Cam Miller

1 Epiphany 2017: When the wilderness is a promise land, and the promise land a wilderness

January 8, 2017 by Cam Miller

Water is never just about chemistry
any more than Rivers are only about geography.

To name a river
is to evoke memory and meaning
beyond its banks.
The Potomac is the nation’s capital.
The Delaware is the nation’s bold, imaginative bravery,
as when Washington crossed it.

The Niagara is power and majesty,
and cantankerous fights
about New York City stealing cheep power from Upstate.

Where I come from there are two rivers of note:
The Ohio and The Wabash.
The Ohio is bigger, longer,
and more important in history and commerce.
But to Hoosiers the Wabash is lyrical:
taught in poetry, paintings and song,
and somehow made to symbolize our very identity
even if on the other side of the state.

I’m sure you know this poem about a river.

I’ve known rivers:

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers.
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

That is Langston Hughes,
who wrote “I’ve Known Rivers”
when he was 19 years old,
and it later became the vehicle of his fame.
As the story goes, he wrote it
while traveling from his home
somewhere on this side of the Mississippi River,
and going to California,
which lies on the other side of the river.
Hughes saw the Mississippi from a train
late one afternoon
as the sun set golden on its muddy surface.
But it was not just a river to Hughes;
it was not just water and shipping lanes.
Langston Hughes knew that the Mississippi
was the North Star for slaves escaping the South.
The Big Muddy was the history of his people
as they risked freedom,
and grasped hope.

He remembered too,
that Abe Lincoln had taken the Mississippi
down to New Orleans as a boy,
and while there
the future great-man
saw with blood-shot eyes,
people bought and sold like molasses
or a barrel of nails.
He saw people whipped like dogs,
and heard people kicked as if they were nothing,
and smelled the acrid scent of human suffering.

Abraham Lincoln never forgot
what he saw and heard and smelled.
But it wasn’t just data
stored in a dark crease in his head
only to be lost one night on the floor of Ford’s Theater.
It was a ghost working on him like tanning acid,
eating away at his soul.
Mr. Lincoln would later tell folks
about that memory
and how it changed him.
And Hughes remembered
that it was the Big Muddy that took Abe there,
just like it took his people away from there.

That is how a river is never just a river.

The Jordan River,
that sometimes trickle snaking through the desert
and still there today –
as when Jesus walked,
as when Isaiah prophesied,
as when Moses died –
is not just another river either.

The Jordan River
has bordered time and hope for generations,
not merely a geographical feature
forming boundaries with its banks.

The Jordan was the boundary
between the Wilderness and the Promise Land;
between home and exile;
between the people of the Covenant and everyone else.
If we know the history of Israel
then we know that every important historical transition
took place with a crossing of the Jordan River
from one direction or the other.

After 40 years in the Wilderness of Sinai,
Joshua leads the escaped slaves across the Jordan
into the Promised Land.

Five hundred years later,
the Babylonians haul Israel en mass
back across the Jordan into exile,
where they become slaves again.

Two hundred years after that,
the King of Persian, Cyrus by name,
allows the people of Israel to return,
and crossing back over the Jordan
to even rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

Each time the Jordan is a line of demarcation,
the border between home and homelessness.

If we don’t know the Jordan
is more than a river when we read the Gospel stories,
then we won’t know
what’s going on in the stories about John the Baptist
and Jesus at the Jordan River.

John the Baptist did not just happen to be there
as a matter of coincidence,
cleansing people at the Jordan River.
John was the first in a sixty-year series
of wild, cult personalities
who knew the meaning of the Jordan River
and used it
to communicate a subversive,
revolutionary message
against the Temple authorities
and Rome.

Here is how it worked according to John Dominic Crossan.

A revolutionary, like John,
would call peasants out into The Wilderness,
to a place on the far side of the Jordan.
Gathered by the thousands on the Wilderness side,
they would ritually cross over in an act of hope –
that somehow by re-enacting the transition
from Moses-in-the-Wilderness
to-Joshua-in-the-Promise-Land,
the ritual itself
would set in motion divine action,
that in turn would lead
to the destruction of the Roman Empire
just as Babylon had fallen.

In the minds of the people,
the events of their history
gave the Jordan River that kind of power.

