Cam Miller

2 ADVENT C 2019: Christmas Subversion

December 8, 2019 by Cam Miller

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 20^thcentury.
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 20^thcentury,
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: Poetry…the Bible

December 1, 2019 by Cam Miller

At great risk of an empty table
for TheoEd today, the topic is “The Bible as Poetry.”
I say that because poetry – like Jazz and classical music –
has an infinitesimal audience of about 3% of adults.
Beyond that little pool of devotees
is 95% who simply say,
“I hate poetry…or jazz or Bach.”

That leaves 2% undecided.

I am making up those numbers,
because poetry actually had an uptick
from 7% to 12% of the public who read a poem
the last year.
But it is still 3% for jazz and classical music.

Why do I know such arcane fun facts?
Because I have a book of poems coming out in July
and I fear not even my friends will buy it.

But I am bringing three great poems to TheoEd to share today,
and the unit will tell you something about the Bible
you probably never thought about before –
but that’s just a teaser, or maybe begging.

Here is the thing: Advent is nothing but poetry.
Advent is not a story –
not a coherent narrative
with a conclusion that takes us someplace.
It is a poem,
a four-week poem.

Gwendolyn Brooks,
the Pulitzer Prize winning former US Poet Laureate,
defined poetry as “life distilled.”
Think about distilling.
Some of you will want to think about whiskey
but I would prefer a more Wendell Berry
or Mary Oliver image.
Take a mudpuddle for example:
the color of coffee with cream
filling a gloppy depression
that your grandchild wants to splash through
and you want to avoid at all cost.
That water –
invisibly, miraculously, in front
of our very eyes –
disappears but is not obliterated.
It evaporates with heat,
becomes vaporous
and rises into the air.

Then, as the sun is tucked into
the clouds for the night and goes to sleep,
the cool vapor
made of molecules from that yucky
mudpuddle,
alights upon leaves
and blades of grass
as sweet poetic droplets
of dew.

The same is true for making whiskey,
by the way.
But the question is, what does Advent distill –
you probably are anxiously waiting to know?

It begins in a liquidy,
windswept deep
called Genesis 1.
“In the beginning when God createdthe heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void
and darkness covered the face of the deep,
while a wind from Godswept over the face of the waters.
Then God said, ‘Let there be light’;
and there was light. And God saw that the light was good;
and God separated the light from the darkness.”

Those words – that poem –
then rises as vapor to something less visible,
something more abstract that we cannot
quite see or touch or comprehend,
called John – as in the gospel of – John 1.
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being in him was life,
and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it.”

In between the cosmos
arriving with a big bang
and it disappearing into stardust
and water molecules
that reappeared billions of years later
on a blue-green planet
incarnate in something called human beings,
we-simply-had-to-wait.
Distillation takes time
between visible liquid and invisible vapor,
and visible liquid again.
There is nothing to be done
during the waiting – other than waiting.
So, between Advent 1
and December 25^th–
which is the amount of time
is takes to age Christmas –
the distilling requires
waiting.

And the way we wait
during Advent,
at least the way the Lectionary
and liturgy invites us
to wait,
is with poetry.

Isaiah, if
the very idea of a prophet
is to be believed,
is God’s poet.
Each Gospel from Matthew,
whether about John the Baptist, Jesus,
or Mary,
harkens back to Isaiah-the-poet.
Every week is poetry.
Every week is life distilled,
not into a mood-altering substance
but into life-giving droplets.

Forget what your middle school teacher
inflicted upon you about poetry –
it is not a fixed form
with a fixed meaning
derived at by literal interpretation
agreed upon by scholars.
Poetry is life distilled.
The poem wants to grab you
by your ears
and pull you into an experience
that you have had before
but had differently,
and it wants you to experience it again
and then arise.
It does it
with your participation,
or more hopefully,
it does it because you fall into the puddle
and say, “Oh yeah, I remember this
but I never saw it from down here before.”

The liturgy wants us to come in here
on a Sunday morning
with mental fog
and mind-numbing shopping lists,
and grumpiness with the people we live with
or the driver who took our parking space,
and leave with:
“Today God gives milk
and we have the pail.” (From Anne Sexton’s poem, “Snow.”)
Life distilled.

The liturgy
and the poetic readings
want us to fall into Advent
and get distilled with it.

