God With Us-- Sermon for the Eve of Christ's Nativity, December 24, 2023

Once, we knew we lived, and walked, with God.

In the beginning God placed us in a beautiful garden(1)—an orderly place, where everything had a name, and everything had a purpose, and everything, even the humans, had been placed there in this beautiful garden by God. We knew we lived with God because every day God would come and walk in the cool of the evening with us. (2) 

We’d stroll along, companionably, and talk about our day together. God would ask us what we had done: “Today we found a new plant over in the verge over there, and we were drawn to it by its amazing fragrance. Few flowers smelled anything like this plant, God, so we named it fuschia.” And our days were filled with wonder, and everything we saw and tasted and touched was a miracle. And God was very pleased. 

When we asked God what God had done that day, God would talk about very important matters, something like midwifing a new solar system in another galaxy,(3) or watching puffins play, or teaching chimpanzees how to use a stick to dig termites out of their mounds so they could eat them as a tasty treat. And always making sure to be home in time for our shared evening walk.

But our restless selves were not satisfied, and so we chose to move away from God and God’s loving companionship. We chafed to be independent. We chafed to make our own rules.(4) That garden and that companionship was tossed aside. (5) 

But God has been chasing after us ever since.

And when we are very honest with ourselves, we have felt something missing deep inside us.

We built monuments to ourselves in Babel, in Nineveh, in Athens, in Mesopotamia, pretending we didn’t need God. God kept visiting our ancestors all along the way, and maybe we’d walk beside God for a while, but always, always, we would decide we could choose our paths better, find an easier way. God even rescued us from slavery in Pharaoh’s courts, parting the waters of the sea like they’d been cracked open like an eggshell, but even then we complained and carped.(6) 

Out in the wilderness, where everything was as un-gardenlike as possible, where hunger and thirst and rattlesnakes dogged our every step, we grudgingly agreed to not only follow God’s cloud in the day and fire in the night and eat the food of angels and the fried chicken God rained down on the ground.(7) 

And in return, in order to keep us happy and safe, we agreed to follow God’s 10 Simple Rules—all of which boiled down to one word really: Love. Love of God and love of each other.(8)

We’d promise—and it would last for a little while. But then, like the trickster raven, we’d get distracted by something bright and shiny, or we’d want to be like the other scrabbling clans around us, or we’d decide we didn’t need a God so incredibly close to us, and we’d push God away and wander off again to do our own thing. Over and over.(9)

When we did turn to God, all God asked was to love us and have us love God and love each other and have some faith. All God asked for was for us to honor God’s presence in the midst of us—not for us a God who needed mountains like the Greeks or Ziggurats like the Babylonians or Teocalli like the Aztecs. All God wanted was to live in the midst of us, and for us to love God and each other. Really.

But we wanted control. We kept trying to put God in a box. David tried to build God a house of cedar, and his son Solomon actually achieved it. God said, "No, no, I’m happy living among you all, a tent is fine, really!"(10) But we wanted our God to be just as awe-inpiring as the neighbors’ gods. 

Each generation made that house bigger and bigger and bigger, and added porches and courtyards and antechambers dripping in gold and gemstones and ivory, all obscuring the fact that they thought they were further confining God out of their everyday lives. Soon, talking to God was reserved for only special days for a select few, and the rest of the time they could go about their business without even thinking about God shut behind those imposing walls and turrets.

But God would not be shut in a box. Not then. Not ever. God would not only be willing to be brought out like the fine china on special occasions or like a lucky rabbit’s foot when things got tough. Because here was the secret: even when we shut our eyes, even when we pushed God away, God was still there. Not forcing us, but waiting for us to see and trust in God.

See, God is always with us, loving us—even when we turn our heads, or our hearts, and insist on our own way—even when our own way is out there with the rattlesnakes and the desert wastes of our fearful hearts even when our own way looks more like a hell of our making. God comes to show us that love is justice and mercy in action—and calls us to embody that with joy and faith. So simple, yet so difficult.

And so it went on. God calling to us, setting before us God’s beautiful vision for which God had made us—and us resisting, mistaking selfishness for security and wealth and power for well-being. Which never worked, much as we wouldn’t admit it.

Finally, God decided that prophets and saints and sages and mystics and even angels just weren’t enough to get us to remember those days when we knew God was always with us.

God with us…..

That gave God an idea.

God, who is the literal embodiment of love and community, decided to actually become one of us. And not as some fire-bolt throwing, six-pack flaunting, bearded Titan; not as some pampered princeling with a fine pedigree and a fancy mansion. Oh no. God had had enough of boxes, even fancy ones. God wanted to show us that God is always loving and present to us—even in the least significant places.

God came to be one of us—and one of the least of us, because God had been trying to tell us all along that money, fame, political power, military might, and oppressing others in the name of our comfort were no way to fill the aching empty spaces in our hearts.

