Writing What I See

Tag: faith

  • Crisis

    Lent 2, Year A                                                                              Ps. 121; Jn 3:1-17

    March 19-20, 2011         

    You may have heard Karl Barth’s famous quote that a preacher should prepare sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, but this week, that has been difficult to do. We have beautifully comforting readings in Psalm 121 and in the famous proclamation of God’s love for the world in John 3:16. But the images going through my mind this week, in the light of the headlines screaming about the “Crisis in Japan,” were of the people whose whole towns had been suddenly swept away by the sea. I kept picturing them lifting up their eyes to the hills, begging for help from God. How would they hear the words of our psalmist that “The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; it is he who shall keep you safe”? And then, when I read John’s metaphor about the wind blowing where it chooses, “but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes,” the immediate image that went through my mind was not of the Holy Spirit, but of invisible clouds of radiation, the unseen, uncontrollable menace wafting into homes and schools. How does the Good News of Scripture speak to a crisis of such haunting magnitude?         

    Sister Joan Chittister writes that crisis “is the junction of the ordinary and the cataclysmic, the place in life where change comes with a vengeance.”[1] Crisis is a turning point, a moment or series of moments out of which we cannot emerge unchanged. We have all dealt with the quiet desperation of personal crisis, such as life-changing illness, divorce, job loss, or the death of a loved one—but the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan symbolize and magnify traumatic change for us. The earth breaking into pieces beneath our feet, the sea pouring onto fields and towns at 100 miles per hour, a ferocious meltdown of atomic forces beyond our control—these are visible crises played out for the whole world to see. Japan, for better or for worse, will never be the same. And the world stands in witness to this violent, unwanted transformation.

    Crisis frightens us because it forces us to act and to change. As Bishop Westcott wrote, “’As we wake or sleep, we grow strong or we grow weak … and at last some crisis shows us what we have become.’”[2]  God does not shield us from crisis, nor do I believe that God subjects us to crisis as correction or punishment. What today’s Psalm tells us, however, is that God “keeps” us in the midst of crisis, that no matter how change shatters us, the transformed self that emerges will be the same beloved self that has always been the “apple of God’s eye.” While that might sound like puny consolation to someone who has just had his heart torn out, those of us watching the present crisis in Japan from afar are still whole enough to reflect on what it means to belong to God. Over and over again in Psalm 121, the Psalmist repeats that God “keeps” us, that God “watches over” us. In the same way that your parents’ love sustained you as a young child, creating and shaping the sense of self that you will keep all the rest of your life, God’s love shapes each of us, “watching” us, “keeping” us, surrounding and molding us.

    As we know from those tragic news reports from foreign orphanages, a baby who is unloved, untouched, left alone in a crib, will shrivel up and die, at least on the inside. As the Russian linguist Bakhtin writes, “’I myself cannot be the author of my own value, just as I cannot lift myself by my own hair.’”[3]The Good News of Psalm 121 is that our souls can never shrivel and die, because God’s unfailing love gives us our self-worth, our priceless value. Crisis might bring change and pain—and even death of this physical body—but God will not cease to preserve and keep us, as the beloved individuals that we are.

    Of course, Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in our Gospel lesson points out this confusion that we have between the body and the self. When Jesus talks about spiritual birth into the new life of God’s Kingdom, poor Nicodemus scratches his head over how someone could be physically born two times. The “life” that matters for God, however, is not the life that begins as we come into the world from our mothers’ wombs, but it is life as a child of God, life lived in the depth and breadth of God’s hands. We are who we are because of God’s love for us, and that is the one thing that will never change.         

    “How do we know for sure that God loves us?” you might ask. It certainly doesn’t look like God loves us sometimes, when we look around at our lives in this dangerous and messed-up world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son … so that the world might be saved through him.” St. John tells us in our Gospel that Jesus, lifted up on the Cross, is the sign of God’s love for us. I was interested to be reminded this week that, for John, “the world” is a negative term, referring to those who turn against Jesus and God.[4] The Cross is therefore a sign of God’s love for all people, even for those who hide from God. Even more strangely, Jesus is not just “lifted up” on the Cross so that we can all see him better, but Jesus is “lifted up” on the Cross in the sense of being exalted.[5] For John, Jesus is glorified not only in his Resurrection but also in his crucifixion–the very shame and weakness of the crucifixion show forth the Glory of God. In the Cross, then, crisis itself is glorified—crisis becomes not the undoing of the world but the saving of it. Not only is the Cross a time of crisis for Jesus, but it becomes a sign of our supreme crisis as well: it indeed “shows us what we have become.”

