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You are here: Home / Archives for Hope

Christmas Eve 2019: Merry Christmas

December 24, 2019 by Cam Miller

Merry Christmas.

On one level
Christmas has been hidden
in the Miller house this year.

That is because we are moving
and we expected to be in our new home
before Christmas.
So we packed away all our emotion-laden Christmas stuff
with everything else that was taken into storage
where we cannot retrieve it
until it is all delivered
when we finally move in.
But that has all been delayed
and so our usual Christmas decorations are in hiding.
And by emotion-laden Christmas things,
I suspect you know what I mean:
The ornaments given to celebrate the birth
of each child.
The children’s books that we always read,
the fake and cracking red apples from my mom
that only I want to hang on the tree.

That kind of stuff.

They are the outer layer of Christmas –
the wrapping that is paper thin
but still holds so many memories
that it becomes the skin of Christmas.
When it is taken it away it can hurt.

But still, all that stuff is just an outer layer.

Somewhere in storage
there is a wooden babushka doll.
It is actually a babushka Santa
with one Santa inside another
and another inside that one,
and down to a little peanut of a Santa –
which, I think, is actually missing after all these years.
Babushka Santa
is a pretty good metaphor for Christmas.
First of all, there is Santa –
something in and of itself
that has absolutely nothing to do
with the nativity of Jesus.

As I wrote in the Finger Lakes Times last week,
according to Pew Research,
96% of Americans celebrate Christmas
whether or not they feel any affinity with the nativity.
32% of Jews decorate a Christmas tree.
More than three-quarters of American Buddhists and Hindus
celebrate Christmas.

Meanwhile, only 46% of those who observe Christmas
see it as primarily a religious event.
So Santa represents
that big babushka of a holiday
which anyone and everyone can celebrate…just cause.

By the way, if you are sitting there
predicting that I am going to get down to the baby Jesus
as the final, small babushka,
you will be disappointed.
So, don’t get too complacent
and think you know where this is headed.
 

The next babushka inside the big one,
the Santa one,
is family.

Family is the centrifugal force
holding everything in place
inside the Christmas whirlwind.
It is also
one of the things that can make Christmas
a dark time for some folks.

It may be because we are not with our family for Christmas;
or we do not have strong family ties to begin with;
or maybe we just don’t have much family;
or maybe the family we do have is toxic.
A big, national party
that everyone everywhere seems to be celebrating
can burn
when the element of family is missing or painful.

But that said, for many of us, getting family together
may be the very best part of Christmas.
Jesus is okay, by if you want to know who I love most,

it is my family: our children, and their partners,
and that rascally little grandson in the back rows.
For me, as for some of you too,
Christmas would be just fine
if all it ever was,
was sitting around with family eating tacos.

Even so, there is another little babushka
inside the family one.
The smaller Christmas babushka inside family
is harder to recognize on its own or to isolate
independent of everything else.
It has something to do with a yearning.
For many of us, it is a yearning
we have learned to detach from or to numb.

I want to call it a…yearning for peace
but that sounds too abstract or corny.
Yet it is something like that –
a desire to feel harmony
and that things that were out of order
are somehow coming into sync.
It is a desire to know “the kids will be alright;”
to know the relationship between
those of us who have and those who have not
is coming into some kind of better balance.

It is a peace
we have never actually known before
and that we understand
has never actually been before
in our tortured and bloody human history.
And yet, somehow,
from somewhere or someone
an ember still glows
quietly within us
that keeps a small desire for it alive.
So I will call it a
little peace-babushka
that gets a small breath blown on it
for some of us
by the Christmas season.

Then there is another one
inside the that one.

Like the peace-babushka,
this still smaller Christmas one
lives inside us too –
and it has little to do
with the big national holiday.
It may have some tangential connection to family
but it also is a seed inside all of that bigger,
more obvious stuff.

I dare say it is a dream.

Coming from where I am coming from,
I want to call it God’s best dream for us –
God’s best dream for you, and for me.
But that may be going too far
for some folks.

So, I will just name it “dream” –
whosever dream it is
it somehow got deposited in us.

By dream,
I do not mean fantasy
or make believe
or pretend.
I mean a real part of who we are
that has been
and is
trying to bloom.

I can tell you for a fact,
that it has nothing to do with age
because mine still keeps taking me places
I had no idea or intention of going.
Yours too, however old you are,
can and is, still blooming.
You know, and I do too,
that we are either blooming or we are dying
and there is no reason to die
before we actually die.