God came to us as the most helpless creature in the world—a human infant, born to a teenaged mother in an occupied territory under the thumb of one of the greatest empires the world has ever know. God came as a little child, to show us the qualities that really matter by embodying them:

Compassion for the lost and aching.
Healing for the hurting.
Wisdom and teaching.
Food for the hungry, given freely.
Empathy for the wayward.
Freedom for the oppressed.
Community and equality for all.
Self-sacrifice and virtue for everyone’s mutual benefit. Especially the forgotten.

A little child, wrapped in rags, lying in a manger—a feeding trough. He and his family looking, like all of us, for a home. Born TO us, born FOR us, living and teaching and loving among us.

Tonight, tonight, if we are very quiet, we can hear—if we are very still and intent—the slight rasp of angel wings as they flutter overhead just as they did to those ragged shepherds all those years ago, and we hear that promise, as much a promise as a plea:

Do not be afraid.
To you, and me, and to all of us is born this day a savior.
He will be called Emmanuel—God With Us.
He will be a Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace.

He will come to live among us, to walk alongside us, in every moment of our lives, no matter how much we try to shove him back in a box and only bring him out on Sundays.

No, our Savior is looking for a home. May we open the doors of our hearts, and spirits, and invite him in, that he may guide us in learning how to live a life of purpose, of joy and connection and life eternal, grounded in love. Jesus didn’t come to reward us for when we die. Jesus came to show us how to live. And it starts by remembering how to walk alongside him, allowing him to show us the way of virtue and love, every day of our lives.

Joy to the world! Jesus Christ is born this night. All he asks is that we live among him, and allow him to a home inside our hearts, that we may walk beside him. Tonight, and every night. God with us. Emmanuel.

Preached at the 8:00 pm Christmas Eve Choral Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 9:2-7

Psalm 96

Titus 2:11-14

Luke 2:1-14(15-20)

Citations:

(1) Genesis 2:8-19

(2) Genesis 3:8 a

(3) Job 9:7-10 

(4) Genesis 2:15-17; Genesis 3:1-5

(5) Genesis 2:24-25

(6) Genesis 11:4; Genesis 10:6-12; Jonah 3:1-3; 

(7) Exodus 13:3-10; Exodus 16:2-16

(8) Exodus 20:1-17; Matthew 22:36-40

(9) 1 Kings 12:26-30; Judges 2:11-13; 1 Kings 11:33-34; 2 Kings 23:8-14

(10) 2 Samuel 7:1-11

Prepositions of God's Love: Speaking to the Soul, November 17, 2022

Colossians 1:11-20

“There is a theology in prepositions…”— Rev. Canon Graham Ward, How the Light Gets In: Ethical Life I

Remain strong, O faithful, O seekers
   with all the strength
   from Christ’s glorious power,
enduring
   with patience,
giving thanks
   to the Father
sharing the inheritance
   of the saints
   in the light.
God rescued us
   from the power
   of darkness
   into the kingdom
   of God’s beloved Son
   in whom
we have redemption, the forgiveness
   of sins.

Jesus is the image
   of the invisible God
firstborn
   of all Creation–
   in him

all things 
   in heaven
   on earth
were created
   through Jesus
and
   for Jesus.

Jesus himself is
   before all things;
all things hold together
   through Jesus.
Head
   of the body,
   of the Church;
Jesus, the beginning,
firstborn
   from the dead;

First
   in everything.

The fullness
   of God
is pleased
   to dwell
   in Jesus.
God is pleased
   to reconcile
   to Godself
all things
   in heaven
   on earth
   by making peace
   through the blood
      of Jesus’s cross.

This is how we remain faithful,
awaiting God-
   with-us,
Emmanuel
   by whom
   in whom
   through whom
we live and move and have our being,
revealing God’s love, longing, redemption,
seeking us–
world
and love
   without end.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul, November 17, 2022.

Mary's Word (Feast of the Annunciation): Speaking to the Soul for March 24, 2022

With a sound of distant thunder
the rainbow-eyed stranger
spoke to me. She
called me “favored one,”
and that made me stop in mid-step.
Just this morning I’d been
a beast of burden hauling water
for the entire household
so that my soon-to-be mother-in-law
could weigh again the bargain that had been struck
for my labor, present and future.
I could still hear my father
walking away, his pockets jingling,
the matter settled.

“Favored one.”

And for once in my life
now I was presented a proposal,
just as a dove slid down
a shaft of sunlight, revealing
lilies in the ditch,
more radiant than Solomon
in his rumored glory.

No fool, at first
I didn’t speak, much less
laugh, but
hurried home.

She appeared again
as I was spinning flax into thread--
poppies nodding at her feet,
the lilies this time an offering
shoulders shadowed
beneath star-flecked wings
flexed half-open, ready to depart or remain
at my response.

