A sermon from the Rev. Linda Griggs for Epiphany 4

Blessed.

Go ahead and admit it: if you are of a certain age, when you hear the Beatitudes your mind automatically goes to one of two places. Perhaps you flash back to Sunday School; to memorizing the verses, or gazing at a picture of a blond-haired blue-eyed Jesus standing on a high hill above a huge crowd of people. Maybe, as your church school teacher read all the ‘blesseds’ to you and your classmates, you privately thought to yourself that being blessed might not be all it was cracked up to be.

Or. You remember the scene in Monty Python’s satire, Life of Brian, in which one of the crowd, straining to hear Jesus, says, “I think it was ‘blessed are the cheese makers.” To which his companion sagely responds, “Well, obviously it isn’t meant to be taken literally, it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.” An argument ensues, degenerating into a knock-down/drag-out fight, and our hero decides he’d rather skip the rest of Jesus’ sermon and attend a stoning instead. And there you have it. A deft skewering of humans’ tendency to completely miss the point due to our sometimes comedic tendency to overthink and under-listen. Oh, the time we spend in the weeds while the forest towers above us.

It’s easy to lose our sense of perspective, to get lost in the weeds—and this applies to a lot of things besides Scripture. I confess that there have been days recently when a sense of existential fear for the future of this troubled world makes it difficult for me to read the paper or turn on the news. This is especially problematic when a guiding principle of preaching is to hold the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. It is important to be a good citizen in these times of uncertainty and division, and even more crucial to be a courageous person of faith living into the Gospel and our Baptismal Covenant. But I confess that the temptation to withdraw from the reality of bitter civic division and anxiety is real. And based on my conversations with a number of folks, clergy and lay alike, I suspect I’m not alone–here in the weeds. So today’s readings are well timed. Because they invite us out of the weeds and into the majestic forest of Christian hope.

The Beatitudes as we hear them today in Matthew are also seen in Luke’s Gospel. Each of the two evangelists probably made use of a common source to create a longer discourse by Jesus, of which the Beatitudes are only a part. In Luke the discourse is known as the Sermon on the Plain, and it is configured differently according to his Gospel vision of social justice. This is why he writes of literal poverty and hunger, not the poor in spirit or a hunger for righteousness. On the other hand Matthew’s perspective was to portray Jesus as the New Moses. Hence we see Jesus go up on the mountain just as Moses did at Sinai. Jesus speaks to the people, offering important guidance, just as Moses did in delivering the Ten Commandments. The Sermon on the Mount is a crucial moment in Matthew’s Gospel, offering a large chunk of his teachings, of which we only hear the beginning today.

And that’s what the Beatitudes are; a beginning. They are the first several verses of three entire chapters of teachings on everything from family and social relationships to correct religious behavior. So there is plenty of time in the Sermon on the Mount for Jesus to get into the details, but this initial passage is different. If you’re a Greek scholar (and I am not), and understand verb tense and mood, you will see from the Greek translation that these are statements of fact, not commands to be followed. And this is important because if we just read the English and don’t know this distinction it would be easy (and common—as it was in our childhood) to read the Beatitudes as The Nine Very Discouraging Commandments that require you to aspire to be poor in spirit, meek, pure and persecuted in order to get into heaven. As theologian Charles James Cook notes, if the Beatitudes are truly meant for everybody, then it doesn’t make sense that they are standards for behavior that can only be attained by the likes of Dorothy Day and Desmond Tutu. If the children of God (that’s us) are to live into the Beatitudes we need to see them, not as individual behavioral guidelines, but as a unit—as a preamble to the larger discourse. The body of the Sermon on the Mount will give us the detailed teachings, but first the groundwork must be laid.

The Beatitudes, then, are the foundation of Jesus’ teachings– a statement of facts. And what are those facts? First, God says, you need to know this one thing: You are part of the Dream of God. That is what it means to be Blessed. The Beatitudes are the definitive statement of God’s abiding presence in a world writhing in the birth pangs of the incoming Kingdom. This is a statement, not that our only way into heaven is to aspire to become poor in spirit, mourning, meek and persecuted, but that God knows that we ARE these things. These are all forms of woundedness, and whether we know it or not, we are all wounded. We are all vulnerable. And God knows it, sees it, and Is. Not- Going-Anywhere. We- Are- Blessed. Blessed by God’s abiding and unfailing presence.