This dream,
the one inside you and me
that blooms slowly
and sometimes suddenly,
can get nurtured at Christmas
without us even noticing.

In my experience,
there is often a quiet moment
inside the big Christmas who-ha
that can give us an inkling of its presence
and our relationship to it.
It is usually a moment
that comes without notice,
all of a sudden,
when things get quiet inside us
even if we are surrounded by others.

The dream, remember,
is not necessarily about our identity –
or how others perceive us
or what we are known for.
The dream is something about
understanding our relationship with the world
and how we are connected to the greater web of life
and seeing our small part in it;
and it’s about understanding how
what we do
ripples the web
and strengthens it,
or makes it more vulnerable.

When we get a little vision of that,
even the smallest of inklings,
it usually points us in a direction.
The dream is that kind of feeling or vision or inkling.

When we find ourselves in the presence of ‘the dream,’
we understand we are not alone,
and we understand that we are not truly an individual,
and that what we do
really and truly matters,
even in a small but outsized way.
‘The dream’ has all that connected to it.
In my experience,
brushing into the dream
is also an experience of hope,
and THAT is the smallest little babushka of Christmas.

Hope is the hunger that nourishes us.

Hope is the one thing
a human being
cannot live without.

When we travel to our core,
or fall into it as the case may be,
hope is the thing
that leads us back out.

If we cannot fathom hope
inside where we live
then that basic, essential hunger
that pools at the center of our being
will take us places
where human beings cannot dwell
in safety or wellness.

Hope is a flame
gently, quietly flickering
in the darkness.
It need not be very big at all
because, as we know,
even the smallest flame
enlightens even the deepest darkness.
That tiniest babushka of Christmas
hidden within all the surrounding ones,
is hope.

What I have just described
can also be applied to the story in Luke
with its outer events winnowing down
to its essential ah-ha!
But that babushka pattern
can be applied to you and me too,
with each element of Luke’s story
reflected in our lives.

I won’t annotate the Gospel story for you,
that is your work; and,
I cannot annotate your story,
the one that takes you down
to that dream…
with its hope.
That is your work too.

All I can do
is tell you that I know it is there –
that everything in my own experience
and the privilege I have had
to accompany others along their experiences,
affirms over and over and over again,
the presence of the dream
and a hope
at the center of Christmas…
at the center of life – yours and mine.

So my hope for you,
is that you bump into peace
and brush up against that dream
with its nascent hope,
and that both things happen for you
soon.

Merry Christmas.

 

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Christmas, Hope, peace

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

December 15, 2019 by Cam Miller


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.

 

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16 Pentecost: Hope

September 29, 2019 by Cam Miller

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This is about hope.

It is about hope in hard times
when hope is hard work
even for people who are by nature optimistic.

It begins with a man
and a story
we might imagine
has absolutely nothing to do with us.
It was, after all,
nearly two-thousand seven-hundred year ago.

It is a story we have the chance to touch on
only every three years
when it comes around in the Sunday Lectionary.
But because many preachers do not focus
on the readings in the Hebrew text,
it is a story that may never get told
in some congregations.

It is the story of Jeremiah,
a prophet in Jerusalem.
He was not a wild-eyed fringe character
like Jesus.
He was not a poor marginalized migrant
like Amos.
Jeremiah was an insider.
He was from one of the ‘good’ families.
He was, as some might say today, “old money.”

According to the story,
God used Jeremiah
to speak to the power-elite of Jerusalem.
It was a time of dangerous international intrigue,
when it was not clear who the king’s real allies were,
or with whom the king’s loyalties were invested.
The Egyptian Pharaoh
was sweet-talking the king of Judah
and coaxing him and Jerusalem
into an alliance with the once powerful,
now faded Egypt.

Pharaoh told the king they had to stick together;
that Egypt and all the surrounding
small nations like Judah had to hold strong
in order to defend against
the big newcomer on the block: Babylon.
Support Egypt,
Pharaoh promised the Judean king,
and together they would defeat Babylon.
That appealed to Zedekiah, the king of Judah,
because he figured
he had a better chance
of holding onto his power
with Pharaoh ruling the region
than if the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar
took over his part of the world.

So, thinking of himself more than his country,
Zedekiah risked the lives
of all the inhabitants of Jerusalem
and the surrounding area of Judea,
in order to keep his throne
for himself and his sons.