    In verse 19, right after our Gospel passage, John writes, “And this is the judgment [or in Greek, the “crisis,”] that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.” God’s love, poured out abundantly, yet illogically, upon the dark world, puts us all before a painful and inevitable decision: to embrace that love and the kind of lives that it implies, or to turn away from it. As preacher David Lose writes: “God’s love — surprising, all encompassing, unasked for and undeserved — is also given unconditionally. God loves us, that is, whether we like it or not. In the face of that kind of love, we will likely either yield to God’s love or run away screaming, for no one can remain neutral to such extravagance.”[6]         

    Humor me by imagining something strange and perhaps unsettling for a moment: Imagine God’s love—God’s unfailing and sustaining love—to be like the invisible fog of radiation spewing from that broken nuclear power plant in Japan. Think about its unstoppable yet hidden power. Picture it blowing where it will, completely free of human control. Imagine the mutations that its presence brings, the painful changes that it must wreak on all of the wicked ways of the world. Instead of bubbling deep within concrete towers, though, imagine this strange Love stirring and leaking from a broken man on a Cross. In that man, at regular intervals, it explodes like a ticking time-bomb out into the world, transforming life as we know it, covering us with joy, surely, yet stripping away all of the dark places in which we like to hide. We do not know when the final explosion will occur. As a worker beneath that seething Cross, will you stay on through the crisis? Like the 50-some brave employees who remained behind at the reactors in Japan, risking their lives when everyone else fled, will you brave transformation by remaining to do the work of love that you have been given by the Crucified One? For such is the crisis placed before each of us who set our eyes upon the Cross Raised High.

    [1] Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams, Uncommon Gratitude (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010), 136.

    [2] Ibid., 138.

    [3] Patricia K. Tull, “Preaching Psalms,” Chapter 1, unpublished manuscript, 5.

    [4] Gail R. O’Day, The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke, John (vol. IX), 552.

    [5] Ibid.

    [6] David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?tab=4&alt=1.

  • A Story to Break your Heart: A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

    March 2011

    Do you remember the instant in which you first knew that you would die? I was about nine or ten years old, and sitting in the bathtub. I don’t know what triggered the moment of morbid reflection—I was perfectly healthy—but I clearly remember the sight of my skinny little leg bones under the water and the crinkled, water-logged skin on my hands, and the rising and falling of breath in my chest, and the horrible, unthinkable thought that exploded without warning into my mind: “There will come a time when I will be no more. And there is nothing that I can do to prevent that day.” Suddenly, a tiny bit of the carefree nonchalance of childhood vanished down the bathtub drain for me.

    Seventeenth-century Roman Catholic priest Jacques Bossuet masterfully expresses the horrified wonder that we all feel at the fragility of our existence: “How insignificant we are …. Only the length of time of my life makes me different than that which never was … I come into life with the law that I must leave it, I come to act out my role, I come to show myself to others; afterwards, I must disappear.”[1] Indeed, we are but dust, and to dust we shall each return.         

    On Ash Wednesday, we repent of our sins at the same time that we remember that we are but dust. Death and sin: the two chains that bind us human beings, the two chains from which we are set free only in Christ’s resurrection. Ash Wednesday invites us to begin the Lenten season of repentance by looking our mortality and our imperfection squarely in the face.

    “Why dwell on sin and death?” you might ask. “It is painful and depressing. What good does it do me to sit around for 40 days with a broken heart?”         

    Poet Mary Oliver hints at an answer in her poem, “Lead.” She begins, “Here is a story/ to break your heart./ Are you willing?” She tells the story of a group of wintering loons that fly into her neighborhood only to die, gracefully, one by one, from some mysterious environmental poison. Appreciating life even in their tragic death, they cry out, “in the long, sweet savoring of … life/ which, if you have heard it, you know is a sacred thing.” After singing, the loon, “speckled/ and iridescent and with a plan/ to fly home/ to some hidden lake,/ was dead on the shore.” Oliver then concludes in her wise way, “I tell you this/ to break your heart,/ by which I mean only/ that it break open and never close again/ to the rest of the world.” Our hearts must break not so that we may be crushed, but so that we may be filled with the Love that is around us.         

    Often, it is our very horror of death that prevents us from living the full and loving lives that God intends for us to live in this world. While loons and other animals can go about joyfully living and dying, unaware of their inevitable death and the tragedy of it, we human beings become frozen with the knowledge of our own finitude. The death that we fear and the death that we mete out to others in violence hold sway over everything that we do.[2] Our fear of death makes us want to control others, through power or violence; it drives us to attempt to keep death away by accumulating possessions or control; it eats away at our hope for the future; it encourages us to think that the body and the material world are evil, or meaningless. I even wonder if it is our discomfort with death that makes us reluctant to talk about sin, since the two are so subconsciously intertwined. Perhaps we think that if we don’t talk about sin, then we won’t have to talk about death, either. If we don’t think about our own moral weakness, then we don’t have to think about the weakness of our bodies. But whether we talk about them or not, our terrified awareness of sin and death keep us in bondage to sin and death, and prevents us from truly turning our hearts to the Love of God that is all around us.         

    The answer to our human predicament, of course, is that Christ came to break our hearts open, once and for all. Christ came to die for love, to make us dwell in love. Descended into Hell, Christ, in an ancient Greek Holy Saturday homily, calls out to Adam and Eve, saying, “I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together, we form only one person and cannot be separated.”[3]

    Since Creation is permeated with the love of God, and we are knit together with Christ, it is our Anglican belief that the will can be transformed through patient Christian practice and piety: through prayer, the reading of Scripture, the Eucharist, through being Christ’s hands and feet in the world. But for practice and piety not to remain a dangerously ineffectual outward show, we must also allow the reality of sin and death to break our hearts open. If, in facing the inevitability of our death, our hearts have been broken open, God can seep into them through love, acting upon our minds through faith, and quietly bending our wills through grace, until we are filled with the hope that allows us, like Jesus, to act in love ourselves. By letting our hearts be broken, we open ourselves to God, to life, and to the rest of creation. This Lent, are you willing to listen to “a story to break your heart?” Are we willing to look mortality squarely in the face, to confess the depth of our sin and our need of repentance, and to watch faithfully as God’s own heart is broken in the passion of God’s Son?         