Jesus’ words were spoken into a world in pain; a world of division, corruption, imperial occupation and political turmoil. It was a world desperately in need of hope; a world where the temptation may well have been to crawl under a rock and pray it would all just go away. It was a world hungering for peace, mercy, righteousness– for hearts of such pure courage and compassion that they would see God in every person. It was a world in need of new prophets willing to take the risk of speaking the truth, to the hopeless and the powerful alike, of God’s love and healing presence—the truth of the incoming Reign of God.

The temptation today, in the face of political anxiety, is to shut down; either to close our eyes to a tumultuous world or to cocoon ourselves in an echo chamber of like-minded outrage and fear. Or, somehow, both. Neither is constructive or healthy. It is a lack of perspective that has lost the vision of the Kingdom—a vision that is ultimately more powerful than any ideology humans can concoct. Instead, God says LOOK. Look within you to where your hunger, your grief, and your fear reside. Look to your neighbor in need of healing, wholeness, and compassion.

The Beatitudes call us to remember our foundation: Blessed. You are Part of the Kingdom. This isn’t just words. God’s unfailing ability to work with human frailty can be seen if we look around us. Each person will have his or her own example, but for me, it was in last weekend’s marches. The thing that most resonated with me is that to paraphrase one of the organizers, it was not seen as a protest as much as it was an affirmation of human dignity—and that is echoed in our Baptismal Covenant. I attended the one in Providence, a number of folks from St. Martin’s were in D.C., and many of us know people who marched elsewhere—New York, Boston, Nashville, Charlotte, and even tiny Chelan in the state of Washington (population 4000). These were people who felt, for themselves or on behalf of others, the hunger and thirst for righteousness, the weight of persecution, and the pain of being silenced into meek acceptance of injustice. I looked at the pictures of the crowds—city after city and town after town—even a ship off of Antarctica, for God’s sake– and was moved to tears. These people–all over the world—raised their eyes from the weeds. And when they did they found their voices and they found each other. That is kingdom light breaking in right there when you can look into the eye of a neighbor, connect his or her pain with your own, and know that neither of you is alone.

Some say a march isn’t enough to bring about change. Maybe that’s true if it remains just a march. But it’s enough to offer hope. And to say that that isn’t significant is like saying that a little round wafer and a sip of wine aren’t a sufficient meal. It’s a beginning, a preamble. An invitation to participate in the Dream of God and to let it equip us, as Micah says, to do as the Lord requires: Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the One who calls each of us, Blessed.

Have you a favorite painting of the nativity? For painters of the Italian school of Renaissance painting, the nativity was a favorite subject. On the front of the Christmas bulletin, we see a reproduction of the central panel of St Martin’s altar reredos. The celebrated muralist of the Art Deco period, Hildreth Meiere has depicted the nativity in the style of an earlier artistic period. In nativity paintings, our attention is deliberately drawn to the action in the foreground.

Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus seem suspended in time against an imaginative depiction of a manger in a state of near disrepair. Surrounded by representatives of the animal kingdom, here we find shepherds, wise men, and in some instances the patrons of the particular artist who have had themselves inserted into the nativity scene among those who have come to pay homage to the infant Christ child.

Have you ever noticed the backdrop? Because our attention is always is drawn towards the figures in the foreground we fail to notice how the nativity event is set against the backdrop of ruins. The ruins of a pre-Christian antiquity; a symbolic expression of former things now superseded by the nativity event.

I particularly like those paintings where the backdrop is divided between two contrasting scenes. On one side we see depicted organized rural life, neatly tended vineyards, winding roads leading to a walled town in the far distance. The other side shows darker more turbulent skies beneath which we see the tumbledown ruins of antiquity, overrun by nature. As a backdrop to the birth of the Christ-child, human manicured countryside is contrasted with the collapse of civilization and wild revenge of nature’s reclamation.

**

Art depicts in a highly stylized form the figures of the Holy Family who seem unnaturally illuminated. Most of us are more than comfortable with this stylized depiction of enchantment. Our comfort lies in the way that the paintings speak to a part of us that longs for the return of a sense of long-lost enchantment; a hankering for a return of innocence.

The painters of the Renaissance period still lived within an enchanted mindset and worldview. I borrow the term enchantment from Charles Taylor’s tracing of the rise of our present secular age. What characterizes an enchanted perspective is the interpenetration of the divine within the material structures of our world. Here, the spiritual dimension is part of the material fabric experienced in places, through objects, and in persons. Yet, there was also a terror within the enchanted worldview for if the divine inhabited material existence so did it’s opposite, evil. The painters give voice to these fears in the almost hidden details of the backdrop scenery.