We have known such rivers.
Our souls have grown deep like the rivers…

You and I have crossed many rivers in our lives,
and we have rivers to cross still.

Childhood to adolescence
is a river we cross.
Adolescence to adulthood
is a river we cross.
Life in partnership with another,
through marriage or some other form of commitment,
is a river crossing.
Divorce is a crossing.
Parents cross rivers with their children
as they grow and develop;
and then those same children cross another
with their parents,
as we age and travel toward death.

Death is a river we will all cross sooner or later.
We have all known rivers
and our souls grow deep like rivers…

It is these river crossings that deepen us,
or conversely,
by not crossing rivers we should have forded,
we become hard and shallow.

It is important for us to remember
that the Wilderness does not always lead to misery,
and the Promise Land does not always lead to joy;
and so we do not want to get stuck permanently
on one side or the other.

For example,
leaving the Wilderness for the Promise Land
may sound wonderful
but it also means giving up a way of life
we have known and that has become familiar.

Some people prefer to stay in the Wilderness
where they can complain about their suffering
and harp on their problems
instead of moving on into new life –
wounds, scars, and all.

The Wilderness of our problems
can become as safe and familiar as an old shoe,
and to venture into a new way of being
may seem scarier than it’s worth.

Likewise, we may find ourselves in the Promise Land
and begin to suspect
life or God is leading us back into the Wilderness.

Most of the time we probably cross our arms
and refuse to go.
I mean, when we are fat and sassy,
living the good life and pretty secure,
there is no way we are going camping again
and sleep on the hard ground if we don’t have to.

But hold on,
because here is where our ancient narrative,
our holy story,
pokes us in the eye.
The history of Israel,
the history of Christianity,
this entire story we tell and re-tell,
is all about going back and forth over that dang river.

The Wilderness is as much a part of our story
as is the Promised Land.
Nothing lasts forever,
and for whatever the reason,
our story is about both Wilderness
and Promise Land.

And in fact, the juiciest, best endings,
and most insightful moments,
often come from those times of camping out
in the wilderness.

I do not mean to romanticize here,
because I don’t enjoy dwelling in wilderness moments
any more than you do.
Heck, most of the time
I don’t even like remembering them.
But truth be told,
most of what I know that gives me hope;
most of what I know that leads me to the light,
most of what I know that whispers to me of God;

I learned in the Wilderness.

Sometimes we forget that what we cherish
as we live our lives in the goodness of the Promise Land,
was sown or grew from out of our sojourns
in the Wilderness.

And right there
is a poignant and powerful paradox.
We usually refer to our time in the Wilderness
as a sojourn – by which we mean, temporary.

And we talk about our time in the Promise Land
as if it were our permanent address,
where we expect to live out our entire lives.
But maybe that is not the way it is supposed to be at all?

I think that is what Baptism is all about.
Even though we do our baptisms in a dried up
little watering hole,
instead of in a running flow of abundant water,
Baptism is still always submersion in the Jordan –submersion in the river that deepens us.

Our baptism,
yours and mine,
is about the commitment to equip one another
with whatever it takes to live faithfully,
to live courageously,
to live resiliently,
on either side of the river.
It is about crossing from self-centeredness
to God-centeredness,
from individualism to communalism,
from Us-ism to We-ism.

You know as well as I do
all the crossings we must make in this life,
I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already lived.

But when we think about Baptism,
instead of thinking about it
in the dead language of Salvation,
in which we are supposed to worry about
heaven and hell,
I urge us to think about our baptism
in the ancient but lively language of Rivers –
about crossings
and deepening
and even revolutionary activity.

In the river of Baptism we ask:
What do we need from one another?
What do we need from God?
What do we need to give to others,
in order for us all to get across the Jordan –
whether this time we are crossing into Wilderness
or away from wilderness into promise?

Whether we are moving into the Promised Land
or back again into the Wilderness,
what do we need for the crossing
and are we committed to providing it for one another?
As a people here gathered,
as a community of households and friends,
as a global community of strangers,
baptism is about equipping one another
for the crossings we must make
in order that we deepen like the rivers
instead of drying up shallow and hard.

We have known rivers:

We have known rivers ancient
as the world and older than the flow of human blood
in human veins.

