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The Wedding at Cana; Epiphany 2, Year C

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That’s a whole lot of wine

Second Sunday of Epiphany

January 17, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

This morning our hearts are of full of sadness and concern for the people of Haiti. We have seen the images on TV, read the accounts in the paper. Some of our members of Grace have been to Port-au-Prince and Jeanette, which is the location for our diocese’s Haiti Project. We have hosted Haitians in our homes as we have been hosted in theirs. Some count Haitians among their friends; some are almost like family members. Those of us who have been there are full of memories, wondering what it’s like now. But all of us, whether or not we are personally affected through friendship or travel, have seen the pictures and have some sense of the devastation. We feel helpless in the face of this destruction; the dollars we give seem a drop in the bucket compared to the vastness of the tragedy.

And inevitably, our minds turn to questions of why. Why now? Why Haiti? As human beings we want suffering of this magnitude to make sense, we want to try to fit into categories and systems we might understand. We want to manage it, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.

But this isn’t the first time for such horrendous tragedy. There was of course 9-11 which now seems like a distant memory; there was the tsunami in Indonesia and South Asia in 2004; there was hurricane Katrina in 2005. Each of them seemed more horrific than the last. Each one brought misery as well as miraculous human efforts. Each one brought questions of why.

We want to know what it all means. We want to put it in a theological framework that we can make sense of; we want to say it was God’s punishment, or God’s will; or perhaps we want to say suffering of this magnitude proves God doesn’t exist. These are hard questions and demand coherent answers, but it may be the answers don’t come.

We are in the season of Epiphany, that time when we celebrate the presence of God among us, the presence of God’s glory. It may be hard for us to think about God’s glory; indeed it may be difficult for us even to think about the presence of God in a world that experiences such tragedy and human misery. Yet our Christian faith lives in the paradox between what is and what will be; what we see with our eyes and what we know by faith. Epiphany is a time to reflect not only on the reality of God’s glory and God’s presence in the world, but also on that paradox. There is no better place to explore that paradox than in today’s gospel reading.

OK. Let’s do the math. 6 jars for purification, each holding between 20-30 gallons of water. That’s between 120 and 180 gallons of water. That’s how much wine Jesus made. And in case you can’t get a clear sense of just how much wine that is, let’s do some more math. A bottle of wine is 750 milliliters; that’s roughly five bottles of wine in a gallon. So we’re talking between 600 and 900 bottles of wine, between 50 and 75 cases. That’s a lot of wine. That must have been quite a party. Now remember, Jesus made the wine because they had run out. In other words, like any good party, the wine had been f lowing for quite some time, and either the guests were drank more than was expected or the hosts had not planned very well.

600 to 900 bottles of wine. Given that the wine had been flowing, assuming the guests were a little tipsy already, what was Jesus thinking? After all, how much wine does it take for your average person to get, well, pretty drunk? That must have been quite a party!

Before we explore the meaning of all this, there’s a little more math in the story that I would like to talk about. John 2 begins, “On the third day …” Now when you hear that phrase, what pops into your mind? Of course, the resurrection. And I have no doubt that the gospel writer is making an allusion to the resurrection. But there’s more to it than that. If we go back to Chapter 1, we see something very interesting. The gospel of John begins “In the beginning was the Word” so quite literally, it begins at creation. But very quickly it moves down to the present day of Jesus. After the gospel begins describing the ministry of John the Baptizer, three times it begins an episode with the phrase “the next day.” So if you add those three, actually four, days to the three days mentioned in John 2:1, you get seven days—seven days from “In the beginning was the word,” to the wedding at Cana.

In other words, for the Gospel of John everything converges on this point, on a wedding, in Cana of Galilee—it is the point to which all creation has been moving, the moment at which the disciples, and we, see the glory of God. It is also, to hearken back to Genesis, the completion, the fulfillment of creation. On the seventh day, God finished the work that he had done… God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it. On the third day, there was a wedding at Cana.

All of this—creation, redemption, resurrection, all of it converges on this point, on this story. But to note that is only to deepen the mystery. Why wine? Why so much wine? How does that reveal Christ’s glory? As we search for an answer to that question, our first impulse, temptation, really, is to place the emphasis on the power involved in turning water into wine. But that is not what the story emphasizes. The change takes place off stage. Jesus is expressly not involved in the miracle. He simply tells the servants to put water in the jars, and to take some for the steward to taste. There is no magic involved, no Hollywood special effects.

So the important part of the story is not that Jesus turned water into wine. The important part of the story is the amount of wine, the occasion itself, a wedding party. And if we think about the gospel writer’s chronological references, it all becomes much clearer. A wedding banquet set “on the third day” or “on the seventh day.” This is no simple miracle. In this story we learn about Jesus Christ, and we learn about what it means ultimately to follow Christ. It is a foretaste of that eternal Sabbath, the messianic banquet of which the Jews of Jesus’ day hoped, and which Jesus proclaimed in his own language as the Kingdom of God.

Our meals participate in and provide a foretaste of that messianic banquet. The Eucharistic celebration, in which we partake of bread and wine bring us into the presence of Christ and promise of that great feast to which all people are invited and in which we will all share. But it’s not just the Eucharist. One of our great obligations as the body of Christ is to offer hospitality, to welcome others in, and to offer them food and drink. The gospels agree that a major part of Jesus’ ministry took place at meals. But he didn’t just preach or teach at them; he used them to demonstrate the inclusiveness of his message. He welcomed everybody to the table, and he was constantly criticized for doing so, for eating with tax collectors and sinners.

There’s a sense of that in the story of the wedding at Cana. Jesus is a guest, what business it of his or of his mother to make a beer run? Yet here he acts as host, ensuring that there will be plenty of wine to go around, that a good time will be had by all. Cana reminds us that we are not the hosts here; Jesus is; Jesus has sent out the invitations, but Jesus is also throwing the party. And like Cana, we need to remember that we aren’t in control of what happens here, Jesus is. As we come to the table, we open ourselves to the possibility that we might be transformed by our encounter with Christ, just as the water was turned into wine.

Ordinary water, ordinary jars, a run-of-the-mill wedding celebration. In the middle of these Jesus turns everything upside-down. Can you imagine what the servants, or the steward might have thought when they saw that the water had been turned into wine? Suddenly, the ordinary has become spectacular. Jesus turned water into wine, and revealed his glory.

That surprise, that unexpected, transformation of the mundane is at the heart of Epiphany. In John 1, the gospel writer tells us that the Word became flesh and lived among us—now we see, as the disciples did, we see the glory of his presence. Jesus was an ordinary human being, like us, but he was also God. The water was transformed into wine. Epiphany reminds us, demands of us, that we be ready to encounter the glory of Christ in the world around us.

Epiphany also demands that we help others see that glory as well. In the Gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly offers his listeners a way into a fuller life; often it is called abundant life. We usually think that he is referring to eternity, to life after death. But the miracle at Cana shows us that the full life Jesus offers us is here around us; in the enjoyment of the creation God has given us, in the celebration of life’s transitions, in a good party.

Just as ordinary water in ordinary jars become extraordinary wine, our presence here, our faith proclaims the hope, the danger, that we might be transformed into something quite new. When we encounter Christ, whether it be at the table here, or in the face of another person, we run the risk that everything will change. We might not like that. Just as we are made a little bit uncomfortable by the math of the wedding at Cana, there’s nothing moderate, or respectable, or seemly about the amount of wine at Cana, we can’t control what might happen to ourselves, to our church, or to the world, when we open ourselves to encountering Christ. All bets are off. So let’s party on!