In contrast, we live in what Taylor calls as the age of disenchantment. Our disenchantment can be roughly traced back to the age of Enlightenment at the end of the 17thC. Enlightenment is an ironic term for a long social movement, which on the one hand freed us from the darkness of superstition and fear, yet ushered in a new kind of darkness, a darkness of despair. A despair born of the realization that human emancipation from enchantment has left us occupying center stage with God now banished to wings. As we celebrate our emancipation it also begins to dawn on us that we are now alone in a universe now largely of our own making and breaking. Today we find ourselves flat-lining in a world of profound disenchantment and increasing disillusionment.

***

In the infant Christ, God enters into a world that is turbulent and chaotic. In the conventions of Renaissance painting, this is the world of the ruinous backdrop where we wander around among the ruins, stumbling over the fallen stones of the forgotten and half- remembered.

Some will find this last statement shocking. Not because they deny its truth but because they abhor my timing. Christmas Eve, of all times, is a night for joy and celebration. Yet, I stand by my statement not because I have submitted to the darkness of despair but because our journey towards the illumination of the nativity event depicted in the foreground can only begin once we take an accurate compass bearing from our location among the fallen stones of the forgotten and half remembered. Our journey to the Christ-child progresses from among the ruins of our lives and the brokenness of our world on into the light.

God’s coming into the world is not a coming of strength into a world of light reflected from glossy surfaces. Jesus’ incarnation is not like the incarnation myth of Augustus Caesar – a divine prince of light coming gloriously and dazzlingly into a world made perfect by his arrival. God’s coming in the fragile form of a human infant, in insignificance and the hidden obscurity of the wrong part of the world is an entry of the divine into a world of instability and uncertainty.

Christians understand the nativity of Jesus as God’s final act of creation. Having created the world, bestowing stewardship responsibilities on humanity, God has watched over creation sometimes in anger, but mostly in sorrow. God has time and again called his chosen back to share the original vision for the creation. Now in the act of Incarnation, creation is made complete through God’s self-emptying entry into the experience of the created order from the inside out, as it were. Our God, Emmanuel –God is with us – comes not to visit, but to stay.

****

We cannot go back to an enchanted mindset. The Enlightenment has irrevocably reshaped our modern minds. Rather our contemporary task is to abandon the solitary hubris that is the root of our despair and encounter the transformative experience of the transcendent within the here and now remembering that for which we hope is already not far from us because of our daring to have hope.

As we journey from our wandering among the ruins of the backdrop towards the illumination of the scene in the foreground we become, as Bishop Nicholas Knisely puts it, charged with the light photons of the nativity scene. We begin to glow more brightly with every step of the way as we journey out of the backdrop and into the foreground where our transformation takes place.

What is the nature of this transformation, this glowing more brightly?

1. We celebrate the ordinary and everyday nature of our lives in which vulnerability and risk are foremost.
2. We become more relational for relationship is the medium the God of the universe chooses to be known through, ensuring that our relationships and communities become the places where grace is encountered.
3. We witness to the nativity, taking heart that it is our ordinariness, our unworthiness, our invisibility that makes us the objects of God’s love, and being so loved, we go and do likewise.

Luke in writing his account of the nativity of the Christ child is writing theology, not history, and certainly not science. In a recent article in the New York Times, Peter Wehner quotes the writer Garry Wills who describes Jesus as: undiscriminating and inclusive, not gradated and exclusive ... a man who honors women and considers sinners his friends. Here is the heart of Luke’s theology, a theology that we are called to make real in lives well lived.

On Christmas Day, our gospel reflection will move on into the Prologue of John’s Gospel. Here, John speaks of the coming of Christ, not in the language of nativity. He declares Jesus to be the Word present at the moment of creation. The Word of God– in Greek Logos – is the communicative element in God. The Word is God irradiating outwards from God’s self as en-lighten-ment.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ….. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. 

As we approach 2017, for many of us it seems the world has taken a turn towards the embrace of darker hues. But we are those who know that the light has come into the world, and thus we are called through our baptism to be the bearers of that light. The responsibility is huge – to shine in the darkness and not be overcome; to be that light the world so urgently needs.