Our souls have grown deep like the rivers…

Let us help one another cross our rivers, and,
when we can,
cross them together.

2 Christmas, January 1, 2017

January 1, 2017 by Cam Miller

For as big of a deal as it is,
both in the Church and in the economy,
Christmas does not get much attention.

Really, if you think about it,
the most the actual story gets
is twenty minutes or so on Christmas Eve.
We hardly tell the story at all,
or point to its implications
and claims, and instead,
get caught up in the swirl
of tertiary sounds and symbols.

We cushion Christmas
with pillowed songs and dim light,
and adorn it with red ribbon and sparkles
before we leave it all behind
in a pile of wrapping paper
and feasting.

And the reason for our avoidance
is that if we spent too much time with it,
we would realize what the narrative
at the heart of the Christmas holiday is all about.

Christmas is a story of exile,
as is almost the entirety of the biblical narrative.

That is why there is so often a painful,
if unacknowledged tension,
between the Bible and Church.
Church has been captured
by the same forces of empire
that has been exiling the people of God
for thousands of years.

You see, the Bible is a story of exile
and exiled people,
and of a God who reaches out to them
and offers hope for a home-coming.
That basic plot scenario
is repeated over and over and over again
throughout the Bible
and when we miss it,
and our part in it,
we lose the profound wisdom
embedded in the narrative.

The Christmas story is told
in the hushed tones
of a dark and silent night;
is whispered in the shadows
of those hiding from oppression;
is cautiously passed underground
from person to person,
until it surfaces from the force of a multitude.

Whether it is ancient slaves
groaning under the assault of Pharaoh,
or sojourning in the wilderness
in search of liberation;
or expatriate survivors of genocide
forced into labor in Babylon;
or peasants eking out a living
at the margins of the Roman Empire;
the Bible is story after story
of exiled people
unable to fit in
or truly take root in the foreign soil
to which they have been transplanted,
or even exiled in place
as tenant farmers on land once their own.

Book to book,
character to character
the baton is passed
from biblical generation to generation.

The social and cultural dis-ease
of each generation is shared and passed forward,
along with the vision of hope for a new possibility,
a new life,
even a new birth.

Over and
over and
over and
over again
the dis-ease of being different
from the people around them
is passed on along with the hope
for a new option.

Never does the Bible
run out of hope.
God can and will
do a new thing, always.
That hope never disappears. Never.

And right there is the most painful rub,
of the most bitter angst,
you and I feel in our generation of exile.

The economic culture
tells us God cannot do a new thing –
only market forces,
only consumer confidence,
only the Dow.

The Scientific/Technological culture
tells us God cannot do a new thing –
only that which can be replicated in a laboratory,
only that which can be manufactured,
only the newest, fastest best technology.

The political culture
tells us God cannot do a new thing –
only the things that worked before
(whether they actually worked or not);
and only the things best for our own pocketbook,
and only the things best for those who live within
our borders,
and our race,
and our class
and our religion.

In our world,
regardless of which sphere of influence
we travel most often,
God cannot do a new thing.

In fact, the newest, most compelling thing
within most of those perspectives
is that there is no God;
or even if there is,
it is a God so remote as to be irrelevant to us.

Between the people who dismiss God
and those that talk about God
as if a light at the end of their magic wand,
there is not much room left for us,
or for a God
that can and does
do new things.

But I will tell you –
and I believe it is absolutely true –
that is impossible, impossible,
to thrive as a stranger in a strange land
without the hope of a God
that can and does
do new things.
Without that God
we will either shrivel into bitter cynicism
or become bloated receptacles of cultural waste.

None of us is
strong enough,
resilient enough,
wily enough to thrive as strangers in a strange land
without dying on the vine
or being swallowed by the culture around us.

Without openness to a God that
can and does do new things,
and without heart and vision
to perceive those new things,
we will eventually drift away
like one more frozen corpse
off the wreckage of the Titanic.

I have absolutely no idea why you come here,
to a place like this on Sunday morning
or any other time,
but my guess is that on some intuitive level –
and perhaps less than fully conscious –
you know you are in exile.
And alongside the whisper
that you are a stranger in a strange land,

is a stirring somewhere below your heart
of a nascent, long ago hope.
Still alive after all this time,
is that hope or vision
you may not even be able to put words to,
but because of ancient biblical people
you know it
and feel its presence.