Baptism of Our Lord

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Baptism of our Lord

January 10, 2010

Some of you know that I grew up Mennonite. It’s not something I talk about a lot, if only because I’ve gotten tired of telling the story over the years. For many of you, the term “Mennonite” conjures up people who dress in funny clothes, drive around with horse and buggies, or bring choirs to sing at the Dane County Farmer’s Market. Well, all of those things are true, I suppose, but that doesn’t at all describe my upbringing. The only funny clothes I wore growing up were the clothes we all wore in the 70s and I’ve never driven a horse and buggy. The Mennonite community in which I was raised had abandoned most of its peculiar dress and ways in the first half of the twentieth century and now if you were to visit my mother’s church, the people would look very much like typical Midwesterners.

That is not to say there are not, and were not, oddities about the Mennonite Church and over time, I’m sure I will have more to say about them and Corrie would be happy to share with you her take on them. My journey from the Mennonite Church of my childhood to the Episcopal priesthood was a long and winding road filled with wrong turns, the occasional dead-end, and a few visits to the ditch.

One of the roadblocks for me was infant baptism. The roots of the Mennonite Church lie in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and with a group of people who rejected infant baptism, arguing that only baptism of adults, made after a mature confession of faith, was valid. What I find interesting in my own journey is that while I came to accept the theological arguments in defense of infant baptism relatively quickly, imagining myself baptizing a baby took a very long time. My spiritual forebears had given their lives because of their commitment to adult believer’s baptism, and if you look at the 39 Articles in the back of the Book of Common Prayer, you can read the denunciation there of the practice of adult baptism.

I say all that because today we are baptizing both children and an adult. We don’t often do that in the Episcopal Church, but I suspect that as our culture changes and becomes more secular, we will be doing more and more of it. Jewel Rose will be taking the big step in a few minutes, and with her will be Cade and Phoebe Seep. I will ask all of them if they want to be baptized; during our run-through yesterday, all three of them answered that question for themselves, and I hope they will today, too. But the next set of questions, Jewel will answer for herself, while Cade and Phoebe’s parents and godparents will respond on their behalf.

It is traditional that we baptize on this day, the First Sunday after the Epiphany, because it is on this day, each year, that we celebrate the Baptism of our Lord, Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptizer in the River Jordan. It may seem somewhat strange that we do this now, when we have just celebrated Jesus’ birth a little over two weeks ago, Jesus’ baptism marks the beginning of his public ministry, and except for Luke’s mention of Jesus’ visit to the temple when he was twelve, the gospels are completely silent about Jesus’ childhood.

We heard Luke’s version of Jesus’ baptism as the gospel today, and well, having taught Bible all those years, I can’t resist pointing out the most interesting piece of Luke’s story. Unfortunately, the lectionary editors left the most interesting part of the story out. You will notice that several verses of chapter 3 were left out of the gospel reading. The reason they were left out was because in them, Luke tells the story of John’s arrest by Herod. In other words, in the Gospel of Luke, John the Baptist is arrested before Luke mentions Jesus’ baptism. Now there are good reasons for this. It’s not that Luke doesn’t know that John baptized Jesus; rather it’s because he wants to de-emphasize John. The question I always used to ask my students when they were confused about this was, “Who has more power, the person doing the baptizing, or the one who is baptized?” Of course, in the case of a toddler, the answer to that question may not be obvious.

So we don’t really see John baptizing Jesus in Luke’s gospel. Instead the focus is on something else—the expectations of the crowd, and the question concerning John. We will see this again in the coming weeks, the question of who John was, and whether he was the Messiah, the one people were waiting and hoping for.

It is a question that was asked in the first two chapters of Luke, and it is a question we will hear again as we read through Luke’s gospel this year. But it’s always a matter of just what one expects, and whether one’s expectations are realistic or warranted. In this case, the answer is not quite obvious.

The problem was not just the question of the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptizer, the problem was also about the meaning of the baptism itself. The gospels agree that John’s baptism was a baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and everyone knows that Jesus was without sin, therefore, why did he need to be baptized? That’s the question the gospel writers struggled with, and part of the reason Luke writes the way he does is to downplay the significance of Jesus’ baptism, for his own self-understanding and for his ministry. The lesson from Acts underscores Luke’s interpretation that John’s baptism was ultimately inadequate.

The crowd was filled with expectation and wondering. Baptism is an important celebration in the life of the church. It is an opportunity for us to welcome new members and to remind ourselves of our baptisms and what we committed ourselves to at that point. In fact, it’s helpful for us to watch an adult being baptized. Too often, the questions that are asked during the service, and the vows we make are treated lightly, as if they really don’t mean what they say.

The baptismal covenant lays out our responsibilities as members of the body of Christ. They are what is expected of everyone who takes that step: to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers; to persevere in resisting evil; to proclaim by word and example the good news; to seek and serve Christ in all persons, and to strive for justice and peace, and respect the dignity of every human person.

Those are enormous responsibilities and tasks, and how each of us fulfills them is between us and God. But membership is not about occasionally attending services. Membership is about committing oneself to the body of Christ, using one’s gifts, talents, and resources to build up the community and to reach out to others. We’ve included in the service bulletin one way for you to do that. While many of you already participate in our worship service by serving as acolytes, readers, and the like, we are always in need of others. I encourage you to think about how you might help out with services, fill out the form, and put it in the offering plate. Of course, there are many other ways you can volunteer. The shelter meal which has been organized by Sarah and Sparky Watts for several years, can always use additional volunteers, for example, as can the food pantry.

The prayer book actually views adult baptism as the norm, not the exception as is our practice. That’s a good thing, because the vows that Jewel makes today are vows that we all make together. As we make them, let us make them, not only with our lips, but with our lives, promising to do all that we can, body and soul, to strengthen the body of Christ and serve God’s kingdom.

Taking another road: Sermon for the Second Sunday of Christmas, 2010

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Taking Another Road

Second Sunday after Christmas

January 3, 2009

Although Corrie would tell you otherwise, I’ve got a pretty good sense of direction. I was talking with someone a couple of weeks ago about having to find our way around, and he observed that there are two types of people: map people and directions people. Both he and I are map people. We have to see on a map where it is we are supposed to be going. Directions just won’t do. In my case, by the time I’ve received the third piece of information (take a left at the old Shell station), I will have forgotten the first two. But even with a map, and if I’ve made no wrong turns, it’s often the case that when I leave, retracing my steps is very difficult. Instead of turning right, you have to turn left, and what happens if there’s a one-way road? It often happens that a trip that took fifteen minutes one direction, can take a half hour the other. So finding the way to a new place can be difficult, but finding one’s way home is not always easy, either.

I was reminded of this while reading this week’s gospel—the story of the wise men and the star. We know it well, but we don’t often note that while the magi had little trouble finding their destination, thanks to the star, and a little help from Herod and his advisers, we know very little about their journey home. Matthew writes simply, “they returned home by another road.” The story ends there; the magi leave the scene, but continue to pique our curiosity.