    “Here is a story to break your heart. Are you willing?”

    [1] My own translation, from a Xeroxed sheet from a college French class.

    [2] Mark McIntosh,  Divine Teaching, 180-81.

    [3] From Patrologia Graeca 43:439-63. Quoted in Carol Zaleski, The Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope (Boston, Daughters of St. Paul, 1983), 483-84.

  • Nursing Anxiety

    February 2011

    In my family, backbones and upper lips come made of steel. My children are no exception. Before the age of one year, my two eldest children decided to wean themselves, cold-turkey. They probably figured that their mother wouldn’t be able to handle the pain of such a denial herself. Maybe they knew that as soon as I saw in their faces any sign of fear’s lonely, impotent ache, an unstoppable flood of milk and love would pour out from me to cover their anxious whimpers. So they would look deep into my eyes, brokenhearted, but they would not drink.

    When we greedily suck life from the material things of this world, and when we lie back, bellies taut, yet shaking in anxiety over our next meal, God, like a mother, can’t help but pour out love upon our fearful cries. I wonder, if, though, to grow, we too need to find ways to wean our souls …. not from God’s love, but from our souls’ newborn dependency upon all that is not God. Psalm 131 is a simple and unpretentious psalm, the only psalm in the Bible that some scholars believe to have been written by a woman. In the original Hebrew, verse 3 reads: “But I still my soul and make it quiet. My soul is silent like a weaned one upon his mother, like a weaned one upon me is my soul.” For the author of Psalm 131, the emotional turmoil of weaning has given way to calm hope, as her soul rests within her, now freed from the worries that come with instant gratification.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus expects us to grow, to stretch ourselves, to seek our life and our nourishment in God’s Kingdom. Jesus does not promise us that we can nurse like newborn babies forever. We must grow, like a child who is weaned, working to find for our full-bellied souls a kind of hiccupping peace in God’s ever-loving arms.

  • Perfection

    Epiphany 7, Year A

    February 20, 2011

    Matthew 5:38-48 and Leviticus 19:1-18

    When I was an elementary school teacher, I did a good deal of reading on the education of gifted children. One of the most damaging things that teachers and parents of a gifted child can do, I learned, is to praise the child for her perfection. Constant admiration and congratulations for straight A’s, for getting all the answers right, or for winning the contest, create young perfectionists, children whose self-worth is totally bound up in their accomplishments, children who think that they are loved only when they achieve. As a recovering perfectionist myself, I cringe, then, when I read Jesus’ words in our Gospel lesson for today: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Like well-meaning but misguided teachers, how often we Christians use these words to perpetuate a kind of moral perfectionism! How many preachers have waxed eloquent from the pulpit about the “gifted” saints of God who are perfectly humble, and perfectly chaste, and totally unworldly, with never a willful or a cross thought in their heads.  “God loves me only when I achieve perfection,” we conclude, even though we know intellectually that God’s love has no such limits.

    The weight of the expectations in today’s Gospel, combined with the weight of God’s similar command for “holiness” in our reading from Leviticus (“You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy”) are enough to cause the perfectionists inside of all of us to throw up our hands in despair. But wait! Before we either give up hope or try to reason our way out from under the weight of today’s readings, let us look at what God is really asking. Let us not get hung up on the words “perfect” and “holy.”

    “Perfect,” here, does not mean morally perfect. It does not mean avoiding all sin. The Greek word that Matthew uses in this imperative of all imperatives means perfection in the sense of arriving at the goal. It means “completeness,” or “wholeness” or “accomplishing one’s God-given purpose.” “Do things all the way,” Jesus says here, “in the way that God does them all the way.” “Accomplish what God has created you to do, as God does what God sets out to do.” Or as Eugene Peterson translates in The Message: “Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.” God is complete and perfect in God’s love. God made us to love just as abundantly. Therefore, we are to live that way.

    Interestingly, God’s command in Leviticus for us to be “holy” as God is “holy,” is very similar to Jesus’ imperative here in Matthew. God is holy, in the sense of being set apart, in the sense of being strange, of being above and beyond all of our categories and rationalizations. Yet, what is it exactly that sets God apart from the world? What is it that makes God’s ways strange to us? Is it just God’s power and might that set God apart? I don’t think so. God’s holy strangeness lies above all in God’s abundant love and grace, in a generosity that is totally foreign to our human way of seeing the world. A God who makes the warm sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends life-giving rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous, a God who loves God’s enemies and who shuns vengeance, a God who honors the poor and lame as much as the rich and famous—that is the strange and holy God that we are being asked to imitate. To be holy is not to puff oneself up with piety or to lock oneself away from the world. To be holy is to love the world with God’s strange kind of love. To be perfect is to act in the image of the gracious God who created us in love and who is pouring out that sustaining love upon us still. As it is written in I John, “if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

