January 18, Epiphany II

Kristin White

The Second Sunday after the Epiphany – January 18, 2015

Beloved, you are created by God:

“Lord, you have searched me out and known me,” says Psalm 139. “You yourself created my inmost parts. You knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

You are created by God, and that is not all. You are also inhabited by God. For all else that Paul says in his letter to the church at Corinth, to a people who have become forgetful, to a people who have lost their way, who have come to believe that they can separate their lives of faith from their lives of action…for all else that is there, Paul also asks this question: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” he asks.

You are created by God, you are inhabited by God, and that is not all. Because you are also called by God. It has been a long time, in the reading from the first book of Samuel. It has been a long time since the people anticipated, since they expected God’s action in the world. It has been a long time since that burning bush, since that pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. The text says that the word of the Lord was rare in those days, and visions were not widespread. God’s word was so rare, in fact, that God called, but it took Eli (a priest of the temple) three times before he figured out how to help his young protégé, Samuel. “Say this,” he tells Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Thankfully, God is faithful, and persistent. God calls again, and Samuel responds.

And it may seem these days that the word of the Lord is rare. It may seem that visions are not widespread. And I say to you, listen. I say to you that you are called by God.

Beloved, you are created by God and inhabited by God and called by God, and that is not all…because you are also invited as a participant together with God and with those others who will follow. “We have found him,” Philip tells his friend Nathanael in today’s gospel passage. “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, the one the prophets foretold. We found him.” And when Nathanael protests (“Is there anything good that can come from Nazareth?”) Philip responds, “Come and see.” No defensiveness, no umbrage, no grand argument, no theological justification of right and wrong, no formulaic proof…instead of all that, an invitation. A widening of the circle. “Come with me. Be part of this, with me. See who this is, and join us.”

And that, Beloved, is all…or at least it is the beginning of all. Because you are created by God, inhabited by God, called by God, invited to participate together with God and to find and invite others…to widen the circle of those who seek the kingdom…and in so seeking, to join God as co-creators of that kingdom, helping with our created and inhabited hands and hearts and voices to bring it into being.

Tomorrow we celebrate the feast of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Yesterday, I saw (from the second row, because I was late getting there and the theater was full) I watched the movie Selma. And as I saw the explosion in a church that would end the lives of little girls who were talking about their baptism, I heard the words of today’s psalm: “Lord, you have searched me out and known me…you yourself created my inmost parts, you knit me together inside my mother’s womb.”

As I watched sheriffs’ deputies wrap baseball bats in barbed wire in order to inflict the greatest possible harm on the bodies they would attack, I heard Paul’s words to that forgetful church in Corinth: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” Do you not know that their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit as well?

As I watched Dr. King kneel at the bridge in Selma, with a legion of state troopers and sheriffs’ deputies and Klansmen before him and thousands of people behind him, as I watched him kneel to pray and then rise and turn back with all those people to return the way that they had come, I heard Samuel respond at a time when the word of the Lord was rare, with the words that Eli had given him: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

And at last, at last, as I watched footage of the actual march, the march joined by clergy from this diocese whom I have had the privilege to meet, together with people of every background from all over this country, the march that finally culminated on the steps of the capitol building in Alabama in spite of everything that the sheriff and his deputies and their governor and so many others had done to stop it, as Dr. King ended his speech to those thousands of followers who had risked all they had to join him, saying “Mine eyes have seen the glory,” I heard Philip, again, to Nathanael: “Come and see.” Come and see the glory of the Lord.

Like you, Dr. King was created by God an inhabited by God and called by God and invited by God as a participant in the Kingdom. And, like Philip to Nathanael, he beckons us with his witness to “come and see.” So come and see, beloved of God. Come and see the kingdom that God invites us to help prepare, with our hands and our hearts and our voices. Come and see, and widen the circle by inviting others who would join us.

Come and see justice roll down like water. Come and see people judged, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Come and see little black boys and black girls join hands with little white boys and white girls. Come and see every valley exalted and every hill and mountain made low. Come and see light drive out darkness, and love drive out hatred. Come and see that dream made manifest.

Beloved of God, together with Dr. King, together with Philip and Nathanael and all those who would serve as witness, you are divinely created and inhabited and called and invited to participate as co-creators of the Kingdom of God. So come and see. And invite the others who would widen this circle.

Come and see the glory of the Lord, revealed.

January 11, 2015, Baptism of the Lord

Mark 1:4-11
Bryan Cones

Imagine for a moment being Jesus on his way to the Jordan. Imagine him for a moment really as a human being, with every human limitation and concern, joining so many others on his way out to the desert prophet, seeking also a “baptism of repentance.” Why was he going there? What was he looking for?

