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2 Epiphany 2017: Did you hear it?

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Did you hear it?
I did.
Some of you did too.

This is our second anniversary, you and I.
I began at Trinity last year
on the second Sunday of Epiphany,
Martin Luther King weekend.

Whether you think that was a good thing
or rue the day –
and I know that it is always true
both perspectives are represented –
it happened because we heard it.

What we hear
isn’t always the beautiful music we like,
and it surely isn’t always what we want to hear.
That makes listening for it risky.
It’s pretty obvious
that all three readings this morning
are about hearing it.

Isaiah, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Andrew and Peter…
each one listening,
each one hearing,
each one changed.

This sermon today,
these words over the next few minutes,
are about…hearing it.
I want to suggest that it is just possible
there is a word tucked in here today
with your name on it.
It may not be embedded in my words, just now.
It may be in the music,
or one of the prayers,
or in a moment of silence between the prayers…
even on the lips of someone else.
But I would not be at all surprised
if you were to hear a word with your name on it
somewhere within this thing we do today.

We’ve heard it before, you and I –
a word with our name on it.

Walking the dog along the lake,
in the field,
the cemetery,
or even on the sidewalk.

Walking to our favorite little spot,
on our favorite trail,
on one of those spectacularly cloudless days
when the vault above
is bluer than the water below.

But it can also be heard
while hunkered down
under an umbrella,
stung by tiny pelts of water or ice.

We’ve heard it before
just sitting on the back deck thinking about nothing,
or on the dock looking out at the pure horizon.
But we’ve also heard it
doing something so humble as
looking down while cutting the grass!

We have all heard it.

Ironing clothes,
scraping cookie dough into dollops,
vacuuming dust bunnies and grit off the floor,
punching the calculator and scribbling numerals,
sorting papers and putting our house in order –
in the midst of mind-numbing little things we do
over the course of a day
that are ordinary, routine, humdrum things –
even in this we can hear it.

In fact, we have all heard it.

It arrives a scrap of thought
landing from out of nowhere
apropos of nothing
we are doing or thinking.

A random spec of thought
floats by on its way to being lost
in the layers of silt
settled in the creases of our brain.
We see it
or hear it
or think it
or feel it – and then…well then,
nine times out of ten
we pay no attention to it.
Heck, we’ve been known to intentionally deflect it.
If you close your eyes,
I bet you can see yourself
knocking it away as just some stray,
random,
stupid,
dumb,
absurd thought.
It didn’t belong to the reasonable world
of ordered and conforming notions
that have been pre-approved for appearance in our thoughts.
So we swatted it
and off it drifted like a dust fairy in sunlight.

Still, I know in my bones,
we have all heard it.

Our problem, of course, is we don’t believe it.
We do not welcome it.
We are not open to it.
We don’t really even want to think about it.

But still, we have all heard it.

It may have called us by name.
It may have stabbed like a shard of glass.
It may have felt so foreign
we spit it out even before we could taste it.
And it’s likely that more than once,
it struck us as so absurd we laughed it away.

It could have whispered to us;
cooed into the fold of our heart
a loving little affirmation
at the very moment
we felt most ashamed,
empty,
or worthless.

We have all heard it.

You may be a hardened old skeptic about this,
and doubt it has ever come close to you,
but giggling in some back corner of your thoughts
is an impish little quirk that knows
a word with your name on it
has come close.

I dare say most of us,
regardless of our level of faith and doubt,
disbelieve its presence most of the time.
We do not imagine we have heard it
and the reason we have such difficulty embracing it,
is that it has not been pre-approved
by the gatekeeper in our brain.
In fact, the very idea that we could hear
a word with our name on it,
even if it existed,
has less approval than those credit card offers
we receive almost daily in the mail.

But without pre-approval from the cranial gatekeeper,
the word with out name on it
will remain a dust mite of thought;
a mere random
and bizarre miss-fire in our brain
that could never be real,
never be authentic,
never be a word for us.

The sad truth is,
that not only must we pre-approve it
to truly hear it
and take it in
and resonate with it;
but when we hear it
we must also, eventually, talk out loud about it
before we can actually confirm it.

It is a double-whammy.

Before it arrives we have to pre-approve it
and once it does arrive,
we have to take the risk to articulate it
out loud to someone else.

That is why hearing it is so rare:
No one
in his or her right mind
talks out loud
about what we cannot even accept
in the privacy of our own brain.