The frosted fields had just begun to green
after winter’s bony grip slackened, yet
the sweet smell of honeysuckle
and rose swirled improbably (only
in my mind?)
with each incredible word
that pulled the tides of my
presumed future moon-ward:
favored by God,
a son with a name like
light and breath.
Unconditional love,
conditional to human consent.

“Who am I
to contain such grace?” My
heart filled with wonder, mind
reeling with choices that I’d never
held in my grasp before. It was
the kindness there, the honor
that gleamed in the angel’s eyes
that rose over the tattoo of my heart
and tempered wonder to resolve.

The choice was mine to make.

The gates of my assent swung wide.

I startled myself
with the sureness of that leap within
my heart. Yes
to bearing the joy, the questions and pain, yes
to Eternity enclosed and growing
beneath my heart’s tempest and flame,
yet my spirit also hovered as if afloat
on the breath of God
who enters only after
my offered “yes”
--THAT was the Word made flesh.

The pulse within me responded,
I am
the hand
maid of
the Lord
Most High.

Before words formed on my lips,
before the spindle fell
from tingling fingers
and I sighed the song
that would frame my life
and burst loose the narrow orbit
I had once inhabited.

Jesus
Jesus
Jesus

In that instant, I knew too
he would be my son, yet
never mine alone.

Assent brought ascent. My eyes raised
to sizzled rasp of receding wingbeat;
the eddied air swirled and reeled.
The messenger departed
bearing my gift
after she nodded and rose, leaving me
this first treasure of many
for the storehouse of my heart.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on March 24, 2022-- the eve of the Feast of the Annunciation.

© 2022 Leslie Barnes Scoopmire- all rights reserved.

Image: "The Annunciation," John William Waterhouse (British/Italian), 1914

Waiting Turned to Witness: Speaking to the Soul, December 16

When the Word became flesh,
it was the women
   who knew what expectation meant—
the circle begins as it ends
in the witness of women.

Zechariah heard but bent like a bitter reed, and
was reduced to scratching
out his son’s name in cowed obedience.
It was Elizabeth who bloomed
   as God’s pledge became her promise.
Years of waiting fell away in an instant.

Joseph dreamt,
absorbed the news of the holy
without a word. Mutely
he put his shoulder to the wheel,
   while his beloved wove her rebel song
like a garland. This choice was not his.

It was Mary
who answered Gabriel’s thunder with assent.
After pondering
   how this could be? nonetheless affirmed
“Let it be for me
as you have said,” knowing
the costs of sacred favor were immediate. Striding 

into the horizon torn wide
as full partner and God-bearer, Mary held
joy and pain in equipoise, resolute.
She hailed Elizabeth
   exulting, and together
   they were willing to inhabit
   what others called impossible:
the manifestation
of holy wisdom as wholly human,
vulnerable, radiating mercy.

Waiting turned to witness:
Sleepers awake!
God is among us
pulling down the thrones of injustice,
filling the bellies of the hungry
slaking those who thirst for hope.
Zechariah took notes
in another room, gratefully.

In time fulfilled, even as the stars danced close,
and strangers followed her song on the breeze,
Mary brought forth eternity
yawning and burrowing
   into his mother’s breast
at his longed-for arrival.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on December 16, 2021.

Copyright Leslie Barnes Scoopmire, 2021

Being United, Being Unified: Speaking to the Soul January 14. 2021

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

The church at Corinth involved a group of people who straddled the world between the Greek philosophy and the developing ethos of Christian morality. The question in the reading we will hear this Sunday from 1st Corinthians is addressed to those people who lived 2000 years ago, and yet cuts straight to the heart of one of the greatest challenges that face Christians today: can something be legal, and still be morally wrong? That’s the problem laid before us in the first verse of our reading. Anyone who has considered the issue of adultery will appreciate that the question’s answer must be, “yes.” Just because something does not violate the law does not mean that it is beneficial, to paraphrase verse twelve. The thirteenth verse extends this question further: do we let legal things- for instance alcohol, food, the search for pleasure of various types—dominate our lives?

The struggle to be unified, to be willing to consider others’ needs alongside your own and uphold the virtue of the common good within the Corinthian church is a struggle that rends American society right now, as recent events have shown. Paul reminds the individuals who make up the church at Corinth that they are no longer simply individuals; they are a body, the Body of Christ. Some members of the Corinthian church used a legalistic argument to continue to visit cult prostitutes, arguing something like: if one no longer believes in the gods the prostitutes serve, one is not engaging in idol worship even in visiting a temple prostitute.

