly moving away from Chaos
with all of its attending threats.

Now the voices of cynicism and disbelief,
the thinking limited to pure reason,
and the dogmatism of science or economics
as the only possible lenses
through which we should interpret the world,
all have dismissed
the possibility of God’s reign.
There is no sense in arguing with them
any more than it makes sense to argue
with dogmatic religious thinking.

But for those of us in between –
who look for light and life
upon the entire spectrum of possibilities,
and have fewer limitations about what is possible,
there is something else.

There is an ancient wisdom.

That wisdom whispers to us
that we have a promise
and the promise is coming.
At the same time
it warns us about the Chaos within which we live.
But what this ancient wisdom asks of us
is to live AS IF,
as if we were already under the reign of God.

It asks us,
with the full sobriety of knowing the potential cost,
to live as if the promise has arrived.
All the prophets,
from Moses to Jesus to Dorothy Day,
tell us that by living AS IF
God’s reign is already here,
we become midwives to holy.

Let’s stop right there.
I want us to think about that:
Midwives to God.

As God painfully labors
to bring forth the New Creation she has promised,
we can be her midwives.
Midwives to God!

If you think this is just a metaphor I am playing with…
you’d be right.
But it is a metaphor that is cast in the mud of reality.
There are more ways to assist
in birthing the New Creation
than the number of stars we can see with the naked eye.
Conversely, there are countless ways
we can contribute to the Chaos as well.

But today I want to leave us thinking about just one way
we can act as midwives to the holy.
It hovers around that punch line we heard in the Gospel:
The least in the kingdom of God
is greater than…(you fill in the blank).

Or we can come at it from the negative.

The only way human beings are able to rape and murder –
or eve to hold, voice, and act with bigotry –
is if God has been turned into a mirror.

Let us make no mistake about evil –
and by evil, I mean the plain old human kind
with not supernatural about it.
We are all capable of tremendous evil.
You and me, and everyone we know,
is capable of deadly and awful behavior.
Let’s just be very honest and clear about it.

The German soldiers
who assisted in the genocide of 12 million people,
or the German middle class
who watched silently as Jews, homosexuals,
and leftists
were scape-goated
and then gradually reduced to the status of vermin,
were ordinary people like you and me.

The Cambodians,
Guatemalans,
Salvadorans,
Rwandans,
Russians,
Bosnians,
Iraqis,
Turks…pick a country
where repression and genocide
has been practiced openly within memory.
In every single one of them
we can see ordinary people like you and me
slipping into silence
and passively accepting evil
until it becomes a full-blown participation in that evil.

The point is: no one here is immune,
and each one of us
is capable of practicing and participating in evil.

Think back to the war of your generation
and your youth:
W.W.II,
Korea,
Viet Nam,
the Gulf Battle,
Iraq,
Afghanistan…
How easily did the words, “God and Country”
slip off our tongues?
How seamless a garment
was the establishment of war
with the establishment of religion?
How snuggly did the Gospel of Jesus Christ
fit into the flag of the Constitution,
and how quickly did Jesus’ face and manner
come to reflect our own as we opposed our enemies?

When God becomes the mirror
in which is reflected
all that we want to see and believe about ourselves,
then any horror is possible and justified.
It is then the world is made
an even more dangerous place.

Our greatest threat
is not from Atheists or Agnostics
who relegate God to irrelevance;
it is from our own capacity
to project our desires,
and our prejudices,
and own fears
onto God
as if they were coming down from heaven
instead of wafting up from our own darkness.

The Gospel has an antidote for this threat –
something that can shatter the shiny reflection
of any mirror.

“The least in the kingdom of God is greater than…”
When we swell with pride at our own power,
we need only look around to see God
in someone who is powerless.
Truly see them.

When we feel satiated and relaxed
in the comfort and safety of our own homes,
we need only listen for God
in the fear and anxiety
of those whose homes have been taken away.
Truly hear them.

When suspicion or animosity wells up within us
toward people we presume are not like us,
we need only touch them
because God lives within their body –
their gay, lesbian or heterosexual body;
their Asian, African, European, or hybrid body;
their well-educated, marginalize, or mainstreamed body;
their Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist body.
Truly touch them.

When the flag of our country –
and remember, in this congregation
we do not all have the same country and flag –
when the flag of our country
is pointed like a missile in flight
to attack the evil in some other country,
then we need to awaken to the sounds of our enemy – because somewhere
in that stereotyped mob of bad-guys,
God is calling out for us to listen.
We need to listen
and awaken to the God within “them.”

“The least in the kingdom of God is greater than…”
Just when we think we are being so good –
we see the least is gooder than us.
Just when we think we know the truth –
we understand that the least is wiser than us.

Just when we think we are right –
the least is proven more perceptive than us.

The Gospel has this built-in correction
to our nationalism,
our chauvinism,
our parochialism,
and our ethnocentrism.

Just when we have identified the borders,
corrected the membership list,
codified the rules,
painted God in the image and hues of a self portrait,
the Gospel says,
“The least is greater than you…”

Believe it,
or risk becoming
and doing awful things.
So if we wish to be midwives to holy,
and assist God in the birth of the New Creation,
we need to become good at recognizing God
in the least…
at the end….
or with the servant.

It is a dangerous world.

It is made all the more dangerous
by religious people who turn God into a mirror.
It is made all the more dangerous by us,
when we ignore the least
and the last,
and the servants.
All of them,
God has embraced
as greater than you and me.

When the Gospel is heard and taken seriously,
mirrors will be shattered.
When that happens,
God is assisted in her struggle
to bear forth the New Creation.

We have one more week of Advent.
The pressure is intense.
The cervix between God and us is thinning,
the veil nearly transparent.

We have one week left
to savor our role as midwives to God.

It should rightly make us speechless
even though we must speak;
and we must work furiously
to keep the chaos away
while God is in so vulnerable a state.
The way we practice our spiritual midwifery,
is to prepare a place in the midst of Chaos
for the New Creation to be delivered safely.

The way we practice our spiritual midwifery,
is to look in the places
and among the people
where we least expect to find God’s presence.

It is dangerous
but it is the birth of a New Creation
that gives meaning to the risks we must take
and even the life we must one day loose.

Let us hold back Christmas just a little longer,
and savor the incredible privilege
of being God’s midwife
in the birth of the New Creation.

Trinity in Time of Pandemic

Our vision…to be 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).

Trinity’s historic building and our adaptive reuse plan has been named and embraced by The Landmark Society of Western New York. Among thousands of worthy historic sites and projects, Trinity’s was selected. Follow this link to read more: https://landmarksociety.org/2019-five-to-revive-announced/

Visit “savetrinity.org” which tells the exciting story of historic re-use striving to be born. You can help us save this magnificent building by visiting savetrinity.org and signing a letter of support! Thank you.

https://www.savetrinity.org

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