Did he feel like a failure, that he wasn’t a good Jew. Maybe he didn’t think he had been a good son to his mother, or a good provider for her. Maybe he had failed to create a family to bear his father’s name. Maybe he wasn’t very good at carpentry or building or whatever trade he had inherited from his father. Maybe he feared his life had lost direction, that he was unworthy.

Now step into the water with Jesus, and imagine seeing that mystical vision and hearing that heavenly voice: You are my son, the Beloved. With you I am well-pleased. And imagine for a moment the feeling of being freed from all your doubts, all your fear of failure, and discovering yourself entirely loved by God, without ever having done anything, accomplished anything, to “deserve” it.

Now step back again, on the way to John at the Jordan, except this time go as yourself: Imagine all your own self-doubts, your own fears: Am I a good parent? A productive person? Am I success?

Imagine all those other voices, all those other standards, the world proposes that we measure ourselves by: whether we are too fat or too thin, too old or too young, whether we have enough money, or if our job is important enough or prestigious enough, whether our marriage is good or happy, or our family fits the model, whichever model currently proposed.

And don’t forget those gnawing, terrible questions lying beneath all those measures: Am I good? Am I worthy? Am I loveable? Am I “normal”?

And now step into the water with Jesus and hear the good news, God’s loving judgment on all that fear and self-doubt: You are my child, my own, Beloved. With you I am well-pleased.

What is it like to have all that doubt, all that fear, washed away by Jordan waters, to feel ourselves beloved, not despite our differences or limitations, as the world judges them, but beloved by God in them and through them.

Beloved in our bodies, in their many shapes and sizes, in their many gifts and abilities and limitations, beloved in our ages, beloved through the spectrum of how our brains process the world around us, beloved through our moods, in our depression, in our joyfulness, beloved when we can pay attention and when we can’t, beloved in our families exactly as they are, beloved in every moment of our human stories, through both the highs and the lows.

Now let us feel ourselves together as the beloved community, that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King imagined, born of Jordan waters: beloved together in our all our blessed differences, all of them created by God, and blessed and redeemed in the waters of the baptism.

That is not to say, of course, that being beloved is without difficulty, or that every blessed difference is easy to hold in this or any beloved community, especially for the person whose difference is hard to bear.

I have been thinking this week of the death last month of a transgender teenager in Ohio named Leelah Alcorn, who could not find a community to see her difference, her change from being Joshua to Leelah, as something they could hold and bless as Beloved. And even for Leelah that difference became too much for her to bear alone, and she decided she could no longer go on living.

As I thought of Leelah, I longed to be part of a beloved community that could bless and affirm her difference as beloved of God, even if it’s a difference I don’t fully understand. And I wondered how this church might cultivate such a vision of all that is beloved of God, so that no matter who comes among us, we recognize God’s beloved child walking through the door, so that no one has to bear their difference alone.

I would like to think that this gathering is one place we do that, that here, Sunday by Sunday we notice with care, and never overlook or dismiss, all the beloved and blessed difference that gathers here.

Here, Sunday by Sunday, we remember in word and sacrament, as we will when we renew our baptismal covenant in a few minutes, that everybody, everybody, everybody is invited into the healing waters of the same font, that everybody, everybody, everybody is invited to a place at this table, and that everybody, everybody, everybody, is held in life beyond death in all our blessed difference by the loving gaze of the One who has created and restored us.

That is the vocation of being Beloved of God, to practice here the vision God has for creation, to gather as God’s outpost of belovedness in a world in desperate need of it, and to be sent to share this good news of God’s loving judgment on all the unkindness of the world: You, all of you, are my children, beloved. In you, all of you, I am well-pleased.

Second Sunday after Christmas, January 4, 2015

A sermon written and preached by Debbie Buesing

Luke 2:41-52

And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” (Luke 2:47)

In the long, 30-year gap between Jesus lying in the manger and Jesus stepping into the Jordan to be baptized, the gospels provide us only this view of a pre-adolescent Messiah. So it is natural for us to wonder – if you’ll pardon the old cliché – what did Jesus know, and when did he know it?

In one of my favorite modern or maybe post-modern takes on this question, in the novel Lamb, subtitled The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal*, the 12-year-old Jesus leaves this scene in the Temple still wrestling with his identity. His mother Mary reminds him, “When you were born, these three men showed up who seemed to understand something about you. Maybe they can help.” Jesus then spends the next 18 years traveling to Afghanistan, India, and China, in search of the Magi, who, one by one, ultimately come up short; and a resigned, grownup Jesus returns home to finish working out why he is here.