The liturgy wants us to be vaporized
and then somewhere between now
and the new year,
alight as new life
among all the lives around us.
That’s not too much to ask, is it?

So, Isaiah.

I am what they call in Vermont,
a flatlander.
And in fact, most of Indiana
is flat-on-flat.

So, it is no surprise to me
that ancient peoples
thought the house of God
was on a mountaintop.

When you live in flat farm country,
wherever there is a slight rise in the land
there will be a house
or a small cemetery.
It is all relative: in Vermont you climb or ski
the highest mountain
and in Indiana, you find and occupy
the highest hill, even if it is only a pimple of dirt.

What do we see from up there,
however high or low up thereis?
Well, perched on a hill above Seneca Lake
or on a mound above Prairie Creek Reservoir
in Muncie, Indiana,
or on Jay Peak or Bald Mountain in
the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont,
you see the same thing
astronauts see from their perch
way up in space.

No borders.
No political parties.
No divisions other than the contours of the land.
That is the perspective
from which swords can be beat into ploughshares.
“Today God gives milk
and we have the pail.”

We can read Isaiah
as if it were by-laws or a resolution
and think he is proclaiming something
that does not exist
and never has.
Or, we can allow him to be a poet
and find ourselves distilled
within its verses.

We have been to the mountaintop
and we have seen the blue-green earth
without borders and division
and “we may not get there with you,”
but we know that beginning with Noah,
God planted an arc of history that bends across the universe
toward justice.

See how that works?

Now the alternative to poetry
is to take the bible literally,
and that is becoming more and more difficult
for 21^stcentury, secularized people
like most, if not all, of us.
I know that we were taught bible stories
as children, the same way
we were taught history.

But then again, given our ages here,
most of us were taught with a straight face
that George Washington never told a lie
and Christopher Columbus was the first American hero.

So, if we do not read the bible as poetry
then we are left to embrace
the Christmas story as a creche scene –
with cattle lowing
and shepherds mumbling
and poor, exhausted, and in pain Mary
smiling serenely with an infant that does not cry.

If we do not enter Isaiah as poetry
then we are left to wonder about a God
that promises peace
when we murder and are murdered
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Hong Kong, Rochester,
Sandy Hook, and just about everywhere else.

If we do not enter poetry as poetry,
and lick it for literal meaning like a lollypop,
then Anne Sexton
is eating snow
rather than stuttering over the goodness of life
she has awoken to
one fresh morning.

I know there are millions and millions of Christians
who read the bible as history
or as a how-to book of moral mastery,
and that most of us here
were raised that same way –
even if the adults around us
winked at it
like they did Santa Claus on the roof.

But personally, and it may only be me,
I cannot ignore what I know
about distillation,
the big bang,
the biology of conception,
the physiology of birthing,
the history of the first century,
or the archeology and literary construction of the bible.
I cannot close my eyes to what I know,
and more importantly,
to what I experience
as we enter into Advent
and Christmas.

So poetry, for me anyway,
is a gift.
It is a new pair of glasses
with which to enter the liturgy,
and the season, and eventually the holiday.
In the same way that jazz is music,
and Bach is music,
and Reggae is music,
so poetry is a lens for reading the bible
every bit as much
as the ways in which it has been read in the past.
And poetry is a form of theology
as much as the way theology was voiced in the past.
And poetry is a form of liturgy
and sharing faith, every bit as much
as the ways we have come to think of liturgical expression
brought to us from other centuries.

So today, with the first Sunday of Advent,
we are about to be distilled –
vaporized over the next four weeks,
only to reappear fresher than before
to give new life to the world around us.

That’s poetry by the way.

Thanksgiving 2019: The Art of Dying – and Living

November 24, 2019 by Cam Miller

George Harrison of Beatles fame,
wrote a song called, “Art of Dying.
In it he describes death as life’s greatest opportunity.
Most of us don’t think of death
as an opportunity, rather,
as some kind of fearsome ending.

“Art of Dying” ends with this line:
“There’ll come a time
when most of us return here /
brought back by our desire to be /
a perfect entity /
living through a million years of crying /
until you’ve realized the Art of Dying.”