Jeremiah watched and listened
to all that was going on in the upper echelons
of his society,
and then told King Zedekiah
it was a bad idea to dance with Pharaoh
against Nebuchadnezzar.
But Jeremiah didn’t just say it was a bad idea,
he said that “God” said it was a bad idea.
And he didn’t just say
that God said it was a bad idea,
he went around told everyone
that God said it was a bad idea.
Jeremiah had a big mouth and knew everyone
who was anyone in Judah.

Well, like all the kings of Judah,
Zedekiah had a stable of yes-men
clergy & prophets who argued against Jeremiah
and promised the king
that God would rescue Jerusalem,
and that God would use Pharaoh to do it.
But against all those voices,
Jeremiah kept telling anyone who would listen
that Zedekiah was making a big mistake
and his foolish clergy and prophets
were just telling the idiot-king
what he wanted to hear.
Then, when the Babylonian army arrived
and support from Pharaoh did not arrive,
people started listening to Jeremiah.
But it became even harder to listen to Jeremiah
because he was now predicting
the demise of Jerusalem
and the death of Zedekiah.
Even though no one really wanted to hear that,
the citizens of Jerusalem began to disappearing
like deserters from the Alamo.
People were sneaking out at night
to surrender to the Babylonian army
that was now surrounding the city.
The siege of Jerusalem
would last for 18 months and 27 days.
That is a long time to sweat.

So with the Babylonian army surrounding them
and Pharaoh’s army nowhere to be seen,
King Zedekiah could nor stand to listen any more to Jeremiah’s rants.
The king blamed the steady stream of
escaping citizens on Jeremiah.
So, someone conveniently accused Jeremiah
of trying to escape, which allowed the king
to arrest the prophet.

Still, it was complicated for King Zedekiah.
He couldn’t just imprison Jeremiah
because he was from one of the ‘good’ families,
and he was recognized as prophet after all.
So instead of prison,
Jeremiah was removed
to the courtyard of the guard,
and shackled – one step up
from a prison cell.

But Jeremiah, if not pleasant
was persistent.
He just kept declaring his message
even while shackled:
“Don’t believe government’s lies;
don’t listen to self-serving fantasies
from religious preachers;
don’t be fooled by the guise of patriotism;
trust what you see and hear;
get out now because the Babylonians will win
and everything and everyone left behind
will be destroyed.”

An unknown, low class prophet
from out of town,
someone like Amos for example,
could be managed by removal or execution.
But an annoying prophet
from one of the old-line families
who won’t shut up?
That is a headache Advil won’t fix.

Eventually,
and it is not clear whether by order of the king
or an exasperated captain of the guard
who couldn’t stand to listen anymore,
Jeremiah was thrown into an empty well.
He was left in a deep hole in the ground
from which no one could hear him,
and where he would eventually be forgotten
and starve to death.
They couldn’t execute Jeremiah
but they could allow him to die.

But alas, I have gotten well ahead of myself.

In Chapter 32 of Jeremiah,
the point in the story that we heard this morning,
Jeremiah is still shackled in the courtyard
ranting and raving about the doom of Jerusalem.
That is where his cousin finds him,
and the piece of the story we heard today.

Under ancient Israelite law,
spelled out in the Book of Leviticus,
there is a statute called, “the right of go-el.”
My Hebrew is even worse than my English,
so I don’t know if I am pronouncing it correctly.

Go-el, as a legal statute,
stipulates that if someone is forced to sell
a piece of property
that has been in the family,
then the first right of refusal must go
to the next of kin.
As it turned out, Jeremiah’s cousin
wanted to sell some property.
Of course he did.

Think about the housing bubble in Jerusalem:
With the Babylonian Empire camped at your door
waiting for you to weaken from a lack
of food and water,
there would be a glut in the real estate market.

So Jeremiah’s cousin can’t sell his property
until he offers it first to Jeremiah –
who, remember, is shackled in the courtyard.
To the cousin’s utter amazement,
Jeremiah agrees to buy it.
“Sure,” Jeremiah says,
“not only do I want to purchase the land
but I knew before you even asked,
that you would offer it to me.

So as the story unfolds,
Jeremiah’s cousin gathers a host of witnesses,
Jeremiah signs the deed,
and gives it to his chief disciple, Baruch.
In front of everyone,
Jeremiah charges Baruch
with protecting the deed
by hiding it in an earthen jar
to be uncovered in the future.
Talk about a bullish act of hope –
it was pugnacious, even aggressive hope.
Surrounded by certain doom,
the very prophet of doom
declares the future is worth investing in.