At the other end of the artistic and perhaps theological spectrum, I have a photograph of a stained-glass window in the 17th-century church of Saint-Eustache in Paris, showing a young Jesus sitting in the Temple on a cathedral-style throne that’s too big for him, looking every bit the medieval prince with his blonde hair in a bob, wearing a gold crown and brilliant brocade robe. At his feet, a tonsure-headed monk holds an open book, leaning in towards the boy and hanging on his every word.

There are scholars who posit that this strange little story arose in a very early Christian community that did not have access to the other narratives of Christ’s birth. So in the absence of heavenly angels and wild stars, they told of a Jesus born with innate knowledge, including his own status as Son of God. I don’t know what the real origin of the story is, but what I do know is that it contains some valuable wisdom about teenagers, parents, and the Church.

A few weeks ago I spent some time kicking this passage around with our high school youth and asked them how they pictured the whole scenario unfolding. Before we got into it, there were some things to clarify. It was incomprehensible to them, in this over-protective and over-scheduled age, that Mary and Joseph would not know where their son was. For those of us who are used to single-family road trips, it helps to know that entire villages walked together to Jerusalem. While the men walked apart from the women and children, a 12-year old boy, on the cusp of Jewish manhood, could easily float between groups, particularly a boy as bold and sociable as I imagine Jesus was.

When we tell this story to very small children, we typically frame it as “Jesus being lost but then found,” because when you are four or five years old, it is terrifying to think of being separated like that. But as our young people pointed out, it is not Jesus who was lost. He was exactly where he wanted to be.

With that established, then, how did they picture the scene in the Temple unfolding? Our high school group pictured a lively dialog, lots of give-and-take. (The text, in fact, refers to Jesus both asking and answering questions.) As one of our young people put it, “Here were men who had spent their whole lives thinking about God, studying about God. They probably had very strong opinions about God. But maybe, just maybe – Jesus offered them an insight that caused them to stop and reconsider what it was that they thought they knew.”

In other words – in the words of Luke’s Gospel – they were amazed. This is a word that goes beyond astonishment. It is that breathtaking moment of recognition that one is in the presence of something truly extraordinary, even holy. It is the way the Gospels describe frightened disciples on the Sea of Galilee, who exclaim, “Who is this, that the winds and seas obey him?” It is the word used to describe the crowds who witness Jesus’ acts of healing and his teaching with authority. It is a word that calls us to pay attention.

I asked our young people who it is that makes them feel that they are amazing. Not surprisingly they mentioned coaches and directors and a few teachers in their particular areas of interest. The mentors who help them discover their gifts and vocations, in the places they are drawn to, much like the 12-year-old messiah who was drawn to the Temple because that was where he knew he needed to be.

And HOW do these adults make you feel that you are amazing, I asked. The answer surprised me: “These are the ones who don’t flatter us. They tell us when we are not doing well and how to do it better.” It seems to me that there is a meeting at the intersection of honesty, respect, and kindness, and perhaps that is what the young Jesus found in that Temple as well.

And where are you in this story? Where are we, as church? For many years I included reflections on this passage whenever I did youth ministry training at churches in our diocese. For the most part, adults see themselves as Mary or Joseph, many of them remembering that same, heart-stopping moment when you realize that your child is missing. (My moment was at Disney World, probably as bad as Jerusalem at Passover.) Typically, just a few will see themselves in Jesus. These are the ones who haven’t forgotten being a curious and adventuresome and even headstrong teenager. But no one ever seems to remember those other characters in the story – the ones in the Temple. And so this is what I remind them (and myself):

As Church, it is our job to be the ones who are amazed. To listen when our young people are ready to give us their truth, and to have the grace to let everything we thought we knew about God be shaped by their wisdom. To be patient, because as one of our youth told me, “Sometimes we don’t answer your questions right away because we are still figuring it out,” and so we wait with them in that holy silence, because in all honesty, we are still figuring it out, too. To listen, to be present with, to be amazed, is not just the province of a few volunteers or youth ministers. The most significant factor in a young person’s choice to continue in a faith community is having had a positive relationship with one other adult in their congregation.

And what of their parents? Mary and Joseph searched, the story says, for three days before they got to the Temple. Perhaps they were too overwhelmed with anxiety to think through the implications of this messiah business. Or maybe with anger. (As our Deacon Bryan’s reading suggested, The Blessed Mother was in possession of the “Mom Voice,” and not afraid to use it.) But there are other echoes in this story. Those three days just might be a foreshadowing of another three days: surely Jesus’ parents’ despair at his disappearance hint at the disciples’ grief and terror after his death. His retort to his mother – that he needed to be here, not with them – is not so different from his admonition to Mary Magdalene in the garden: “do not hold onto me.” These are painful words to hear – and so as Church, we embrace the parents too, and reassure them that their sons and daughters are amazing, in those times when they are too close to the action to perceive it.