A sermon from Linda Mackie-Griggs for Advent III  

“What then did you go out to see?”

Among all of the words in the English language, the word, “expectation” has got to be one of the most freighted. It brings with it, on the one hand, the eager anticipation of, and preparation for, something wonderful in the future, or on the other hand, the stomach-churning realization that something we anticipated has disappointed somehow. No one wants to deal with something, in others or in ourselves, that has not lived up to expectations.

Listen to John’s words from prison: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we wait for another?”

In earlier accounts, John the Baptist has greeted his cousin with awe and joy as the Anointed One who is to come and rescue Israel:“Behold, the Lamb of God!”, he has declared to his disciples, palpably excited that the hopes of his people are about to be fulfilled.

But now John has been jailed by Herod. He may not know it yet, but he will die in prison. And his hope is ebbing as he realizes that his joyful expectation of Jesus’ triumph over Roman occupation is in jeopardy. He is losing hope. You can almost hear the accusatory tone; the impatience, the doubt: “…should we look for another?”

And Jesus responds, as he often does, by turning to Israel’s roots. He alludes to the prophet Isaiah, some of which we heard today in the first lesson. Jesus says, look around. The things that the prophets told us of are actually happening; healing and justice are abounding—the Reign of God is breaking in, just like Isaiah said it would. Don’t lose hope, John, he says. All is going just as it should.

But of course, that is part of the tension here. Jesus says that the words of the prophets are being fulfilled, but evidently, John has different expectations of exactly what that should look like. John expects a heroic Messiah who will overthrow the Roman occupation—and he’s definitely not the only one who feels that way. But thus far Jesus is not meeting those expectations. There is a disconnect between differing visions of the Kingdom—the Reign of God—and this disconnect may well lie in how we read Isaiah, which is the foundational text that informs Jesus’ response.

Isaiah wasn’t a single person who wrote at a single point in time. A number of prophets wrote under that name between about 8^th and 6^th centuries BCE, and their writings are generally seen as being organized into three major sections, as we heard last week. The reading we heard today falls in First Isaiah, which emphasizes the importance of worshiping one God who will purify Jerusalem before inaugurating a vision of peace, healing and reconciliation. Of particular importance in this vision is the Davidic line of kings, of which, according to the Gospel accounts, Jesus is the culminating figure—the Anointed One that Isaiah prophesied over a half-millennium earlier.

Isaiah describes the coming Reign of God as a time of healing and justice, and Jesus alludes specifically to this in his response to John. But, as we just heard in the first lesson, that isn’t all Isaiah said. It’s not just about humanity:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.…

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;

the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes. 

Do you hear that? The prophet’s vision of the coming Kingdom encompasses all of Creation. This isn’t something we usually consider. But as we look at the water protectors at Standing Rock and what they have accomplished, and as we grieve the destruction and suffering being visited upon our Mother Earth due to pollution and climate change, we are invited to broaden our vision of the Reign of God beyond the anthropocentric—to remember that it’s not just about us.

Jesus turns to the crowd, and he begins by asking them about their expectations of John. “What did you go out to the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind?” Some scholars speculate that this was a reference to an image on royal coinage. Jesus continues to press the issue—what did you expect to see? Royalty in soft robes? Really? What kind of kingship do you think the prophets were talking about?

Or, did you expect a prophet? Well that’s what you got—and you may not know it yet, but you’ve gotten a lot more than you expected.The implicit question to the crowd in this interrogation has been, “What is YOUR vision of the Kingdom?” Because Jesus is implying that he’s about to turn it upside down. He says,

“Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

And it’s the last part of this statement that rocks the world. Yes, John is important—he’s the forerunner sent to prepare the way for Jesus. But what does it mean that he is the least in the Kingdom?

To answer that, I have another question:

What is our expectation of the Kingdom? If our expectations are in any way informed by the world as it is and not as we are called to help form it, then we are probably off the mark.

Let me introduce you to a living parable.

Steve Blackmer has been dubbed by Harper’s Magazine, ‘The Priest in the Trees.”* He’s an Episcopal priest, ordained just a couple of years ago and called from the beginning of his discernment to a ministry focused on conservation and healing in the natural world. During his time in seminary, he was struck in his study of Scripture by how much of the narrative is immersed in the land—mountaintops, valleys, lakes, gardens, deserts, rivers, wilderness. His Church of the Woods, now a year old, is comprised of just over 100 acres not far from Canterbury, New Hampshire. Liturgy in the Church of the Woods involves hiking, stargazing, storytelling, meditation walks, trail work, and open-air Eucharists. His vision is to help people understand, and repent of, what he calls ‘ecological sin.’