In the reading from Jeremiah, the prophet promises that Yahweh will lead the people of God home. It’s actually not at all clear when this particular passage was written, but it seems to presuppose that the prophet is writing during the exile, when many of the people of Israel had been carried off in captivity to Babylon. God is promising them that their exile will cease, that God will bring them back to the promised land, that God will lead even the lame and the blind home. It is a powerful image and theme, common not only to the Hebrew Bible but also to the Christian New Testament, to both Judaism, and Christianity. Such imagery was also seen in our readings for Advent; with the cry of John the Baptizer: Prepare a way for the Lord.

But we often think of this imagery only in terms of God leading God’s people to a new place—the promised land, and not in terms of God leading God’s people back. The familiar story of the wise men is a good example. They followed a star from the east to Bethlehem, stopping in Jerusalem to confirm their directions. Let’s unpack this story a little bit; let’s make it strange instead of familiar.

First of all—the wise men themselves. As you know, there is no mention in the text of the number, that they were kings, and certainly not their names. All of that is later pious Christian accretion to the story. In fact, “wise men” is even something of a mistranslation. They are magi—astrologers. That they come from the east suggests that Matthew is trying to emphasize their foreign-ness, that they are exotic travelers. What’s more from the perspective of the Gospel of Matthew, to call someone a wise man is not necessarily a compliment. Matthew consistently contrasts wisdom and foolishness—the wisdom of the world is not true wisdom but folly.

To be sure, there are kings in Matthew’s story—two of them, Herod and Jesus with very different kingdoms and with different sorts of power. The magi come to Herod for directions, because Matthew wants to highlight the opposition between Herod and Jesus and because, I think, he wants to say that for all the magi’s knowledge, in fact, to call them wise is somewhat misleading. They have seen the star, and they want to follow it, but they still don’t know its meaning.

When they reach Bethlehem, they bow down and worship Jesus. And then they go home by another road. We don’t wonder what happened to them after that. Matthew isn’t interested in their journey home; just as Luke is not interested in what happened to the shepherds after their encounter with the infant Jesus.

I’m inclined to imagine that what happened to the magi and the shepherds after Christmas is very much like what happens to us, too. There’s this tremendous build-up: growing excitement, heightened activity, everyone’s just a little bit on edge with the planning, the parties, and all. And then comes Christmas, and inevitably, there’s something of a letdown.

But it’s not just Christmas that has such an effect. No doubt you’ve all experienced it—working toward some goal that was at once elusive, yet seemingly full of promise, even life-changing. Reaching that goal takes all of one’s effort, incredible psychic, spiritual, and sometimes physical energy. Then having achieved it, what’s next?

Perhaps some of you the George Clooney movie “Up in the Air.” His character lived and worked for a single goal, one that he hardly dared articulate to his friends. At the end of the movie he achieved it, but his victory seemed somewhat hollow. There was no one to share it with, no one who cared and the goal itself, 10 million frequent flyer miles, seemed hardly worth the effort.

For many of us, achieving the goals we laid out for ourselves may be something of a game, a way of challenging ourselves to improve our lot, to better our selves, and when we’ve achieved them, we set a new goal. For others, that goal may be our raison d’etre. And when we get there, we have nothing more to look forward to.

What the magi may have had in mind is quite beside the point. According to Matthew they saw the star; they followed it, and when they reached their destination, they returned home by another road. Did their long journey and the encounter at the end change them? Who knows? That’s not really the point. For Matthew, what mattered was to depict these men, come from afar, worshiping the newborn Christ, while others, most notably Herod, sought to kill him.

The magi knew to go home by a different road but what was next for them? Did they set new goals? If so, how? And we, like the magi, have encountered the incarnate Christ again at Christmas. What’s next for us? What are we looking forward to? How do we set those new goals? How do we find our bearings, when the star we were following no longer leads us, and we’ve reached our destination? Where do we go from here? Do we retrace our steps, or embark on a new journey?

These questions are especially compelling, now, with the beginning of a new year. We look forward to what might come, with some apprehension perhaps, but also with a sense that there are infinite possibilities lying ahead. We want to start over anew. We make new year’s resolutions to change our lives.

In the life of our parish, we have also reached an important milestone. After years of conflict and turmoil, uncertainty, many of us finally feel like we have achieved what we were working for the last few years. There seems to be some stability, new energy, and a new rector. Outgoing Senior Warden Sally Phelps and those vestry members who have seen us through so much in the past few years have stepped down. They may feel like they deserve a break, and indeed they do. As a parish, we need to thank them again and again for their hard work, and for having brought us to this place in our common life.

Yet all is not perfect by any means. There is work to be done and it is no time to rest on the journey. We must continue to move forward. Perhaps we do not yet have a clear goal in mind; there is no star leading us forward. The direction may not be clear.

The magi knew where they were going when they left Bethlehem, they were going home. They chose a different route for expediency’s sake. We may lack the clarity they had as they got up from the encounter with Christ but like them, we should be wise enough to choose the better road, for ourselves, and for Grace Church. Let us be like those, as the Psalmist says, whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.

Re-reading old sermons

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In Maryanne Robinson’s Gilead, the elderly Protestant pastor is going through decades of sermons, ostensibly to put them in some sort of order for posterity. His sermons are written on paper. The exercise gives him the opportunity to reflect back on his ministry, on those many years of being with his congregation, on the changes that took place over those decades, and also, to ask about the meaning of it all.

I haven’t preached anywhere near as many sermons as that, and I’ve preached in several different contexts but I do go back and look over what I’ve written before. It is fascinating to do so. I find myself drawn back into the life of the parish in which I preached the sermon and very often into the mood of the time, even if fewer than five years have passed. Rereading those sermons often brings to mind members of those parishes, the struggles they were going through, and, inevitably, those people who have departed this life.

Very often I go back over past sermons in hopes of finding some nugget to include in the sermon I’m currently writing. This week, not having to write a sermon for the First Sunday after Christmas Day, I went back over some I had preached over the years. Given the heightened anxiety over terrorist attacks again, I thought it might be of interest to others:

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And the Word became flesh and lived among us: Christmas Day, 2009

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And the Word became flesh

Christmas Day, 2009

Grace Church

In the beginning was the Word. Have you ever wondered what that might mean? Are words, is a word, ever at the beginning? I remember when I was in college thinking a lot about words. I repeatedly had the experience, I’m sure everyone’s had it, where I couldn’t quite find the word to express the thought I was having. I would be frustrated because my grand idea never sounded as good when I spoke it as when I was thinking it. As I studied foreign languages, and as I became fluent in German, that feeling became even more common. There were times when I wanted to say something in English, and knew the perfect German word, but no English word seemed adequate. Of course the opposite was true as well.

Words are funny things. We need them to communicate; we also need them to think. Philosophers debate, and have debated for thousands of years, whether the written word is more important or less important than the spoken word, and where the unspoken idea fits, as well. I’m sure you know that the word translated in John 1:1 as “word” can mean other things, among them reason, wisdom, even idea. These verses in the Gospel of John are so important in the Christian tradition because they make the connection between us and God in a profound way. It is fitting that the church has long read this gospel on Christmas Day, because it allows us to reflect on the miracle of the incarnation.

For John to begin this way—in the beginning was the word—is to link Christmas to creation. In the beginning was the word draws our attention away from Bethlehem for a moment and to the whole universe. In Genesis 1, God creates by speaking. “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light and God saw that it was good.”