I like to imagine we come here to listen:
come here to listen to the voice within us;
come here to catch a glimpse of that hope
as it dances on the horizon;
come here to play and sing and touch joy;
come here to get knocked up side the head
when we get cynical;
come here to get goosed
when we’ve become too uptight;
come here even to be agitated and emboldened
and re-focused when complacency has buried us.

I like to imagine, hope even,
we come here to this table that has no borders;
to these pews rubbed smooth by the prayers
of ten and half generations;
to be reminded of our place
in that biblical story of exile and liberation.

Standing here on the first day of the New Year, 2017,
celebrating Christmas for the last time,
even as everyone else around us
has left Christmas far behind by now,
I like to imagine we came here
to listen to that odd little voice inside the old story,
the one that reminds us
who we are
and whose we are.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Christmas Eve 2016: God Makes It IN Alive

December 24, 2016 by Cam Miller

Merry Christmas.
In the next fourteen minutes
we are going to zig and zag from Geneva,
to stars and light beyond our solar system,
back to Bethlehem, and then to Humpty Dumpty,
and to Geneva all over again.
Hang on,
and come with me if wish,
or just stay there and relax.

Every story
has a denotation and a connotation
just like a window faces in and faces out
all at the same time.
IF it is a story that matters – a life and death story,
or in any way holds serious implications for our own lives and how we live them –
then we had better know the difference
between its denotation and connotation.

The denotation of a story
is the direct, explicit,
even literal meaning of its words.
Directions for how to put together
the bicycle or organizer you just brought home
are denoted
and are not in any way symbolic.

The denotation of a story
is the meaning of its face value –
the words are given no license to speak imaginatively
nor for the reader to wander off the leash
of literal meanings.

The denotation of a poodle, for example,
is to its specific breed, a class of dog;
but it is not an indication
of the socio-economic class of its owner –
that would be its connotation.

The connotation of a story,
distinct from its denotation,
is a very different kind of animal.

While “house” denotes shelter,
home connotes a warm, safe place.
There’s the difference.

The connotation of a word or story
is what it suggests or implies,
rather than pointing explicitly to its definition.

The connotation of a story
wanders free of its literal designation
and into the dream-world imagery
of expressive ideas and secondary meanings.

Let’s take for example, the rhyme, “Humpty Dumpty.”

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the kings’ men
couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Humpty Dumpty, literally,
was the name given to a canon, as in a big gun.

Literally, the denotation of Humpty Dumpty
was a specific big canon
that sat on a fortified wall of an English city,
pounding the forces laying siege to it
that were also threatening King Charles 1st
with a Parliament.

Humpty Dumpty defended the King
against having to rule
in collaboration with a bunch of Commoners.
As fate would have it,
an errant rebel cannonball shattered the wall
below the big cannon,
and down Humpty Dumpty, that big cannon, fell.

As the rhyme tells us,
it broke into a million pieces.
There was no egg.

Humpty Dumpty,
the LITERARY character depicted as an egg,
came a hundred years later,
in Lewis Carroll’s, “Through the Looking Glass.”

So the original denotation
of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme,
was a rebel cheer
over their victory against Charles 1st
when the fierce cannon fell.

The connotation of the rhyme
was the English Civil War
with its clash of ideas about government.
But eventually,
both its denotation and connotation disappeared
and we were left with just a rhyme.
That is not unlike the Christmas story.
While it is the denotation of the Christmas story
we witness in crèche scenes
and hear in these carols we sing,
it is the connotation
of the Christmas story that matters.

Get it?
IT’s the meaning behind the images.
The Christmas story is an epic poem,
not a short story.

The Christmas story is understood,
not by tracking literal definitions on the page,
but rather, by hunting in the bush
of wild and wondrous meanings.

So let us leave behind
the familiar denotation of Christmas
like an old metal milk box on the stoop,
and follow the tracks of wild dreams and images
until we hunt down in this story
its strange and beguiling connotation.

A dark,
dark
night.

Dark…as in standing inside a closet –
or closing a casket.