Steve tells this story of a major turning point in his ministry: He calls it the Chainsaw Eucharist. As he was clearing brush and saplings in the forest he came upon a stand of mature beech trees that were in the way of a new meditation trail. He cranked up his chainsaw and began chopping away. But as tree after tree fell, he became increasingly uneasy. He stopped. He realized that in cutting down those trees he had neither shown nor felt the slightest regard for the fact that he was taking lives that were worthy of reverence. Right then and there he set up an altar with his traveling Communion kit and turned to the Lectionary reading for the day. It was from Isaiah:

I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you. . . . Shout, O depths of the earth! Break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest, and every tree in it.

The author of the story writes: [Blackmer] prayed the prayer of confession, consecrated the bread and wine, and offered them to his fellow congregants — the trees — before partaking himself.

Set aside the complete lack of liturgical orthodoxy of Blackmer’s actions here, and see it, as I said, as a living parable: What is the Kingdom of God like? The Kingdom of God is where Jesus gave himself for ALL of Creation–for everything that God declared Very Good from the beginning of time. ALL of it.

None of Creation, not the natural world that we steward, nor the poor, nor the sick, nor the outsider are to be regarded as something that is in the way of our selfish desires. God’s Dream is to turn all of that on its head; in the words of the Magnificat, to cast down the mighty and lift up that which we would treat as lowly. It’s audacious, it’s what Isaiah envisioned, and that’s what Jesus wanted John the Baptist to understand.

Because, you see, John’s expectation was as imprisoned–as boxed-in–as he was. As he began to lose hope he thought he might have been expecting too much of Jesus, when in fact, he expected too little; as did the crowd that Jesus addressed. They expected to see the liberation of Israel—something they could imagine– not the unexpected–beyond imagination–, which was the healing and renewal of all Creation.

The prophetic imagination of Isaiah, and of the entire Gospel message, calls us to participate courageously in the Dream of God. It is a daunting message, and at the same time a hopeful and joyful one. Today we lit the pink candle on the Advent wreath to mark Gaudete Sunday, which means Rejoice. And we can rejoice today. We can rejoice in the audacious expectation and hope that the God who comes as a child is faithful to all of Creation, and calls each of us to be the ones that we’ve been waiting for.

*http://harpers.org/archive/2016/12/the-priest-in-the-trees/

Advent Sunday sees the gospel focus switch from Luke, our guide through Jesus’ ministry over these last 12 months to Matthew, who will be our guide over the coming year. Advent Sunday 2016 opens with Matthew 24:36-44. In this little apocalypse  Jesus addresses the experience of uncertainty, loss, and expectation – about the day and the hour no one knows. In a nutshell, Jesus tells his hearers that in the end, all is going to be as it should be according to the mind of God. However, the period of time between now and then involves a great deal of uncertainty and suffering. Can there be a worse message than this with which to open a new Church year? Uncertainty fills the imagination with dark foreboding.

So much of the way we manage our experience is to minimize uncertainty as much as possible. We are compelled to do this even if we are self-aware enough to recognize that our sense of certainty is nothing more than enveloping ourselves in an illusion of predictability. We need, it seems, a certain level of certainty predicated upon our faith in life as predictable. The past colors the present and sets the parameters for the future. What we can expect is conditioned by what we already know. How safe, and yet how limiting.

Apocalyptic writing emerges over and over again in the Biblical record. Its presence identifies periods of history when our ability to successfully envelop ourselves in the illusion of predictable continuity becomes impossible to sustain. When things get so bad, when social conditions break down under the weight of persecution, then the only option for believers is to project their hope onto the event horizon variously referred to as the end times, the Day of Judgment, the Second Coming of the Lord.In periods when apocalyptic language is the only language powerful enough to express a current experience of acute uncertainty and profound disappointment, hope leapfrogs into an imagined future.

Yet, apocalyptic writing is misleading if you think its attention is only directed to the end time event horizon. Apocalyptic writing is also focused on the response of the faithful to their experience in the present time. Scholars are divided on whether Jesus’ words in Matthew 24 are predictive of the fall of Jerusalem or a reframing by the Evangelist writing after the event itself. The use of apocalyptic language and imagery is uncharacteristic in Jesus’ teaching and this tends to lend weight to the opinion that chapter 24 is Matthew writing from within the acute social and religious dislocation following the destruction of Jerusalem.

