Sore Afraid

Christmas Eve, 2008
Luke 1
“In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid.”
Terrified. Scared witless. Filled with fear.
I sometimes think that they’d feel right at home in our age.
I was sitting over at Murky one day this week, listening to peppy music on the sound system, looking around at folks sipping warm drinks on a sunny, cold afternoon. The place certainly did not seem filled with fear.
And yet, we are a society permeated by a fear that has crept in like a cold mist and settled quietly around us. This fear goes usually unremarked upon, so unquestioned has it become in recent years. It is simply the wallpaper of our collective house.
It’s like the grass in a field of sheep: spotty in places, nothing much to look upon.
I suspect that shepherds in Luke’s story would have understood. While there were not two wars being fought around them, they lived under the tyranny of an oppressive empire governed through violence such that the cross which we think of as singular and unique was actually ubiquitous. Mary and Joseph quite likely passed quite a few of them on their trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
The economy they lived in was probably less functional than our own – if you can imagine. It was certainly less equitable than ours even though we live with the most inequitable economy in the developed world and one with a larger gap between rich and poor than at any time since the Gilded Age.
And we are sore afraid.
We probably don’t put it quite like that: we are worried, concerned, perhaps. But on this cold, dark night, if we are honest, we’ll acknowledge that there is so much quiet fearfulness around us.
Thus these days the word of the Lord to Isaiah strikes me as most wonderfully comforting:
“the people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness,
on them light has shined.
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness.”
We are that people, and this promise is for us.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it, John promised. Darkness comes in various hues in our lives but we all experience it.
When the light shines, however, people tend to react in different ways. The shepherds saw the light and were sore afraid. The wise men saw the light and chose to travel toward it.
Preaching in the middle of another era of great fear, the 1930s, the Harry Emerson Fosdick said, "In these visitors two basic human characteristics are portrayed. In the shepherds we see fear in motion, and in fact, we are all at times compelled to act in response to fear. But it offers us no enduring benefit.”
Fosdick’s defense of liberal theology against the straightjacket of fundamentalism cost him his pastorate in a New York City Presbyterian church, and his steadfast commitment to nonviolence cost him as well. In the midst of the Great Depression he wrote one of my favorite hymns, God of Grace and God of Glory, which prays, “grand us wisdom, grant us courage for the living of these days.”
But he understood that such a gift must be received and used if it is to have any meaning in our lives, if it is to make any difference, if it is to move us beyond fear. As he put it, “For strength that endures we must seek to be like the wise men, guided in the dark times of life by the light of love in motion. This is the key characteristic to a successful spiritual journey."
Love in motion. That is what the Christmas story is all about. Into the midst of darkness and fear, God sets love in motion. The question is, what shall we do in response? Turn away in fear? Or open our lives to live lovingly in response.
As John’s gospel famously reminds us, “for God so loved the world” – the cosmos, in the Greek, all of creation, not just the rich and the powerful and the religiously proper, but each and every one of us – for God so loves the world that God sets love in motion again and again and again.
We are invited this Holy Night, to open our lives to God’s creative love and find in it the deep reservoir of hope, faith and love that is fundamentally necessary for the living of these days.

The Road to Bethlehem

Dec. 21, 2008
Luke 1 (selected verses)
BBC correspondent Aleem Maqbool has been retracing the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem on a donkey. Despite what our friend John Bell insists, that there was no donkey in the Biblical story, Maqbool decided that the 70 miles needed a beast of burden.
Alas, the first donkey he took refused to budge, the second one could not make the border crossing from Palestinian territory to Israeli territory because its papers were not in order. So, by day three of his trek, Maqbool was already on donkey number three.
It seems the political situation – as well as the stubbornness situation – has not improved a great deal in 2,000 years since King Herod’s threats caused the wise men to reroute their trip and forced Mary and Joseph to flee to Egypt. Indeed, UN officials told Maqbool that if Mary and Joseph were to make the journey that Luke describes in the Christmas story, they would have to go through five permanent check points, three temporary check points and get a permit to go into greater Jerusalem.
Maqbool’s reporting reminded me of the intimate connections between the spiritual and political, the personal and the public, the ethical and the ephemeral that always exist in Christian life and faith from its humble beginnings in the experiences of poor folks existing on the margins of first-century Palestinian life and in the writings of the earliest Christian communities.
The beautiful Christmas story from Luke, that we read again every year, begins not by accident with a description of the political situation. “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
A decree: in other words, a political announcement as distinct from, say, an oracle or a heavenly announcement.