Think this doesn’t apply to us? Anyone who has struggled over what to do with a found wallet has dealt with much the same dilemma, or the Christian employers who rationalizes paying his employees as little as possible. It comes down to this: just because you CAN doesn’t mean you should. All children of alcoholics have to decide if they are going to be able to control what happens after they take that first drink, and all people who have found themselves imbibing too much have to evaluate to see if they should continue drinking.

For months, pleas have gone out to wear a mask during the COVID19 pandemic, but some spurn such appeals as limits on their personal freedom rather than seeing them as a simple way to express concern for those around them. Politicians accept gifts from lobbyists and then vote in favor of lobbyist concerns even if they are against constituents’ interests, and when challenged, point to the fact that such behavior is not against the law—even as it violates the spirit of actually being a “representative” for one’s constituents. As we have heard in the last week, calls for “unity” that lack both accountability repentance for previous divisiveness smacks of gaslighting, not of justice or reconciliation. Being one body means actually feeling others’ pain as our own, and prioritizing an outward- oriented concern for the common good, even if it costs us something to alleviate a wrong.

As Christians living in the 21st century, we face every day a hundred interior negotiations between what we say we commit to as disciples of Jesus Christ, and what we commit to as people living in a post-modern capitalist society, based as it is on a heartless calculus of a few “winners” and a large pool of “losers.” Paul is reminding us that being a Christian involves answering to a higher standard. What is allowed is not always for the good, and that certainly applies to matters of law and economics. Sometimes it feels like this needs to be engraved over every legislative chamber, courtroom, and voting booth in the land. The battle between what we are able to do and what we should do arises from the fact that law and morality have never fully overlapped.

Our reading from 1st Corinthians specifically deals with an embodied morality, particularly in matters of sexuality in a specific cultural context. We live in a society that at once worships and vilifies all matters pertaining to the body. Ultimately, however, the point Paul makes is not denigrating the world of the flesh. Instead, he is making the point that it is through the body that we are united with Christ- not just metaphorically. Being united with Christ also unifies us with each other, as members of the body of Christ. Further, Christ did not merely clothe himself in a human body, but he became God incarnate. He did not masquerade as a human body- Christ HAD a human body, and through that experience in that body Christ lived, loved, suffered, and died.

As Christians, we have to be aware that what we do with our bodies and our actions through those bodies matters, not just to ourselves, but to those who are joined with us in the body of Christ. What we do reflects upon all who share our affiliation as Christians. Does what we do increase love, or does it increase division? This is a vital question for us today.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on January 14, 2021.

This was written as President Donald J. Trump was impeached for the second time in his term in office for incitement of the rebellion of January 6, 2021.

From Yes to Witness: Sermon for Advent 4B

The angel rode a rope of light down through the stars, and landed lighter than a dust mote right behind the old priest.

Gabriel, whose name means “God is my strength,” watches old Zechariah fussing about with a light in the Holy of Holies in the Temple, glides in behind him and down like a feather and promptly startles a year off the old priest’s life. The angel loomed up out of the shadows like a gargoyle for an instant, but then the radiance that rolled off Gabriel like as an afterglow from the heavenly courts lodged behind the old priest’s left eye and began to grow like a rising moon on the horizon.

The angel told the priest to not be afraid, calling him by name, Zachariah, as if that would reassure the old man that she was friendly, but you might as well tell someone to decide not to breathe. Gabriel relays the message, a prophecy about a child, complete with child’s name, and what the child will mean to the people of Israel. Now other people, when they’ve gotten the full treatment—spotted the wings, the glory, the rising light in the eye—they’ve gone straight to laughing, or singing, or both. Not Zechariah. Despite his fear, Zechariah doubts the words of Gabriel. In return, Gabriel gives Zechariah an affronted version of “Do you know who I am?’ and as a lesson, Zechariah is struck mute for nine months.

Six months later, Gabriel slides down that rope of light again, but this time to Galilee. The angel expects to see a slight young woman, this Mary, gown and hair making her seem larger than she is, near a locked garden to remind us of how pure she is. Gabriel touches down lightly, like a dancer, a dancer who spends most of her time in the air and not earth-bound.

Gabriel takes a step back at the determined light coming from Mary’s eyes as she looks up from her book. A stem of lilies appears in Gabriel’s hand—trumpets to announce that the walls of sin and death will fall before the power of Love Incarnate. Lilies offered-- offered and accepted, and at the moment Mary touches them they become brighter white, and a sweet scent twines itself around the room.

The angel greets her as “O favored one,” and says that the Lord is with her. Although she’s a very young woman, her response is interesting: she’s not afraid, but rather is perplexed and puzzled. When Mary was declared to be God’s “favored one” one wonders if she did not have to fight off the urge to look behind her to see if the angel was talking to someone else. Where are all those signs of “favor?” Is she rich, well-connected?