Jeremiah was investing in the future
with a dramatic, physical,
concrete and highly personal
act of trust.
It was trust in God,
trust in the future,
and trust in the inevitability
of justice and mercy.

Everything around them spoke of destruction.
Everything seemed futile.
It not only looked bad, it was bad.
In the face of sure and certain doom
Jeremiah embodied hope
by investing in the future.

And now, the rest of the story.
For about eighteen months
the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem,
weakening the will of the walled city
before a devastating onslaught.
Eventually the Babylonians
broke down the walls and invaded.
They sacked the city,
stole everything they could carry away –
including the giant bronze pillars of temple.
The temple itself they reduced to rubble.
They killed every officer and leader of the guard.
They mercilessly killed
all three of King Zedekiah’s sons
right in front of the king’s eyes.
And then, they cut out the king’s eyes out
so that the deaths of his sons
would be the last thing he saw.

Jeremiah survived the devastation
because the Babylonians mistakenly thought
his prophecies meant he was on their side.
But Jeremiah was not in favor
of the Babylonians;
he was in favor of trusting God
to have the last word.

Legend has it, that Jeremiah died in Egypt.
But we do not know for certain.

We do know, and this is an important part
of the story,
that an Ethiopian slave,
likely one of the eunuchs that guarded
the royal harem,
saved Jeremiah’s life.
He got Jeremiah released from the well
before the city fell to the invaders.
The slave somehow convinced King Zedekiah
to allow Jeremiah’s freedom.

So there is the great irony
we should be used to by now,
and always looking for, in a Biblical story:
The foreigner in their midst,
and their slave,
could recognize God spoke through Jeremiah
even when those who knew him best could not.

This strange and ancient story
is pregnant with great insights about us,
and about our moment in history,
and about what you and I could be doing
in the midst of our families and friends
who do not yet recognize what time it is.

Jeremiah, the prophet of doom,
committed a devastatingly bold act of hope
by investing in land
at the very moment he knew
it would be ravaged and occupied
in the short run.
He trusted God for the long run
and embodied hope in the short run.

That is the punch line.
Our days, yours and mine, are numbered.
We know that.
But what happens to us,
is the not the final word
or the last act of the story.

So if we are capable of seeing
beyond the little universe in our own head,
then we can see that our own heartbeat
is only the short-term.
If we can see that,
it opens us to seeing that the long-term
may be influenced by us
even if it is not about us.
“The long-term can be influenced by us
even if it is not about us.”

So if the future is not about us,
we can start looking past our own particular
fears and anxieties to see the unexpected.
In this present moment, the one you and I live in,
hope is hard to come by – even for those of us who are optimistic.

I have had so many conversations with folks
about our fears and anger, and the
the seemingly overwhelming nature
of our problems.
I hear from people,
and from within my own heart,
about how difficult it is
to muster hope for the future
because we are surrounded by
deep and pervasive crisis
in the environment,
among nations,
and within our own nation.
There seems to be a pervasive crisis
in every institution of society
whether education, medicine,
law, the economy, or religion.

We are like Judah and Jerusalem
under the reign of Zedekiah,
when tomorrow seems to end in shadows.
We cannot see beyond the darkness
and what we imagine beyond
what we can see
is too disconcerting to entertain.

As in Jeremiah’s day, false prophets surround us.
They smile and promise a gospel of prosperity
for anyone who believes
their theological propaganda.
They promise that faith
and the love of God
will solve all the problems of the world
and act as a talisman
against danger.

Our royalty –
the political, corporate, and religious elite –
would have us be quiet,
and stop naming the grotesque imbalances
within our economy.
They want to hush us
and claim that we only know counterfeit truths –
they castigate the eloquent voices of our youth
who are now irrepressible
and out of their control.

Our royalty and their prophets,
who are broadcast loudly
by their media corporations,
eat away at the foundations of our future
like termites beneath the floor.

To the efforts of our royalty to shut us up
we can be silenced
or we can engage in acts of hope.
We may not have loud voices,
but our lives speak loudly.

For us, the question we must ask
is what are the acts of hope
available to us in our particular moment?
As individuals,
as households,
as a spiritual community –
what acts of hope
can we engage in now,
today, tomorrow
and the next day?
What would it mean
for us to act like Jeremiah
who bought property
even at the darkest moment in his city?