If I have a prayer for Saint Augustine’s, it is that this may always be a place where our young people can come,

And question,

And answer,

And know that they are amazing.

*Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Christopher Moore, 2002.

First Sunday after Christmas, December 28, 2014

Bryan Cones

Luke 2:22-40

So how did Simeon know? How did he know that baby was the one—out of all the little 40-day-old babies coming to the Temple, that this one was him, the Messiah he had been waiting for.

And how did Anna know? She had been waiting for a very, very long time. The story makes her sound almost unbelievably old—84 years is common now, but back then she had lived almost three times as long as most people.

Luke says it was the Holy Spirit who told Simeon, but unless the Holy Spirit operated differently back then, whispering in people’s ears, I think maybe it was a little more complicated. How did they know?

And what was it like for them to have to wait for so, so long? Was it a fun kind of waiting—like waiting for Santa Claus to come, or waiting for your birthday—the kind of waiting that is exciting, when a surprise is just around the corner?

Was it like being pregnant, an almost unbearable combination of hopefulness and joy and uncertainty that comes with knowing things are about to change big time, and will probably never be the same. The coming of Jesus has certainly changed things.

Or maybe it was the boring kind of waiting, like on a long car trip, or being a senior in high school, in February. I wonder if Anna ever said, “Are we there yet?” while she was fasting and praying in the Temple all those decades.

Was it like waiting for good news, like sitting by the phone expecting the job offer of your dreams? Or maybe like waiting for news not knowing if it will be good or bad—like being in the oncologist’s waiting room. Simeon says that Jesus is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, so while we might call him “good news,” he wasn’t good news for everyone.

Or was it the frustrating kind of waiting for a change that never seems to come, like peace in the Middle East, or an end to gun violence.

Maybe waiting all that time was like waiting with someone who is dying, that sad and hard and beautiful kind of waiting, or maybe it was like the waiting that comes with grief, when we are wondering when we might find our new normal after a loss, when things will be bearable again.

There are lots of kinds of waiting, and I imagine Simeon and Anna experienced a lot of them in their long lives of waiting for the Messiah. And even if it was at times unpleasant, or joyful, or boring, or uncertain, it was actually all that waiting that made Anna and Simeon ready to recognize the Messiah when he appeared. That’s how they knew.

The time of waiting was when the Holy Spirit was doing her work, making space in Simeon and Anna to receive Jesus, preparing their eyes to recognize him, their spirits to announce him.

Maybe Anna and Simeon knew Jesus when they saw him, because they had gotten very good at waiting for him. Jesus finally showing up on his presentation day was merely the climax for what God had been preparing Simeon and Anna for all along.

And preparing us as well. It might be easier to recognize God—at least it is for me—in the moments of the “big reveal,” when the baby is born, or that good news comes through, or even in the grace of a good death. What might be harder is recognizing God in the waiting, in both the excitement and the discomfort, in the anxiety and the expectation.

But surely in the waiting God is also present to us, the Holy Spirit is doing something in us, discovering and nurturing the gifts we need to face whatever life has in store for us, opening our eyes to how God works, or opening our ears to be ready to receive good news when it comes.

A good part of the Christian life is waiting, and part of the discipline of being Christian, or of just being human, is getting good at waiting. In all that waiting, God is making us ready to recognize Christ when he appears, so that we can say: There you are, I recognize you—I’ve been waiting for you. So that we can sing our own version of the Song of Simeon: “Now my eyes have seen your salvation for me, which you have prepared in the presence of all people, all light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” 

Christmas Day, December 25, 2014

Bryan Cones

Isaiah 52:7-10, John 1:1-14

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."

Beautiful feet indeed, especially when they are a baby’s feet, astonishing in their brand-newness, so unbelievably small, bearing the good news that God has indeed appeared among us, as one of us.

Oddly enough, it’s not the story of that baby that we hear in this Christmas morning gospel passage: Instead of a story, it is a song: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

This opening hymn from the Gospel of John, speaks of God’s Word becoming flesh, but not specifically of Luke’s poor little Jesus boy in a manger, or Matthew’s star child visited by Magi, then fleeing in danger to Egypt. John’s song is more like an overture, the ballad that tells the backstory of what God had in mind all along, a plan that started way back in the beginning, at the very beginning, when God first sang the Word that became the World, a creation whose purpose, its reason for being, is to make a place for God to live with God’s people.