Creation and Christmas are linked, not just because John 1 is the gospel for Christmas Day. Creation and Christmas are linked because Christmas is the feast of the Incarnation, when we celebrate Christ becoming human. The Incarnation, Christmas reminds us that it the universe in which we live was created by God, and that it was created good. The Incarnation and Christmas teach us the important lesson that the world in which we live, the bodies that we inhabit, were created good.

It is a difficult lesson to learn, because so much of our experience seems to deny that goodness. To deny the goodness of creation is one of the oldest heresies in Christianity. It appears to us in various guises. Sometimes, it rejects the material world, even our human bodies as evil and sees salvation as deliverance from this mortal flesh. Sometimes, it appears in another form, when you hear Christians wanting God to destroy everything, punish the world and all that is in it and start over.

In the ancient world, it was inconceivable for many, especially the more learned, to imagine that the divine might become human. By the time of the New Testament, most cultured Greeks and Romans thought the old myths, even the old gods—Zeus, Apollo, and the like—were nothing more than stories that might have a suitable moral. But for these people, the idea that the divine could become flesh and bone was inconceivable. That bias remained in early Christianity, and for many, it remains today. Many Christians are uncomfortable thinking about a Jesus who had emotions, or was ever hungry, or whose body was limited in the ways that our bodies are.

Of course, that is what the story of Mary giving birth to Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem is all about—that God became flesh like we are flesh. In these verses from John, we here both sides of the paradox that is the incarnation. On the one hand, the profound statement that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” On the other hand, that profound statement, “and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. In that paradox is the heart of the Christian message, that the God who created the World is present among us, recreating us, and the world.

Those Christians who, in centuries past and today, have a strong sense of the fallen-ness of human nature and the fallen-ness of creation are not entirely wrong. St. Paul writes in the letter to the Romans “that all creation has been groaning until now.” The English poet John Milton put it another way. When describing Adam and Eve eating the apple in Paradise Lost, Milton writes “Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her Seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe that all was Lost.”

All was not lost. Milton and Paul are trying to express that deep sense that things are not as they should be. It is a sense we all have when we encounter suffering, or death, or any inadequacy in ourselves or in those around us. But in spite of that, creation is good. It must be, for we believe it was created by God, who is good.

Today on Christmas we celebrate the Incarnation, the word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. I began by speaking about the inadequacy of words. Words can hurt, we can easily misunderstand one another; we find it hard to express ourselves as clearly and plainly as we want. Our faith is expressed in words, and very often those words seem inadequate to say what we think they mean; sometimes we wonder whether we really believe what we say. Christians have fought over words, and still do, we fight over the meaning of the creed and over the meaning of scripture.

In the beginning was the Word—the logos, the idea, perhaps even a conversation that God had with Godself. When God created with the Word, when God comes to us in the Word, God reaches out to us to draw us to God. We don’t need to try to comprehend it, because it can’t be. We need only be assured that God is present, in Word and Sacrament, and in the Incarnation.

Muddy feet: Christmas Eve 2009

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Muddy Feet

Christmas Eve

Grace Episcopal Church

December 24, 2009

This Advent, I’ve been blessed by a series of encounters with great art. A group of us were treated to a tour of the Chazen led by parishioner and curator Maria Dale. The tour introduced me to several spectacular images of the Virgin Mary that continue to fascinate me. The next week, Corrie and I spent a day in the Art Institute of Chicago, and much of that time was spent in front of a Caravaggio on loan from England. Then on Sunday the 13th, Tom Dale, Professor of Art History here at the university, gave us a whirlwind survey of images of the Virgin Mary.

Among those images was one that has haunted me ever since. It’s another Caravaggio, this time the Madonna of the Loreto. It’s the image on the service bulletin tonight and was painted by the great, and controversial Italian painter on commission for a chapel in San Agostino in Rome’s Piazza Navona. When it was unveiled, there was considerable controversy. Mary is barefoot and looks like a very ordinary woman, with only the faintest hint of halo to distinguish her from the other people in the picture. Even more scandalous, the dramatic focus of the painting seems to be the dirty feet of the man who is kneeling in homage to her.

A black and white reproduction of that painting is on the cover of tonight’s service bulletin. It’s probably difficult to make out details in the image, but I think you’ll agree that the peasant’s feet seem to be the center of attention. And it was those feet, crusted in dirt, as well as the fact that the Virgin herself is barefoot, that led to the public’s derision of it.

The peasant’s muddy feet. I have no idea why Caravaggio painted this image in the way he did. What little I do know about him leads me to think he was a something of a seventeenth-century equivalent of those contemporary artists who seem most interested in shocking the public. But I think most scholars agree that whatever his motives, and in spite of his scandalous life, Caravaggio was also a man of faith, who sought to express that faith through his life.

The peasant’s muddy feet. His public rejected the image because it did not conform to their ideas of beauty and what was appropriate for the chapel in which the image was to hang. It offended their artistic and religious sensibilities. I doubt any of you would even notice the dirty feet if you were looking at this image where it now hangs. You wouldn’t notice those muddy feet unless your attention were drawn to them by a guide or art historian, and even then, you probably wouldn’t think there was much wrong with the picture. It’s a beautiful painting, masterfully done, in a style we all associate with religious art, with high art.

Now I know that some of you may have muddy boots having braved tonight’s weather to come here, but I suspect most of you are dressed a little better than usual. It’s Christmas Eve after all, a time to celebrate, and most of us want to do things that will make Christmas seem a little different than any other day—Why else would you have come to church tonight? Christmas is out of the ordinary, and we want to mark that in all kinds of ways, with festive dress, great food and wine, and the like.

As part of that celebration, but only part, we have gathered here. Some of us for the first time, many of us returning here from the places we now live, and others who come here most Sundays. We come to connect with our past. We come also to connect with our faith, or to reconnect, or perhaps, we come even in search of or grasping for faith. All of those reasons, and many others have brought us here.

We come here, tonight, in the midst of an uncertain and changing world, looking for stability, and certainty. We yearn for the old familiar ways. We want to be reassured that in spite of everything going on in our lives and in our world, for a few minutes at least, for an hour or so, we can push away all of our doubts and fears, our pain and suffering, and relish once again, the lessons and carols that we have heard so many times before. We are here to celebrate again the birth of Jesus Christ.

We come out of duty, out of habit, and out of hope. Like the shepherds, we come hoping that we will encounter Jesus Christ, the savior of the world, in word and sacrament. But in spite of that hope, we probably do not expect to be transformed as the shepherds were, as Joseph and Mary were. Our expectations may be low, if only because it’s all so familiar to us.

This aura of familiarity surrounds the great mystery of our faith—that God has become human, that 2000 years ago, in a crude manger in a stable for animals, God became incarnate in a tiny baby. That great mystery is so incomprehensible, so beyond our grasp, that over the centuries we have done everything in our power to protect ourselves from its explosive power.

In the twenty-first century, it has come to this. We celebrate Christmas with blow-up Santas in our front yards, with nativity scenes that include Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer and Frosty the Snowman alongside the shepherds and magi. We celebrate the birth of Christ in an orgy of consumerism and then pause this evening, to acknowledge for a few minutes what we ought to be celebrating this season.

We want to bundle our celebration of Christmas in a package of sweet consumeristic nostalgia. We want to worship the Christ child, but we want to do so on our terms—to approach the manger with eyes veiled and ears closed. We surround ourselves with kitsch and extravagance to shield us from the simple, wonderful power of this story.