Not surprisingly,
I don’t have an immediate answer for us
and I can’t answer for you anyway.
But given the choice,
why wouldn’t we engage in acts of hope
and refuse to be silenced?

 

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6 Easter 2019: A Note in a Bottle

May 26, 2019 by Cam Miller

Ptolemy World Map 1467

To my grandson.

My Dearest Declan,

Just this week for the first time, you escaped your play blanket on your own. Your mom and dad celebrated it by texting us all a picture (by the time you read this, you may not know what a text is but I’m sure there will be a way to find out, as in our time it was a Google search). They are excited and encouraging your every strong movement now, but soon they will be reining you in and holding you back. You will chaff as they once did, to become a free agent. But that is not why I am writing.

It is 2019 and we are feeling our way in the dark –groping our way into what will become your century not ours. I remember fifty years ago talking to my Great Aunt Elma who was born in 1880. To hold her hand, and feel her breath upon my cheek, and to touch her spotted skin was as if I were on a long-distance call to another place in the time tunnel. She had known Civil War veterans and freed Slaves, and people who had heard Abraham Lincoln debate Stephen A. Douglas. Now I am your ligament to the last century and, like Aunt Elma, I will become just another rusting link to another time and place.

So, my heart is in my throat as I write to you with a little voice inside, one who whispers what I most know and care about. I am stretching every joint and tendon to reach into your world with words that will move your blood.

Please listen then, for the pulse of wisdom that runs from my heart to yours; that runs in veins sutured together across time and space, carrying life and holiness and wisdom from the most ancient, ancient of days, to your present time.

That pulse is Hope.

Hope is a four-letter word we use without thought and yet it is the glue that keeps us poised to change the world. Or, when we live without it, to dissolve into the squalor of cynicism.

As powerful and essential as hope can be, it is maddening that we have so much difficulty putting our finger on what it is we should hope for.  Our minds are divided: “double-mindedness” is the word I like to use.

We have half-a-mind to live as cynically as a sewer rat, and half-a-mind to reach for the thinnest of explanations that will allow us to believe in fairies.

Authentic hope lives in between.

In 2019, which is the trapdoor to the past from which I am writing you, cynicism is on the rise and doing well. There is so much bad news that it seems naïve and child-like to hope for a quick end to the entangled, endless wars of our day or to arrest the encroachments of climate change. I feel certain that both of these are growing tentacles into your world.

Only the one we call God, knows what the world of your adulthood will be like – the last half of what is right now a young century. But at this moment, people are so brutal and violent, the ravages of legal and illegal pharmaceuticals so devastating, and the threat of pestilence and disease so random that many people feel hope is absurd or simply do not know what to hope for.

On the other hand, memory can serve us well.

Back when I was holding my Aunt Elma’s hand, India and China were importing rice and struggling with cycles of starvation.  Now they export rice and import jobs.  While such success is a two-edged sword for the earth, it is a measure of how fast things once assumed to be hopeless can change.

But there is a war of worlds going on right now, and I wonder if the partisans of the various constituencies will know peace by the time you are old enough to read and understand this letter.

We have those who live in a world that was formed even before my Aunt Elma was born – a world undefined by machinery, assembly lines, and things we think of even now as old fashioned.

Let’s call that the “old world,” by which I mean people in cultures living today but living with expectations and values of the pre-modern world. They continue to respect and revere the past, tradition, and elements of a more ancient time and culture. They resist what most of us consider ordinary and denounce what we think of us good.

And yet, those living as the “old world” do so side-by-side with people living a more contemporary life. Let’s call that world “the modern” world. My generation is known as the Baby Boomers, and we were raised in the modern world by people, like my mom and dad, who were born during World War I. Our parents lived through a metamorphosis ushered in by speed and flight, and atoms and microchips.

We do not cherish the past or revere tradition in the ways that the “old world” does, and we have come to expect comfort, security, and the possibility of affluence. The institutions that defined the twentieth century are crumbling in the twenty-first century, and though it is disconcerting it is not all that surprising to us.

As you might have guessed, the old world and the modern world are at war with one another, pitting terrorism against state-sponsored violence in an endless cycle of misery.

And then there is the “new world.” Where both the “old world” and the “modern world” imagined order as the orchestrating element of everything, the “new world” imagines chaos as the guiding agent, and recognizes change as the nature of Nature.