And though we speak today of a “Savior, Christ the Lord,” John’s song isn’t yet ready to be that specific: For John there is something more to the Word than any baby can capture. After all, in the gospel of John, there is no baby at all: The Word didn’t become flesh for its own sake, to be God’s one-and-only, but to give those who believe the “power to become children of God,” to give us, who today sing John’s song, that power to be God’s children here and now.

The mystery of Christmas is our own mystery. The Word became flesh and dwells among us, so that we in our flesh might dwell with God.

Which makes me wonder just whose beautiful feet Isaiah is talking about: For us this Christmas they are surely the newborn feet of the Christ-child, both the messenger of peace, and the message himself. And, for us who join in singing the Gospel of John’s opening song, they are also our feet, whether showroom new and unmarked by a step, or calloused and worn by the twists and turns of life’s long road.

It is our beautiful feet, our bodies, our voices, our lives, that bear the Word-made-flesh, each of us the Words God is still singing into creation, each of us notes in the Christmas harmony God has been singing since the beginning. 

Christmas Eve, December 24, 2014

Kristin White

It is God’s essential nature for God to make space for us.[1] Throughout the stories of our salvation history, God shows this again and again. In the story of Creation, God forms the first person, breathes God’s own breath into Adam, and plants a garden by the sweat of God’s own brow – a space where Adam can live, a land for him to tend and to keep. In the story of God’s people becoming a people, God sends Abram to a land which God promises to show him, a space of his own, far from everything and nearly everyone Abram has known. In the story of the Exodus, the people who have been strangers and slaves in Egypt follow Moses; they follow the pillar of smoke by day and the pillar of fire by night; and when they find themselves at the Red Sea, God makes space for the children of Israel to walk through on dry land. In the story of two women who have lost everything they have, God makes space for Ruth with her mother-in-law, Naomi: “Where you go, I will go,” Ruth says. “Where you stay, I will stay; your people will be my people, your God will be my God.”

God makes space, in creation and abundance and promise and delivery and refuge. God continues to make space, multiplying loaves and fishes so that 5000 people (besides women and children) don’t have to leave and go find their own dinner. God makes space in the storm for a boat full of fearful disciples, calming the waters that rage. God makes space. Over and over, throughout our history with God, God makes space for us.

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Last Sunday our Associate Rector, Bryan Cones, preached a beautiful sermon about Mary’s assent to God’s messenger, about Mary’s agreement to partner with God, bringing Christ into being through her flesh and blood and bone.

And the truth of that is that “God’s ‘yes’ depends on our own…God’s birth requires human partners.”[2] And Mary’s “yes” might be the most faithful and powerful response she could give to that angel, and thereby to God. After a history of God making space for God’s people, here is a moment when God’s person agrees to make space for God. That’s what it is, to use Bryan’s words, that’s what it is to be “all in” with God.

And so, tonight we celebrate that divine and human partnership, that interdependent, sacred “yes”. Tonight we celebrate God taking on human flesh and taking up space in this world. Tonight we celebrate God choosing to be like us in order that God would be with us.

Tonight we make space for God. We tell those stories of God with us. We remember them in ways that make those stories part of our own flesh and blood and bone. We teach those stories to our children, help our children allow the stories to inhabit themselves, so the stories of who we are and who God is can live on in their bones, as well. We make space for God as we give the good gifts we have to share – our worship and our joy, our care for one another, our hospitality.

It seems to me that this dark night is a good time to remember God making space for us. This is a good time for God to inhabit and illumine us, right now. The world as it is, is not the world as it should be. So much is fearful and divided and despairing. If we think too long about Liberia and Sierra Leone, and Ferguson and Staten Island, and Peshawr and New York, if we think too long about the devastations in and frustrations our own individual lives, it’s too easy to hold God at arms’ length. It’s too easy to choose guardedness and isolation and self-protection and even cynicism, over trust, over hope, over light and love.

Because love makes us vulnerable. And because love makes God vulnerable, too.[3]

After all, the stories we live might just break our hearts. The hospitality we extend could bring pain with it too. The gifts we give might well be lost.

And Mary could have said no to that angel. Joseph could have refused her and cast her out, shunned and humiliated her, when he realized she was pregnant. The innkeeper might not have offered even that barn, or that cave, whatever it was, meager a space as it was for a poor pregnant couple to spend the night. The shepherds might have chosen to remain out in that field in their fear, instead of adding their voices to the chorus of God’s glory.