We come to hear the old familiar story and sing the familiar carols. We come full of nostalgia and perhaps hope. And many of us, all of us come with dark places in our lives—with concerns, doubts, fears. We come with muddy feet, if you will, muddy feet that we hope no one else will notice and that we try to forget.

In fact, Christmas is muddy and messy. It’s supposed to be. Luke tells a story that is about God becoming human, God becoming one of us, God taking on flesh that is just like ours, a body like ours with all of its messiness. Because we all know, bodies are messy.

I’m reminded again and again when I talk with people about how hard it is for us to accept the doctrine of the Incarnation—that God became flesh, that Jesus is the Son of God. There’s something about it that tends to bother us. Many of us get caught up in the biology of it, or in the difficulty of believing that the divine can become concrete in such a way. It seems like Luke’s story is written in such a way as to offend modern sensibilities. If we ask the obvious questions, our faith might shatter, so we push them away and remain content with the story.

Jesus came among us, not as a ruler but as a baby. He came to a poor peasant woman of Galilee and a poor carpenter, a couple that was engaged, not married. The shepherds who heard the angels’ message were of even lower status. They came from the fields, just as they were, muddy feet, tattered clothes, and all.

They came to worship, as we do. And that’s our mistake. We want to understand, categorize, make sense of the story. But when we do so we lose sight of the mystery of it—the mystery and wonder of God becoming flesh and living among us. That great mystery cannot be comprehended, and yes, our only response should be to worship.

And that is why this story, this night cannot be contained by our feeble attempts to celebrate it. We cannot hope to understand the incarnation. We cannot grasp what God becoming flesh might mean. But it is not ours to accept or reject. It is ours to ponder and treasure, to puzzle over for our whole lives. How might we respond to the love of God that we meet here, in this place, on Christmas? It is a love that accepts us whoever we are, however we are, wherever we are, muddy feet and all.

Let us put aside all of the trappings and the trimmings, the decorations, the kitsch, the extravagance, and like Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds, encounter Christ Jesus as a babe in a manger. Let us open our hearts to ponder this mystery, of God become flesh. Let us also, as we approach the altar encounter the love of Christ, encounter Christ himself in the bread and wine of the Eucharistic feast.

May his love enter our hearts, transforming us, so that we might show forth the love of Jesus Christ in all that we do, this day, and forever more. Amen.

Fear Not: Advent 3, Year C

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Advent 3, Year C

Grace Episcopal Church

December 13, 2009

What is it you fear most? Death, debilitating illness, loss of your job? Homelessness? Are there things you are so afraid of that you cannot even think of them? And how do you deal with those fears? Do you examine and analyze them? Or do you push them away, repress them, ignore them, or try to develop ways of avoiding or not noticing them?

For those of us who grew up in the fifties and sixties, we can remember fears of nuclear war. The threat was always there, lurking under the surface. Occasionally it broke through our ordinary lives, during the Cuban missile crisis, for example. But we came to live with it as a reality and as a backdrop to everything we did. More recently, the fear of terrorist attack has played some part in our lives; though again, that fear has receded dramatically since 2001.

Still, it sometimes seems as if fear is everywhere. Certainly, those of us who have been driving in Madison the past few days know the experience of ordinary, common activities becoming fear-inspiring. But it goes much beyond the lingering effects of this week’s snow storm. If like me, you tend not to pay to close attention to the news, it’s because you don’t really want to know what’s going on in the world, it’s all just too scary and depressing.

It’s often the case that when the world seems to be a threatening place, that the future is uncertain, people turn to religion. In fact one common refrain by detractors of religion is that religion both preys upon people’s fears, and survives by inciting fear. People turn to religion when or because they fear death, so it is said. Many people argue that religion creates supporters by inciting fear in people, fear of damnation, fear of hell.

Among the fears that religions, specifically Christianity, (or some forms of it) exploit, is the fear of the end of the world. Advent confronts us with that fear as we hear lessons that promise destruction and the second coming. Such fear drives the perennial popularity of movies like the recent 2012 that try to depict the future according to some religious text, in this case from the Mayan tradition. There was also the recent phenomenon of the Left Behind series that sold millions upon millions of copies. There is biblical precedent for such beliefs; we have heard over the past two weeks imagery of death, destruction, and rebirth that was used by Jews and Christians to make sense of the violent and oppressive world in which they found themselves.

John the Baptizer was an apocalyptic prophet. He foretold doom and destruction, and we hear part of his message in today’s gospel:

“YOU BROOD OF VIPERS! WHO WARNED YOU TO FLEE FROM THE WRATH TO COME? BEAR FRUITS WORTHY OF REPENTANCE…. EVEN NOW THE AX IS LYING AT THE ROOT OF THE TREES; EVERYONE THAT DOES NOT BEAR GOOD FRUIT IS CUT DOWN AND THROWN INTO THE FIRE.”

John preached what used to be called “fire and brimstone” sermons, promising hell to everyone who didn’t repent of their sins and amend their lives. John is one of those biblical figures toward whom few contemporary Episcopalians feel any sympathy. We like our religion nice and tidy, and usually not too emotional. We certainly don’t want to be pressured, whether it be to repent, or to give money. That’s all too unseemly. And many of us came from Christian traditions where, like John the Baptizer, preachers pulled out all of the stops in order to effect conversions. Some of us may still carry emotional scars from those day, scars that make it more difficult for us to find our way in faith.

And even if you come from a different religious background, or even none, you may have read Jonathan Edwards famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” where he describes “natural men held in the hand of God over the pit of hell” or if not that, perhaps you recall James Joyce’s wonderful description of a sermon preached at a retreat in The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The notion of religion, of Christianity inciting fear and wreaking havoc on the psyches of individuals, and even whole communities, that notion is something with which we are all too familiar and perhaps turned off by.

So we hear the story of John the Baptizer and we hope to get over it and through it, and to the much better story of the birth of Jesus, which we are still waiting for. Yet Luke provides us with detail concerning the Baptizer’s message that shades the image of John as a fearsome prophet.

John delivered those frightening words, “The axe is laid to the tree, everyone who does not bear fruit will be cut off and cast into the fire.” We hear those words and imagine ourselves terrified, caught between fear of eternal punishment, the wrath of almighty God, and our own weaknesses and sin. We wonder about John’s listeners, how did they respond? Why did they come out into the wilderness to hear him preach?

We don’t notice what Luke tells us about those listeners. They don’t fall on their knees in terror, begging forgiveness. They don’t run away in fear. They engage the prophet, they ask him, “what then should we do?” Unlike the televangelist or revivalist, John doesn’t answer, “accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.”

No, John gives his listeners advice. He tells them what to do. But his advice isn’t the obvious. He doesn’t tell those who ask him to come out and join him in a counter-cultural movement. Instead, he gives them rather straightforward, and not at all that radical advice. “If you have two coats, share with someone who has none. If you have food, do likewise.” That’s what John says to the crowds, to all those who ask. Luke has other people, specific groups come to John and ask the same question. And to them, John responds in much the same way. Tax collectors ask him what they should do, and he replies, “collect more than the amount prescribed to you.” And to soldiers, John says, “Do not extort money from anyone, be content with your wages.”

Now, as you probably know tax collectors and soldiers in the Roman Empire were not simply government workers. Tax collectors made their income by taking a percentage of what they collected. Soldiers supplemented their meager wages by extracting money from the people they protected. In other words, they were both part of a deeply oppressive, and profoundly unjust system. Yet John did not demand they leave that system.

