In These Days –

In a time long ago, in a galaxy far, far away– oh, sorry, this is the beginning of the wrong story. Let me try again. Now, what is it? Ah – here it is – to boldly go where no one has gone before. No, that’s still the wrong story. What about – once upon a time there was – no, no, no, this won’t do either.

Let’s try again.

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. Phew! Finally, the beginning of the right story.

By mentioning Augustus, Qurinias, and the first census, Luke firmly locates the birth of Jesus in an exact historical moment of linear time. Among the other three gospel evangelists, Luke is the only one who does this. But Luke is not simply interested in accurate historical reporting. He’s more concerned with showing Jesus’ birth as a kairos moment – a moment in which time itself becomes permeable to the influence and action of the divine life of the universe – welling up and breaking through the surface of linear time.

In Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials, Austin Farrer, the renowned 20th-century Anglican priest and theologian, with poetic eloquence, wrote:

In the saving action of the incarnation, God came all lengths to meet us and dealt humanly with human creatures... He came among them, bringing his Kingdom, he let events take their human course.  He set the divine life in human neighbourhood. Men discovered it in struggling with it and were captured by it in crucifying it. What could be simpler? And what more divine?

This Advent, I’ve been exploring the interplay of Kairos and linear time as integral to understanding resistance as future hope embodied in present-time action. This past Sunday, I was delighted when K Casenhiser – without knowingly echoed Austin Farrer when she noted the significance of the divine life embodying in the child Mary bears as the means for God to involve human bodies in the Kingdom’s work. She said that

God insists that bodies are the systems through which the world of the Kingdom will be built. God articulates God’s dependence upon us human creatures when God says: humanity is how I wish to become recognizable in the world. Critically, though, before God takes this action, God chooses to get the consent of the actors involved.

The Kingdom is a set of values and expectations revealing God’s desires for the world. We are invited rather than commanded to participate in the divine project of the Kingdom’s coming. Farrer rightly notes that the presence of the Kingdom creates tension in his wonderful image of the neighborhood because Kingdom values and expectations are not easy for us to live up to.

Hence, we struggle against the Kingdoms’ coming, and as Farrer noted – at an extreme moment in that struggle, we tried to get rid of the Kingdom altogether by killing Jesus, only to discover that through his death, the ultimate victory of God becomes ensured. While resisting, we become captive to Kingdom expectations because they demonstrate that love proves stronger than death – or, in Farrer’s words – Men discovered it in struggling with it and were captured by it in crucifying it.

On this Christmas Eve, we come looking for comfort and solace—a brief respite from the world’s buffetings. We come to find comfort in familiar memories of Christmas past, with a desire to once again hear the message the angels proclaimed of glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to all people of goodwill. Note the qualification – people of goodwill – here.

On Christmas Eve, we come to hear the good news of our Savior’s birth. In some churches, it will be enough to bathe worshippers in a warm bath of manger scene nostalgia of shepherds, angels, and, eventually, wise men. In others, however, something edgier will be offered – capable of speaking the good news of our Savior’s birth into the pain and chaos of the world in these times.

What many of us may not be prepared for is that in such times as these, the good news of our Savior’s birth carries an uncomfortable message. For how can we sing O Little Town of Bethlehem and ignore our fellow Christians in modern Bethlehem – for whom the commemoration of Jesus’ birth requires digging deep in their suffering for the wellsprings of joy and resilience – in a town ringed by walls and watchtowers that witness the brutalities of human inhumanity.

This Christmas finds many of us demoralized by a challenging direction of events in the nation and the world. The drift toward extreme right-wing and nationalist parties is disconcerting to anyone who knows a modicum of mid-20th-century history. Yet, among those for whom the neo-liberal economic order of deregulation, global capital flight, and the exportation of once good-paying jobs has destroyed their confidence in liberal democracy – in communities where dignity and pride once resided in a proud tradition of making useful things – a bitter cynicism has taken root among men and women who no longer feeling useful. In many small towns and large, in the depth of rural poverty – the growing fentanyl epidemic is a solution of sorts to the loss of hope.