But instead, at least in that moment, in their various ways, they all said yes. And as they said yes, they went all in. And earth met heaven and heaven met earth, together with angels and archangels and all that blessed company. They made space for God who makes space for us.

And so, friends, on this holy night, I say to you what the authors of these texts say to us all, to everybody, everybody, everybody: Do not be afraid. Because a light shines in the darkness. Do not be afraid. Because a child has been born for us. Do not be afraid. Because the word has become flesh, and dwells among us, full of grace and truth. Do not be afraid. Because God creates space enough for us all.

And so make space of your own, this night, for God. Let Christ inhabit you, as you remember these stories of who we are. Let Christ inhabit you, as you give the good gifts you have to share. Make space for love and light to inhabit you, and grace upon grace. Make space for God, who will still and always make space for you.

[1] Molly Marshall. “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 2. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010. 468.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor. Gospel Medicine. Boston: Cowley Publications, 1995. 157.

[3] VanderZee, cep.edu

Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 21, 2014

Bryan Cones

Year B: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16, Luke 1:26-38

Two characters frame this Fourth Sunday of Advent: a king at the height of his power and a young woman, little more than a girl, with no power at all, and not likely to ever have any. They are both God’s partners in the story of salvation, but the difference between them tells us something about the kind of human partners God is looking for.

First is David: We can imagine him in today’s passage having an “it’s good to be the king” kind of moment: finally having secured his throne, captured Jerusalem, and delivered the ark of the covenant—basically God’s presence—into the holy city, in a particularly shrewd political move. Now he lives in a fine palace, probably believing a little too much his own press, telling the court over and over again about that Goliath guy.

At the height of his strength he makes some not uncommon human mistakes when it comes to God: First, he imagines God to be a lot like him, a king (and therefore in need of a palace), and second, he is eager to do “for God” what God neither wills nor wants.

And so God has to step in through the prophet Nathan: “Slow your roll, there, buddy,” to paraphrase a bit: “Remember, I plucked you out of the fields and made you king, when you were little more than a boy. I’m the one who will build you a house.”

How God builds that house brings us to the young woman, Mary, with a whole lot of nothing to call her own, except herself. Probably the furthest thing from her mind was that God would have anything for her to do. And yet it is to Mary that the angel Gabriel, “sent from God,” comes: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you,” the angel says, “God wants you to build a house.”

But unlike the house of cedar David offered, which would set him back only the cost of building it, Mary’s task is a bit more involved, and, we can safely say, more complicated. I’ve always wondered if Mary’s perplexed statement of the obvious—“How can this be, since I am a virgin?”—was said also with some trepidation, some knowledge that God is asking for a lot, maybe for everything. Her marriageability is Mary’s most precious and only asset, and building God this house is going to put that in jeopardy. In fact, when this same story is told another way in the Gospel of Matthew, God’s sends an angelic messenger to Joseph instead, counseling him to overlook Mary’s untimely pregnancy.

And yet, Mary, says yes, she goes all in, even as she has everything to lose. And in doing so, she opens the door to the salvation of the world.

A king and a young woman, and God chooses the girl with nothing, the one who goes all in with God with what little she has, so that God can go all in with the world God has made.

Which leads me to wonder how and when God might choose to partner with us. Perhaps it’s not those times when we are at the height of our strength or our success, not the times we think we know what God needs and wants from us. With Mary as the pattern, it is more likely to be those times when we feel we have nothing to offer, or we don’t know what to do, or we don’t think we can even survive what life has brought us, times when the idea that we could do anything for or with God is furthest from our minds.

Maybe it’s when we are stripped of any pretensions, when we are most aware of our weakness, that’s the time when God sends the messenger with Good News: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid. You have found favor with God.”

The irony of Advent is, after all, that in answer to our prayers that God tear open the heavens, and shake the mountains and come in power to accomplish the Great Divine Cleanup of the World, God answers those prayers with weakness, with the abject powerlessness and utter vulnerability of a baby, born of a young woman, barely more than a girl, with nothing but herself to offer, God’s partner in opening the door to the salvation of the world.

Why should it be any different with us? For nothing will be impossible with God. 

Third Sunday of Advent, December 14, 2014

Victoria Garvey

14 December 2014

St Augustine, Wilmette

Isa 61.1-4, 8-11; Ps 126 or Lk 1.46-55; 1 Thess 5.16-24; Jn 1.6-8, 19-28

I assume that all of you are aware of the various peaceful pop-up prayer walks that took place last Sunday at churches and synagogues and other faith centers concerning violence on our streets and particularly concerning the recent court decisions in Ferguson, Missouri and New York.  You might have seen pictures of the signs they carry:  “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter.”  Perhaps you even participated in one of these pray-ins. 