    Both Leviticus and Jesus are very clear about how we are to go about living in love. It sounds simple. We are to care for the poor and the foreigner. We are to be honest with one another. We are to act justly with one another. We are to love each other—even our enemies–as we love ourselves. We are to resist evil in non-violent ways. St. Paul gets it. He writes to the Ephesians: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

    If it were only that easy. The problem with today’s readings is not that they are unclear or difficult to understand. The problem is that, despite their apparent simplicity, they are difficult to do. In Chapter 19, Matthew tells us the story of Jesus and the rich young man, who asks Jesus what he needs to do to have eternal life. Jesus tells him to follow the commandments, such as they are presented in our reading from Leviticus. “Oh, I do that,” says the young man. What else do I need to do?” “Well, to be perfect,” answers Jesus (and here’s our word again), “to be perfect, to follow God completely and wholly, you need to give away all of your possessions and follow me.” That is when the rich young man turns sadly away.I was in New York City last week. My children sent me on a mission to walk a few blocks from my hotel on the Upper West Side to get H&H bagels (which claim to be the best bagels in the world!) and to bring them, on the subway, to Brooklyn, where my daughter lives. I was tense about this adventure. I didn’t know exactly where the H&H store was, and I had never been by myself all the way to Brooklyn on the subway before. By the time I found the store, I was running late. As I approached, I saw a huge line ahead of me, too, snaking out of the store onto the sidewalk. Sighing inwardly, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a bedraggled, homeless man standing on the curb right outside the bagel store. “I’m hungry,” he called out to passers-by. “I’m hungry,” he called out to me. No one seemed to be stopping to give him anything. You would not think that it would be rocket-science for a priest in God’s Church to give a bagel or two to a hungry guy on a sidewalk outside a bagel store, would you? I know what the Scriptures say. I even thought to myself as I went into the store, “This is easy. I don’t need to worry about giving him money, I just need to get some extra bagels and give them to that man.” But at the same time, I worried. “Should I even approach him?” I thought fearfully while standing in line. “What if he grabs my purse or yells at me? Does he really even want bagels? Should I do this, or not?” Before long, other worries crowded out all thoughts of the hungry man. “What kind of bagels did my kids say to get? How much cream cheese should I get? How many people will be there and how many bagels will they eat? Now, which subway lines do I take again?” Worry after worry passed through my mind as I waited in line, the homeless man much too quickly forgotten. Finally, late and bagels in hand, I came out of the store to see him still standing there, and he was still hungry. I had forgotten the simple act of getting extra bagels. But I wasn’t about to get back in that long line again to get some more. Afraid not to have enough if I shared, I scurried quickly by, eyes on the pavement. I knew what Jesus expected of me in that moment. I knew the story of the rich young man. I knew the Sermon on the Mount. I knew about the feeding of the 5000 with only 5 loaves. I knew all about God’s abundant love, so why didn’t I feed the hungry that day? What got in my way? Mainly fear, as usual. Fear of the stranger; fear of not having enough; fear of getting lost; fear of upsetting my kids by being late; fear of rejection. Fear is what usually stops me from the wholeness to which God calls me.

    Think for a moment about what most often stops you from following God’s command to love. Is it shame? Resentment? Fear? There are all kinds of shadows deep inside our hearts that block our God-given response to live generously, to love one another and to love God. The good news, however, is that the closer that we draw near to the One in whose Loving Image we are made, the more we can be transformed into that likeness. The closer that we draw near to the one who was crucified to show us perfect Love, the more strength we will find to mirror his strange sacrifice. St. Augustine would say to those receiving the Body of Christ at the Eucharist: “Receive who you are. Become what you have received.”[1] As we approach the altar today for the Eucharist, I invite each of us to hand over to God those things that block God’s love from flowing through us. I invite each of us to receive our whole, complete selves—our perfect selves–from Jesus Christ, to grasp and taste the gift that we receive, to become true sons and daughters of God, true brothers and sisters of one another. Receive your perfection. Become the perfection that you have received.

    [1] Quoted by David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=456

  • Walking with God

    January 2011

    As an “extreme intuitive introvert,”[1] my “inner eyes” are often more focused than my outer ones. I could walk by a whole herd of purple elephants without noticing that they are lumbering along beside me. Passing down an unfamiliar road, it takes a deliberate and concentrated effort for me to observe enough about the houses and trees around me to find my way back home. But when I walk on the ice and snow, I am the picture of intense, outwardly-focused attention. I creep slowly forward, stopping often to survey the perilous ground in front of me. My eyes never leave the wet and dry patterns of snow on concrete, and my brow is furrowed in careful concentration. An observer might think that I was walking through a mine field, rather than a snow-covered parking lot.

    The epitome of God’s command for us in the famous passage from Micah 6 is “to walk humbly with your God.” The adverb “humbly,” however, is merely a guess for a Hebrew word that appears only rarely in the Bible. It could also mean “carefully,” “prudently,” “in a well-measured way.” I couldn’t help but think of the alternative translation as I picked my carefully “measured” way through the snow the other day: “walk prudently with your God.”