Dark…as in no city,
no street lights flooding shopping malls,
no municipal parking lots,
or downtown streets.

No light
except millions,
zillions, even a gazillion
freckles thrown across the black dome above.
Sweet, twinkling, stingy
stars, holding back any shower of light,
refusing in their cold distance
to illuminate even the hillside above a village.

So dark…
the town cradled in the valley below
remains unseen from the hillside above.

Precious, fragile candles
in darkened homes
cast no more light to the hills above,
than ancient stars enlighten the
celestial shadow to those below.

Dirty.
Rough,
rough and dirty.

Rough…as in a trough hewn by hand
from a rotten tree.
Rough, splintered, and ragged
left in apathy because
people don’t use it anyway.

Dirty…as in cows drink from it.
Thick, nameless film
and unidentifiable crust
gathered from cud and saliva,
bird feathers, and goat hair.
Just plain dirty.

Dirty trough…as in manger.

Raw,
new Life.

Raw…as in the wall of blood and mucus
an infant must pierce
in order to enter this dark night.

New…as in seconds old,
choking like a fish stranded in mud.
Slimy, soaked body
trying to swim the air,
eyes sealed shut;
arms and legs like tentacles
searching for the warm water-world
left behind.

Life…as in his burning throat
sputtering for air,
choking as he thrashes in misery
until
finally,
the large warm hands of his father
cradle him with a swift and gentle motion,
placing him on the bare breasts
of his new world,
his new place of rest.

Mother.

Mother…as in she who coos
with tears,
with pain still throbbing now diluted,
with relief still on edge
as the cold,
the dark,
the dangers,
stand unseen beyond the small shroud
of candle light and husband.

Mother… as in mystified co-creator
wrapped within an invisible bond
suddenly filled with love
that surpasses all her understanding.

Raw, new,
Life
wrapped in hand-spun cloth,
placed in rough hewn
and dirty trough,
surrounded by the absence of light.

And then that one final element, God.

God…as in sliver of light
entering unseen
the dark envelope of night.

God…as in the warm breath
exhaled into cold air.

God…as in Life,
gyrating IN the arms
thrashing IN the legs
in search of this new body.

God…as in the invisible bond
holding them all together;
a love so sudden,
a rushing wind from nowhere
so virulent
it surpasses every thought, word,
and understanding.
God…the one who endures birthwars with us.
God…the one present in the aftersilence of death.
God…the night,
and the light,
and the stars;
who was and is the infant
the father
the mother.
That is Christmas.

Christmas…as in God
who cradles us
in the complicated stress
and loneliness
of a holiday.

Christmas…as in God
nestled in the dirty commercialism
we love and hate.

Christmas…as in God
slipping into the darkness of our grief
over those not with us this year.

Christmas…as in God
who is an infant in the dark;
tucked away in the anonymity of poverty,
hidden in a cave,
blanketed in dirt and coarseness.
As in not born of privilege.
As in not mediated by coercion.
As in not protected from our violence.
As in a story of impoverished vulnerability
lacking in guile
but massively in the face of our
bigotries
and excesses
and fraudulent values.

That God,
the one not so big,
easily overlooked in the birth of newness
and nascent hope,
born even in this moment.

That God.
That Christmas.
That newborn hope.
That light in the darkness.

Let us wander around in that connotation
of those images
and of those words,
and away from the denotation of a set stage
that looks like a 21st century Hollywood image
of a first century rural village.

The power of the Christmas story
bubbling up through ancient Scripture
and whispering hoarsely to us
through the noise of our celebrations
is in its poignancy
not its romanticized images.

Somewhere
in the connotation of words and images,
not in the denotation of literal meanings,
the powerful poignancy of this story
is seen, and heard, and felt.

But one of the difficulties we have
in seeing and hearing the Christmas story
as Matthew and Luke may have intended it,
is that we always look up
as if at the bottom of an imagined pyramid
toward the pinnacle of power,
asking for a sign of what is to come
or for its meaning
and for clear directions.

We look up to the boss,
up to the president,
up to the parent,
up to the heavens…
But the Christmas story is about the cosmos
looking down toward the earth
for a sign…from us.

That is the connotation of the Christmas story.