Still,
a word with our name on it
has an exceedingly long shelf life.

It can be something we ponder in our heart
for many years,
but if it is something to be actualized
in the hardened and dirty soil of daily routine,
then we have to talk out loud about it
with other people
who can help us decipher it
and confirm its meaning.

That is the nature of IT –
the word with our name on it.
It is how we come to hear it
and then how,
with the help of others,
it gets opened up.

It may begin as a word we receive
in the privacy of our own heart,
but it will not become incarnate –
embodied in our body or anyone else’s –
until and unless
others hear it from us,
recognize it,
and then confirm it.
That is the nature of a spirituality,
which is, at its core, communal.

And this thing we do,
that we are a part of by virtue of baptism,
is communal.
Christianity, like our mother Judaism and cousin Islam,
is communal at its core and not individualistic.

The other thing about the word with our name on it:
it has a mission.
It is not just for us,
or for our own little purpose and pleasure.

It is aimed like a missile outward
into the messy mall of people living around us.

There is a word given to you and me
that needs to be said and done
among the people we live with,
and among the folks we work with,
and even with those people we play with.
There is something
WE have been given
that we need to embody by word and deed,
that we have not already done.

But the word we have been given
is not just a simple sound,
or utterance,
or formation of letters;
it is something that needs to be done.

The word with our name on it
has a mission
in this church,
in this neighborhood,
in this town,
in this area,
and you and I are the ones
who know it
because it has been give to us.

But most likely,
we have also resisted working towards it.

The word with your name on it
is agitating like a stone in your shoe
about something we need to do
or change
or make
or develop
if we are going to be what we need to be.
We have all heard it.
A word
a whisper
a thought
an insight
that comes to us from beyond –
from a power greater than ourselves
even if it seems to come
from within ourselves.

And for whatever reasons
we do not want to believe it
or accept it
or hear it
or even acknowledge it.

It is such a twisted contradiction,
this word with our name on it;
an attraction-repulsion without end.

As attractive
as the idea of a word with our name on it is,
we resist for a reason.

For example, I heard it
standing right here in this sanctuary one day,
on a hot August afternoon,
with no one from the church
even knowing I was here,
walking around aimlessly with my son
on our way to Ohio.
I didn’t expect to hear it,
I wasn’t listening for it,
and actually, I didn’t want to hear it.

The last thing I wanted to do
was be part of a congregation with a hulking,
deteriorating historic building.
Been there, done that, so over it.
In fact, I went out and found myself
a very attractive alternative job
before anything could get serious about this one.

And there is the problem
with pre-approval
and listening.
We do not want to hear
these words with our names on them
because we know they will get us in trouble.
We know up front,
without even thinking much about it,
it’s going to be trouble
or painful
or include a risk
without any clear pay-off.

These words with our names on them
look for the whole world
to be harebrained,
stupid,
and not something
we want to even think about for ourselves
let alone talk out loud about with other people.
So you see,
we have very good reasons
for not hearing it
and not engaging it
and not doing it.
Don’t feel bad about any resistance you put up
because it is much better not to pre-approve the word
in advance of its arrival.
If we don’t believe it
we don’t have to go near it.
And that is a very good strategy
we should all remember; I employ myself all the time.
It works:
Require that dang word
to be signed for on delivery,
but disbelieve it’s coming
and therefore never get it.
Hah!

Whatever you do,
DO NOT pre-approve the sender
or the offer
or the idea
or the message.
If we do not pre-approve it
we can keep it at bay
and not take it seriously.

But there is a fly in the ointment of that strategy.

For some ridiculous reason,
we come to a place like this
and week after week,
the knock is on the door.
We hear it in Isaiah and the prophets
over and over and over again.
We hear it in the gospels
over and over and over again.
Mostly we hear it in absurd,
distant, long-ago stories
that don’t seem to have much to do with us.
But they do,
and those stories agitate us.

These things we listen to week after week,
or the rituals we do again and again,
soften us up,
weaken our resistance,
and worst of all,
become a brain-worm
that wriggles through our sleep,
drills beneath our random thoughts,
and while we are fishing
or ironing
or relaxing with a cup of tea
in the late afternoon,
they surface when we least expect.

Doggone that word with our name on it.
Listen at your own risk.

 

 

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

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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

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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

by

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

by

It is a dangerous world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it is ALIVE.

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

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

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

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

There is an ancient wisdom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or we can come at it from the negative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a dangerous world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trinity Place

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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