Differing interpretations

Christian communities across America listening to this gospel reading on Advent Sunday will approach the text in three broad ways. [1]

1. Strongly fundamentalist-separatist congregations whose approach to the world is inherently adversarial will see Jesus’ words as an accurate description of their experience in the present time filtered through a prediction of the immediate future. For these Christians, the battle is already joined and the victory of Christ’s return is nigh. In the meantime, the work is to remain pure, uncontaminated, and in some extreme cases to be prepared to take up arms to hasten the glad day of the Lord’s coming.

2. Evangelical Christians, within the mainstream of evangelical thought, will tend to wonder more about the immediate predictive nature of Jesus’ words. For them, the Second Coming is a firm expectation, yet attending to the literal meaning of Jesus’ words will lead them to focus less on the when of the Second Coming and more on the need to be ready for it, no matter when it comes. Being ready is a matter of being watchful, vigilant, prepared for its arrival at any moment. In the meantime, it’s a matter of individual accountability in the work of conversion of souls as well as the transformation of society. Through whatever political means at hand, souls must be won and society must be conformed to an evangelical Christian belief in the Bible as an internally consistent rule book for modern government.

3. Mainline and progressive Christian communities will understand Jesus’ use of apocalyptic language as metaphor, or even hyperbole, i.e. exaggeration for effect. Among these Christians, the Second Coming is no longer thought of as a once-and-for-all event, but as an evolutionary or unfolding process. Thus their understanding of the Kingdom is that it is already here and yet still in the process of unfolding – it is now and also not yet. Making the Kingdom a reality crucially depends on the capacity of God’s people to work in covenanted partnership with God as collaborative agents – working in the present time for justice and peace.

Confusing overlap

There is a temptation to mistake peace and justice for the metrics of the Kingdom’s coming. We so long to feel in control of events yet as Jesus reminds us all we can know is that in the fullness of God’s vision and in God’s own time the trajectory of the Kingdom always bends towards justice.

As a preacher, I believe my task is to address Jesus’ words for a community within a mainline-progressive Christian perspective. For many in my community, it feels the work of agitating for the expectations of the Kingdom just got a little bit harder with the loss of an attentive ear of government. Understandable though this perception is, it is nevertheless mistaken. Progressive Christian and secular humanist perspectives overlap considerably, yet they have quite different origins and motivations.

One of my tasks as a preacher within a mainline-progressive Christian context is to more clearly differentiate between the coming of the Kingdom and the Post-Enlightenment socio-political agenda. The latter focuses on the perfectibility of human society by its own means and according to its own insights. This is a boastful agenda that believes it has grown up and moved beyond any need to recognize the spiritual dimension in human experience.

In differentiating between a progressive Christian vision and a secular-humanist agenda, this Christian vision’s emphasis falls on the partnership between God and human agency. it is this partnership that provides the engine for social change as a fulfillment of the expectations of  God’s reign.

In contrast to the secular humanist belief in human society’s potential for self-perfectibility through political progress, i.e. with the right policies things will always get better and better, the mainline-progressive Christian vision is a sharing of the divine vision. This is a vision in which human beings’ have a part to play, but the vision does not originate with us and will not be accomplished by us without God.

A theology of covenant

This is the tradition of Covenant Theology, a continuous theological thread woven into the heart of the Hebrew and Christian understandings of the human-divine relationship. How does this task look on Advent Sunday 2016 in which we continue to find ourselves living in a world of increasing uncertainty? How do we maintain a hope-filled orientation to the world?

In confronting our experience  Jesus reminds us that uncertainty is not only natural but might even be desirable. Because we cannot know the day or the hour, we live in the hope of God’s promises. We implement our hope through the agency of human action, i.e. doing our part in partnership with God. If we do our part, God promises to do God’s part. This is not a matter of contingent promise – I will do my part only if you do yours – it’s a recognition that in accordance with our creation in God’s image as beings with free will, God chooses not the encroach into the areas for which we are the accountable party in the contract or covenant.