History tells us that in times such as these – many will flock to embrace the illusory certainties of right-wing and ultra-nationalist rhetoric – that so effectively channels resentment by inflaming primitive tribal fears of difference and diversity. and the artful identification of scapegoat stereotypes labeling the most vulnerable as enemies within.

The shock of this has come home to those of us in the more insulated reaches of the middle class, presenting a strong temptation to retreat into self-protective complicity with despair (there’s nothing to be done), while quietening our consciences by a conspiracy of silence in the face of the evils of unashamed racism, gender and transgender scapegoating, Christian nationalism, and the seemingly unstoppable rise of a homegrown oligarch class of which Musk and Bezos are only two of the usual suspects. That a tyrant like Vladimir Putin had the good sense to banish the oligarchs from politics is a lesson we seem to be slow to learn from.

To meet the challenges and seize the opportunities in our world, we need to locate ourselves in the right story – the deeper message beneath my somewhat whimsical beginning. As Luke begins: In those days, how would this story read if we begin its sequel with – in these days …?

Through the lens of history, we can look back on Jesus’ birth as a moment in linear time when the divine life entered our human neighborhood to deal humanly with humanity. What it is not is a supernatural event now firmly in the rearview mirror of history. It is an event that presents us in our here-and-now with a question: in the face of a world where evil continues its grip on the human heart, will you answer yes or no to the invitation to through the choices you make, the actions you take, and the paths you refuse to travel – embody the values and expectations of the Kingdom?

We are faced with the urgency of this question as our confidence in the march of progress – the arc of the moral universe bending in the direction of justice is shown to have been naïve in its inference that somehow unknown to us, things are moving in the right direction without any help from us.

Comfortable Christianity’s conflation of low-risk belief with a moderate political agenda – whether it be center left or center right – is now rudely shaken. Across the democratic West, centrism is now dying – both in its political and religious form.

For us hitherto safe armchair Christians, a more radical sense of allegiance is now being asked of us. For us, the Incarnation is a new story that must begin with – in these days …??

In these days, when Donald Trump is President and Elon Musk, oligarch-in-chief and co-president– the divine life that has taken up residence in our human neighborhood is inviting us to embody the dream of the Kingdom.Given that God must await our response – yes or no – how do we want this story that begins with – in these days – to end?

December 24, 2024 4

Resistance of Becoming

Advent spiritually refocuses us on the thorny experience of hope. While hope is a universal trait of the human spirit, its thorniness lies in how hope raises both the promise of fulfillment and the fear of disappointment.

I cannot reflect on hope and the expectation of fulfillment without hearing the voice of my fatalistic grandmother: Expect nothing, and you will never be disappointed. We all instinctively know what she means.

To hope is to risk wanting – and wanting raises the possibility of not getting – of disappointment. While my grandmother’s expression captures our fear of risk, it misses the essential point about hope. Hope is not primarily – a picture of a longed-for future fulfillment. We don’t yet know if it will or even can be realized. More crucially, hope is the compass setting that orients us in responding to present time challenges and grasping opportunities – the compass setting that tells us we are here – and from here, establishing a direction of travel ahead.

Don’t hope—never be disappointed is not simply a protection against future disappointment. It’s a severe limitation on present-time action – inhibiting our possibility thinking.

On Advent Sunday, I ended with the line– we are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the ones we have been waiting for is the title of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book in which she comments that:

We are the ones we have been waiting for because we live in an age in which we are able to see and understand our own predicament. With so much greater awareness than our ancestors – and with such capacity for insight, knowledge, and empathy – we are uniquely prepared to create positive change within ourselves and our world.

A brief survey of current world and domestic events might lead us to question her confident assumption, yet she points to our capacity to understand and effect change – if we choose to.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for was also a phrase that Barack Obama borrowed—not necessarily to indicate that he or his administration were the ones desperately awaited—but that present generations of our society have the potential to change American society’s direction of travel towards an—as yet—unrealized future. Such a future is shaped by the courage to hope.

At the everyday level of experience, we have begun to doubt the truth of this assertion as we live through the chaos and upheaval of a period saddled with the rigidity of a two-party political system and an increasingly self-serving political class disinterested in responding to voter dissatisfaction. The shape of our future hope is bedeviled by the paradox that as we increasingly dream of utopian futures, we become more cynical about the possibility of change.