The gathering area for one of them was Water Tower Place in Chicago and some folks from the bishop’s staff participated.  I was told that one of the most edifying parts of the walk occurred as members of St James and 4th Pres and St Chrysostom and several other churches and synagogues began to walk south on Michigan Avenue in the Mag Mile.  They had already prayed and heard stories from those who know the violence and injustice all too well.  As they walked, some carrying those signs, they were silent.  And here’s the thing:  Michigan Avenue, Nordstrom and Disney and Apple and Crate & Barrel Michigan Avenue, and the crowds and the traffic on that Michigan Avenue began to be silent as well.  18 days before Christmas in arguably one of the busiest shopping districts in downtown Chicago and the shoppers who had been hurrying in and out of stores and herding children and talking with their friends stopped and watched the silent parade and got quiet themselves as if they’d been infected by an unseasonably benevolent flu.  As the marchers passed one corner some of them overheard a conversation between a little girl and her dad.  “What are they doing with those signs?  And why are they so quiet?” the little girl asked.  Silent himself for a moment, the dad finally answered, “They want us to pay attention.”

Last week we who gathered in churches heard from another Isaiah, a quiet one who wanted his own people to pay attention and who sang a lullaby to a beleaguered, depressed and hopeless people:  Nahamu, nahamu, ami, this Isaiah crooned:  “ ‘Comfort, comfort my people’ says your God.” And then we heard from Mark’s John the Baptizer who was anything but quiet, stirring up the people with his talk of baptism and forgiveness and a mysterious someone who was yet to come.  John the B also desperately wanted his own occupied and oppressed people to pay attention.  That was last week.  This morning’s Isaiah, au contraire, is full of gusto and intensity and … infinitives; this is an Isaiah on a mission with no time to stop and sing lullabies.  Listen to this cascade of verbs: bring, bind, proclaim [2 x], release, comfort, provide, give.  And did I mention that all of them are infinitives, that part of speech that most of us learned about in the 3rd grade, that state of the verb not marked or limited by time or by a particular tense, but utterly open to the present and to the past and to the future. 

 It’s the job of the prophet to get the people to sit up and take notice so that they can hear the truth about themselves and about their world.  In ancient Israel, the best of the prophets were summoned and sent by God to do just that and the truth of this Isaiah is that the good news, that bringing, binding, proclaiming, releasing, comforting, providing and giving is available now despite appearances to the contrary, despite upheaval and injustice and violence.  What a passel of unbelievable good news that is to those who had been oppressed or broken-hearted or captive or imprisoned or who had been in inconsolable mourning.  And all of this whirlwind of activity is not to be a private gift hoarded by the donees, but a largesse so big and so astonishing that is noted by those who watch from the sidelines. Israel, in its great resurgence from certain death to renewed and revitalized hope and life in the late 6th century stands, as an earlier Isaiah had promised, as a light to the nations, as witness to the graciousness and unending attentiveness of their God.

 And again this week, as happens every 2nd and 3rd week of every Advent, we are treated to a reprise visit from John the B. We’re used to calling him ‘the Baptist’ or better ‘the Baptizer’ because in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke that’s what he was famous for doing; in this gospel, though we are told he baptizes, that role is muted as the emphasis on his central ministry changes.  Here, he’s the first of several witnesses to Jesus, and for this gospel, being a witness to Jesus, seeing him and having insight into what he’s doing is a very big deal.  John pays attention and he wants his contemporaries to pay attention too.  And John the Witness witnesses even before meeting the object of his witnessing.  That’s kind of extraordinary.  And his witnessing is a little weird as well.  As Isaiah pulsates with infinitive tripping over infinitive opening everything up, John’s speech is marked by a series of negatives which get stridently terser:  “I am not the messiah…I am not…No!” muting his own heretofore quite active ministry gradually down to a whisper.  He declares who he is not and when he finally answers the question of identity relentlessly pressed by his questioners he quotes somebody else and even there he self-deprecates.  Despite what our English translations say, he is not the voice crying but a voice.  He is not the main event but the opening act.  When he says later in this same gospel, “He must increase, but I must decrease," he wasn’t kidding.

There’s a Greek word for what he does in this gospel: martyrion, and that word appears in this gospel 45 times and in the other gospels combined only twice so obviously for the author of the 4th gospel this witnessing business is important.  In fact, it becomes the key characteristic of a follower of Jesus.  In the ancient world, being a witness, like being a prophet, meant telling the truth.  Your life depended on it as false witnessing was deserving, in the law codes of the day, of the death penalty which is why the English noun martyr, derived from the Greek verb ‘to witness’ gradually took on the meaning of dying for the faith, something that John would in fact later do.