The cosmos
in all of its unutterable vastness
looking down onto the pitifully puny
blue-brown planet
swirled in the white wisps of atmosphere.

The heavenly chorus of brilliant stars,
and vast expanse of interstellar space;
galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses;
all looking down, down, down
to a single point on this spinning orb.

All of it
looking down into the dark,
ordinary, anonymous world
that each of us knows so well
in our own way and in our own times.

The whole cosmos
looking down for a sign
of what we will do
with this God-filled moment.

We look up.
We look up to the heavens
and angels
and stars.

But they all point back and say:
“Don’t look up!
Look here,
look there,
look now,
look around.
Your birth is at hand.
See? God is born in your midst,
now, there, over here, there, now.”

The cosmos looks down and points to us
and pleads for us to stop looking up.

If the story of Christmas is only about Mary
and Joseph
and the baby Jesus;
if it is only about the shepherds
and the village of David;
if it is only about something that happened
a long time ago;
then all of this is just a very weak re-enactment,
like a grade-school play
about the life of Lincoln or the Erie Canal.

But it is not about something that happened
a long time ago;
it is not a re-enactment –
that would be its denotation.

Christmas is about God
who continues to be born;
born into your life and mine.

It is about God
who is born into a hostile and dangerous world –
born into the darkness
but makes it IN alive!

Christmas is about God
who is born into the lives of Sikhs and Muslims,
Jews and Buddhists,
and among those who do not know
or even look for a God.

It is about God
who is fulfilling ancient promises,
and making new ones.

It is about God
who pierces the placenta that insulates
old-time religions
and those of cynical belief,
and who is delivered into our hearts and minds
in spite of ourselves.

On this cold,
dark
night…
under the same sky
that has covered the millenniums;
the same dome of freckled lights
bathing us now in the dirty air
of the twenty-first century;
and surrounded now
by the high-tech but spiritless glow of electricity,
headlights,
and dull blue screens;

God is born.

Here and now
God makes it IN alive
again and again
in Geneva,
Ovid,
Lyons, and
Clyde;
in Canandaigua,
Seneca Castle, and Seneca Falls;
and all parts
east and west,
north and south.

At this moment,
in this perilous milieu
of post-modern,
rampant
globalized consumerism,
and culture of abandoned megalomania –
and whatever else we are this night –
God is born.

God makes it IN
alive
again;
not far away in the distant past,
or on some hillside in Judea.

God makes it IN
alive
to our darkness,
here in this place,
in our time
into our darkness.
Born here, and born now.
It is Christmas…as in “Emmanuel.”
As in, God is with us.

Let’s connote that with our own lives!

Merry Christmas.

3 Advent 2016: Midwife to the Holy

December 11, 2016 by Cam Miller

It is a dangerous world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it is ALIVE.

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

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

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

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

There is an ancient wisdom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or we can come at it from the negative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a dangerous world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Advent: Corner Man of Hope

December 4, 2016 by Cam Miller

Man, O man,
if ever there was an Advent sermon, this is it.
(Notice, I didn’t claim it is a ‘good’ sermon,
just that it is inherently an Advent sermon).

I won’t lie, this vision thing of Isaiah’s,
right now, today,
at this moment in history,
exhausts me.

“Really?
I have to preach hope,
now?
Really?
Now?”

So then I turn away from Isaiah and say,
“Let’s look at the Gospel instead.”
And there he is, right on cue,
John the Baptist:
“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
His winnowing fork is in his hand,
and he will clear his threshing floor
and will gather his wheat into the granary;
but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Can’t beat that,
sounds more like the world we know –
punishment from the top down
instead of Isaiah’s vision
of peace and equity
from the bottom of the food chain up.

I am an optimist,
and relentlessly hopeful,
but sometimes hope is a twelve round
boxing match in the ring of the soul.
Right now, looking around at the world,
hope is bloodied like Rocky Balboa before the bell.
Hope gets in a few good jabs now and again
but The Nasty
over in the other corner
has brass in his gloves,
and each punch lands hateful
and harsh
on the bruised
and battered face of hope.

Isaiah is the corner man,
or cut man as they say.