Emperor Augustus: in other words, a political leader as distinct from a religious one.
Governor of Syria: in other words, a leader from a particular political jurisdiction.
In passing, I would simply say that when folks complain about mixing politics and religion I always think of the Christmas story and “blame” the mixing on the authors of scripture who so clearly understood that if the Advent story – the coming of Christ into this world – was to have any meaning worth celebrating, worth recalling, worth opening our hearts to again and again, that meaning must essentially involve transformation – repentance, in the Biblical vernacular – a turning not only of our personal lives but also a turning of the world.
On the road to Bethlehem the intimate details of our personal stories intersect with the broader sweep of the story of our time. Each informs and shapes the other.
That is why, in the first place, we are still here. Why we gather, more than 2,000 years after the fact, to remember. But more than mere memory – which is all too easily reduced to nostalgia and fuzzy images on pretty Christmas cards – more than mere memory, we gather to rededicate ourselves, our lives and our treasures, to this story of transformation.
We gather to join together on the road to Bethlehem, to journey again to the manger.
And the manger, as Bonhoeffer pointedly reminded us, is one of two places, two sites, that cause the powerful to tremble. The second site is the cross.
For the journey to Bethlehem and the manger must also be, always and already, a journey toward Jerusalem and the cross.
The Christmas machine of American consumer culture wants no part of this journey.
But followers of Jesus have always been on this path. We know that the road to Bethlehem is also the road to Jerusalem, and we walk it nonetheless.
This year the journey finds me particularly moved by some of the folks I have been sojourning with. I hope I do not embarrass anyone here as I name a few names. It’s not my intent.
Naming names is important because it draws us down to specifics, and if Christian faith is about anything, it must be about specifics, it must be about incarnation. The Christ of our faith is, above all else, about making the generalized God of heaven specific and incarnate in our lives.
I was thinking about this the other day when I was visiting Woody in the hospital. I asked him my standard pastoral question, “how goes it with your soul, Woody?” He chuckled and said, “my soul is fine; it’s my body that’s worn out.”
Woody was part of that generation of American Mainline Protestants who wear their faith quietly, and don’t talk a great deal about spiritual practices or personal relationships with Jesus. But as I thought about making the generalized God of heaven specific and incarnate in our lives, it struck me that Woody, for many, many years, made incarnate among us, right at the front door, the deep and foundational Christian spiritual practice of welcome and hospitality. He lived a long, long time on the road to Bethlehem.
Sojourners, fellow travelers, if you will, are crucial to our journeys, and we never know just who they will be for us. I don’t imagine Mary and Joseph expected to encounter an inn-keeper who couldn’t give them a room, but who could find some space in the barn for them.
I doubt that Woody and Evelyn ever anticipated that some of us would be sojourners with them. Evelyn told me Friday that Ron and James had brought them cookies from the cookie bake last week, and that Ron had stopped by the day before on his way to work.
Imagine that: a D-Day vet and his war bride of 60-some years, being cared for by a gay Presbyterian elder and his partner of 20-some years. Two men who have, for many of us over the years, made incarnate the deep and foundational Christian spiritual practice of compassion, of being present with us and in solidarity with us in times of suffering and also in times of celebration and joy. They have lived a long time on the road to Bethlehem.
The road to Bethlehem stretches out before us, and the Spirit of God beckons us to gather round close to the manger again and open our hearts to the possibility of transformation.
Of course, we don’t have to have been on our journeys for a long, long time to make a difference in the life of the world.
I’ve been smiling all week thinking about the Christmas story as it was told to us last week by our young people. The wise boys and girl who brought their gifts to the moose/Joseph. The bunny-eared angels. Mary the cat.
It was as if the angel Gabriel came down to our Sunday School classroom and said, “Greetings favored ones. The Lord is with y’all! You have been called to bear God’s word into the world!”
As the moose/Joseph might have said, “what?”
Or, as Mary said in Luke’s gospels, “how can this be, for I am but a child.”
“Nothing is impossible with God.”
And so it was, that the youngest members of this community made incarnate for the rest of us the love and the joyousness of the gospel. They have not lived long, but they are living on the road to Bethlehem.
It is out of such living that the turning of the world, of which Mary sings, becomes possible.
Such turning is necessary, and if we are journeying on the road to Bethlehem as faithful followers of the Prince of Peace, then we do not have to look too far to understand and feel that urgency.
As Henri Nouwen reminded, “you are a Christian” – a follower of Jesus – “only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in … so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come.”