…A million years of crying
until you’ve realized the art of dying.
The art of dying,
according to this formula,
is to lose any desire
to be a perfect entity.
And if you think about it,
what is a bigger buzz-kill than perfectionism?
What is more ruinous to a grateful heart
than a perfectionistic mind?

So, this is a very Hindu idea,
and Harrison was himself a Hindu.
As such he gave great credence
to this idea of the art of dying.

Harrison struggled against cancer,
and while he deeply valued life
he also refused to cling to life at all cost.
When it was clear that treatment could no longer
resist the progression of his disease,
he limited the number of painkillers he would receive
so he could be fully conscious and aware while dying.
He wanted to be in what he called
a state of God consciousness
at the moment of death.
“Death,” he said, “is just where your suit falls off
and then you are in your other suit.

At the end, George Harrison went to Los Angeles
with his wife, and invited their closest friends
to be present at his death.
Ravi Shankar, the renowned
sitar musician and his daughter,
played as Harrison laid dying
and was surrounded by burning incense
and candles.
His favorite images of Krishna and Rama
adorned the room,
and they say he chanted
all the way to his last breath.

When he died, Harrison’s body
was burned immediately,
his ashes taken to India,
and poured into the sacred Ganges River.
Only then did the world hear of his death.

But even more interesting than how Harrison
managed the circumstances of his death,
was the near-death event earlier in his life
that came along without warning.

Quite a few years before he died,
a knife-wielding intruder broke into Harrison’s home.
A fight for life ensued
between George Harrison and the intruder.
But then, in the midst of the struggle,
Harrison had the presence of mind
to realize that if he were killed while fighting
he would not end his life in God consciousness.
So, amazingly, he just stopped fighting.

He simply stopped fighting
and focused his mind upon God
and the goodness of life.
He was severely wounded
but lived to die another day.

But stop and think about what George Harrison did.
He did not want to die fighting,
so he focused his mind on God
and the goodness of life.

Boy, that is some super-charged gratitude!

You are dangling on a cliff,
there is not much chance you are going to live.
Is your mind overcome with terror
or thanksgiving for the goodness of life?

The reality is
we are always dangling over a cliff,
we just don’t know
whether the ground gives way today
or tomorrow, or thirty years from today.
So that question about the choice of terror
or thanksgiving –
anxiety over our lack of control
or gratitude for the goodness we have known –
is not really an academic question.

That said, there are times
in which gratitude for the goodness of life
is a hard-fought struggle.
There are dark times each one of us here
has endured, that requires
our last bit of strength and resiliency
to get through.
So gratitude for the goodness of life
is no gimme –
sometimes it is a gut-check
and onerous
grasp.

Even so, gratitude
is the one thing I know
that has healing in its wings.

Happiness,
satiation,
thrill,
pleasure,
pride,
even joy
are sensational
and have a very brief shelf-life.
But gratitude
heals the chapped, rough edges
that bleed
and cause us pain.
It does not do it miraculously,
all at once –
it does it with small, steady doses.
Even the stubbornness of grief melts
beneath the press of gratitude –
slowly, of course,
but surely.

That lovely, rhythmic piece
from Philippians has gratitude
as its webbing
or canvass.
The sentiments behind each word
are like waves lapping the beach –
cadenced,
calming,
almost hypnotizing.

But what an amazing ego
Paul must have had –
to tell everyone
to keep doing
what they saw him do and say:
“Keep on doing
what you learned
what you received
what you heard, and
what you have seen medo.”

On my best day ever,
I could not have told my children
with unshakeable confidence
they should do what I do
and say what I say.
Perhaps some people are so very good
that they could point to themselves
as the iconic measurement of integrity and goodness
but I am not one of them.

Paul’s arrogance aside,
what he wrote is a lovely
and profoundly wise
invitation to us.

Do not worry about anything…
(instead) the peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
guard your heart
and protect your mind.

Whatever is true,
whatever is honorable,
whatever is just,
whatever is pure,
whatever is pleasing,
whatever is commendable –
think on these things.

If I were of a mind to get a tattoo,
I would have the last part of that invitation
written as if on a scroll
down the middle of my back:

Whatever is true,
whatever is honorable,
whatever is just,
whatever is pure,
whatever is pleasing,
whatever is commendable –
think about these things.