Instead, he gave them relatively simple and easy-to-follow advice. Don’t game the system, he said. Do what you can. In fact, it’s not a message of fear at all, but rather of hope. He gives to his listeners a way of living in a corrupt and evil society. The only options are not to either flee from it or to make your peace with it. Instead, you can live within it and do our best. It’s a message many of us might find appealing as we try to make our own way in a difficult world. How many of us find us in situations, in jobs that present us with difficult alternatives, in jobs that are dehumanizing or exploitative, making decisions that are far removed from the ethic of love espoused by Jesus.

Our response is often to ignore the ethical implications of those decisions, to say to ourselves that what matters in the end is keeping the job and taking care of our families. But such decisions, such jobs, can eat away at us. In such cases, John offers us a way through. Do what you can, act as justly, as ethically as possible in this corrupt and evil system.

John’s preaching offers us one set of messages for this third Sunday of Advent. Caught between God’s judgment and the ethical demands of the gospel, we waver uncertain. There is yet another, very different message in today’s lessons. Paul, writing to the Philippians says, do not worry about anything. The rich language of Zechariah includes the advice, “Do not fear, Oh Zion.” More importantly, each time an angel appears in the gospel of Luke, whether announcing the coming of John the Baptizer, or the birth of Jesus, or even the resurrection, each time, the angel says, “Fear not.”

Our faith is not a faith created or sustained by fear. Rather, our faith is a faith that has no fear. Our God offers us salvation, love, not death and destruction, we need not worry about what might happen to us tomorrow, at death, or when Christ returns in majesty.

Fear not, the angel said, fear not the prophet Zechariah said. As we go forth from this place, let us go, rejoicing in the coming of Christ who offers us hope and love in a harsh and fearful world.

Advent 2, Year C

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Blessed be the Lord

Advent 2, yr C

December 6, 2009

I sometimes think Advent is like being in a time warp. If you pay close attention to the readings, and the season, it’s very disorienting. First, there’s the fact that Advent is a season about two different comings—the coming of Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ, and also about the second coming, Christ coming in majesty. Are we looking backward two thousand years, or looking ahead to who knows how many years? Or are we looking forward just two and a half weeks to Christmas Eve? Which is it?

And then there’s the reality that the world around us is in the midst of Christmas, while we are still in Advent. Advent and Christmas are two quite distinct seasons of the church year. In Advent, we wear purple, a penitential color, while Christmas is festive white, for celebration. We shouldn’t even be saying “Merry Christmas” until Christmas Eve.

If that weren’t enough, Luke adds another layer of time for us in today’s lessons. We are in year C of the three-year lectionary cycle, so we are reading for most of the year from the Gospel of Luke. Luke was written later than the gospel of Mark, which was the focal gospel last year, in year B. Like Matthew, Luke builds on Mark, relies on its overall framework, but adds considerable material. Even more importantly, Luke was not content with only writing a gospel. He wrote what was in essence a two-volume work that includes the book of Acts, and tells the story of Jesus Christ and the early church that is carefully constructed. For example, Luke uses a geographical framework that takes the story from Bethlehem, to Galilee, to Jerusalem, and ultimately to Rome and the world.

Luke is also concerned to connect the story of Jesus Christ and the early church with themes from the Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Bible. Nowhere is that more true than in Luke’s version of the story of Jesus’ birth. There are themes, images, and motifs that return us to the Hebrew Bible again. The song of Mary for example, the magnificat, is by and large a reworking of the song of Hannah from I Samuel, which she sang after giving birth to her longed for son, Samuel.

These themes and resonances come out especially in the story of John the Baptist. Luke depicts him as the last of the Hebrew prophets, dressed as they dressed, delivering a message straight from their works. But perhaps the strongest example of the connection between past and present, between God’s working in the history of Israel and God’s working in the present is the song of Zechariah, which we read together a few minutes ago: “Blessed is the Lord the God of Israel, he has come to his people and set them free.”

These words of Zechariah were the first words he spoke after first hearing that his wife would give birth nine months earlier. It is his response when his son John is circumcised, and one can imagine someone thinking for those nine months of just what to say if he ever got his voice back.

In fact, the words are Luke’s creation and demonstrate Luke’s powers as a writer and poet. Luke ties the birth of John to salvation history, to the story of God’s mighty acts in saving God’s people.

If you are familiar with the Daily Office, especially with the service of Morning Prayer, and I would encourage you to familiarize yourself with it; you would recognize the Song of Zechariah as one of the canticles that are recited or sung on a regular basis. It was in that context that I became familiar with those words, and other wonderful biblical hymns, like the Song of Simeon. As is so often the case, when we repeat things often enough we can memorize them. Sometimes memorization means that we never pay attention to the words, but it can also mean that those words become engraved in our memory, and come back to us often and at random.

Our lessons today, and throughout Advent, are full of such familiar words. “For he is like a refiner’s fire” or “And he shall purify” from the Malachi reading, and of course, Handel’s Messiah. We know them from Messiah but barely notice what they are saying. “Who can endure the day of his coming and who can stand when he appears? The images Malachi presents us with seem full of violence and the promise of the destruction of God’s enemies. Even the words of Zechariah seem directed at the same end. God promised to save God’s people from their enemies. Violence and destruction lurk just beneath the text.

And of course, there is violence to in the imagery used by John the Baptizer. John leaves the settled area of Palestine, leaves Jerusalem for the wilderness, where he takes potshots at the culture he has abandoned and threatens the coming of destruction from God. He demands repentance and promises a world upended by divine intervention: “every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill made low.”

Violence, too, lurks just beyond the world of the text. Luke takes great care to place his narrative in the political context of the Roman Empire. He is writing after Rome has brutally suppressed the Jewish revolt and destroyed the Temple. Luke is writing with those terrible events in mind and one of his goals is to offer an alternative. That may be why he so carefully and completely delineates the powers arrayed against John, and by extension against. He lists seven names, beginning with the emperor Tiberius, and extending downward to Pilate and Herod, and including in the mix the high priest. Seven powers challenged by a voice, crying in the wilderness.

Rome promises violence and oppression, Zechariah hopes for a God who will deliver God’s people, will save them from their enemies. The nature of that salvation isn’t completely clear. Perhaps it will be violent, but the end will be radically different. Zechariah’s hymn ends with the hope that God’s tender compassion will come down from and how and that God will “to guide our feet into the way of peace.” In fact, peace is one of Luke’s central themes. He uses the word more often than all of the other gospels combined.

I couldn’t help thinking of that promise of peace this week. It is a sentiment we hear repeatedly this time of year, the words of the angels in Luke’s gospel easily roll off our tongues “Peace on earth, good will toward all.” Yet we live in a world in which there is no peace; our nation continues to be at war, increasing its military presence in Afghanistan with no end in sight and apparently no real plan nor real hope for bringing stability and order to that part of the world. Apparently, we fight because we fight.

It’s hard for us to take peace seriously in such a world, it’s hard to believe that God’s in-breaking into the world might bring peace. It’s hard to even imagine what it might be like for us to have a faith like Zechariah’s. In some ways, we might understand John a little better. We might imagine ourselves, or a different version of ourselves, getting so tired of everything—the religious establishment, the political establishment, a culture that focuses on White House party crashers and adulterous golfers rather than the intractable problems that face us as a society and a world community—we can imagine getting so sick and tired of everything that we go off into the woods, or go crazy, and start preaching on a street corner or screaming from that wilderness that it’s all going to come to an end.