    Suddenly, I pictured a life of hesitant, uncertain steps—a life in which fear of falling absorbed all of my attention. “That is certainly not what God wants for me,” I thought, although that is often the way I live. There is a difference between an attentive life and a stressed one. There is a difference between a creature living in communion with her Creator, remembering that she depends on that Creator with every step that she takes, and a creature who stands still for fear of falling.

    Then I saw the dogs. There was my crazy beagle, slipping and straining on his leash, pulling me down the street thoughtlessly and carelessly, utterly enslaved to one random scent or another. But there was also the neighbor’s golden retriever. He didn’t wear a leash, yet he constantly turned back to look at his master after each short exploration. His walk was attentive, prudent, and well-measured. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the snow, either.

    [1] As described by Marcus Borg in Putting Away Childish Things, 307.

  • The Power of Words

    Written January 2011

    In the news this week, we have heard much pontification over the power of words. Did the angry, fear-filled words of politicians reach into the deranged mind of the Arizona shooter to incite violence? Do the words of TV hosts and bloggers create, as Matt Bai writes in a New York Times editorial, “a culture of hyperbole … [that has lost its] hold on the power of words.” I was reminded of Psalm 12 (especially striking here in the King James Version):

    2 They speak vanity every one with his neighbor: with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak.
    3 The LORD shall cut off all flattering lips, and  the tongue that speaketh proud things:
    4 who have said, With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our own: who is lord over us?
    5 For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the LORD;I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him.
    6 The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times…

    I have never seen precious metals being refined, but I can picture the tiny, fragile flakes of silver that are held captive within their rocky frame, inseparable at first from the heavy dross that encases them. Only intense heat and mighty flame can transform the ore, melting it, changing its form completely, and allowing it to float freely to the surface. Just as the Word of the Lord, the Word that creates and gives life, passes through the crucible of the Cross, what then in me or in my words must be shattered and burned before it can be true?Like the lips of the evil ones in the psalm, our lips are often so swollen with pride that our words, burdened with false authority, must burst loudly from the prison of our mouths. Or thin lips as cold and miserly as steel squeeze the warmth from our words, as they slide out like gray sleet. Or lips lost in the pleasant sensation of their own movement let airy, thoughtless words do flippant somersaults from ear to ear. Instead, our testimony needs to float upwards through lives that have been tried in earth’s furnace, lives that have been burned and bruised in the fight against oppression and want. Theological and political discourse, without lives broken and refined in the service of justice and mercy, only grasp at a power that they can never truly own.

  • Sunsets and Stars

    Epiphany 2011

    On this cold, gray, cloudy New Year’s Day, I was driving west at sunset, when I saw a little wisp of orange sky linger over some low-lying hills. Rather bored by the drive and pensive about the New Year, I acknowledged the few seconds of light with a slight nod to hope and beauty. “How nice,” I said to myself, and then fell back into my own distant thoughts. Soon, however, after rushing by a few more hills and fields, I had to gasp in amazement. How had the little wisp of orange suddenly spread over the entire horizon, lighting up clouds and sky as far as the eye could see? With a constantly changing quality of light, this was a sunset that went on and on for miles, deepening from orange to red, glistening like mother-of-pearl, causing drivers to pull over to the side of the road to gape in awe. The bare arms of branches seemed to reach up into the iridescent sky, attempting to hold down the cover of light with their crooked, black fingers, as if to prevent it from ever slipping away. I, too, wondered how long the shadows of earth could stand to be covered in this splendid light, as time itself seemed to stop in the presence of such beauty.

    Bathed in gold more glorious than the most precious metals and covered in reds deeper than the finest rubies, I couldn’t help but feel as if I were looking into the face of God. I thought about Moses, begging to see the fiery, radiant splendor of God’s Glory, that wondrous light that both attracts and repels at the same time, that dangerous power that cloaks God’s incomprehensibility and goes before the Lord, dreadfully and majestically, out into the world. I didn’t think about Isaiah’s poetry, but I should have: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.” So speaks God, through the Prophet Isaiah, to the desolate, broken city of Jerusalem. It is a city whose walls have been destroyed, whose Temple has been laid waste, whose leaders have been exiled, yet Isaiah calls to the city to see itself as it will look when the light of new life shines upon it. In Isaiah’s poetry, I can picture my Western Kentucky sunset transplanted to Jerusalem, with golden light shining over the brown Judean hills and waves of pink clouds embracing the ancient stones. Even a broken and battered world could shine with God’s healing presence when covered in such a light.

    I can imagine God’s epiphany, the shining forth of God’s presence into the world, bathing my own battered soul in light like that sunset over Jerusalem, promising new life, abundance, honor, and glory. That, however, is not quite the  kind of divine epiphany that we hear about in Matthew. God’s glory, in our Christian story, appears not over the great city of Jerusalem, but over the tiny village of Bethlehem. In our story, the light that God shines down on the earth does not fill the horizon with jewel-toned fire. It is instead found in the cold beam of a distant star, lost in a sea of darkness and shining down on a newborn baby in a stable. Like Elijah, who searches for God in the mighty wind and in the terrible fire but finds God in whispering silence, the wise men follow a God who flickers in the silent blackness of the desert at night. Instead of being surrounded by the Glory of God’s Face, the wise men, like Moses, must make due with following God’s back. Sunsets, after all, are gifts for the close of day. They reside in memory, carrying us over until the next sunrise. The incarnate God is not a sunset. The incarnate God resides with us in the world’s darkness, not merely in our memory of the light. The Light of Christ, however glorious in itself, spreads through this world like the flames of our Christmas Eve candles during “Silent Night” and brings us to Resurrection as quietly as the Paschal fire that leads us into the darkened Church on Easter Eve. Indeed, as night fell over the Western Kentucky Parkway, and the glorious light faded into velvet blackness, I would have traded all the heart-warming gold for a tiny little star to lead me on my way through the cold, dark night.