You see, if I had that written on my back,
then, when I get monkey-minded
and the angels of my darker nature
wander out from the shadows
and start acting like it’s their turn to take over,
I could point over my shoulder
and remind all those squirrely voices
of what the script is.

Paul’s onto something here
as he describes the dance
between thinking and doing.

We tend to go hog-wild for one or the other
and allow them to drift apart.
But it is a dance between
the two partners.
“…if there is any excellence
and if there is anything worthy of praise,
thinkabout these things.”
That is what Paul writes
just after his litany of lovely things.
And then he adds:
“Keep on doingthe things
that you have learned
and received
and heard
and seen…
and the God of peace will be with you.”

“Think about these things”
and then, “keep doing them.”

So, the way I translate this,
is that half our task
is to keep framing our lives with gratitude
for the goodness we have known and tasted.
The other half
is to keep sharing
what we have been given
and what we ourselves
feel grateful for.

It is not a very complicated formula
but it is deeply transformative.
Keep framing our lives
with gratitude
and keep sharing
the very things
for which we are grateful.

Honestly, if I had to boil down
the Christian spiritual practice
to one sentence, it would be that:

Keep framing our lives
with gratitude
and keep sharing
the very things
for which we are grateful.

I am convinced
that the human community
and the planet we share,
would be radically different
if even half of us
lived more fully
by this principle.

I thank you for your gifts
to Trinity Place –
this community and our ministry together.
Have a blessed Thanksgiving.

23 Pentecost: Eschatology or the Theology of Framing

November 17, 2019 by Cam Miller

Okay, this is about eschatology.
Yep, I knew that would move you
to the edge of your chair!

So, we are sitting between
Isaiah and Jesus this morning,
and it is like pulling at both ends of a cherry popper
or snap dragon – the fireworks are in the middle
and you have to pull at both ends.

Isaiah is all dreamy-eyed
and gushy
while Jesus is dark and morose.

Both are eschatological,
which traditionally is a form of theology
focused upon death, judgement,
and the final destiny of humankind.

Eschatology is a lens
through which we look at life on this planet
and proclaim what it all means.
We are tiny neck hairs
on a small planet lost in space
and with a growing sense
of just how infinitesimal and vulnerable we are.
Eschatology reels that in a little bit.

It can be grand and inspiring to sit on a mountain top
and savor the blue-green vista
and feel awed by the beauty
and intricate balance of nature
and our small part in it.
But it is another thing altogether
to sit naked beneath the stars
and recognize that beauty
is actually massive hot gaseous explosions
into which everything we know
will be incinerated
in a Nano-second.

It is a deep well of ponderance
we can easily fall into
and never come out of,
which is why taking one step at a time
is such sage advice
for little creatures like us.

So eschatology is a lens we inherited
to help us see the enormity of life
a little closer.
Like those funny glasses
used to look at a solar eclipse,
our eschatological lens
allows us to stare into something
that might otherwise harm our soul
if not our mental health.

A lot of Christian tradition
has treated biblical eschatology
as if it were the Farmer’s Almanac of Earth time,
a kind of folk art
that can predict with precision
what science can’t quite get right.

But eschatology
is not a sundial of the universe
that will tell us
how and when or why
all things come to an end.
Rather, it is an act of imagination
that seeks to understand
how and why the events of the moment
are connected to the movements of God.

Just like physics wants to understand the Big Bang
and everything that has taken place
between then and now,
biblical eschatology
wants to understand God
and the relationship of God’s best dream for us
with all that has happened
and is happening now.

It has to be an act of imagination
because we are too small
to truly comprehend the massive whole
in which we are but a teeny tiny part.

So Isaiah is imagining how it all works out
given the horrendous history he is navigating.
Jesus is imagining how it all ends,
so that God’s best dream for us
can finally come to pass.

Where they are standing
in the context of their own lives and nation,
and their own moments in history,
effects what they see
and what they say.

When Jesus pushes before the faces of his friends
his shocking and traumatic vision
he is standing at the end of his life.
His context is grim.
He is about to go toe to toe
with the Roman Empire
and get rubbed out.

His compatriots may not have understood
the trajectory of Jesus’ prophetic ministry,
but he surely did.
Jesus also likely understood
that many of his friends
were living close to their end too.

In the midst of such a grievous moment,
someone makes a stray comment
about the beauty of the stained-glass windows
– oops, I mean the glory of the Temple.