The “new world” lives alongside both the “old world” and the “modern world,” but it sees life through the lens of technology and in streaming images, considers money and privacy as quaint, and insists upon borderless communication. In the “new world” values and beliefs are extremely personal rather than communal, and all of it thoroughly relative.

Domestically, in politics and culture wars, there is a nasty power struggle paralyzing any effort to make progress. That bitterness reflects what is happening internationally, and very little problem-solving or even repair seems to be getting done.

The people of these three worlds walk among each other, witnessing the very same earth and sky and sea but apprehending them differently, literally seeing them differently and warring in the process. How will they ever come to terms? How will they ever learn to agree or tolerate such differences?

My sweet Declan, the struggle of these three worlds and the carnage that this conflict is creating across the planet earth, and within our own nation, is the very ache that has caused me to write you so many years before you can understand a word of it.  I suppose this is a note in a bottle dropped into the ocean of time between us.

It is the grasp to hope, and the reach to know what to hope for, that inspires me to write you.

Human beings almost always live out over our skis, lean too far over our handlebars, and imagine how it could be even before we know how to create it. We have buried deep inside us a powerful grain that enables hope: Imagination.

Our double-mindedness is healed by the knowledge and experience that what we can imagine we can achieve. While you are now experiencing the daily frustration of your reach to crawl that exceeds the grasp of your body, it is that very capacity to “reach” that offers hope.

Moses envisioned a day when the grandchildren of slaves that built the pyramids would become a nation unto themselves. He did not live to see it but it happened.

Jeremiah once dreamed that God would invite gentiles into the covenant with Israel.  He did not live to see it but I am living proof that it happened.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of racial equality and economic justice for all.  He did not live to see it and neither will I, yet it is still being created stone upon stone.

Technology that once seemed a ridiculous projection of bad science fiction is now in use, even commonplace.

My grandfather, your great-great grandfather on my mother’s side, was a country doctor in rural Michigan. He watched people die of pneumonia and tetanus while today we watch hearts and lungs and kidneys traded like spare parts.

What we can imagine we can achieve.

This is where we can hope; and it is where you become part of the hope even as I am part of the hope.  We need to imagine ourselves into what the gospels would have us to become.  We need to imagine ourselves into the kind of people that Jesus and so many of our spiritual ancestors have told us we can become.

We need to imagine ourselves becoming tender with love, generous with resources, vulnerable with service, and open to receiving wisdom from where we least expect it.

When we have become cautious and timid with our love because we have been betrayed or hurt, we need to employ our imagination. We need to imagine how we would act if we were to take the risk to love more courageously.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

If we are stingy with our money, jealous with our time, or self-centered about the use of our hands, then we need to make up a story about how the scrooge inside us will be transformed.  We need to write ourselves a script that imagines a new future.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

If we have been timid about crossing socio-economic, ethnic, racial, or political boundaries to develop relationships of mutuality that defy our differences, then we need to imagine what it would take for us to be braver.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

If we find ourselves defensive and resistant to ideas that threaten our assumptions, then we need to imagine that we can become a new canvass upon which the ancient wisdom will be painted in new and vibrant images.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

Declan, I mentioned a man named Jesus, someone I hope you have learned about along the way. Moses, Jeremiah, and Isaiah too.

Like many prophets and agents of God’s love, Jesus was facing a violent end at the hands of a world order who feared people like him. He saw with sober clarity the horrendous suffering he faced, and still, even then, he imagined a new relationship with God that his friends and family could live into. He promised them a hope he would not enter, but that he could imagine.

I find that inspiring Declan, and a way of soothing my double-mindedness. I let those ancients and moderns alike, the ones I call prophets and agents of God’s love, lead me into futures I cannot not see.

So, my sweet boy, or man as you may be now, whatever the condition of your world, you can engage in the subversive act of imagining a new world.

You can engage in the revolutionary act of imagining a new order or new chaos.
You can engage in the healing art of imagining a new way of living and loving.
You can practice imagination with a purpose, the re-creation of the world as God has dreamed for it to become.

In the days ahead, on your long march to learn to walk and see and know and love and care and understand, I pledge to keep my own imagination alive so that when the time comes, I can teach you how to imagine.

With whatever time we may have to share the world together, we will use our imaginations to set in motion such incredible changes that God will smile, and we will continue to live with relentless hope.

Love,
Granddad

 

 

 

 

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