  • A Christmas Sermon

    December 2010

    I’m not preaching on Christmas this year, but here are some thoughts from 2009:

    Once upon a time, a tiny baby was born in a cold, stone palace in Jerusalem, a tiny baby prince upon whose shoulders rested the hopes of his people. He was born to an oppressed people in a land controlled by foreign despots who treated its inhabitants like animals, taxing them until they starved, forcing them to haul stones for building projects until they fell exhausted into the dust.

    The little baby was born in a time of war, in a time when the heavy boots of invading soldiers could be heard pounding back and forth across the country, leaving bloody cloaks and mangled bodies in their wake. He was born in a land in which God’s people had lost hope; wherever they looked it was as if they saw only “distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish,” and they felt themselves “thrust into thick darkness.”[1] The birth of this baby, this new king, became a sign of hope for his people, however. Their prophet, Isaiah, pronounced a loud “Yes” of hope in God’s name, when this child was born. Isaiah took God up on God’s Covenant promises of old and, holding up this child, he committed God to shine light into the darkness of this sad land, to infuse life into this land of death. Isaiah anchored God to the people’s hope in a name that recalled to them and to God who God is: “Planner of wonders, mighty, victorious God, Father for all the future, ruler of peace and well-being.” It was a name that fit neither the tiny baby nor the desolate, abandoned situation in which he was born, but this name made everyone dance and sing with the delight and joy usually reserved for the celebration of a bountiful harvest or a great triumph in battle. It was a name born of hope, a name that demands wholeness, justice, righteousness, and peace without end.

    Some seven hundred years later, another tiny baby was born in a dank, dark stable room in nearby Bethlehem, and upon his shoulders lay the salvation of the world. He was put down to sleep in a stone feeding trough for animals, filled with insect-infested hay. He was born to a poor father and a teenage mother, who had been summoned by the occupying powers to a strange city, at a time when the heavy boots of soldiers could be heard pounding back and forth across the country, with men hung on crosses in their wake. He was born in a land in which God’s people had lost hope; wherever they looked it was as if they saw only “distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish,” and they felt themselves “thrust into thick darkness.”[2] The birth of this baby was a sign of hope for all God’s people, however. Hearing of his birth, the neighboring shepherds danced with delight and wonder, “praising God for all they had heard and seen.”[3] These shepherds pronounced a loud “Yes” of hope in God’s name, when this child was born. They took God up on God’s Covenant promises of old and, holding up this child, they committed God to shine light into the darkness of this sad land, to infuse life into this land of death. Later Christians anchored God to the shepherds’ hope, in a name that recalled to them and to God who God is: “Planner of wonders, Mighty God, Father for all the future, ruler of peace and well-being.” It was a name born of hope, a name born from God’s passion for the impossible, a name that demands wholeness, justice, righteousness, and peace without end.

    Our Christmas hope is not a weak, fragile shrug of “oh well, things aren’t so bad.” It cannot be frantically conjured up with gifts and lights and carols. It is not a vague and sentimental “nice feeling,” prompting us to snuggle up under the tree, sure that things will somehow look better someday.  Our Christmas hope is a desperately powerful thing that brings true rejoicing in the midst of darkness. French writer Jacques Ellul calls hope the “passion for the impossible”[4] that commits us “to those insane actions which alone are reasonable, to that critical knowledge which alone is constructive, to the relentless scouring of the real which is the only realism.”[5] Hope looks out with open eyes into a darkness where God seems absent or silent at best and demands that God speak again. Ellul writes, “Hope means to be invited, to find the doors shut, to be offended by that, to put in a claim that God operate in accordance with what he had said. Hope uses the most violent means to enter into the Kingdom of heaven, which is our passion, our expectation of joy, our abundance, our reason for acting, our every breath, more precious than each beat of the heart, our assurance of justice and our inner light of peace.”[6]

    Hope is indeed like the birth of a child into a dark world: the powerful, living insistence upon future and love where those things seem impossible, brought into the world with determination and great cries, celebrated with great joy. Indeed, true hope cannot be manufactured; it can only be born, born because of and in spite of the circumstances surrounding it. W. H. Auden describes this kind of obstinate hope in his Christmas Oratorio, as the people in darkness cry, “We who must die demand a miracle./ How could the Eternal do a temporal act,/ The Infinite become a finite fact?/ Nothing can save us that is possible:/ We who must die demand a miracle./ … Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking:/ The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;/ The Real is what will strike you as really absurd;/ Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly a dream of your own;/ Unless you exclaim—‘There must be some mistake’—you must be mistaken.”[7]By bravely calling God to account, by speaking for a God who seems silent, hope gives birth to hope. Isaiah’s hope becomes the hope of the shepherds; the shepherd’s hope becomes the hope of the early Church; the hope of the early Church becomes the hope of our ancestors; the hope of our ancestors becomes our hope–if we decide to proclaim it.