Yet just as with Zechariah, Gabriel assures her that she shouldn’t be afraid and addresses her by name. In place of being told her prayers are being answered, she is assured once again that she has the favor of God.

And so in these verses we hear in our gospel are the seeds of the so-called “Angelic Salutation,” the Ave Maria, or “Hail Mary:”

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners now,
And at the hour of our death. Amen.


And Mary considers this. That same light that filled Zechariah’s eye blooms within Mary’s dark gaze, and begins to glow.

But Gabriel explains to her exactly how it’s going to happen—that she will bear her own child. To give credence to this prediction, Gabriel references Mary’s kinswoman Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Where Zechariah scoffed and was made mute, Mary ponders, and gets the last word: Yes. At the moment Mary declares herself a servant of the Lord, violets spring up outside the window where angel and maiden meet.

You would think that she would be the one who would refuse to believe that she had found favor with God, given her lowly station as a probably barely-teenaged peasant girl living literally in the middle of nowhere. God’s call to Mary is an invitation, not a command. It seems impossible. And yet, “Nothing is impossible with God.” As crazy as this all sounds, Mary ponders… and says “Yes,” even though her entire world will be changed in unimaginable ways. In giving her assent, she is the supreme example of cooperation and collaboration with God and human free will.

This is an important point. Mary agrees to do this absolutely of her own volition—she had the ability to say “No,” but the courage and the faith to say “Yes.” Her choice. Her song. Calling us to our own witness.

And yet this week’s gospel reading leaves us hanging. Puzzlingly, in this year we don’t get the record of the longest conversation between two women in the entire New Testament—Mary’s Visitation to Elizabeth, and Mary’s resulting prophetic shout of liberation, The Magnificat. Luckily, the Magnificat is today’s canticle.

It is clear the two prayers—the Hail Mary and the Magnificat—are meant to be considered together. At the Annunciation Mary says yes to God. In the Magnificat she explains why she said yes. She moves for yes to the angel, to joy and proclamation with Elizabeth. She says yes so God’s economy, God’s reign, God’s household, God’s justice can be brought to life and embodied amongst us, starting with Mary. Yes to love, yes to mercy, yes to restoration and stretching all the way to dusty roads running to and from Jerusalem and back again.

The Magnificat erupts from Mary’s throat as a song of joy and triumph the moment Elizabeth and Mary see each other. One young, one old, but these two women share the longest conversation between two women in the New Testament, reveling in a bond not just of kinship or shared expectancy, but of two people who know the power of God in their lives.

And Mary’s song moves from joy to power, from being full of grace to being full of fire. Mary goes from the Mother of God to God’s disciples with a full-throated roar that would make Elijah, Isaiah, or Jonah weep for envy. Mary creates a song so powerful that its singing has been banned on slave plantations, in India under the British raj. In Argentina during the reign of the dictator Pinochet, mothers of the disappeared were banned from singing the Magnificat as a protest against government terror on its own citizens.

The Magnificat is a threat to unjust regimes everywhere, for it clearly realigns the world and names the work of a God who is not waiting until tomorrow to act. Mary speaks with certainty from the other side of oppression. God HAS pulled down the corrupt mighty from their thrones. God HAS filled the bellies of the hungry. God HAS lifted up the lowly—starting with Mary herself. And God asks us, like Mary, to join in that work, and against injustice anywhere.

As a prophet, as a freedom fighter, Mary herself is suffused with light. After that assent to God’s holy messenger, with the acceptance of the offered lily, Mary is no mere vessel. She offers her very being to God—and to the raising of her son. She says yes, not because she expects that being “favored” bit to translate into being blessed by wealth or renown. She says yes, and then in the Magnificat waves the banner of true equality which is justice and God’s real reign set into motion.

Mary says yes, because she knows that when King David wanted to build a palace for God, David was also trying to domesticate God—to place God within a gilded cage, rather than in the human heart and as the center of the human community, where God longed to reign. With Mary’s yes, God is restored to live among us and within our hearts again. To live as one of us to show us that we can live by not the iron law of devouring each other but in compassion, amity and justice.

She says yes to show us the courage we are given when we say yes to God, when we consent to raise our field of vision from our own navels to the horizons of hope that is God’s invitation to live in a different better way than by our own blindness, brokenness, and prejudice. She says yes to encourage us all to allow the Son of God to grow. Within us, under our hearts, and to bear him forth into a world that STILL does not know the beauty of his gospel. We are all called to give birth to Christ in the world, and mother his gospel to those who need his good news the most.

Mary is a model to all of us who seek to follow in the Way of Jesus. Her story reminds us that we all have the choice to say yes and to see what HAS already happened by the hand of God in our lives. It is up to us to choose to assent—or not. To lift our eyes from our own feet to the horizon of God’s grace that. is waiting to fill us up to overflowing as well.