In other words, if you are to live on the road to Bethlehem, you must live with eyes wide open to what is going on all around you, while at the same time, casting a vision of that kingdom that was launched through the curious imagination of a God who understands greatness in the least of these, who understands the true power is born in a manger.
I think of Woody’s deep sense of welcome and hospitality, and understand in it the seeds also of his passionate concern for peace. The most anger I ever saw him articulate came through in his disgust with the war in Iraq and the terrible waste of so many young lives.
I think of Ron and James’ deep sense of care and compassion, and understand in it the seeds of their commitment to justice for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community.
I think of the kids’ creativity, joy and love, and can imagine in it the seeds of their future commitments –to a world that honors creation, to communities marked by deep joy, to lives defined by the love that radiates out from them. That joy reminds us that though the journey will be difficult at times, that the road we travel goes by way of the cross, that there will be tears along the way, it is a journey of life, of new life and of resurrection.
As Isaiah cried out for the exiles, “comfort, comfort ye my people,” trusting that the rough places would be made smooth, the crooked straight and that all of us will see the glory of the Lord, as the psalmist put it, in the land of the living.
As we journey along the road to Bethlehem, as we gather again close by the manger, may we together, through our hospitality and welcome, our care and compassion, our creativity, joy and love, and all the other gifts that we have been given – may our souls magnify the Lord, may our spirits rejoice in God our savior. For God has looked with favor on us. And through our lives, may the great turning of the world begin again in the small and intimate turnings of our own lives, as our mourning is turned to dancing, as the proud are scattered, the powerful brought down from their thrones, and the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled with plentiful food and the poor brought good news of a gospel that begins again and again on the road to Bethlehem.
May the way be made clear for all who want to travel it.
Amen.

Holy Waiting

December 7, 2008
II Peter 3:8-15; Mark 13:24-37
On my way over to the coffee shop last week, I paused to chat with the child care center kids on the playground. One little girl was hanging from the monkey bars, just dangling there, swinging back and forth as she slowly made her way across under the watchful eyes of one of the teachers. The tiny body swinging back and forth struck me as just hysterically amusing – cute, funny, sweet and timeless.
The sight skipped my mind back to when Hannah was that girl, when her first successful crossing of those very bars was a milestone of our first year here.
I walked all the way to Murky with a smile on my face at both the sight of that little girl dangling there, and the thought of time passing. People I passed on the sidewalk probably thought I was an idiot!
Time, it is said, is God’s gift to us; what we do with the time that we have been given is our gift to God.
The season of Advent is all about what we do with the time that we have been given.
On the one hand, Advent is about waiting – which can seem utterly passive and often like a huge waste of time. On the other hand, Advent is about hope and preparation. Mostly, I believe, Advent is about living in the tension between the time that is and the time that is to come, and thus, about the tension between what we might call holy patience and holy impatience. Advent, then, is about faithful living in the present moment.
Both of our readings this morning emphasize attention to the present moment, the subtle signs of the movement of the Spirit, the intimations of God. The readings also underscore the utter uncertainty of the future. The author of the letter to Peter suggests that there is, indeed, something salvivic in the way that we tend to Advent time. “Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.”
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus puts it simply: “stay awake.”
Stay awake to the present moment. That may be the most difficult challenge of all for us – not only in the liturgical season that we call “Advent,” but in all of the advent seasons of our lives. After all, life is made up of countless small advents. From the expectation that a little girl on the monkey bars will grow to a young woman, to the hope that our work in this moment will amount to something good and lasting for the future. Through all such advent time, we are bound, it seems, to spend too much of our time worrying about that uncertain future or fretting, angry, grieving, over past losses or struggles. So we miss advent time because we are living in the past or worried about the future, and thus asleep to the present moment.
Against all that, Jesus says simply, “stay awake.”
Staying awake, being mindful, is being faithful in the between times in which we live and move and have our being. And if we are not mindful to the present moment, it is all too easy to miss the still, small voice of God which whispers to us, “be still, and know that I am God.”
I was pondering such mindfulness, such awakeness, this week and was struck by a couple of seemingly random experiences that brought to mind a pair of disparate conversations spaced apart by about a quarter century, through which, years later, God seemed to be speaking to me this week about Advent time. Let me unpack that for you.