Their ogling at the glory of the architecture
sends Jesus into a wild-eyed explosion of emotion
with him muttering all kinds of images
related to his and our mortality.
It was as if to say,
“Stop!
Focus on what is important!
This thing you think is so great
is nothing.
This building
you think is so awesome
is meaningless and irrelevant.”

And then…that’s it.
That is literally the end of Jesus public statements.
He’s done preaching.

His dark prediction
about the demise of the temple
is end of the story for Jesus.

Now, every story has an ending.
We tend to think of the Gospel
as ending with the resurrection –
a kind of tortured happy ending.
But that is not how Jesus chose to end
the story of his public ministry
in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
His last public story
in each of these Gospels,
is the one we heard in part today.

It is a story about the end of time
and it is pretty dog-gone dark.

And in all three Gospels
Jesus’ last story is provoked
by a knuckle-headed pilgrim to the city of Jerusalem ogling at the Temple
and exclaiming over how beautiful it is.

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

But honestly, we actually do not know if
Jesus ended his public teaching
with this little apocalypse,
or if the editors of the gospels
were the ones to use it as a period
at the end of his public ministry.

Here is what I mean.
If it was Jesus predicting the Temple would be destroyed,
then he was doing it
in the year 30 or so of the first century.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke
are editing their Gospels 45 to 60 years
AFTER Jesus is already dead and gone.
In-between Jesus’ death
and the writing of the Gospels,
there is a terrible Jewish/Roman war.

The war lasts for three years
and ends with nearly every Jew in Palestine
killed or fleeing for their lives.
When the Romans march into Jerusalem
they destroy the Temple.
So, in the year 70 of the first century,
Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Temple
comes to pass – forty years after he made it.

Now, the descendants of those first followers of Jesus
remember his prediction.
“Wow, it happened just like he said it would”
they marvel forty years later.
So all those early Christians
begin to attach other signs and meanings
to Jesus’ original prediction,
things like warnings about being arrested
and persecuted.

They attach those warnings
to the memory of Jesus’ prediction
because they are being arrested and persecuted.

The fact that Jesus’ prediction is born out
in their present moment,
even though it is through repression
and violence,
is a kind of twisted hope for them.
“Nation will rise up against nation,
and kingdom against kingdom…
and there will be dreadful
portents and great signs from heaven.”

So IF this dreadful apocalyptic vision
was something the editors
put on the lips of Jesus,
instead of some kind of verbatim memory
of his last teachings,
then they were saying it to their tormented
and targeted generation:
“There is hope.
After death comes resurrection.”

They can say that
because they know how it turned out
after Jesus was tortured and executed.
So it helps them FRAME their moment
and face their struggles.

What is happening here
is that the original prophecy
is contextualized
by the succeeding generation
to FRAME the crisis of their own day –
and as always,
each generation thinks its crisis is the last crisis
of human history.

Framing or contextualizing
is exactly what should happen with the bible.
Each generation
should take the ancient words of our wisdom
and contextualize them
for own day
and own crises.
The words of Jesus or Isaiah
are not to be pheasant under glass.
This wisdom is not frozen in time
with a meaning limited to a single historic occasion,
rather, it is to be made present
in each new generation.

The “So What?” in this sermon,
as with the implications
of the poem from Wendell Berry
and the visions of Isaiah and Jesus,
is to ask ourselves
how we are framing OUR moment?

How are we framing our lives
in this moment,
and is the way we frame it
empowering us to act
or disempowering us?

In every single moment
we face a life
and a world
that is at one and the same time
Isaiah and Jesus –
both hope and dread,
both life and death.
They are always the possible next moment,
and every breath we take
holds both possibilities.
How do we frame that?
In fear
or commitment?
In anxiety
or resolve?
In resignation
or passion?

How we frame the moment,
how we frame our lives in any given moment,
and how we frame the opportunities and challenges
of the moment we are in,
makes all the difference in the world.
It makes all the difference to the world.

I want to end with one of the primary
ways I frame my life –
especially when things get dark and wiggly.
It is really just a metaphor,
probably one you have heard me use before
in one form or another,
because it is my eschatology.

The light from the star closest to our sun
(Proxima Centauri)
takes four years to get here.
Light from the most distant stars we see at night
has taken up to ten millennia – ten millennia –
to reach us.