    Nigerian priest and novelist Uwem Akpan opens us up to Christian hope in our day in his book of short stories called, Say You’re One of Them. At the end of each one of his stories, stories that take place in the deepest darkness imaginable in our world, a child runs away into an unknown future. “Say you’re one of them, one of these children” he seems to be saying to us, “what kind of future will it be? Will you decide for life or death? Will you chose hope or despair? Will you speak for God, or remain silent?” In his first story, “An Ex-mas Feast,” Akpan describes a family’s desolate Christmas in a Nairobi slum. Let me borrow his setting for a minute.

    Once upon a time, a tiny baby was born in a shack made of plastic in a Nairobi slum. He was born to an indebted people in a world controlled by huge corporations and foreign economic interests. The little baby was born in a time of unrest, in a time when the heavy boots of corrupt policemen could be heard pounding back and forth through the slum, rival gangs leaving bloody cloaks and destruction in their wake. He was wrapped in plastic bags to keep him dry in the rain while his older sister took him out to beg. He was put to sleep in a beat-up cardboard box and ravaged by malaria-bearing mosquitoes as he slept. He shared his mother’s milk with his twin sisters who were still nursing. He was born in a land in which many people had lost hope; wherever they looked it was as if they saw only “distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish,” and they felt themselves “thrust into thick darkness.”[8]Tonight, remembering God’s presence in a stable over 2000 years ago, will we pronounce a loud “Yes” of hope at the birth of this child and millions like him? Will we take God up on God’s Covenant promises of old and, holding up these children, commit God to shine light into the darkness of this sad world, to infuse life into this land of death? Will we anchor God to the people’s hope in a name that recalls to us and to God who God is: “Planner of wonders, mighty, victorious God, Father for all the future, ruler of peace and well-being?” It is a name that will make us dance and sing with the delight and joy of abundance. It is a name born of hope, a name born from God’s passion for the impossible, a name that leads us to live in expectation, to pray with determination, and to act courageously for wholeness, justice, righteousness, and peace without end.  Amen.

    [1] Isaiah 8:22

    [2] Isaiah 8:22

    [3] Luke 2:20

    [4] Jacques Ellul, trans. 

    C. E. Hopkin, Hope in Time of Abandonment (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), 197.

    [5] Ibid., 201.

    [6] Ibid., 184.

    [7] W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” in Collected Longer Poems, 138.