Our choice is this: will we bear Christ into the world—or not? Do we want to unlock the chains of fear, hopelessness and distrust that bind us to the ways of fear, or do we want to be free-- Free to offer our opened spirits like a bowl to be filled with the promise of salvation, to respond in faith and courage to God’s plea to live not in wood or stone building where human hands can keep God safely locked away, but within our hearts?

How would it change our perspective and our lives to go from confining Jesus inside a box of our own making, and instead to make Mary’s song our own:

My soul overflows with the greatness of God,
My spirit sings unending praise to One Who Saves,
the One who lifts up the lowly servant
who dares to be the instrument of God Most High.
Surely, from now to time unending
All generations will see that I have been blessed.

What would it be like to allow the power of hope and assurance of God’s steadfast presence to make its home with our spirits? What could we do? What could prevail against us?

May we have the courage to say yes. Yes to bearing Jesus in our hearts, and in our lives, in our words, and in our deeds. Yes to our souls magnifying the greatness of our God in our life and in our work. Yes to making ourselves a true home and witness for God, forgiven, healed, and renewed.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am online worship service in Coronatide from St. Marin's Episcopal.  Church, Ellisville, MO. 

Readings:

Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16

Romans 16:25-27

Luke 1:26-38

Canticle 15

Two Poems and a Song: Sermon for Advent 1B

End and Beginning ©Jan Richardson janrichardson.com

We begin a new liturgical year for the church this morning, and most of us are ready to bid good riddance to the last one. Unfortunately for us, our readings this morning, which I have kept in the Revised Common Lectionary even though we are using the Morning Prayer format for our worship this season, are hardly brimming with straightforward joy or predictions about anticipating a sweet little baby who will become the Prince of Peace.
Rather, every year on the first Sunday of Advent, we get treated to descriptions of the apocalypse. It’s enough to unsettle even the most optimistic among us.

What we have just heard are words of discontent, not just longing. We have heard complaints about God’s absence when we need God most. The section from Isaiah we heard is a plea for God to ride down in rescue as the people face calamity—what their theology tells them is punishment at God’s hands—a fear that is echoed by our psalm portion from Psalm 80.

And then, we start our year’s exploration of the gospel of Mark at one of its most challenging spots: Mark 13 is sometimes referred to as “the little apocalypse,” which provides a break or a hinge between Mark’s discussion of Jesus’s ministry and the narrative of the passion. Mark’s audience, much like many people in the world today, lived at the center of a host of disasters.

Mark, chapter 13, begins with a prediction of persecution of Christians (which intensified in 64 CE after Christians were accused of burning down Rome under the Emperor Nero) and the destruction of the Temple (which did indeed happen in 70 CE). It felt, after all, like the end of the world.

And we’ve been being prepared for this reading for several weeks at the end of the last lectionary year, what with parables about vineyard workers and bridesmaids and such. So today’s gospel, too ends with a warning to be watchful, looking for Jesus’s return at every opportunity.

In the year 2020, this collection of readings, with their common theme of feeling abandoned by God, speak especially to our situation, nine months now into Coronatide. Nine months of us worshiping with fear of contagion swirling over us, including 8 months of online worship only. And I hear some of you when you tell me you are sick of it. I am sick of it too. But that still doesn’t mean we get to start acting like COVID-19 doesn’t exist. And so we can look at these readings we hear today as speaking directly to us. Some wonder where God is in this pandemic. They wonder what Isaiah wondered 3000 years ago and Mark’s audience wondered 2000 years ago—when will God come and be with us?

And if you have been paying attention at all this year, you know that almost exactly 100 years ago, a similar pandemic swept across the world, necessitating the closure of schools and churches and businesses, although at that time, with medical intervention still being in its infancy rather than something to take for granted, arguments about government overreach were not QUITE as hyperbolic as they are now. Nonetheless, the so-called Spanish flu that swept across the world carried by deploying soldiers at the end of World War I threatened to bring the world to its knees, just like today.

And 101 years ago, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats looked at the world as it was in 1919—violent rebellions in Ireland against British rule; the end of a modern, industrialized war that was filled with new, human-designed horror of chemical warfare and poison gas. And on top of it, he had nearly lost his pregnant wife to the Spanish flu.


In late November 1919, Yeats wrote a poem that brings together Jesus’s incarnation at Christmas and his Second Coming at world’s end, as the early Christians expected—but fueled by feelings of abandonment such as Isaiah expressed. So, he wrote this poem, entitled “The Second Coming,” and vented some of his anger at his feelings of helplessness as well as the presumption that a baby’s birth 2000 years prior could do anything to alleviate his anxiety:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blind and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?(2)

Yeats looks around his world and sees signs of apocalypse everywhere, much like a modern Isaiah. And he despairs, torn between his longing to believe in something redemptive to come out of all the suffering afflicting the world, and his angry skepticism of Christian promises that “everything is going to be all right.”