So while we see those sparkling orbs up there
the light we are seeing from them
was actually created
between four and ten thousand years ago!

In other words,
we are not actually seeing those stars
when we look up;
instead we are seeing the past.
Think about that…just hover on it for a moment.

What we see is not what is, rather,
what we see is what was –
what was years and years and years ago.
In some cases thousands of years ago.

We think we are seeing those stars
and that light as if in real time,
but we are only seeing what they once were.
In fact, some of that light
is emanating from sources
that no longer exists.
Some of that light is but the ghostly image
of what was
but is no longer.
And yet that light,
even the light we see from the sources
that no longer exists,
has lasted longer than all of human history
and will outlast any of us here.

If you will forgive a movie reference here,
it is Rick’s line to Ilsa at the end of Casablanca,
when he explains why he is suddenly
going to act against his own self-interest
and risk everything
to join the Resistance:

“Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble,
but it doesn’t take much to see
that the problems of three little people
don’t amount to a hill of beans
in this crazy world.”

Our lives are small
and our smallness is in fact,
part of the beauty of God’s creation.
What WE imagine is hopeful
or dreadful,
is not the last word.
And the point is,
we do not get to know the last word.
So how we frame our lives
on this planet, and in this vast cosmos,
will make an enormous difference
in how we live our lives.

As weird as it is to say, eschatology matters.

How we frame this crazy life
and our place in it,
really does make a difference.
And here is the money part –
since this is stewardship season
and I am really supposed to preaching on money.

What we do with our money,
at least that which is somewhat discretionary,
reveals better than just about anything else,
how we frame our lives.
Time and money are the currencies
in the economy of God.
How we spend them
and what we spend them on,
declares our values far better
than any words we use.

So it is worth thinking about
and actually doing a little research on
how we use our money
and what it may say about our values
and even our eschatology.

22 Pentecost 2019: A Data-Driven Theology

November 11, 2019 by Cam Miller

“I know that my redeemer lives.”
That line in Job seems pretty clear
and it forms the heart of the anthem
that begins the Episcopal burial liturgy.
Clearly the Lectionary Committee
that fastidiously pairs these readings
as if entrées with wine,
wants us focused like a laser on resurrection.

But that is not what Job is about,
and it is not what even this line from Job is about.
And even the translation of the lines before
and after “I know that my redeemer lives,”
is totally uncertain.

I am not a Hebrew or Greek scholar
and so all I can tell you is that those who are
have a lively debate
and serious disagreements
about this very passage from Job.

I don’t have a dog in that fight
so that is not where I want to spin our tires.
But here is what I think is amazing
about this section of Job.

Listen to an abbreviation of some lines
that come immediately before the part we heard today.
“(God) has put my family far from me,
and my acquaintances are wholly estranged…
my serving girls count me as a stranger…
My breath is repulsive to my wife;
I am loathsome to my own family.
Even young children despise me…
All my intimate friends abhor me
and those whom I loved have turned against me…”

THEN, Job turns around and says,
but still “I know that my Redeemer lives.”

Much of what we may have learned
about the Book of Job
is written, preached, or taught
through the filter of Christian beliefs.
That filter misreads Job
in favor of using it as proof of Christian ideas,
like resurrection.
That is not what Job is about.
What Job is doing here
is standing up to God,
and standing up to his own friends
who he accuses of siding with God
instead of performing their obligation –
which is to be HIS “Goel.”

Goel is a Hebrew word and core concept
in the ancient Hebrew religion.
It was and is a big word –
like resurrection is a big word.

Goel represented a worldview,
and at the same time,
a detailed prescription for living life.
Goel could refer to a human being or God.
A Goel, or to be a goel,
was to be a vindicator,
an avenger,
a protector of the family line,
a redeemer of lost lands or fortunes.
A goel looked after the vulnerable,
like widows and orphans
who had no natural protector or redeemer.

Every family had a goel,
someone whose task it was
to continue the family line
or avenge the blood of someone in the family
whose life or limb was taken from them.

If an individual within the family,
or the family itself,
lacked the power to redeem losses
or avenge injustice
or protect the family line,
then another family
or another person
or another God for that matter,
was recruited to be a new or additional goel.