    [8] Isaiah 8:22

  • A Meditation on the Magnificat

    December 2010

    Nora Gallagher begins her latest book with a quote from James Michener’s Chesapeake:“The ultimate source of the Susquehanna River was a kind of meadow in which nothing happened … merely the slow accumulation of moisture from many unseen and unimportant sources, the gathering of dew, so to speak, the beginning, the unspectacular congregation of nothingness, the origin of purpose… This is how everything begins—the mountains, the oceans, life itself. A slow accumulation—the gathering together of meaning.”[1]It is also how the Incarnation begins: with a slow accumulation—the gathering together of meaning.Life-size bronze statues stand today in the courtyard of the Church of the Visitation, on the quiet outskirts of the little village of Ein Kerem in Israel: Two women in silhouette, willowy and graceful despite the bumps of growing pregnancy beneath their long, flowing robes … Mary, just an innocent teenage girl, and Elizabeth, an older woman made wise by years of disappointment, by slow years of waiting. Bellies almost touching, they lean in to each other, face to face, whispering of strange things–Sharing the secret of new life in the sunlight, by a spring. Until the Holy Spirit comes down, that is, and songs of praise are drawn out from them, songs that grow beyond anything that they could imagine.          The Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise, does not begin with theological statements about God. It does not begin with a recitation of the history of Israel or a recounting of the grand miracle of creation. It does not begin with meaning. It begins with her amazement that God has come to her, a poor Jewish peasant girl from the Galilee. She knows that her life has been nothing special, yet she also knows the songs of other mothers who have found themselves miraculously with child, old mothers like Sara, barren mothers like Hannah who, centuries before her, sings in thanksgiving for her pregnancy: “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God … There is no Rock like our God.”[2] Mary begins with her own experience, her own experience of transformation from emptiness to the fullness of life: from girl to mother, from milking goats and hauling water to speaking with angels, from shivering in the cold to being wrapped in the loving-kindness of God, from lowly peasant to Mother of God. Slowly, as she continues speaking, her words shift from her own situation to the experience of her people, from her own transformation to all of the times in Israel’s history that God has lifted oppression, fed the hungry, punished the unjust, or raised up the poor. It is as if her words get away from her, radiating out across time, gaining power and strength and meaning until the words themselves seem to cause the transformations of which she speaks: He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, * and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, * and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel, * for he has remembered his promise of mercy.I heard this week about a controversial setting of the Magnificat by the contemporary composer Conrad Sousa that depicts for us in music the growing power of Mary’s song. It begins quietly, softly, in very simple melodic lines. But as it continues, it grows in musical complexity and even dissonance. Sounds begin to fly haphazardly around the room, as if the world is falling apart, as the music stands for the shattering of preconceptions involved in divine transformation. Suddenly, the unpleasant whirling of noise stops—and there is silence. Only after a long silence does the choir break in with peals of “Glory, Glory to God in the Highest.”[3]          Just as meaning comes to Mary in slow accumulation—in a long history of insignificant people and strange divine acts—and bursts forth in a slow crescendo in the midst of intimate conversation, so too meaning comes to us, as “the slow accumulation … from many unseen and unimportant sources.” Just because we don’t realize what is going on until after the shattering silence of transformation, does not mean that God was not in what we perceive as insignificant beginnings. So often, we Christians want to find our meaning in the generalities of morality, the generalities of doctrine, grasping at the air of Truth or Goodness that surrounds general concepts. I remember thinking when I was younger that meaning must come from outside of me, already wrapped by God in golden paper like a lovely Christmas gift. Mary shows us, however, that meaning grows out of our own amazement, that it must be discovered in reflection, in shared conversation with others, and that it is true when it grows beyond anything that we can control.Christian philosopher Paul Ricoeur explains that we truly know God only in particularities, in what is individual, unrepeatable, and unique. For Ricoeur, God is revealed in the face of a particular, irreplaceable, individual human being; in the particular moment captured in a work of art; in the uniqueness of a glimpse of the natural world, at a certain time, in a certain light.[4] Think about it: Doesn’t God come to you today when the voices of the choir come together to touch your heart in just a certain way, in just a certain moment? Doesn’t God speak to you in the love of a fellow human being who is as unique and irreplaceable in this world as their own fingerprint? Isn’t God revealed in a certain landscape, when the sun happens to come through the clouds in a certain way that might never happen again were you to visit that place hundreds and hundreds of times? Doesn’t God speak to you in a certain translation of a certain verse of scripture, read at a certain time of day? God is revealed in particularities. It is only in sharing those particular experiences, in mulling them over with others, in incorporating them with your own story and the story of your community, that it all comes together—and then blows you away.In our spiritual lives, we have more in common with Mary than we think. I believe that is the reason that Mary’s prayer of thanksgiving resonates so strongly with us. That is why her words speak at all to us comfortable Christians here today. It seems as if Mary’s words should frighten us, for we are the mighty who are about to get knocked off of our thrones. We are the rich of this world who are about to get sent away hungry. But instead of frightening us, Mary’s words of world-altering upheaval seem to warm even our own well-fed, complacent hearts. That is because Mary does not begin with proclamations of condemnatory Truth. She begins with amazement over God’s place in her own story, just as we do. The images of liberation and joy over the end of oppression are the meaning that grow from her story, from our shared story, and we recognize their difficult truth in our own hearts.          Who are you? What is your ordinary, particular story? When was the last time that you shared your experience of God with a loved one, in the quiet, in the sunlight, by a spring? If you try it, though, watch out. For the words that you utter will belong to God, and they will shake your world to its foundations.

    [1] Nora Gallagher, The Sacred Meal (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009), 1.

    [2] I Samuel 2:1-2.

    [3] According to what I remember as an acquaintance told me about the piece. I was not able to find a copy of this in order to listen to it for myself!

    [4] Paul Ricoeur, L’unique et le singulier, (Liege : Alice Editions, 1999), 46-47.

  • Advent Light

    December 2010

    In his book Resurrection, Rowan Williams compares the disorientation of Jesus’ followers at the Resurrection to our confusion after the lights have suddenly been switched on in the morning. In both cases, it takes awhile for our eyes to adjust to an unexpected, blinding light. We squint and blink, not quite sure of what we are seeing, until the world comes back into focus. I like this image for Resurrection, yet I would add that the light that we await at Advent comes more like the dawn on a cloudy day.

    On my two-hour drive to Western Kentucky every Sunday, I start out in darkness. The sky is wrapped in thick black cloth that hugs my car like a shroud and keeps my eyes fixed on the small segment of road right in front of me. I can only see the narrow path illumined by my car’s headlights, a limited path that ends in the darkness of the unknown road. I think that we often imagine God’s light to be like those headlights, a focused beam that we can point into the future and swivel across our world, advertising divine presence and calling attention to our cause. 

    While my eyes are fixed anxiously on the narrow beams ahead of me, however, God’s light is silently sneaking up behind. On clear days, a routine glance in the rear view mirror shows slivers of pink and coral light slowly peeking through the hills and trees. I smile at the subtle beauty of a new day. When it is cloudy, though, I can’t see the delicate hints of the light to come. Behind me, the blackness of the night just gives way imperceptibly to gray–gray that grows brighter and brighter until I suddenly realize that I can see, and that my car’s precious head lights have become superfluous.

    In Advent, there is no blinding light that we must accommodate, no flash of Glory. There is only an imperceptible dawning, an acknowledgment that, while my eyes were set on controlling the darkness, God has ushered in the light of day–a light in which stables and trees, poverty and richness, the beauties and horrors of the world are made visible and, once again, await our attention.