After all, the Hebrew scriptures are filled with stories of a God who leads a ragtag rabble through a howling wilderness with a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud and causes the bread of angels and hailstorms of basically Cornish game hens to fall down at the feet of God’s beloved people. Why can’t we have a little bit of that right now?

We seek an answer to our longing for a respite, and our lectionary gives us dark portents. What are we to do with this?

Although Advent gives us the gift of hope and expectation, of learning to wait with grace with building excitement for what it to come, we are impatient. Surely just this once God can just accede to that plea from one of my favorite 80s rock bands, the Smiths, and written by their mad king, Morrissey, in the dreamy, brief musical gem “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” As gorgeous music swirls in the background the singer morosely vents his frustration at losing out on what his heart most desires, and prays to a God he usually dismisses:

Good times for a change
See, the luck I've had
Can make a good man turn bad

So please, please, please
Let me, let me, let me
Let me get what I want this time…(3)

Who can’t relate to this feeling of being on the losing end? And we set ourselves up for it, so much of the time. We are constantly caught in a conundrum of our own making. We want to proclaim our freedom and independence loudly—until a crisis comes. Then, too often, that same God we hold at arm’s length so that we don’t have to give up our autonomy and self-congratulatory belief in our own agency suddenly is the same God we cry out to solve all our problems like a genie when things go wrong.

However…. (There’s always a however, isn’t there?)

If you think waiting is hard for us to understand, just wait until you see the Incarnation.

That the same God who gives us free will means it, and chooses self-limitation in order to grant us our freedom to choose. A God who so often chooses the underdog, the youngest son to be the leader, the barren womb to give birth to nations, is telling us to WAIT, darn it, and that God is coming into this aching world to help us learn how to better tend to it and each other. But instead of the heavens torn open and a warrior God on a chariot from heaven, with white beard streaming over his muscular, warrior’s body swooping down to fix things, straight from the Sistine Chapel to your living room, what do we get instead?

A baby. One of the most helpless, squishy things on earth. That’s what we’re waiting on, while the world crashes down around our ears. A God who enters human history as a peasant baby in a backwater of Empire with an unwed teenaged mother.

Jyoti Sahi, Incarnation in the Anthill, 2019

We KNOW this story and how it is going to resolve itself at Christmas. But have we really SAT with how seemingly inconsequential Jesus’s entering into human life is? Mark’s gospel doesn’t even recount it. THAT’S how inconsequential it is to some early Christians.

Jesus’s shockingly unspectacular birth was a source of embarrassment for some of his earliest followers, those like Judas Iscariot, who maybe could get past Jesus’s humble birth but could not get past his refusal, as the rightful king of Israel to take up arms and foment a military coup in which the TRUE savior of Israel would restore the monarchy of King David and drive the invaders from Israel’s borders.

So one answer to our situation, especially in times such as these, is to see if there are spots where we can embrace mystery and wonder—the mystery and wonder of worshiping a God who does the unexpected.

One answer to Yeats’s howl of rage is given to us from another poet-- Denise Levertov. At age sixty, she converted to Christianity after growing up with a Welsh mother and a Russian Jewish Hasidic émigré father who became an Anglican priest. After her conversion, she wrote some of the most beautiful religious poetry of the late 20th century, in my opinion. And she answers Yeats’ dread and despair with wonder and awe in this poem, entitled “On The Mystery of the Incarnation:”

It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.(4)

Levertov reminds us that God looks into our pain, our waywardness, and, instead of abandonment or punishment, answers with the best God has to offer: God’s own son to show us how to live a fully human life, and to show us how close to God’s heart we are, how to recover the divine spark that God enclosed in us from our beginning. That’s what Advent promises us, despite apocalypses all around.

The theme of Advent is "watching and waiting." These two attitudes can be filled with either hope or dread, and sometimes both at the same time, because sometimes an ending can lead to new life, new growth. Sometimes an ending can be a blessing—even if that comes later, and especially if it becomes a blessing only because our tendency as humans is to try to reshape our stories so that even our losses end up blessing us with new wisdom, new resilience, new inner resources.

It’s easy to take for granted God’s care of us when things are ticking along smoothly. It’s easy then to discount the safety net that God stretches beneath us, running alongside us as we wobble along from one adventure to another like a small child riding their bikes without training wheels. But this pandemic has brought us real heartache. It’s also called us to embrace minor inconveniences for the sake of the protection of others. And we should not equate the two. Real tragedies are job losses and health care coverage then disappearing and long term illness and a quarter million families dynamited by the loss of loved ones forever just in the US alone. We stand in the midst of millions of little apocalypses too, no less real because they are personal rather than global in scale.