The purpose of hope is not to inhabit the future before it emerges but to focus our attention on the quality of our present-time choices—both those we boldly embrace and those we fail to make. Hope is a lifetime’s work requiring courage in a world that often—like my grandmother’s saying—plays up the risk of disappointment.

In the OT reading for this third Sunday in Advent, we hear a section from the prophet Zephaniah. Zephaniah is the 9th in a group of 12 – known as the minor prophets. The designation minor refers not to the lesser importance of their message but to the shortness of their prophecies. Compared to the major prophets whose prophecies unfold at greater length – Isaiah’s cover 66 chapters; Jeremiah’s, 52; Ezekiel’s a mere 48, Zephaniah’s prophecy is only 3 chapters long – reminding us that in this case, less is more!

Zephaniah wrote in the middle of the 5th century BC, around the pivotal period of King Josiah’s reforms in the 620s. The overall mood in Zephaniah is exceedingly gloomy about the present-time outlook but holds strong hope for a future better than the past—a future in which God will save the lame and gather the outcast, changing their shame into praise and bringing them home. It’s important to note that while Zephaniah looks to divine action to rescue Israel from its current predicaments, history reminds us that divine action is effective only when channeled through human agency.

In chapters 8:7-18, Luke develops a picture of John the Baptist’s attraction to all conditions of people flocking to flee the wrath to come – that is, seeking reassurance against future anxieties. He charges the pious, comfortable, and despised security thugs of the oppressive regime—Jewish as well as Roman—to bear fruit worthy of repentance. They ask him, “What then should we do?” John’s answer must have left them wishing they had never asked.

John lays out a template for ethical behavior as a prequel to the upwelling of God’s kingdom among them. He instructs the rich to share their abundance with those who have little. He warns those with power to manipulate the economic system against dishonesty and abuses motivated by greed. To those with police and military powers of coercion, he decries their practices of intimidation through violence and extortion with menaces, telling them to be satisfied with their wages.

John impresses upon the crowds the urgency of the moment. He warns them that the axe is already laid to the roots of the trees—a metaphor for an attack on the societal pillars supporting injustice. The hope of liberation that the crowds hear in John’s message understandably leads them to misidentify him as the Messiah. John disavows, prophesizing that there is no time to lose as one more powerful than he is following close on his heels.

Last week, I spoke about the call to follow Jesus as an inauguration of a Christian resistance movement. In the Christian resistance, there is no hiding place from the frightening realities of the world. Being part of the Christian resistance asks us to reject self-protective complicity with despair (there’s nothing to be done) and a hard-hearted conspiracy of silence in the face of evil.

Instead of passively pining for God to beam us up out of the mess we have made – as a Christian resistance – transformed by the teaching of Jesus, we embody the change we long to see. Together, we courageously face the challenges and seize the opportunities of the present time in recognition that our hope in a future where justice becomes the byword – is already working effectively upon us.

On the 3rd Sunday in Advent, we are reminded that we are already the ones we have been waiting for. Allowing for an appropriate sense of humility, if we are not – then who will be?

December 14, 2024 0

Resistance!

On the second Sunday in Advent this year, we hear Malachi’s prophecy concerning the expectation of a messenger to prepare a way before the Lord as he enters his temple. As we know today, expectations are risky. Malachi echoes this when he cries, Who can abide the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?

Malachi’s messenger has a very specific task—to purify Levi’s descendants. This refers to the corruption of the Levitical priesthood in the restoration period following the return of the Babylonian exiles.

Generally speaking, the messenger’s task is to redeem the present-time experience. He is a transitional figure—a punctuation point in the linear flow of time—uniting the uncertainty of future hope with happier memory—happier, at least in hindsight.

The suggestion here is that the flow of time is not linear but circular. In the language of T.S. Eliot – to reach the end is to be reminded of the beginning – and to know it as if for the first time opens the possibility for different choices.