A goel required power
and power sufficient to protect the family.
It comes from the Book of Leviticus
and is deeply rooted in the DNA of Israel.

When the prophet Isaiah comes along,
he makes the bold imaginative leap
to claim that the God of the cosmos
is Israel’s go’el – literally, “Go’el Yisrael”.

So when Christians talk about Jesus as “Redeemer”
and sing Handel’s “Messiah,” it springs from Goel.

Job is declaring then,
that he will get another god
to stand up for him as his avenger
against the god who has wronged him
because he is an innocent man.
Job is standing toe-to-toe with God
and with maximum confidence and hubris,
declaring his innocence
while prosecuting God as a wrongdoer.
Now prosecuting God
may not seem like a wise thing to do
for a human being,
but that is what Job was doing.

Nowadays we have a difficult time
allowing the text to speak for itself
because we want to harmonize it
with our preconceived notions.
How could there be more than one god
we ask from our 21^stcentury perch.
How could a Biblical text
suggest more than one God?

So, we harmonize it by declaring
it means something else even though it does not.
And because early Christians
were always on the lookout for Hebrew texts
to reinforce their ideas
about redeemers and resurrection,
Job was a low hanging fruit to pick
and pretend it was about Jesus and resurrection.

But that is not what the Book of Job is about.
Rather, it is about God put on trial
by an innocent man
standing up to the god, family, and friends
who done him wrong.
It would make a great Country Western song.

Don’t worry, no spoiler alert here.
If you haven’t read it yet,
I am not going to tell you how it ends.
But I do want to hunker down
on that idea of goel, redeemer,
in a very specific and very 21^stcentury kind of way.

I think the data is pretty convincing
that God is not going to save us from ourselves.
The notion that God is our goel
who will protect us from environmental disasters
provoked and enflamed by human behavior,
seems a foolish theology
based in nothing we have ever seen.

On the other hand,
the idea that God empowers us to be goel
for the planet earth and forone another –
the protectors and care-givers of our own garden –
seems much more plausible.

If we want a data-driven theology
it seems pretty clear: When we are good stewards
of the land and the resources that come from it,
and when we live in community
that takes it upon itself
to care for all its members,
and especially the most vulnerable within it,
then the garden grows pretty well
and so do we right along with it.

Conversely, the evidence is also clear
that when we simply use the earth
and do nothing but gluttonously consume it,
and when we create a steep hierarchy of privilege
with justice for those at the top
and injustice for everyone else,
then things go badly for us as a species.

It is not a big spiritual secret and there is no magic to it.

We may have a redeemer in heaven
that makes it all better in the afterlife,
but we will never really know until then.
On the other hand,
we are the redeemer
when it comes to doing what Jesus
asked us to do:
which is midwife the kingdom –
the one that is to spring forth
on earth
as it is in heaven.

We keep looking at Jesus as the redeemer
but Jesus commissioned us as goel.
Indeed, we are co-creators with God,
authorized and assigned
as stewards of the garden.

So, if we need to redeem the earth
and bring about the kingdom here –
instead of the miserable situation we have created –
then we better have each other’s backs,
and we better be “goel” for one another
in the here and now.

That brings us to what the heck we are doing here.
Whether we are a small group of people
working out of an old wine bar
in downtown Geneva,
or a small group huddled
in the holy darkness of a college chapel,
what is this thing we are doing
and why are we doing it?

It is essentially a stewardship question –
not necessarily a money question
but a question about who we are
and whosewe are,
and really,
underneath it all,
whywe are.
My theory of spiritual community is that
it nurtures and empowers us to be goel –
redeemers – in the places
and among the people
with whom we live and work and play.

Here are three ways spiritual community
nurtures and empowers redeemers.

First, it provides a thin-place for an encounter
with the holy.
Now there is not a lot to say about this part,
because God is quite mercurial
and will be who
and where
God will be,
and there is not much we can do
to force an encounter.

But we can soften ourselves
and become more open to being touched by the holy
in the places
and among the people
that foster it.
Because, truth be told,
all of us are like the haunting call of a loon at night
in that we live alone within ourselves
and deeply desire to be touched inside –
to touch and be touched
by a power greater than ourselves.
Within us is a dry thirsty voice
calling with a hope against hope
for a whispered response.