Isaiah sponges the wobbled fighter of hope
with ice water,
applying adrenaline-laced Vaseline to our cuts,
dabbing the bulge around the eyes
with an ice-cold iron to staunch the swelling.
He checks our vision to make sure it is clear.
He talks to us with calm and reassurance.

He reminds us of our strengths,
then cautions us to guard our weaknesses.
When the bell sounds
he lifts us up
and pats us on the back
and assures us
he is there waiting
for the next time we get a minute to rest.

That’s Isaiah,
the corner man for hope.

Last week
I spoke of what I know about hope,
and all of that was honest and true.
But it is a battle not a cakewalk.
Hope is arduous
and not for the faint of heart.
It is so much easier
to be grim
and calloused
and cynical in our world.
Really, it is.

We can so easily bend
the gray cloud of despair
down around our heads
so that it rains wherever we go
and thus fulfills bitter prophecies.

We can do that,
it actually makes us feel powerful
and secure
in a way hope never does.
We like cynicism, really we do –
it feels good.

“Yeah,
that’s what I’m talking about!”
we get to declare
whenever any bad thing happens
because we predicted it.

“Yeah!
I told ya!”
we get to say out loud
when disappointment rains down on the moment.
Sometimes we don’t even need to say it
to feel the satisfaction.
We can just give a knowing look and gloat.

Honestly, I think more than anything else,
even more than the reign of scientific
and economic worldviews,
hope is the primary cause
of rapidly disappearing Churches.

Really, hope is the problem.

You know those big, glamorous
stadium-size churches
with television audiences
and online ministries that rake in
tons of money and viewers?
The message of those places
is not really hope
it is wishful thinking.
It sounds like hope
but is just the opposite of hope.
It is actually cynical,
dog-eat-dog economics
disguised as hope.

You see, the so-called Prosperity Gospel
boiled down to its crude equation,
says that the blessings of God
are success,
achievement,
and prosperity.
We will get what we deserve
if we believe and do the right things.

Sooner or later
we will get what we ‘want’
if we just believe right.
Our desires
will be fulfilled, is the promise,
and our fulfilled desires
will be the sign we are blessed.
It is reward for the righteous and,
by implication,
often left unsaid,
deprivation for the unrighteous.

According to this false-hope Prosperity Gospel,
the rewards for our right thinking
and believing are economic –
gain,
recognition,
maybe even celebrity and fame,
as if those are a blessing.
It is the top-down equation
that we like so much better than
the bottom-up vision of a hapless guy like Isaiah.

This is tricky now,
so stay with me
because by promising
material, physical, even social well-being,
the Prosperity Gospel reinforces our cynicism
in an ironic
and paradoxical way.

Without our ever realizing it,
the Prosperity Gospel propagates

the worldview of consumerism
with its dog-eat-dog order we call Natural Selection.
Equating God’s blessings
with health,
power,
security,
and material well-being
sounds theologically pleasing
because its language is all blessing and happiness.
But that language disguises
what is actually a top-down,
trickle-down,
deny the margins kind of theology
that is very much at home with consumerism.
In fact, it is not a prosperity gospel at all,
it is a consumerism gospel
and it is a perfect fit
for a culture operated by profit margins,
short-term gain,
and winner-take-all.

Wishful thinking for the masses
means believing that God’s blessings
are material security,
and status-driven achievements,
that have us looking good
and feeling good
and winning the game.

But authentic hope,
the kind Isaiah’s poetry points to,
knows that looking good
and feeling good
and winning the game
are nowhere to be found
as the criteria of blessing
in the kingdom of God.

In fact,
authentic hope
has absolutely nothing to do
with yours
or my
benefit.
Yours
and my
self-interest
are not even a gleam in God’s eye – ever.
We may personally benefit
from things going well in the kingdom of God,
but we may also have to sacrifice for things to go well.
In fact, it could even happen that our self-interest
may actually have to be denied,
or even extinguished,
in order for things to go well
in the kingdom of God.
It is never,
ever,
about us, personally.

The kingdom of God
is about the KINGDOM
not you and me individually.
And authentic hope knows that.
Hope is all about the collective creation,
not even about our own species in particular.