We might even think that John is somehow more faithful and more responsible than Zechariah, his father. Last week, I talked about the irrelevance and futility of lighting advent candles in the growing December darkness. I spoke of the difficulty of paying attention to that light, of how hard it was to discern the signs of the times.

Zechariah saw, and knew. In the baby that was born to him and Elizabeth in their old age, he recognized the dawn from on high breaking in and he expressed his hope and faith that God would deliver God’s people. His hope was not a hope limited to himself, to his family, or even to his religious and ethnic group. His hope of peace and salvation ultimately extended to the whole world, even to the universe. Such a hope is the hope of Advent. Such hope should be our hope now and always.

Signs of the Times: Advent 1, Year C

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The Signs of the Times

Advent 1, Yr C

November 29, 2009

 

There were many things that I never got used to in fifteen years of living in the South. Grits, for example. I first tasted grits when I visited Corrie’s parents just after our engagement. There was this mess of off-white something on my breakfast plate the first morning I was there. Politely, I had a spoonful. Tasteless, with the texture of wallpaper paste, I swallowed. It was the last taste of grits I had for many years. I avoided them assiduously, even refusing them vocally in a buffet line in Charleston, leading to a delightful interchange with Natalie Dupree, the doyenne of Southern cooking.

In fact, the list of things about the south I never grew accustomed to is quite long. If pressed, I might be able to come up with a similar list of things I liked. But one of the oddest things was the way Southerners approached, or didn’t approach, winter. As a native Midwesterner, with a dozen years in Massachusetts under my belt; I knew what to do when October came around: You got out the storm windows, you made sure you knew where the snow shovel was, and all of your winter clothes, and coats, and the like. You should have gotten the car winterized. In the south, none of that is necessary.

In the south, in South Carolina, where we lived for the last decade, when November came around, life continued pretty much like it had in the previous months. In fact, often by late October or November, it was actually cool enough that you could enjoy the outdoors after a summer of 90+ degree weather.

The only times people actually gave a thought to what winter might bring were when weather forecasters promised snow or ice. Then, everyone got into high gear, making sure that all of the grocery stores were sold out of bread and milk, long before the first snowflake or ice pellet appeared in the sky.

As a somewhat snobbish northerner, I came to think that the climate had shaped Southern culture and character in negative ways. Not needing the annual discipline of careful preparation for a bitter winter, many Southerners tend to approach all of life with a somewhat lackadaisical, carefree attitude. What are the consequences down the road of some decision we make now? Who cares, we’ll deal with that when the time comes. Don’t worry, be happy.

They may be hardnosed businessmen and women, but if it’s a really nice day, many would be inclined to take it off for a round of golf or a day at the beach. One could call it “flip-flop” culture; the tendency to wear overly casual clothes, summer clothes deep into the winter. Of course, one need only drive down University Avenue once to see flip-flop culture’s advance north—as students everywhere seem to have adopted that mode of footwear.

It’s hard work to get ready for winter. I’m beginning to remember that, even though we are renting. We don’t own a house and have all of those preparations. I did, finally put on the storm doors over the weekend. Hey, don’t criticize me, these were the first two solid, consecutive days off I’ve had since moving here. We’ve got a cord of wood laid in; we’ve been out shopping for new winter coats, winter clothes, boots, and the like. I think we’re ready, but not psychologically.

We think about the hard work of getting ready for Christmas—the shopping, the party planning, the decorating, and we may think that when we come to church, we can leave all of that hard work behind us and enjoy another year’s worth of Advent music and upbeat sermons. But Advent is hard work too. Advent is all about preparation, about getting ready. But it’s about more than that. More than that, it’s also about paying attention.

In today’s gospel, Jesus warns his disciples to be on the lookout. Be on guard, be alert, Jesus cautions his listeners. Today’s reading comes from what scholars call the little apocalypse; a sermon that is common to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in which Jesus tells his disciples about coming events. It’s called an apocalypse, because it, like the book of revelation and parts of Daniel, including the section we read last Sunday, focus on events that are promised to take place in the near future.

Now there’s a lot I could say about apocalyptic, I once taught a course on the topic, but what’s important for us to understand is that apocalyptic presupposes a cataclysmic end to the world as we know it. It posits an eternal battle between the forces of good and evil, and in the end, a final victory of good over evil. Most scholars argue that in spite of all of the predictions that seem to linger in apocalyptic literature, it’s actually more focused on what has already happening, or what is happening right as the author is writing.

In fact, most of us are probably uncomfortable with apocalyptic language and unless we’ve attended church services regularly over the years, and paid attention to the readings, chances are we’re wondering what this gospel lesson has to do with the coming of Christmas. Where’s the joy? Where’s the party?

In fact, Advent is about two comings. Yes, we look forward to the incarnation, the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem; but of course, when we do that, we are really looking back to events that took place more than two millennia ago. Advent is not just about preparing us for Christmas. It is also about the second coming, the coming of Jesus Christ at the end of the age, an event we all proclaim our faith in every time we recite the Nicene creed.

The symbol we use to mark the first Sunday of Advent, a single candle, is a reminder to us of all that Advent means. We may miss its significance in a well-lighted church, but by itself, one advent candle shines brightly in the darkness. It reminds us of the darkening world in which we live, as the days grow shorter and we near the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. But it takes effort to notice it; we are easily distracted away from that single candle toward other things.

Jesus warns his disciples about being distracted, and about missing the meaning of the signs they are seeing: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” On first blush, the language and the imagery may startle us. We may be inclined to dismiss it as nothing more than another example of apocalyptic language that has no place in our lives. Yet the resonances are real, and it may be that by dismissing it as apocalyptic, we lose sight of the real power behind the words.

“Signs in the sun, moon, and stars, nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves?” This sounds a great deal like the very world we live in, a world in which we are reminded again and again of the destructive forces of nature, and the extent to which we humans have brought destruction to our world. Our climate is changing; the scarce natural resources from which we live are vanishing at an alarming rate; our food supply is endangered by all manner of threat. But for the most part, we go about our daily lives, oblivious to the future, oblivious to the myriad ways in which our decisions every day contribute to ultimate global catastrophe.

Those problems seem quite distant from us. Instead, we focus on our own concerns, our own lives, and however much we might pay lip service to the world around us, we do everything in our power to keep all those fears, all that uncertainty, all that change as far away from us and our families as possible.

But my brothers and sisters, think about it for a second. Such attitudes fly in the face of the evidence around us. At some point, our personal hopes and expectations are going to meet up against the cold, hard, reality of the world. Try as we might, be it by willful ignorance, by blinding ourselves through entertainment, or relentless consumption, we might try to keep the world at bay. But it has its way of breaking in upon us, reminding us that all our efforts at avoiding pain and suffering will come to nought.

But it still breaks in upon us. The world surprises us at every turn. We have lit one faint candle, a sign of hope in a darkening world. There may be no clearer symbol of the meaning of this season of Advent than to light the advent wreath. In this time of the year, as we move toward the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year, we defy the inevitability of our darkening world by lighting candles each week. We light candles, proclaiming our faith that in spite of the darkening world around us, we look for the coming of the Light of the World.