You may prove me wrong,
but I truly sense most of us come to a place like this
in search of an encounter
with a power greater than ourselves;
or a wisdom wiser than we are;
or a flame more passionate than our own;
or a hope more trustworthy than what we wish for;
or a vision so much clearer than ours.

We want it.
We need it.
We hope, often secretly, to find it
in a place like this.

So that is the first thing – an encounter.

Secondly, spiritual community
can provide another kind of connection.
I am thinking of the human connection,
touching and being touched by ‘the other.’

Just as we wander the universe
in our solitary bodies,
and we hanker for a deeper spiritual connection
with that power greater than ourselves,
we also wander about in human society
among our small,
fragmented bands of family and friends.

We often feel dislocated,
fragmented,
strangers in our own land.

Even those of us with strong, healthy families
can feel the vulnerability of the few.
Even the sweetest of small tribes
is but a molecule
in the ocean of humankind.

The painful irony of our sorrowful fragmentation
is that every single one of us
has been taught to believe
we should be self-sufficient.
We were nursed on a mother’s milk of individualism
that brainwashed us into believing
we are not quite mature enough,
not quite healthy enough,
not quite together enough
if we can’t make it on our own.

It was an awful socialization
that makes our desire for community –
for connection with people we may otherwise
have never known or cared about –
all the more confusing and complicated.
We are not supposed to need other people,
especially other people outside of our own tribe.

We were taught,
and it is likely still nagging at us,
that there is something wrong with needing it –
something not quite right.
And yet once we get a little taste
for that connection, it is really good.

Maybe we stumble into a friendship
with someone whose politics or lifestyle or background
are very different from our own.

Maybe we find ourselves in an unintended
conversation with somebody we don’t know well,
making self-disclosures we don’t normally make
to people outside our own family.

It is an encounter with a kind of power
greater than ourselves.
An encounter with community
that locates us as a small part of something bigger.

The power of community
is accumulative over time
and deepens its resonance within us
like an aged wine.

The more we get the more we want,
and the more we have of it
the more powerful its influence
and healing can be.
Community is in fact, redemptive
for the redeemers.

Finally, spiritual community is healing.
And who doesn’t need some of that?

There are all kinds of wounds.
Some deep, some shallow;
some mortal, some festering.
There are routine wounds –
the kind of dings and scrapes and dents
that are going to happen to anyone.
There are extraordinary wounds
that should never be inflicted on anyone.
There are in-between wounds
that are injuries awaiting us all
but that all of us do not receive.

Every one of us here has multiple wounds.
I dare say that every one of us here
has at least one wound that has been debilitating,
and that can be counted upon
to be debilitating again.

It might be some kind of limitation
that has been painful over time,
and that held us back.

Or maybe we have just been a round peg
placed in a square hole,
and over time the wedging and pinching
has rubbed us raw.

It could also have been a deep loss
and the grief of it
sits in the pit of our stomach like a tumor.

Whatever the wound
or more likely wounds,
we pretty much want to get rid of it.
We get tired of the pain.
We get sick of its onerous presence.
We want to be cured of it – to be free.

But what spiritual community
can help us discover
is that healing
is not the same thing as curing.

We want our wounds magically cured –
taken away as if they never happened.
But that is not very likely.
If we are lucky
and if we are open,
we may discover that a healing wound
is more like a fountain than a cut.
It somehow restores and transforms
more than it bleeds.

In redemptive community,
recovery from whatever hurt we carry
can become a source of wisdom and strength
even as it continues to be a wound.

All woundedness is like that:
offering the possibility of wisdom and strength
when we allow them to heal
instead of demanding
they just go away.

Spiritual community
can offer a safe place for healing,
and that is redemptive because it allows us
to be fully engaged in midwifing the kingdom
among the people with whom
we live and work and play.

So, when it’s working,
spiritual community
nurtures and empowers us to be a goel –
a source of redeeming presence
for the kingdom
that is to come on earth
as it is in heaven.

We can be redeemers to one another,
and to those who find their way to us,
by providing access to the holy,
an experience of deep community,
and a place of healing.

2 ADVENT C 2019: Christmas Subversion

1 Advent: Poetry…the Bible

Thanksgiving 2019: The Art of Dying – and Living

23 Pentecost: Eschatology or the Theology of Framing

22 Pentecost 2019: A Data-Driven Theology

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