But consumerism,
whether with economic language
or theological language like the Prosperity Gospel,
is always about consuming.
It is about exploiting our appetites,
our hungers,
our desires.
It is about somebody profiting
from our desires
no matter whether fulfilling our desire
is good or bad
for everyone else.

It is about profit.

It is about arranging the society
around making money off of other people,
any way we can.
The more money we can make, the better it is for us.

When that happens,
according to the Prosperity Gospel, we’re ‘blessed.’
When we are the top dog
eating the meat of the lesser dogs,
we are blessed.

Consumerism,
whether as an economic principle around
which we organize the society,
or as a theology
around which we organize our church,
is about exploiting the needs and desires
of other people for somebody’s profit.

In such a scenario, for example,
medicine is no longer about healing;
it is a commodity to be purchased
if you can afford it.

Housing is no longer about shelter,
it is about bundling mortgages
in such a way as to make more money
from people who cannot afford to live in their homes
without borrowing,
with interest, for decades.

Security is no longer about caring for one another
and looking out for each other’s needs,
it is about buying insurance in case bad things happen.
But we can only get that insurance
if the odds are extremely in favor
of the insurance company making a profit from
our vulnerability.

It is about the funding of public works
with taxes that everyone pays,
but the more money you actually have
the less taxes you actually pay;
so that public works are actually
funded more by people with less money
instead of more.

Hope,
authentic hope,
the way Isaiah envisions it,
is very much the opposite
of the prosperity theology and consumerism
that has come to own our lives
and define the world around us.
AND THAT
is why hope can be so exhausting –
it is a battle against all odds,
and a trudging upstream against a fierce current.

Here is the deal on Isaiah’s so-called
peaceable kingdom vision:
It is not in the lion’s best interest to eat straw.
I mean really, no one can imagine
a happy, straw-eating lion.

Here is an fierce example of Isaiah’s vision
embedded in our world.

Veganism is not likely a choice that gets made
by following our desires for something yummy.
It is a choice that gets made
by looking out at the valley
and seeing that the environment suffers
in multiple ways
from our obsession with copious amounts of meat,
which also happens to be driven by a small segment’s
compulsive thirst for profit.

Veganism or vegetarianism,
or a diet that vastly reduces our intake of beef and pork,
would be one of those choices
that is made not because of our self-interest, our desire,
but because of the common good.
I am speaking as a meat-eater by the way,
but I can see the difference between
the self-interest of my desires
and the common interests of my species.
Hope agitates me
toward a life-style change I haven’t made yet.

That’s just a little example.

The difference between
the authentic hope of Isaiah
and the wishful thinking of our consumerism
and consumeristic theology,
is quite clear.
Wishful thinking
says that greed is good for the marketplace
when it comes to economics,
and that the goal is to win rather than lose
when it comes to the accumulation
of resources and wealth.

The assumption underneath this wishful thinking
we call consumerism
is that it is a dog-eat-dog world
and therefore it is better to be a big dog
than a little dog.

Authentic hope,
the Isaiah and Jesus kind,
understands wishful thinking,
and recognizes the way we have constructed
our world is a dog-eat-dog coliseum for fighting.

But authentic hope
has a vision
for the re-construction of our world.

Authentic hope
can see that it would be possible
to construct a world
in which the role of the big dogs
is to nurture and support the needs of the little dogs,
and therefore enjoy the benefits of the common good
instead of only those of self-interest.

Authentic hope also knows
that it is not possible to construct this new world
with the use of coercion.
Coercion is the tool of big dog usury and profit,
and bringing about a new creation with coercion
will simply sow the weeds of the old world
into the fabric of the new.
So a different way must be found.
All the more reason
that authentic hope attracts few followers.

Still, as tired as we feel at any given moment,
getting ready to go into a new round
with cuts and bruises from the last round,
I know that authentic hope
is the only true hope.

The lion will probably never eat straw,
but it is possible for us to create a world,
one small community at a time,
in which the big dogs
tend to the needs of the little dogs
instead of eating them.

I chose that hope.

1 Epiphany 2017: When the wilderness is a promise land, and the promise land a wilderness

2 Christmas, January 1, 2017

Christmas Eve 2016: God Makes It IN Alive

3 Advent 2016: Midwife to the Holy

2 Advent: Corner Man of Hope

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