Luke draws on Isaiah’s messenger – a voice crying in the wilderness announcing the way of the Lord through a dramatic terraforming project that reminds us of the modern excavations required for freeway building. Every valley will be filled in, and every mountain and hill will be made low, paths will be straightened, and rough terrain will be smoothed out. Isaiah’s messenger is to proclaim that all flesh shall see the salvation of God, a statement marking an astonishing leap forward in Jewish post-exilic understanding of the extent of God’s embrace – a central theme for Luke.

Luke incarnates Isaiah’s messenger – the voice of one crying in the wilderness in the figure of John, the baptizer. John bursts onto the scene very much as the prophet messenger -clothed in the power and authority of Elijah to fulfill the expectation of Elijah’s return to announce the Messiah’s immanence. Like the messengers of Malachi and Isaiah, John is, even more, a transitional figure – a punctuation point on the historical timeline between Old and New Testamentary periods – the last of the Hebrew prophets and the forerunner of the Messiah.

The days and weeks since the recent election have personally felt like a period of enforced withdrawal from my addiction to the 24-hour news cycle. I feel rather pathetic in confessing this, but there is some small comfort in knowing that I am not alone in enduring a sense of being unplugged.

Like all addiction recovery experiences, the immediate problem is how to fill the empty spaces hitherto filled by the daily fix of news subjected to endless opinionated spin. How do I fill the emptiness when reading the NY Times and the Washington Post, along with the daily ritual of sitting down with a drink in hand to view the 6 pm PBS News Hour, have become anxiety-triggering events?

I’ve found some solace in retreating into reading espionage fiction and listening on Spotify to historical podcasts such as The Rest is History, Empire, and The Rest is Classified. I find watching documentaries about World War II comforting because no matter the suffering involved, democracy’s triumph reassures me that all will be well in the end, if not today, then soon. But more than providing nontriggering distraction, I find being exposed to the sweep of various historical perspectives offers a much-needed frame of reference within which to locate the current cycle of national and international events. As they say – history may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

Yet novels and podcasts offer only temporary respite—a brief interlude before facing up to the increasingly alarming realities of the world around me. They’re an escape—a respite—rather than a long-term refuge.

Luke intentionally situates John’s ministry and Jesus’ arrival on the scene within a historical context in which Tiberius is the Roman Emperor; Pilate is governor of Judea; Herod, Philip, and Lysanias are Tetrarchs – vassal rulers of Galilee, Idumea, and Syria, respectively, and Annas and Caiaphas are the High Priests in Jerusalem.

Though something close to a 1st-century historian, Luke’s purpose goes beyond a desire for historical accuracy. David Lose notes that Luke is keenly interested in the impact his gospel story will have not simply on the world as kosmos — the world, that is, conceived most generally — but also on the world as oikoumene — the world as it is constituted by the political, economic, and religious powers. Luke wants us to be in no doubt that John’s preaching of repentance is a direct challenge to those invested in the political, economic, and religious status quo.

Naming the rulers of oikoumene — the world of political, economic, and religious power, goes to the heart of the theology he is weaving – which, in summary, is that those named and the powers they represent – were and will always remain in opposition to Jesus and those who heed his message that the kingdom of God is here!

Last Sunday, I spoke about change as the only certainty in life. Opportunities arise, and challenges are confronted—some overcome, and others accommodated as we learn to live with what we cannot control. Time passes, memories accrue, and future expectations arise, while in the present, we celebrate successes and weather disappointments.

Jesus’ birth as the Christ Child and his ultimate return as the Cosmic Christ are the two bookends bracketing our resurrection lives in the here and now. Living resurrection lives challenges our avoidance of unpalatable realities – remembering Bonhoeffer’s comment that silence in the face of evil is evil itself.

The call to live as a follower of Jesus is an invitation to become members of a Christian resistance movement. In the Christian resistance, there is no hiding place from the frightening realities of the world. Being part of the Christian resistance asks us to reject self-protective complicity with despair and hard-hearted collusion with evil. In the time of the resurrection – the time between the Incarnation – Jesus’ birth, and Parousia – his ultimate return – we live by the light of faith and the inspiration of hope as we work tirelessly to become the change we long to see. Putting future hope into present-day practice, we forge new pathways for realizing the expectations of the kingdom of God, taking one step and one breath at a time.

December 7, 2024 0