As you may have seen on my blog this week, I happened to hit opening day of the new Capitol Visitors Center. It was an Advent kind of experience. After six years and $600 million of waiting and hoping and preparing – of the advent of the new center, as it were – the place finally experienced, a few weeks early, its own Christmas-type fulfillment. That was my own interpretation of the faces and attitudes of every staff person – from the security guards to the docents – whom I encountered in the 45 minutes I spent wandering the new center. They were all so clearly happy and excited finally to be able to play with their new toy! It was a little snapshot of hope fulfilled. Mind you, this is not a comment on the place, the money spent or any of that – merely an observation about the emotions on display among those who had waited, hoped, prepared, and expected this day for such a long time. Their patience was rewarded, their hopes fulfilled, and it was written on their faces.
The second experience involved a bit of house cleaning. I was dusting this week, and for the first time in too long I dusted the backs of book shelves behind the books. I’ve put that off for months, using my inability to do this motion as an excuse.
Anyway, in dusting behind one row of books I found a little book that had been pushed behind the others. It’s called, What Child Is This?, and it’s a simple little story aimed at early adolescent readers – you’d find it in the “young adult” section of the bookstore or library. I couldn’t remember when it came into our house, and I had not read it, so that evening I did.
It’s not great literature – a bit above average as kid lit goes in my experience. But it was a good story about foster kids longing for community, connection and family at Christmas time.
When eight-year-old Katie tells Mr. Pollard, the social worker that she wants a family for Christmas, he tells her to think little. Her teen-aged foster brother, Matt, tells her later that it isn’t true, that “Christmas is about big things.” Matt’s response to the social worker’s well-intended warning about false hopes stopped me cold: “There is no such thing as false hope, thought Matt, no matter what Pollard says. Hope just is. Every morning, every night. Hope doesn’t guarantee. Hope doesn’t promise. Hope doesn’t do a thing.
“But you have to have it.”
You have to have it. Hope, which is nothing more, but nothing less, than an orientation of faith toward the future, trusting that the intimations of God point toward the fulfillment of the promises of God.
Such hope entails, indeed, demands a practice of holy patience.
My friend, John Bell, calls it the discipline of waiting. Scripture is full of waiting, and Jesus spent a goodly bit of time in the discipline of waiting – waiting for the right time to go up to Jerusalem, waiting at the well to engage in conversation with a woman, waiting in the garden, waiting, ultimately, in the tomb.
John Bell suggests that “Waiting is an important countercultural spiritual discipline. And it is that for a number of reasons: In the first place, instant decisions, especially as they affect our life and the lives of others, are not always the best. […] Secondly, waiting allows for the development of relationships which would never mature if first impressions were the last word. […] Thirdly, waiting is the prerequisite for real intimacy. In personal relationships, the beloved will not give away what is deep in herself or himself until time and familiarity have enabled trust to develop and intimacy to be safe. […] Finally, waiting is a sign of love. Indeed it is perhaps the most clear indication of whether or not love is true.”
And so we wait, in Advent time.
But our patient Advent waiting is not a passive state, not a time of sleep, but of staying awake and aware to the subtle movement of the Spirit in our midst, beckoning us onward toward that Kingdom time in which we already partially dwell.
That thought, this week, reminded me of a pair of conversations. The first occurred more than 25 years ago, when I said to a faithful young seminarian, about something I’ve long since forgotten, “we’re closer to death every day, and we’ll all be dead for a long, long time.” He said to me, “David, we’ve only just begun to live, and my faith tells me that we will live for a long, long time with God.”
The second conversation was more recent, and was with someone from a church who was growing impatient with the pace of change and progress in the congregation. I said, “in the long run these things will happen.” He said, “in the long run, we’ll all be dead.”
There it is: the Advent tension between holy patience and holy impatience. We live in that balance, which is nothing new under the sun. Like the little girl on the monkey bars, we live suspended between a past to which we cannot return, and a future that beckons us onward in faith and hope. And as the mix of joy and determination on her face reminded me, this is life, and there is such joy in it!
Jesus lived that way, in that balance, as well.
When we pray together the prayer that he taught his disciples, we open our hearts to that tension as we say, “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”
On earth, now, in our time – a holy impatient demand for the fullness of the kingdom of love and justice, of compassion and mercy, of grace and peace to be realized now, in our time, in our midst.
Balanced with the holy patience that understands that the kingdom of heaven is never fully realized, that it is always calling us from a future that will never be fully present and complete because creation itself is still living in Advent time, still emerging, still growing, still being completed, still to come in the future of God’s imagination.
The great gift of God in Jesus Christ, the great gift of Christmas, is to be shown just how to live in this Advent time: live into hope. For, if we are to live into an eternity in the presence of God, why not start living in that presence right here, right now?
May it be so, for each of us, this day and always. Amen.