Jesus’s entire life and career are wrapped in riddles and mystery, especially at first glance. There are some of us who have heard these stories dozens of times and are still no closer to penetrating their meaning for our lives.

Yet Jesus’s coming also reminds us of the power that God has handed to us as God’s children and agents for change and renewal in the societies in which we live—the fact that God is within US to act according to bring God’s healing presence into view in the midst of sorrow.

Advent reminds us of the truth of Jesus’s THIRD coming as much as the first two in this: Jesus comes into the world from within us, when we let him. A miracle, by definition, is often only recognized as a miracle AFTER the fact, when it comes from the unexpected—a miracle is itself a mystery, since it’s unexplainable by our normal tools of natural law and reason. The season we are called to observe for the next four weeks is stubbornly wrapped in miracle and mystery, even from our perspective 2000 years on the other side of it.

But here’s the blessing behind the currently unanswered longing we hear today: even in the storm surges of human existence, Jesus enters into human life and reminds us that God is not aloof from human suffering but knows it intimately. Jesus is Alpha and Omega, present at every beginning and cradling us to his shoulder in every ending. Jesus’s willingness to enter into this howling wilderness of human existence offers us the hope of healing and wholeness and peace—that beautiful state of release and rest our Jewish brethren call shalom—to bring our longing, aching hearts to rest and recovery, from our beginning to our end. Every ending also contains within it a beginning—and that IS good news, indeed. (5)

Stay awake and alert, therefore. Open your heart to Jesus, and allow Jesus’s power and love to work through you where others are hurting and lost.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am online service of Morning Prayer on November 29, 2020 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 64:1-9

Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:24-37

Citations

1) End and Beginning, © by Jan Richardson, janrichardson.com. Used by permission.

2) William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming," in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1989. For a discussion of this poem, see here.

3) Steven Patrick Morrissey and Johnny Marr, "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want," from the album Hatful of Hollow, 1984.

4) Jyoti Sahi, Incarnation in the Anthill, 2019, from Art and Theology blog.

5) Denise Levertov,  "On the Mystery of the Incarnation," from The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, 2013. For a wonderful overview of her spiritual poetry, see here. For a collection of Levertov's religious poetry, see The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes, 1997.

6) Jan Richardson, "Blessing When the World Is Ending," November 23, 2014, at The Advent Door, at janrichardson.com

Prayer, day 2613: The Feast of the Annunciation

Almighty God, we sing your glory,
joining the joyful song of creation
as our souls sing out your greatness!
How beautiful upon the treetops
is the rising light of morning:
O God, you bless us beyond measure with beauty
and our hearts kneel before you in praise!

Give us your favor, O Redeemer,
in leading us to consent to your will in our lives,
that we may join our hands in unity
in the pursuit of justice and peace,
pulling down oppression from its throne,
filling the hungry with good things from the bounty we have.

Strengthen us to bear you into the world, Blessed Jesus,
as a mother carries her child
close to her heart.

Holy One, place the protection
of your mighty arm and heart
over us this day,
and guide us in paths of gentleness and compassion.
Stretch out the awning of your mercy, Beloved Savior,
over all who rest in your care.

Amen.

Look!

As we learned how to read, were we 
beginning to forget to look, 
our young eyes caught in tangles of print 
so that imagination was choked? Were we 
trapped at that remove from ourselves? 

Or did we begin to see a new way, with eyes 
that widened in the amazement of reverie, 
memory, invention? As we peered 
between the words, could we make out 
shapes and colors beyond them?

What did our inside eyes make of 
the black marks on creamy paper, on onionskin? 
A dream of angels turned real, perhaps. 
A wooden boat on a lake. Three small loaves 
fragmented to fill all those empty mouths 

and baskets. Or this: a blind man 
opening his eyes so that the first face he sees -
a vision, surely - is Christ's, spittle 
still shining on the quick fingers, 
his mouth saying urgently, Look! 

—Luci Shaw (1928- ) from Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

Prayer, day 2576

Beloved Savior, we come before you
seeking your grace and compassion this day: 
we long for the weight of your hand upon us 
as we seek to live into your witness of reconciliation. 

Awaken us to your presence within us, Lord Christ, 
that we remember that in your incarnation, 
you remind us of our true nature and work: 
to heal the sick,
to stand alongside the oppressed,
to reconcile the lost,
to honor the least of these, 
to walk humbly and ever closer with our God. 

Blessed Jesus, you taught us to pray and to listen, 
to embody wisdom, peace, and virtue, 
breathing forgiveness and mercy 
in the renewal of life, holiness, and hope for all:
Today, may we set our feet firmly in this pilgrim path. 

Bless and strengthen us in determination, O Messiah, 
as we seek to embody your light and truth, 
and in your compassion pour out your comfort 
upon those whose needs we bring before you.

Amen.