The paradox

We remember that to have hope, to expect is to live as if that for which we hope is already available to us. Hope moves well beyond any notion of pie-in-the-sky wistfulness. Hope costs, hope pains, hope risks. Hope is somewhat paradoxical in that it is the transformation of our experience of loss and disappointment into an alliance with the purposes of God.

Advent is a time for facing our disappointments and letting them become for us an opportunity for the transformation of our experience of pain, loss, and disappointment. Through grace pain, loss, and disappointment become reframed within a larger meaning.

With the commemoration of Nicholas Ferrar, Deacon 1637, in the first week of the Advent Season, I am taken back once more to T.S. Elliot’s poem Little Gidding -the fourth in his extended series Four Quartets. The poem was inspired by his visit to the little church in the Huntingdonshire village of Little Gidding during the depths of the dark, war-weary winter of 1941. If you are looking for an Advent meditation, I commend the poem to you. In a Wikipedia entry, the editor speaks of the poem:

as a discussion of time and winter with attention paid to the arrival of summer. The images of snow, which provoke desires for a spiritual life, transition into an analysis of the four classical elements of fire, earth, air and water and how fire is the primary element of the four. Following this is a discussion on death and destruction, things unaccomplished, and regret for past events.

Jesus’ words in Matthew 24 are echoed in Elliot’s exploration of the play on time – endings being also beginnings, and the familiar providing an opportunity to know something for the first time. In juxtaposing winter and summer, regret and hope Elliot makes Little Gidding particularly pertinent for Advent reflection.

As we commence our own Advent preparations amidst the  commercial distractions of a premature Christmas, we might pay especial attention to the actions of God’s grace. Grace (Elliot’s fire) transforms thwarted emotional energy to become the engine of our hope. In hope, we discover the paradox that hope does not need to know the day or the hour, the time or the place. Being a transformation of the energies of loss, hope becomes the compass, the directional finder aligning us with the expectations of God’s Kingdom.

This Advent Sunday what kind of place is it we have arrived at? Are we not so sick and tired of ourselves that we long for something to be different and so are ready to risk in order to move forward? The apocalyptic language of Matthew 24 is a reminder to us of Elliot’s immemorial lines:

What we call the beginning is often the end
/And to make and end is to make a beginning.
/The end is where we start from. …. We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3089

I

This Sunday, the last in the season after Pentecost is Christ the King. Christ the King is a relative newcomer in our Anglican-Episcopal calendar, having been adopted only with the Three-Year Ecumenical Lectionary. The Sunday before Advent was traditionally known to us as stir-up Sunday because of the opening words of the Collect: 

STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

The English joke that the name stir-up Sunday derived from this Sunday marking the first occasion for the many stirrings of the Christmas Pudding, presents a lighter side to this day. There is, however, a more serious side to the designation of Christ the King for the last Sunday of the calendar year. In 1925 Pius XI proclaimed the feast of Christ the King as an assertion of the Catholic Church’s protest against the rise of fascism and the growing threat of communism.

Against these forces, Pius XI asserted the old Constantinian power of the Church as the only center of allegiance for Roman Catholics. At a considerable cost to liberty and freedom of thought within the Church, he marshaled the Catholic legions against those he perceived as the enemy.

The historical context for the origins of the commemoration sounds a tone today that is also problematic. This is an old story of one authoritarian system asserting itself against competing, equally authoritarian rivals. This is problematic because the Episcopal Church lays no such claims to this style and exercise of political-monarchical authority. Consequently, we have to find our own more authentic understanding of Christ as King.

II

Luke 23:33-43, a section of Jesus’ Passion Narrative appointed to be read on Christ the King this year points us back to Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion in our search for a model of Christ as King that is authentic to our tradition.

The crucifixion is the end phase of a process that has Jesus embroiled in a complex three-way political power play between the Temple Authorities, the Roman Governor, and an angry and anxious populace. Finally, the Temple priests have Jesus in their grasp. Yet, they fail to get Pilate to easily do their bidding. Pilate thinks he has adroitly outmaneuvered the Chief Priests in finding no charge against Jesus. However, as he prepares to release him he is confronted by the third force in this political quagmire – the people who on realizing Pilate’s intention clamor for the release of Barabbas, a much more dangerous yet popular rabble-rouser. Throughout history, crowds seem to have an attraction for bullies who appear to be men who will upset things and get things done. Pilate is trapped. Although fully prepared to thwart the designs of the Chief Priests he caves before the pressure of the threat of popular agitation.