But before all of that, he appears out of nowhere in this gospel. Again, the English version that Bryan proclaimed a moment ago is not quite how the Greek has it, not the smooth “There was a man sent…” but  “A man appeared, sent…”.   Just when we’re getting into the groove of that majestic hymn with which the gospel begins  …  you know the one: “In the beginning was the word and the word was toward God and everything God was the word was…”. John interrupts lofty poetry with earthy prose and grounds the cosmic and mystical and otherworldly with the incarnational and concrete and emphatically this-worldly providing all by himself a Christmas story in shorthand.  And he witnesses, how he witnesses.  I’m not the one, he says over and over:  ego ouk eimi:  I am not, I am not, I am not, preparing for the one who in this gospel will claim over and over I am, ego eimi:  I am the good shepherd and I am the bread of life and I am the light of the world.

It is no wonder that we have so many depictions in the art of the millennia pairing Jesus with John. And in most of them John points, even when he’s a chubby little toddler in those several Renaissance paintings, he points to the baby in Mary’s lap.  In this gospel, John the Witness is more than baptizer, important as that role is; here he’s the first disciple who shows the way not only to the one whose sandal strap he’s not worthy to tie, but he’s the one who demonstrates discipleship to all those who will come after him in this gospel and beyond.  To follow Jesus is to witness to who he was and what he said and what he did.  And not only that.  Jesus did not go to all this trouble to leap from heaven to become one of us for the fun of it.  What we celebrate in a bit more than a week is that God became one of us to teach us to become more like the God in whose image each of us was made.  John the Witness somehow knows this and points the finger:  Here’s the One.  He’s got important stuff to say and to teach and to do.  Pay attention.

Several weeks ago, I was on the bus on the commute from the train station to my office at St James Commons and I was doing what many of my fellow passengers do near the end of commute and beginning of workday.  I was daydreaming, glancing idly about as you do, when something caught my eye.  It was one of those moments when you’re looking around but not really seeing and your eye passes over something and keeps on going and suddenly your brain catches up and you stop and reverse direction.  What I had seen was the word ‘GOD’ in discreet white letters on the arm of a black coat that a woman sitting a few seats away was wearing.  I didn’t want to stare rudely so I looked away.  But I couldn’t help myself; I kept glancing back as surreptitiously as I could.  Why did she have God embroidered on her Columbia down-filled coat? Was she a little gospel right there on the 125 on Wacker Boulevard?  What God was she proclaiming so silently on her coat?  If we got into a conversation would we be talking about the same sort of God?  Would I have the courage to wear God on my sleeve?  Should I?  What would it mean to me and to others who saw me?  Then she got up to leave the bus a stop before mine.  It wasn’t ‘GOD’ on her sleeve after all; it was the number 600 and the slight crease in the last zero as she sat made it look to me like a ‘D’.  Still, all unknowing, she was for me that morning an interruption and a witness.

 It’s Advent 3.  We’re almost to the main event of the season and both John and Isaiah have something to say to us.  We don’t have to wear God on our sleeves on a bus or stand in a real wilderness and point.  We don’t have to do anything really if we don’t choose to.  But John and the countless witnesses who follow his lead tell us it’s not enough to say we believe in Jesus or go to church or even say we love Jesus if we don’t point to him and what he did and what he said and what he taught.  Pop-up prayer walks like the ones last week and today and that will continue to happen perhaps until, as another prophet puts it, “justice rolls down like a river” are one response because they interrupt us and point and ask us to pay attention to what we’re doing or allowing others to do in our name.  The Jesus whose birth we’ll celebrate in 11 days didn’t sit still for violence and unjust practices; he died because of them.  And Isaiah’s God who prompted the prophet to let loose that cascade of life-giving infinitives did not rappel down from a height to do the work that would make those verbs a reality; instead it is the people to whom those verbs were directed who do the work of redemption: “They shall be called,” says Isaiah in the middle of our reading today, and “they shall build up…they shall raise…they shall repair.” There’s the good news.  There’s the witness.  Pay attention.

 To what do we point in our lives, in our families, in the places we hang out?  Old Isaiah’s Israel became for a while what it was called to be, ‘a light to the nations’ and an active witness to their God.  In this festival in which we celebrate the coming of the Light into the world, may we do a little of the same in any way we can.  Not as Messiah.  Not as Elijah.  Not as the prophet.  Not   even as John.  But as just us here and now in the world that God still so impossibly so loves.  And that will be enough.