Our every tendency may be to ignore the suffering in the world around us. There’s nothing we can do about it; the problems seem so great and intractable. Our impulse is to circle the wagons, retreat inside our homes, perhaps even inside of our gated communities and there to live life to the fullest, perhaps assuaging our guilt with an extra donation of money in this season of giving. But our faith does not let us do that.

Think about that candle again. Think about the irrelevance, the meaninglessness of lighting a single candle in the growing darkness of December. How can that dispel the gloom of a winter’s day? Yet we do it, each year. Each year we proclaim our faith in the Light of the World. We proclaim our faith that our redemption is near as we light the candles of the Advent Wreath. A simple, insignificant act like that should give us hope that all of our actions, no matter how small and insignificant may also contribute to the redemption of the world.

Proper 29, Year B

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Christ the King

Last Pentecost, Yr B

November 22, 2009

 

 

I’ve long been fascinated by the power of visual images. For some odd reason, that power always comes to mind when I reflect on the texts for the last Sunday of the Church Year, what has come to be known as “Christ the King.” In all three years of the lectionary cycle, the texts we read paint vivid pictures of the kingship of God, and of Jesus Christ. Over the centuries, the rich and evocative biblical imagery of Christ or God ruling in majesty as a king has inspired equally rich and evocative visual images.

The one I’ve been reminded of all week is “Ancient of Days” by William Blake. Blake is one of those historical figures who is a perennial focus of fascination and debate. His religious views were unorthodox; he was a visionary, a visual artist, and a poet. The print depicts a strong man, with white hair and a long, flowing white beard. He seems to be surrounded by, and standing on the sun. He is bent over on one knee, with an arm stretched out. His fingers are splayed in a 90 degree angle and from them emanate two shafts of light, perhaps even a compass, as he creates the universe.

Blake is depicting another visionary’s image. We heard today from the Book of Daniel the description of the “Ancient one… his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence.”

In fact, the reason we heard these verses read was not so much for the ancient of days, but for what is translated as “one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven” who was given dominion and glory and kingship. What is translated here as “one like a human being” reads literally in the Aramaic, “the son of man” and of course that title comes to be used in the NT of Jesus Christ. Much of the imagery in Daniel is repeated in the reading from the Book of Revelation.

A copy of Blake’s print leaned against the back of the rood screen up until last week. I don’t know how it got there or why, nor why it was removed, though I suspect its absence has something to do with the bishop’s presence here last Sunday night. Perhaps no one wanted to give him any ideas.

Images like these exercise immense power on our psyches. We are still, even the most sophisticated and intellectual of us, prone to occasionally conjure up images for ourselves of God with white hair and a beard, in a flowing white robe. On the surface such images may seem harmless, but often they can be fraught with danger. If God is an old man with white hair and a beard, then we may be prone in our relationship to God, to act toward God like we might act toward an old man with white hair and a beard.

This is even more true when it comes to other images, like kingship. Even though few of us have ever lived under a monarchy, and what passes for monarchy these days bears little resemblance to ancient monarchies, our hymns, psalms, and liturgy, is full of language of kingship: Today’s psalm reads “The Lord is king, he has girded himself with strength… Mightier than the breakers of the sea, mightier is the Lord who dwells on high.” To think of God as King seems obvious. When we think of God, we think of power and might, a vast distance between ourselves and the deity. We imagine ourselves bowing before him. Of course that’s a gesture full of meaning itself, as we heard last week of the outrage on the right when President Obama bowed to the emperor of Japan.

Both of these images—the ancient of days, and God as king resonate powerfully and seductively. Yet there are dangers when we use such language of God. You may have noted that I used the male pronoun consistently when I spoke of the Ancient of Days and King. I did so deliberately, because both of those images are tied to masculinity. What would you have thought if instead of speaking of God as King, I had begun speaking of God as Queen? No doubt many of you would have been uncomfortable, perhaps some of you would have smirked, even.

The point is that such images are used to say something about God, but in the end, they are inadequate to fully describe God, and it is relatively easy to elevate the image in our mind, to a reality. Thus children often think of God as an old man with a white beard, but as we grow older and mature, we come to see the inadequacy of that image. If we don’t we may in fact fall into the sin of idolatry.

The inadequacy of the image of kingship is glaringly obvious in our gospel passage. Pilate asks Jesus a straightforward question, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus responds finally with those famous words, “my kingship is not of this world.” It’s hard for us to hear these words freshly because of our own history, and indeed our culture’s history, with these concepts. It seems to be a rather obvious and clear distinction between secular and spiritual between political kingship and divine kingship. We tend to blame Pilate, and the Jewish authorities for misunderstanding what Jesus was about. But as we’ve seen this fall while reading through the Gospel of Mark, contemporary notions of messiah-ship were focused on the political, that the Messiah would deliver the Jewish people from the Roman occupation and would restore the fortunes of the Jewish people.

What’s important to recognize is that in the synoptic gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, when Jesus rejected the notion of the Messiah as a political deliverer, he was not rejecting the political implications of messiah-ship or indeed of divine kingship. If God is Ruler, there can be no secular ruler. And of course in the Roman Empire, by proclaiming the kingdom of God, the reign or rule of God, Jesus was explicitly challenging Roman rule. That’s why there was so much conflict between the Roman empire and Christianity. In Rome, as the notion of the divine emperor developed, there was no room for another ideology that proclaimed a different ruler or emperor.

All of this may seem rather far from our twenty-first century lives, but it’s not. The temptation to equate the nation with God is a persistent human tendency that has profound, long-lasting, and dire consequences.

Nowhere is this more true than in contemporary America, where many Christians view the United States as uniquely ordained, blessed and protected by God. Perhaps it is especially common in the South, where churches advertise a special patriotic service on the Sunday before Memorial Day or the one nearest the 4th of July. Instead of hymns of praise, God Bless America, My Country tis of thee, and the like would be sung. There’s often a pageant, and the promise of a color guard, or military presence in the service.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s wrong to be patriotic. It isn’t. It’s wrong to allow patriotism to take the place of religious faith or to equate patriotism with faith in Jesus Christ. To do so, is to commit the sin of idolatry and even worse to see one’s enemies then, as enemies of God, as satanic. Apparently, it has gotten so bad in some places that conservative Christians are advocating praying for the death of our president, because to them he so clearly is going against God’s will. They are apparently using a verse from a psalm as sanction for such desires.

What does it mean to think of Christ as King and ruler of all? What does it mean to imagine God reigning in majesty over the universe? These are political images so it is impossible not to draw out political implications from them. Typically when Christians have done so, they have tended to equate the political system in which they find themselves in light of that political imagery. But we live in a democracy, not a monarchy or empire.

There’s a profound irony at the heart of Christ the King Sunday. It is an irony expressed in Jesus’ words, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” Our king Jesus Christ does not ride in majesty, he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. The purple in which he is clad is a purple that is mocked. The crown he wears is a crown of thorns. He has no palace or throne, but as he said “Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Over the centuries, and even in our own day, Christians have defended and legitimized their power, wealth, and oppression of others with the language and imagery of the bible, of Christ reigning in majesty. But as Jesus told his disciples repeatedly in the Gospel of Mark, and as the gospel of Mark has reminded us all these weeks of the fall, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”

Our ruler is a servant, not a king. His power is the weakness of the cross, not of weapons or armies. His kingdom is not of this world, and if we are his disciples, we should hope and trust in his love, not in the power and might of any government. Thanks be to God.