III

Politically, there is nothing new under the sun. Like many at the moment, I find myself transfixed and at the same time repulsed by the drama of the Trump presidential transition appointments. I know that there are others who like me are also transfixed, but yet unlike me, are excited by this process and its prospects. At times, I do approach a feeling of excitement as I catch glimpses of the possibility that Donald Trump might be, inadvertently so to speak, the catalyst for the change we all so yearn for. In other moments, I am filled with fear at the dangers and uncertainties opening before us.

Amidst our uncertainties and deep soul questioning in this post-election period, we have a sense that something fundamental has changed. Whether fearful, or celebratory, or merely curious we all remain so close to events that it’s difficult to see clearly, exactly what it is that has shifted and whether this shift is for better or worse?

I read calls for reconciliation. I hear calls for resistance. I suspect both will be needed yet I am mindful that both reconciliation and resistance involve negotiating confusing tensions. When does reconciliation become simply a cover for appeasement? When does resistance degenerate into a party politically motivated refusal to accept democratic process?

Yet, I am increasingly aware of a third call beginning to emerge; a call for repentance. How has the Left lost the popular support of working men and women? It is sobering to remember that the block who unequivocally voted for the Trump ticket are the people who supported Roosevelt and the New Deal, and who most recently returned Barak Obama to two terms in the presidency. As the Democratic mainstream faces up to a need for repentance, it’s not a matter of diversity politics or jobs to combat poverty. Why not both at the same time, wouldn’t that be a novel idea?

In the interests of even-handedness, it’s also salutary to remind the Right, that although the Republican electorate, in the end, threw itself behind a Trump victory, this is not the wider electorate’s endorsement for Repbublican policies which overwhelmingly favor the 1%. One thing becomes clear, the working class electorate is not stupid as many had begun to fear, it seems to have simply become desperate.

IV

I suspect as we move forward, the specificity of unfolding events will offer greater clarity to each of us about how we need to respond. In Luke 23 Jesus’ ministry has led him to such a moment. Hanging on the cross he makes the ultimate offer of reconciliation. Yet during his trial, he has presented a powerful if perplexing model of resistance in his refusal to play the tit-for-tat power game. Jesus’ strength lies in his very vulnerability and is this not why we overlook him as our model for our political response?

The vulnerability of non-violence reveals Jesus’ truth; that God can do nothing with our pretense of strength. Our pretense of strength squeezes God from our frame of reference. Our vulnerability, on the other hand, offers God an invitation to enter into our picture of the world and to partner with us. Jesus’ vulnerability becomes an opportunity for God to act for the crucifixion is not the end of the story.

That the fear of being vulnerable unleashes a virulent strain of paranoia in any culture, is not a new discovery. We see this coming to the fore as the voices of racial, religious and cultural purity gain ascendancy across the world as otherwise helpless politicians and leaders seek to advantage themselves through the exploitation of fear. Everywhere we see the mounting consequences for populations whose fate is to pose the specter of the utter helplessness we defend against recognizing in ourselves.

It’s a sorry story of history that Pius XI didn’t foresee his increasing resort to authoritarianism to confront authoritarian assaults would lead to a distortion that ultimately made it hard to distinguish between friend and foe.

V

The deepest insight of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition is that humanity is made in the image of God. The implications of this are rather far reaching to contemplate. So instead the Church has always had a tendency to reverse this central insight and to see God as refracted through our image of ourselves; Christ as an  earthly potentate.

When God becomes remade in our image the result is one where violence, oppression, hatred, and fear become divinely sanctioned – Christ dons the trappings of our earthly rulers’ pretense of strength. To realize that we are made in the image of God requires us to embrace vulnerability and be changed by this experience. This impels us to focus on solving problems at source. This is what it means to be agents, not of a worldly rule given the fig leaf of divine sanction, but of the continued in-breaking of the Kingdom of God that moves one heart, one mind, one breath at a time.

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer continues:

Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men [and women]. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?  

As with Jesus, we may discover there is a cost attached. In searching for an interpretation of Christ the King that is more authentic to our own tradition, Luke’s gospel directs our attention back to the iconic image of Jesus, not robed in kingly power, but hanging on a cross. Perhaps here we can see an image of reconciliation as the ultimate expression of resistance. 

An anonymous Franciscan blessing goes:

God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships so that we may live deep within our heart. May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.  May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war so that we may reach out our hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world so that we can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen