Nineveh shall be overthrown

Jonah and Nahum are literary neighbors, they live on the same block in the Bible, as it were, but they can be hard to find. Each book is only a few pages long, and flipping through the prophets you can easily fly from Obadiah to Habakkuk as though Jonah and Nahum weren’t there.

In addition to living close to each other in  the same scriptural neighborhood, the two also share an intense relationship with a city, Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire, a middle eastern super power that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and held the southern kingdom of Judah as a vassal for almost one hundred years. In Israel’s imagination, Nineveh had become a symbol of violent oppression, and Nahum’s entire proclamation is infused with rage against the hated city.

Ah, city of bloodshed,

utterly treacherous,

full of violence,

where killing never stops!

Crack of whip and rattle of wheel,

galloping steed and bounding chariot!

Charging horsemen,

flashing swords and glittering spears!

Hosts of slain and heaps of corpses,

dead bodies without number—

they stumble over bodies.

Because of the countless harlotries of the harlot,

the winsome mistress of sorcery, [Nineveh]

who ensnared nations with her harlotries

and peoples with her sorcery,

I am going to deal with you—

declares the Lord of Hosts.[1]

I am going to deal with you; violence for violence. The city must fall. Toward the end of the 7th century BCE Nineveh was totally destroyed and never rebuilt. It’s easy to see how, for many people suffering under brutal regimes, the hated city’s fall from glory became a source of deep satisfaction. For those living under oppression, the prophetic proclamation of the Lord who declares, “I am going to deal with you” and brings down the mighty, has long been a source of hope.The book of Nahum ends with a question, directed at Nineveh: “All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?”[2]

The book of Jonah also ends with a question, but it presents an utterly different narrative. It begins, “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim judgment upon it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’”[3] And Jonah set out, but instead of heading North and eventually East for Nineveh, he went West as far as his feet would take him, until he arrived on the beach near today’s Tel Aviv where he dipped his toes into the water of the Mediterranean Sea. And apparently this wasn’t far enough. Jonah found a ship going to Tarshish, a port far beyond the horizon, at the end of the known world, as far away as he could from the presence of the Lord. Jonah ran away and got on a boat to go where God was not, only to find out that there was no such place. The Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and in the storm Jonah asked the frightened sailors to throw him overboard, and the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah. And after three days, the fish vomited Jonah out upon the same beach where his sea adventure had begun.

There he was, covered all over with stinky fish slobber, and the word of the Lord came to him a second time. “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” And this time, Jonah went. Not a word is said about how he felt or what was going through his mind. All we’re left with to ponder as he makes his way to the city is the realization that it’s not merely really, really hard to escape God’s presence and call, but impossible — something I find both terrifying and immensely comforting.

Next thing we hear is Jonah, a day’s walk into the city, crying out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” That’s just eight words in English, five in Hebrew. Without a question one of the shortest and least poetic prophetic utterances in all of scripture. Jonah doesn’t scold or accuse his audience nor does he give any reasons for his announcement, he just makes it.  And not a word is said about what a hard assignment this was given the size of the city and its evil ways. No, Jonah makes his announcement and the people hear it and they repent like nobody’s ever seen: the whole city, from king to cattle, put on sackcloth and sit in ashes, fasting and praying. “Who knows?” we’re told the king wondered. “God may turn and relent and turn back from his wrath, so that we do not perish.” And God saw what they did, how they were turning back from their evil ways. And God renounced the punishment he had planned to bring upon them, and did not carry it out.

And Jonah? Jonah who just witnessed the most fantastic response anyone tasked to declare the word of the Lord on the face of the earth could ever even dream of? Jonah is angry. He does not like what he just saw, does not like it at all. “Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that you are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, and ready to relent from punishing these people.”[4] Jonah is so mad, he declares he would rather die than witness a moment longer how God extends to Israel’s enemies the very compassion Israel has always depended on for its own salvation. We know the feeling: let them taste relentless justice — and grant us your mercy. We know the feeling and we get to laugh at it, laughing at our silly selves as we laugh at silly Jonah.

Dr. King urged us not to forget that in the struggle for liberation from the powers of oppression,

the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races. … The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice.[5]

It is so easy to confuse unjust systems with the people caught in them and to forget that when godless, sinful, violent systems fall — and fall they must — the people caught in them are human beings made in the image of God.

We are deeply divided, and it is easy to forget that we are not called to fight those on the other side of the divide, but that which divides us so deeply. We are called to dismantle the old walls and the unquestioned assumptions that separate us. We are called to step into Jonah’s shoes and walk into the city of bloodshed, into the heart of the system that eats people, and to tell the truth that such a city, such a nation cannot and will not stand. And we care called to step into the shoes of the Ninevites and listen to this nobody from nowhere who dares to tell us that our city, our nation cannot and will not stand. We are called to repent — to turn around, to turn to God and to each other, and to let the Spirit of truth inspire and empower us.

It is awfully easy to imagine vengeance and retribution, human or divine, and to say with Nahum, “All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?” It is awfully easy until we have the courage to consider our own cruelty, our own lovelessness, our own entanglement in oppressive systems and structures, our own complete dependence on the mercy of God.

At the end of Jonah’s very curious story, God has the final word, and God leaves us with a question, “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left?”[6] Countless people who are so lost they don’t know their right hand from their left — those are my people, stuck in deadly myths of supremacy and inferiority, steeped in lies, and yearning to be free.

“All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you,” Nahum declares, imagining the applause after Nineveh’s fall. I am grateful for the hilarious and very serious counter testimony of Jonah who dares us to imagine, against his own inclinations, the world’s laughter and applause after Nineveh’s repentance. Laughing with the redeemed, I clap my hands, and this joy gives me the courage to hear the whole truth and to tell the truth and, again and again, to turn to the mercy of God.

[1] Nahum 3:1-5a

[2] Nahum 3:19

[3] See Jonah 1:1-2

[4] Jonah 4:2-3

[5] From an article in the Christian Century, 1957; reprinted in A Testament of Hope, 8.

[6] Jonah 4:11

True repentance

“Look at ships,” I read in the book of James, “though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.”[1]

I listened to the radio on my way home from Mount Olivet cemetery on Wednesday afternoon, and only after a few moments of confusion and disbelief did I begin to realize what had actually happened at the Capitol. I was very upset, but I wasn’t surprised. Words matter. Words have consequences. And I can’t remember a day during the past four years when government leaders, beginning with the head of the administration, didn’t lie to the American people or insist on presenting “alternative facts” while denouncing any media that didn’t parrot their caustic narrative as “fake news.” I thought about the Senators, Representatives, and others who for weeks had kept repeating lies about the election for political gain.

Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you, Do not swear at all … Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”[2]

Our representatives swear, many of them with their hand on the Bible, to protect the constitution, but apparently those are just words when political calculations make an assault on the constitution the preferable career move. Many of them love to appropriate the Ten Commandments for their purposes, but knowing or observing them is a different matter. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, the ninth plainly states.[3] And in Exodus 23, in what reads like a commentary on this commandment, it says, “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with the wicked to act as a malicious witness. You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing.”[4]

Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her newsletter how, at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday,

heavily armed guards escorted the lawmakers back to the Capitol, thoroughly scrubbed by janitors, where the senators and representatives resumed their counting of the certified votes. The events of the afternoon had broken some of the Republicans away from their determination to challenge the votes. Fourteen Republican senators [, among them Sens. Blackburn and Hagerty from Tennessee,] had announced they would object to counting the certified votes from Arizona; in the evening count the number dropped to six: [Ted] Cruz (R-TX), [Josh] Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), John Kennedy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). In the House, 121 Republicans, more than half the Republican caucus, voted to throw out Biden’s electors from Arizona. As in the Senate, they lost when 303 Representatives voted in favor. Six senators and more than half of the House Republicans backed an attempt to overthrow our government, in favor of a man caught on tape just four days ago trying to strong-arm a state election official into falsifying the election results.

Prof. Richardson, a historian, ended her newsletter with the words, “Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.”[5] She didn’t mention “that if Black people had [breached the Capitol like this], the hallways would be red with their blood.”[6] She didn’t mention that this happened the day after Georgia had elected its first Black senator and its first Jewish senator. She didn’t mention that someone had set up a noose outside and that “a few of the marauders wore T-shirts that said ‘MAGA Civil War, Jan. 6, 2021.’”[7]

Many have declared that “this is not who we are”, that “this is not America” — but what else would this be? Somebody else’s country? Someone else’s history? Some kind of alternate reality we accidentally fell into? Roxane Gay wrote, “This is America. This has always been America. If this were not America, this would not have happened. It’s time we face this ugly truth, let it sink into the marrow of our bones, let it move us to action.”[8]

Wednesday was the feast of Epiphany, when churches of the East celebrate the birth of Christ, the manifestation of God in human flesh, and churches of the West, the visit of the wise men who come to Bethlehem in response to this birth. The word epiphany has connotations of seeing something shine forth, seeing the full reality of an event, its truth; and in that sense, the events of Wednesday, bringing to a head multiple chains of events and developments, have epiphanic potential — if we have the courage to face the reality they show us and let it sink into the marrow of our bones.

In the Gospel of Mark, there is no Christmas story at the beginning. There’s the long-awaited messenger who appears in the wilderness. There’s John who calls people to repent and be baptized. He calls them to orient themselves toward God’s future: the promise of liberation, the promise of redemption, the promise of the kingdom. And he calls them to repent. Repentance is our capacity to see who we are and where we are, and to turn away from habits of thinking and doing that we know go against God’s will for human kind. Not that our capacity for, or our track record of, repenting are great, but there is promise in holding the gaze of the prophet, or our own when we look in the mirror and see who’s there, who’s really there, and not turn away until we let the truth sink into the marrow of our bones. It’s the beginning of not bearing false witness.

According to Mark, people came to the Jordan in droves to be baptized and to be prepared for the coming of the stronger one who would baptize them with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth and life. They came from Jerusalem and from the Judean countryside, city folk and rural folk; they were all headed down to the banks of the Jordan to listen to the wilderness prophet and be baptized by him. One by one they stepped into the water, said what needed to be said, and let him plunge them beneath the surface, into the silent depth: Long ago, their ancestors had entered the promised land crossing this river. Like them, they wanted to begin anew. They wanted to live as God’s people on God’s land as though they had just crossed over. They prayed that the mercy of God, like a river, would wash away their wrongdoings and their guilt and the terrible shadows of all they couldn’t undo. They prayed they would emerge from the chilly depth with their lives scrubbed clean as new, prepared to face the holy One who would renew all things in righteousness.

Jesus came like the rest of them had come, walking on dusty roads, waiting in line in the heat of the day, and finally stepping into the water, like the rest of them. He began his ministry where sinners gathered, ordinary people who were ready for a fresh start and needed a space where they could be honest with themselves. So many were gathered at the river, you couldn’t have picked Jesus out from the many faces, and the way Mark tells the story, neither could John. Standing in the water, he didn’t realize that his arms were holding the one whose coming he had been announcing. He plunged him beneath the surface like the rest of them, into the cold silence, down into the darkness at the bottom.

As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

This is the first, big epiphanic moment in Mark’s Gospel. The beginning of the good news of Jesus is like the beginning of creation: the face of the water, the Spirit, and the voice of the One who creates, beholds, and names. In Genesis we read,

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth darkness covered the face of the deep and a wind from God swept over the face of the waters, and God said: Let there be light! And there was light. And God saw that the light was good and called it Day.

There’s the face of the water, the Spirit, and the voice of the One who creates, beholds, and names. God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good. God was delighted. And when Jesus emerged from below the face of the deep, God was delighted. It was a new beginning for the world, a new day. In this man’s life, Mark proclaims, God has come to us, stepped into the river with us, in loving solidarity with humankind, disappearing in the deep not to be washed, but to drown and rise. The moment Jesus stepped into the river, he made us all his own. Because of him, we emerge from the water affirmed in our identity as beloved children of God, assured of our kinship with God and with each other and with every last one on the river banks who longs for new life. Baptized into Christ, his death becomes our own and his life ours. As we come up for air, his Holy Spirit becomes our breath.

True repentance takes honesty and courage, and all who want to hear rousing words of healing and unity must first know that we won’t get there without telling the truth — not about them, whoever they might be in our self-centered worlds, but about ourselves.

My hope, when I’m able to cling to it, is rooted in God’s faithulness. I cling to the hope that love frees us to be truthful and humble.

[1] James 3:4-5

[2] Matthew 5:33-37

[3] Exodus 20:16

[4] Exodus 23:1-2

[5] from Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters From an American” email newsletter at https://billmoyers.com/story/today-the-confederate-flag-flew-in-the-united-states-capitol/

[6] David Brooks https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/capitol-riot-republicans.html

[7] Michelle Goldberg https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-capitol-attack.html

[8] Roxane Gay https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/capitol-riot-trump-america.html

Stream of blessing

The letter to the Ephesians begins with a deluge of blessing and praise, washing readers and listeners in a downpour of poetic, hymnic exultation.[1] The great challenge the letter addresses is as old as humanity: how to live together, given our many differences. But the author doesn’t begin with a good, hard look at the various lines that have long divided us – Jews and Gentiles, women and men, rich and poor, blue collar, white collar, citizens and migrants. The letter’s sender addresses as a Jew a largely Gentile audience with the good news that in Christ God has “made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”[2] Living with differences requires real effort, and the author acknowledges that it takes humility, gentleness, and patience[3] — but the first words are not words of congregational analysis and pastoral admonition: the opening sentence is an outpouring of blessing and praise, with all the attention given and directed to what God has done in Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing… and what follows is just one breathtakingly long sentence, phrase after phrase naming what God has done to bless us and why we in turn are to bless God. “The rambling form of the sentence … seems to have trouble finding a place to stop,” one commentator observes, adding, “This is the grammar of worship more than it is the grammar of … argument, and it is no surprise if we are left struggling to keep up.”[4] It is like standing in a river of praise, a stream of grace washing over and around us like waves, and through us like a cosmic current originating in the heart of God. Blessed be God who has blessed us in Christ… choosing us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be God’s people, without blemish in God’s sight, full of love… destining us to be adopted as God’s children through Christ… redeeming us through his blood… making known to us the mystery of God’s will… as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth. The whole world and all who live in it… Earth and heaven… the entire universe washed in this grace… All things reconciled to God the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of creation… All things reconciled to God and to each other in the wide embrace of Christ on the cross…

The letter begins with a deluge of blessing and praise, washing us in a downpour of poetic, hymnic exultation, and inviting us to begin our year, our moments and our days by entrusting ourselves to this stream, floating in it, singing.

Praise doesn’t come easy in these days of twittered rage, mournful lament and cautiously leashed hope. Full-throated rejoicing may feel premature or insensitive to those who live their days far from joy — and there is much grace and love in such hesitation — but the stream is there to carry us, and the right words will come when the time is right.

The letter to the Ephesians reminds us, in poetry and prose, that in Christ we participate in a new humanity, wherein everyone and everything in heaven and on earth is reconciled to God and one another. In Christ, even our deepest and proudest divisions come to an end, and we greet and embrace one another as kin. Augustine, who became Bishop of Hippo at the end of the 4th century, said in a sermon on the feast of Epiphany,

Now, then, my dearly beloved [children] and heirs of grace, look to your vocation and, since Christ has been revealed to both Jews and Gentiles as the cornerstone, cling together with most constant affection. For he was manifested in the very cradle of his infancy to those who were near and to those who were afar – to the Jews whose shepherds were nearby; to the Gentiles whose Magi were at a great distance. The former came to him on the very day of his birth; the latter are believed to have come on this day. He was not revealed, therefore, to the shepherds because they were learned, nor to the Magi because they were righteous, for ignorance abounds in the rusticity of shepherds and impiety amid the sacrileges of the Magi. He, the cornerstone, joined both groups to himself since he came to choose the foolish things of the world in order to put to shame the wise and “to call sinners, not the righteous,” so that the mighty would not be lifted up nor the lowly be in despair.[5]

Luke tells us of the shepherds and Matthew of the wise men, but when we put together the Nativity set, year after year, we put the whole world in and around the stable — Jews and Gentiles, poor working folk and star gazing royal figures, locals and outsiders, ox and ass, sheep and camels — the vision of peace is for all of creation. And all because the one in the cradle “came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near,” as we read in Ephesians. And now it doesn’t matter anymore how we determine who or what is “near” or “far off” because the one who went from the cradle to the cross brought us all near in the wide embrace of his love. “So then [we all] are no longer strangers and aliens, but … citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.”[6] Members of the household of God. One life, shared by all. The purpose is no longer hidden, but revealed in Christ’s embrace of the world.

Left to our own devices, we can’t escape our tendency to rend asunder what God has bound together. Catherine of Siena, speaking in the voice of God, said, “I could easily have created [human beings] possessed of all that they should need both for body and soul, but I wish that one should have need of the other, and that they should be my ministers to administer the graces and gifts that they have received from me.”[7] Left to our own devices, we keep trying to grasp for ourselves all that we should need both for body and soul, and in the process we create alienation, distrust, suspicion, and hostility. Left to our own devices, we make a world where unless you are like me, I have no need of you; unless you are with me, I have no need of you; and unless you are useful to me, I have no need of you.[8] But this proud dismissal, “I have no need of you” was never an option for human life; it became a reality only because of the power of sin.

The letter to the Ephesians begins with an outpouring of blessing and praise, because we are not left to our own devices: Christ has conquered sin so we might live in the community of his making, reconciled to God and one another, in the blessed conviviality of creation, to the praise of God’s glory.

We live in a new day, because God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. Christ has made us his own, and because we belong to Christ, we are part of God’s great enterprise of reconciliation and the healing of God’s broken world.

God said about us humans, according to Catherine of Siena, “I wish that one should have need of the other, and that they should be my ministers to administer the graces and gifts that they have received from me.” And Brian Doyle once said to a friend, “We’re only here for a minute. We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.”[9] The creation and redemption of the world is God’s great story, and for you and me, Doyle suggests, it’s the dailiness of catching and sharing shards of light and laughter and grace.

Doyle spoke of God as the “coherent mercy” that cannot be apprehended but may be perceived by way of “the music in and through and under all things.”[10] To the writer of Ephesians the music in and through and under all things is Christ, and from that lovely tune our praise erupts — because God has made known to us the mystery of God’s will: to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth, all of creation made complete in him. All things reconciled in Christ. All things healed and whole in Christ. All things — even the wounds of our hostility and our broken hearts. All because of God’s relentless determination to bless the world.

We live in a new day, not because Earth has completed another course around the Sun, but because Christ is come. Thanks and praise be to God.

[1] Eph 1:3-14

[2] Ephesians 2:14; see Susan Hylen https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas-2/commentary-on-ephesians-13-14-12

[3] See Ephesians 4:2-3

[4] Brian Peterson https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas-3/commentary-on-ephesians-13-14-9

[5] Augustine, quoted in Connections, Year A, Vol. 1, 153.

[6] See Ephesians 2:17-19

[7] Quoted by Stephen Boyd, Connections, Year A, Vol. 1, 139.

[8] In addition to Catherine, see 1 Cor 12:21.

[9] From a collection of Doyle’s essays, One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder, quoted in https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opinion/impeachment-trump-pelosi.html

[10] Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/books/review/one-long-river-of-song-brian-doyle.html

Joy to the World

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her king;
let every heart prepare him room
and heav’n and nature sing,
and heav’n and nature sing,
and heav’n, and heav’n and nature sing.

I miss our singing together, and my heart rejoices imagining our singing the carols together with at least twice the joy next Christmas. I love how the words of Joy to the World by Isaac Watts and the tune attributed to Handel come together just right: the opening line happily hops down the scale, step by step, like our little ones come down the stairs on Christmas morning, and then the whole earth leaps back up to the opening note to receive the newborn king. We invite each other to let our hearts be his abode before letting this praise reach cosmic scale in the singing of heaven and nature, and listening as fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains repeat the sounding joy.

Isaac Watts was looking at Psalm 98 when he wrote Joy to the World, but the theme of all creation coming together in praise of our Creator is even stronger in Psalm 148, the Psalm for the First Sunday after Christmas. Saint Francis of Assisi composed his Canticle of the Sun based on Psalm 148, calling to brother sun and sister moon, brother fire and sister water, brother wind and sister earth, and all of us to praise our Maker by being who and what we were made to be. And of course it was Francis who first built a nativity scene that included the baby in the manger, surrounded by Mary and Joseph, angels and shepherds, ox and ass and sheep and royal visitors from distant lands — all of creation coming together in praising God and welcoming the newborn king of peace.

The Book of Psalms begins with a strong emphasis on laments — prayers of God’s people from times of trouble. The composition of the book as a whole indicates an increasing emphasis on praise, coming to a climax with Psalms 146-150. Each of these five Psalms begins and ends with Hallelujah, a joyful call to praise God, and the arrangement itself is an affirmation of confident hope: in the end, all of creation is united in its praise of God the creator and redeemer of all.

In its songs of praise, Israel regularly invites an extraordinarily expansive congregation to praise God — including “all the earth;”[1] “the peoples” and “nations;”[2] “heavenly beings” and “all God’s works.”[3] This joyful inclusivity reaches its climax in Psalm 150:6, the final verse of the entire Book of Psalms, “Let everything that breathes praise the LORD!” But there’s actually an earlier culmination in Psalm 148, where the poet issues an invitation that is even more expansive: this Psalm invites not just “everything that breathes,” but rather everything that is to praise God!

In verses 1-6 the inhabitants of the heavenly realm are called upon: angels and heavenly hosts, sun and moon, stars, the heaven of heavens and the waters above the heavens. And unlike among many of Israel’s neighbors, in this poetry of praise sun and moon and stars are not themselves gods, but are part of God’s creation, moving and shining according to a law that cannot pass away. In the vision of this poetry, the awesome constellations of the night sky are not hard-to-read maps of frightful fate, but wondrous creations of God, praising their creator with their motion and light.

In verses 7-14, the focus shifts to the earthly realm below the dome. Now the poet calls on the inhabitants of sea and air and land to join in the praise: sea monsters, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind, mountains and hills, fruit trees and cedars, wild animals and cattle, creeping things and birds of the air.

Perhaps you noticed, the praise does not begin with people, but with sea creatures. It begins with all things that entered the great symphony of life long before human beings appeared. It begins with all things that serve and praise God simply by being what they were created to be: fire being fire and snow being snow; fruit trees being fruit trees and fruit bats being fruit bats; lilies being lilies and ravens being ravens.

On several occasions this past few days, I watched a squirrel in our backyard praise God. I had put out some goodies for the birds —  sunflower seeds, millet, peanuts and such — and I presented them in a feeder designed to keep large birds and squirrels out. I hung the caged feeder from a pole with a squirrel cone, and since the pole had two hooks, I tied a wire around a couple of pine cones and stuffed them with peanut butter and more seeds, for the larger birds. The birds came to feed, and I loved watching them fly in and out or hop around on the ground and pick up what picky or sloppy eaters had dropped. But then I watched the squirrel climb up the pole. As intended, the squirrel guard presented a major frustration for the little guy. But it didn’t take long before the squirrel climbed up the pole just high enough to leap up and out to the bottom of the feeder cage, grab it and pull itself up. It couldn’t get to the feeder itself, but the cage provided a perfect squirrel ladder to the top of the pole. Now it sat up there, eyeing the pine cones below. The wire was too thin for squirrel paws to get a grip. But soon the little guy was hanging upside down, with its hind paws grabbing the hook and its entire body stretched just enough for the front paws to reach the top of one of the cones, grab it, and pull it up enough to get busy eating.

It was marvelous, this repeated display of perfect squirrelness. “You go, Buddy,” I said quietly. “You finish that cone, you worked hard for it. And when you’re done, I’ll make you another one.”

Praise the Lord, Chickadees and Cardinals, Bluejays and Carolina Wrens, and you, Eastern Gray Squirrel, acrobat of the backyard and planter of oaks! Praise the Lord, all of you that serve and praise the Lord simply by being what you were created to be!

In the Hallelujah poetry of Psalm 148, people aren’t called to join the chorus until verse 11, and perhaps that’s because we are late arrivals in the story of creation. Or perhaps it’s because we struggle with being who we were created to be. Perhaps it’s because we struggle with simply being human beings, made in the image of God. We’re called upon to join the chorus as kings and peoples, rulers and judges, men and women, old and young together. Each of the terms describes segments of our diversity, and each pairing also highlights relationships where our differences easily become pyramids of status and privilege. Humans have trouble finding our place as creatures made in the image of God because we’d rather be like God on our own terms, as lords and masters of creation.

Yet angels and shepherds and royal visitors, ox and ass and sheep, sun and moon and stars, and all of us with all our wondrous and difficult differences come together around a manger in Bethlehem, because this child is our salvation. This child was sent to us to redeem us — to free us from sin’s perverse reign and to bring us back into the household of God as kin and as heirs of the promise.

We celebrate the incarnation of the Word of God, “born of a woman” as Paul puts it in utmost simplicity. This is how we all enter the miracle of life, born of a woman, whether we be male or female or fitting neither category, whether we be kings or people, rulers, judges, or tired healthcare workers, and regardless of where on this beautiful planet our DNA has been knit together.

Together with all of creation we praise God for the birth of this child, because in love that knows no end, he makes us one – one with ourselves, one with each other across all that divides us, and one with the beloved community God created life to be.

Joy to the world, the Savior reigns!

Let all their songs employ!

[1] Psalm 66:1; 96:1; 98:4; 100:1

[2] Psalm 67:3-5; 96:7; 117:1

[3] Psalm 29:1 and 103:20-21

Advent moment

The story Luke wants to  tell us begins with two pregnancies, both quite impossible. Luke first introduces us to Zechariah and Elizabeth, who, he tells us, were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments of the Lord. But they had no children, and both were getting on in years. Some of you may hear echoes of Abraham and Sara.

One day, the angel Gabriel came to Zechariah and told him that Elizabeth would bear him a son, and that he would name him John. The old man found the angel’s announcement difficult to believe, given the circumstances. Yet soon, Elizabeth, whose hair once was black as the night but now was silver as the moon, became pregnant.

It was in the sixth month of that impossible pregnancy when Gabriel was sent to a town no angel had ever heard of, to talk to a young woman about God’s plans for the future of the world — a future that had a lot to do with her. “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” The angel’s words sounded very matter of fact: The Lord is with you. You have found favor with God. You will conceive and you will bear a son. You will name him Jesus. The Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. I imagine Mary raising her hand at some point as though she could slow the torrent of angelic announcements with a gesture, saying, “Hold on, wait a minute, you lost me when you said I would conceive – how exactly is this supposed to come about? I am a virgin.”

Luke tells the story with Mary asking just one question, “How can this be?” She doesn't get to ask any of the other questions we think she might have had, like, How exactly is this surprise pregnancy supposed to be a favor? How am I supposed to explain this to my parents or to Joseph? And why me? Don’t you know that folks in the village will shun me or perhaps even stone me to death for getting pregnant out of wedlock? Can this wait until I’m married? But in Luke’s story, all she gets to ask is, “How can this be?” And the angel speaks of the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the power of the Most High, and of the child’s holiness — and only indirectly of her, Mary whose body would be at the center of these divine arrangements. Mary is much perplexed, and, in at least one commentator’s imagination, the angel isn’t a picture of calmness either. Frederick Buechner wrote,

She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with the message to give her, and he gave it … As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings, he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.” [1]

Mary’s answer mattered. She would not be coerced to bear this child. She could decline the favor.

Many artists have tried to capture this scene. In the monastery of San Marco in Florence, the tiny cells on the second floor still look very much the same as they did in the 15th century when Fra Angelico painted the walls with the most beautiful biblical frescoes, most famous among them The Annunciation.[2] Gabriel is standing on the left looking at Mary on the right, who is kneeling on a wooden bench. Nothing in the painting clearly indicates what has or hasn’t been said between the two; they look at each other, both holding their arms close to their chests, both with apprehension in their faces.

I like to think of the picture as capturing the moment right after the angel has finished speaking. This is more than a matter-of-fact announcement, “Here’s what’s going to happen.” This angel didn’t just come to deliver a message and return to heaven. This angel is having an advent moment; this angel is waiting, waiting for Mary’s answer.

When Herbert O’Driscoll was a child growing up in Ireland, his parents would often take him and his siblings to their grandparents’ farm. John Brennan was a hired man living in a thatched cottage on their farm, and in the evening after the cows were milked, he would sit on a large flat stone outside the stable door and smoke his pipe. Sometimes little Herb would sit beside him and listen to the old man’s stories.

One night, as they were sitting together outside the stable, John told the boy to look up into the sky. The moon had appeared, still ghostlike because the light of the sun was not fully gone. Here and there, the odd star could be seen.

“Do you know,” said John, puffing on his pipe, “do you know that the stars and the sun and the moon move around all the time?”

Herb said he did, he knew a lot about the universe.

“Well,” said John, “do you know how the angel Gabriel came to Mary the mother of our Lord to tell her she would have a child?”

Herb said he did, he knew lots of Bible stories.

“Well then,” said John, looking skyward as he spoke, “do you know that when the angel asked Mary if she would bear the holy child, all the stars and the sun and the moon stopped moving? Did you know that?”[3]

Did you know that Gabriel and all the angels in heaven stood in breathless suspense? God had chosen Mary, an ordinary girl in an ordinary town, for reasons she didn’t understand, to be the mother of the Son of God — what would her answer be? What I see in Gabriel’s face in that fresco at San Marco is the whole host of heaven holding their breath and waiting: God had spoken – what would Mary say?

And Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

“How can this be?” she had asked, and Gabriel’s response had only given her a lot more to ponder, but she answered like one of the great prophets of old, giving herself to the service of God for the salvation of the world.

When Fra Angelico painted The Annunciation on that wall in one of the cells at San Marco, he used perspective and the layout of the room to make it look as if the scene were happening then and there in that very room, right next to the window. The people who lived and prayed and slept in that cell didn’t just have a religious painting on the wall; they lived and prayed and slept in the space, in the silence that opens between hearing God’s word and responding to it with the courage of faith.

Luke’s Gospel opens with this story not to dazzle us with the miraculous circumstances of Christ’s conception. We’re invited to hear Luke’s witness and to listen for the word of God in the text with the same openness as Mary and her readiness to be part of God’s redemptive work in the world. She had much to ponder, and she questioned, and she could have declined the proposal, but she said yes, and not because she had to, but because she wanted to. And her yes was not the end of her questions or her ponderings, but she trusted God enough to take this huge step, to give birth to the child who would turn the world upside down. She became the first to believe the good news of Jesus.

When I was a little boy, I had a part in the annual Christmas pageant for years. I started out as a sheep, and eventually I got to play one of the shepherds and the inn keeper and Joseph – but I never was cast to play Mary. I appreciate the kindness of the adults who didn’t want to ask a little boy to play a girl. I’m much older now and I have come to believe that Luke invites us all to play Mary’s part: to receive the word of God with faith and to nurture it — within us and among us — like mothers and midwives care for new life that wants to be born.

Wherever and whenever the good news of Jesus Christ is proclaimed, God comes to ordinary people in ordinary towns with this extraordinary message that is both a favor and a call: to carry Christ for the world. You too have found favor with God. You too have been graced with the word of God, which calls forth life out of nothing — and now God and all the angels in heaven, and the sun and the moon and the stars, and a world longing for wholeness — all stand in breathless suspense, waiting for your response.

What will you say? Will you say, “I’m sorry, I already had other plans for my life…” Or will you reply — not really knowing what you’re getting yourself into but trusting the word that the kingdom of God is near — will you say, with courage and humility, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

[1] Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 39

[2] The famous version of the annunciation is in the hallway http://www.wga.hu/html/a/angelico/09/corridor/annunci.html One of the cells is home to another, strikingly simple rendition of the scene http://www.wga.hu/html/a/angelico/09/cells/03_annu.html

[3] The Christian Century, December 13, 2003, 18.

Rooted in joy

“Before Advent is a word, it is a sigh,” wrote Richard Lischer, “and never more deeply felt than in these troubled months.” Advent is a yearning, a longing, a preparing and a making room. It is the expectant opening of our exhausted hearts to the coming of God.

“We are waiting—dreading—“ as Lischer wrote, “what one health expert promised would be ‘our darkest winter,’ as COVID-19 spikes and spreads in regions that thought themselves isolated from the worst of it. We are … waiting for Christmas, of course, but this year with no grandparents, siblings, cousins, or other relatives gathered around the tree, with no safe way to sing … carols in the nursing home (or to be sung to by fresh young voices).”[1] We are waiting with our souls stretched thin, craving a true word amid the lies, a reliable word amid the constant noise of careless speech, a word worthy of becoming a song. And during these days of Advent, like the gentlest rain of grace, the words of Isaiah fall on our parched hearts:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
    because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
    to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
    and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

We hear the ancient words and the oppressed raise their heads, the brokenhearted find the courage to hope, and the captives imagine the doors of their prisons flung wide open. Joy blossoms, because we remember how again and again the Lord anointed messengers to bring good news to those walking down life’s weary road. “They shall build up the ancient ruins,” the prophet declares. “They shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.”

“About whom does the prophet say this?” we ask, hoping that the promise was not just for the exiled families of Jerusalem and Judah returning to the promised land a long time ago, but that this promise, this commissioning is also for us amid the devastations we are facing. Joy blossoms tenderly because we are not alone in facing these devastations: God is the architect and builder of the city of peace, where righteousness is at home. Joy blossoms because Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry, went to his hometown synagogue, and when he stood up to read, the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled it and read,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down to teach. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he said to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”[2]

The words of the prophet are for us, for all of us — and not because we have claimed and appropriated them for ourselves, but because Jesus has made us his own. Because of Jesus we have come to see ourselves and each other no longer as strangers and aliens, but rather as citizens of the city of God.

Our own cities have had a hard year. We have continued to struggle to really face the devastations of many generations caused by the sin of slavery. We have struggled to respond in solidarity to a deadly pandemic. We have learned on the edge of the abyss — and are still learning — how vulnerable our institutions of government are to wreckless destruction. We have watched somewhat helplessly how our trust in each other and in our words and motives has thinned and frayed. And all of us have some ideas how it has come to this, but we no longer seem to know how to convey them to each other.

Pope Francis said, “We have so much to do, and we must do it together. But how can we do that with all the evil we breathe every day?” And then he added, “Thank God, no system can nullify our desire to open up to the good, to compassion and to our capacity to react against evil, all of which stem from deep within our heart.” Thank God, no system can nullify our desire to open up to the good. Thank God, no exile can nullify our desire to open up to the promise of God. Thank God, no injustice can nullify our desire to open up to the Lord who loves justice. With all the evil we breathe every day, what can we do to nurture this righteous desire in us? Pope Francis said,

To Christians, the future does have a name, and its name is Hope. Feeling hopeful does not mean to be optimistically naïve and ignore the tragedy humanity is facing. Hope is the virtue of a heart that doesn’t lock itself into darkness, that doesn’t dwell on the past, does not simply get by in the present, but is able to see a tomorrow. Hope is the door that opens onto the future. Hope is a humble, hidden seed of life that, with time, will develop into a large tree. … [And] a tiny flicker of light that feeds on hope is enough to shatter the shield of darkness.[3]

God made heaven and earth. God brought Israel out of Egypt. God raised Jesus from the dead. God poured out the Spirit on all flesh, thus anointing all flesh to proclaim the good news of God’s faithfulness.

As the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.

Righteousness and praise – against the evil we breathe every day, against the fears that threaten to paralyze us and the idols that hold us in thrall, we entrust ourselves to God and to the promise that oaks of righteousness will spring up and thrive on earth. And so in hope and humility we give ourselves to the work of proclaiming good news to the poor, the work of raising up the former devastations and of seeking to heal our deep divisions in the Spirit of Christ.

“Rejoice always,” Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.” Paul had found something to sing about and even the darkest prison cell couldn’t silence him. He was beaten for the gospel he proclaimed, he was imprisoned, he was shipwrecked three times, in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, cold and naked — but he had found something to sing about.[4] He was happy when things were  going well in the fledgling communities of believers that sprang up in response to his proclamation, but his joy wasn’t determined by circumstances. His joy was a happiness that didn’t depend on what happened. His joy was rooted in the faithfulness of God. And with his words to the Thessalonians he urges us, his listeners and readers, to let the deep joy over God’s unshakable faithfulness fill and transform our whole being.

Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances. In all circumstances. We know that Paul wasn’t coming up with bite-sized servings of self-help advice by the pool of his posh Malibu mansion.

How might one cultivate such gratefulness? John Kralik wrote a book about writing a thank-you note every day for an entire year. He called it 365 Thank Yous. He didn’t resolve to write all of those thank-you notes at a time when he was feeling particularly grateful. In fact, it was at a particularly low time in his life. His small law firm was losing money and losing its lease. He was going through a difficult divorce. He lived in a small, stuffy apartment where he often slept on the floor under an ancient air conditioner. He was middle-aged, overweight, and at the end of his rope. Then, one day, he got lost on a mountain hike and didn’t know how to get home. And by the time he found his way down the mountain he had a plan. He would write a thank-you note each day for a year.

He writes, “My only problem: Did I have anything to be grateful for? The way my life was going, I hardly thought so.” But he got started, by writing notes to the people close to him, his family and friends. Then it got harder. “One day,” he writes, “I just couldn’t think of anybody to thank.” He stopped at his regular Starbucks, where the barista greeted him with a big smile — “John, your usual venti?”

That’s when it clicked. “I thought, this is really kind of a great gift in this day and age of impersonal relationships,” Kralik writes, “that someone had cared enough to learn my name and what I drank in the morning.” So he wrote the barista a thank-you note. And so it went through an entire year.[5]

It was a simple practice, but it was a discipline that opened him to notice the gifts of others. It was a discipline that made him more attentive to all the ways in which his life was woven into a fabric of mutuality. He became aware that life is altogether gift. And he found joy there.

[1] Richard Lischer https://www.christiancentury.org/article/reflection/advent-season-sighs-especially-year

[2] see Luke 4:16-21

[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/pope_francis_why_the_only_future_worth_building_includes_everyone/transcript

[4] 2 Corinthians 11:24-27

[5] Martin Copenhaver https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2015-10/learning-give-thanks

A mighty good question

There are no shepherds keeping watch by night in the Gospel of Mark. There are no angels announcing the child’s birth, no star-gazing visitors bearing gifts from distant lands, no ox and ass, no baby in the manger. Mark hits the ground running and jumps right into the Jordan with John the baptizer.

After opening with something like a headline — “The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” — the story begins with a voice crying out in the wilderness: John preparing the way of Jesus with a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Many have wondered why the headline says, “The Beginning” rather than simply, “The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Some hear echoes of the opening of Genesis, the beginning of creation, and to them it sounds like Mark wants to emphasize that the good news of Jesus Christ is as good and grand as the story of life itself; that this is the beginning of life’s redemption from the powers that deform and disfigure it; that this is the beginning of God’s promised future for this beautiful, broken world. Others have suggested that Mark calls the story ‘the beginning of the good news’ because this story is meant to continue and unfold in the lives of all who hear it, in lives of faith and hope. Mark’s story is just the beginning, because it continues with us and for us and for all, in all the ways that we hear and live and tell the good tidings of God’s faithfulness.

So here we are, at the Jordan with John. At the very river where Israel gathered in the plains of Moab, after forty long years of wilderness wanderings, after their escape from slavery in Egypt — the river where they crossed over into the promised land. The river marks the border between promise and fulfillment, between exodus and arrival. At the Jordan Elijah was taken up into heaven, the great prophet who was expected to return before the day of the Lord to prepare God’s people — and Mark’s quick portrait of John suggests more than a resemblance between the two. Clothed with camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist, John looks like the ancient prophet, and speaking of repentance and the forgiveness of sins, he sounds like him.[1] His diet of locusts and wild honey is untamed — he only eats what God provides and the earth produces on its own. And John’s message and practice are as undomesticated as his clothing and his food. Forgiveness of sins was priestly business, but this truthtelling wild man offers a cleansing ritual far from Jerusalem and the temple, and he announces the coming of another one, more powerful than he, who would baptize people with the Holy Spirit.

This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ — the remembering of the mighty acts of God, the resonance of the words of the prophets, and the call to repent, to reorient our lives in light of the nearness of God’s reign. The wilderness prophet urges us to look at ourselves and be honest, to name what we see and to name what is missing, to lament what is missing, and repent: to turn away from our complicity with the old order of things and reorient ourselves toward the kingdom of God, when all creation flourishes in the peace of God. John calls us to prepare the way of the Lord by becoming an Advent community, a community of the repentant and expectant who eagerly await the fulfilment of God’s promises. The old order is marred by sin, by idolatry, by injustice and violence. But in Jesus, in faithfulness and mercy, the God of Israel has embraced all people with the promise of salvation.

We meet John at the Jordan, in the borderlands between what is and what shall be, between the promise and the coming true. In the wilderness of these days, when the arrogant trample without shame on decency and dignity, we hear a voice calling us to live in bold hope, to let ourselves be immersed in the untamed flow of God’s grace, and to stand up and raise our heads, because our redemption is drawing near.[2]

Heidi Neumark wrote almost twenty years ago, “For as long as I can remember, Advent has been my favorite time. Before going to bed, I read again the text for tomorrow: Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places plain (Isa. 40:4).”

And she asks, “When will this be?”

The prophet’s words were recorded around 2,500 years ago and I haven’t noticed much movement in the right direction. The gap between the rich and the poor—Longwood Avenue in the South Bronx and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan—remains as wide as ever. We turn people away from the food pantry because we’ve run out of canned stew, canned beans, canned tuna, cereal and powdered milk. Yet this is the busy season at Dean and Deluca down in Soho where my husband, Gregorio, works on his feet 12 hours a day trying to meet the insatiable demand for imported foie gras, truffles and caviar. Sometimes he wraps up single sales totaling over $1,000.[3]

I don’t know what’s happened to Dean and Deluca since then, but there are more people waiting in line at food banks today, and more people placing fancy food orders online totaling over $1,000 and having them delivered by workers who themselves may well wait in line at the food bank after work to get groceries for their families.

A good number of mountains and hills have indeed been exalted, and some valleys have indeed been made lower. The uneven ground has become even more uneven, and the voices of the prophets speak the word of God with the same urgency today as in the past.

My colleague Bill Goettler shared a fine story:

Danny appeared on our porch on a cold December afternoon a couple of years ago, hat in hand. He’d been sleeping here and there since getting back into town, he said, mostly on the porch of the Red Cross headquarters across from the church. The people there didn’t seem to mind, and he always cleared out before anyone arrived for work in the morning. He didn’t want anyone to be frightened.

He needed some food, maybe some money for the bus. We’d just hung the Moravian star on our front porch and placed Advent candles in our windows. It was a pretty tough moment to refuse someone aid, so I dug into my wallet and found a few dollars. As he was leaving, Danny turned and looked me in the eye. “Is this the way it’s supposed to be?” he asked. He was off before I could reply or even register what he’d said.

He came back with one need or another throughout the winter and over the years that followed. Sometimes I’d give him some money or make a call to find him a place to live, but nothing seemed to work out for very long. I’d see him working downtown, selling newspapers in front of Bruegger’s Bagels or washing windows on Chapel Street. “Good morning, Reverend,” he’d call out, and just about every time he’d ask, “Reverend, is this the way it’s supposed to be?”[4]

That’s a mighty good question.

We meet John at the Jordan, in the borderlands between what is and what shall be, between the promise and the coming true. We hear the words of Isaiah, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God,” and we know it has nothing to do with, “Make my people a little more comfortable in their exile.” What the prophet proclaims is the faithfulness of God: there’s no mountain high enough to keep God’s people in exile, no valley deep enough to keep them away from the promised land, or to keep God from coming to us to take us there.

We’re facing enormous mountains, mountains of injustice, mountains of suspicion and distrust, mountains of guilt and shame. And between them run valleys of despair, valleys of resignation, valleys of loss and grief where the shadows are deep — but God is coming.

“Comfort, comfort, my people,” God declares in the heavenly assembly, “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her penalty is paid.” Then the prophet reports what appears to be a debate among members of the heavenly court.

“The people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field.” It sounds like an objection or a lament. The people are short-lived, unreliable, hardly worth the effort, here today, gone tomorrow, they wither, they fade, they don’t have what it takes to reflect the divine glory.

But another voice replies, “Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.” The faithfulness of God’s people and their leaders may wither and fade, but God’s faithfulness to God’s people is firm. God’s commitment to creation is unshakable. That, and that alone, is our hope. That is why we look at ourselves and at the world, and we don’t say, “That’s just the way it is.” We say, “That may well be the way it is, but it’s not how it’s supposed to be; and it’s not how it shall be.”

And because God moves mountains to get through to us, we too take our shovels and go to work on God’s highway project, lowering the hills of distrust and suspicion with kindness, and filling the vales of fragmentation with acts of solidarity and friendship. We follow the way Jesus came to prepare for us; we live and tell the good news of God’s faithfulness until all things shine with the glory of God.

[1] See 2 Kings 1:8

[2] Luke 21:28

[3] Heidi Neumark https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2001-12/advent

[4] Bill Goettler https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-11/sunday-december-4-2011

Yet you

“I once caused consternation in a drugstore in Louisville,” Thomas Merton wrote a long time ago.

I was going to the hospital and I wanted to get some toothpaste, so I went in and said, “I’d like some toothpaste.” The clerk says, “What kind” and I said, “I don’t care.” He almost dropped dead. I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or Crest or something with five colors. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient. The worst thing you can do now is not care about these things.[1]

Kathleen Norris called him a prophet for saying “I don’t care” in one of the temples for the brand-conscious consumer.[2] These days, of course, it’s a lot harder not to care about these things since they tend to invade your every waking moment. TV ads, pop-up ads, radio ads, billboards, busses, and thumbstoppers. Haven’t heard about thumbstoppers yet? It’s what they call social media ads like tik-tok’s dogs in panda suits – you glance, you do a double take, and before you know it, your thumb has stopped scrolling.

And in that movie you streamed the other night? A whole team of people worked hard to make sure you notice without noticing that the young, handsome hero drives a Dodge, and the villain, an import.

Did you go bargain hunting on Friday? You know that as a brand conscious consumer you are expected to spend much of your Thanksgiving week tracking special offers and what they used to call door busters before 2020 happened — track those offers so you’re ready to pounce when price and delivery estimates meet in the sweet spot.

Or you could work on becoming a junior prophet, take a sip of coffee, and declare, “I don’t care.”

Retail marketing and faith are both about the cultivation of desire and the formation of habits. But where marketing is all about annual sales, brand loyalty, and the promise of purchased fulfillment, faith is about our relationship with God and aligning our lives with God’s purposes. Many voices invite us to enter the holiday season of santas, angels, elves and lights, all mixed with warm childhood memories and bathed in a nostalgic glow. In the church, today is the first day of a new year, and the voices we hear during Advent urge us to watch and wait for the God who comes to us in the child in the manger, in visiting strangers, and like a thief in the night. The latter, of course, doesn’t lend itself to sentimentality, which is why the Black Friday marketers won’t touch it.

The contrast may never be clearer than today: Advent begins with the prayers and tears of an old man.

Look down from heaven and see, from your holy and glorious habitation. Where are your zeal and your might? The yearning of your heart and your compassion? They are withheld from me.[3]

The voice of Isaiah has been with the people of Jerusalem and Judah for many years. His was a voice of warning, a voice of truth telling and judgment, a voice of challenge and comfort. Isaiah spoke when Jerusalem was proud and when the city fell to the Babylonian army. Isaiah spoke in exile, reflecting on the devastations of loss, and declaring that they were God’s righteous judgment on a people who had made a mockery of justice and faithfulness in their communities. Eventually Isaiah began to speak of an end to their exile. They would return to Jerusalem and the hills of Judah. The Lord would lead them on a highway through the wilderness, in an exodus even more glorious than their liberation from Egypt, and they would return to the land of their ancestors and the city of David.

And when king Cyrus of Persia toppled the Babylonian regime, they began to return. But amid the burnt ruins of the city and the temple, their shouts of joy and songs of freedom soon died down. Journeying home under banners of hope was inspiring and catching — doing the work of hope in rebuilding was hard, much harder than any of them had imagined. The old prophet, in moving poetry, gives voice to the people’s longing:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence … to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

These are the first words of scripture we hear on the first day of Advent. “Advent begins not on a note of joy,” says Walter Brueggemann, “but of despair.” We are urged to recognize ourselves in that situation of utter need.

Humankind has reached the end of its rope. All our schemes for self-improvement, for extracting ourselves from the traps we have set for ourselves, have come to nothing. We have now realized at the deepest level of our being that we cannot save ourselves, and that, apart from the intervention of God, we are totally and irretrievably lost.[4]

Advent begins with a profound sense of stuckness and absence. It feels like you’re kneeling under a blanket of silence, pleading, and all you can sense is your own yearning for something better. It feels like letting go entirely of anything like respectful restraint before God and crying out, “Rip open the heavens and come! Come like wildfire! Do something nobody can ignore!”

We don’t pray for long when the fire we want isn’t coming, but the prophet keeps praying.

You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways, but there is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you.

Isaiah offers words of confession and reproach, suggesting that we think honestly about our part of the relationship, but he also sees responsibility on God’s part:

You have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

Not that we don’t deserve it, but don’t leave us like this. The prophet keeps praying, wrestling really, refusing to let go of the relationship that has shaped his entire life. He’s come to the point where God’s face is hidden and all we can see is our iniquity — true enough, but not the whole truth. At the point where the chasm between God and God’s people appears too wide and too deep to be crossed, the prophet on behalf of the people makes a bold and confident turn:

Yet you, Lord, the prophet says, and I imagine he whispers here when before he may well have thundered — yet you, Lord, are our father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. You made us. You own us. All of us. You are responsible for us. We belong to you. We are your responsibility, your burden, your problem, your treasured possession. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people. We have long been like those whom you do not rule, like those not called by your name.[5] We are stumbling in the darkness, not walking in your light. Yet you, Lord, are our father. Everything hangs on that briefest and boldest of prayers. When we’ve taken an honest look at ourselves and what we’ve made of the world, when all is said and done, when we’re at the end of our rope, when we’re exhausted by recognition and confession and despair — yet you. You made us. You own us. All of us. Will you hide your face forever or turn to us with mercy? Will you keep silent or speak the word of peace? Will you remember that you have made us your own?

Most of us have wished on occasion that God would tear the veil between heaven and earth and do something big, something to make the mountains quake and the nations tremble, something that would undeniably manifest the divine presence among us, so that all of us, from the first to the last, would confess that the Lord is God and no other. It may well be that, because we live in a world of constant noise, we expect a voice loud enough to drown out all the others. And because we live in a world of constant distractions, that we expect a vision bright enough to outshine all the others. And because we’re constantly bombarded by advertising, that we expect thumb-stopping kingdom marketing.

But God doesn’t shout or flashbang people into belief or manipulate them into trust. God calls us and waits for us. God comes to us, and God is continually at work among us until creation is complete. Isaiah’s psalm moves from the image of God as the divine warrior who comes bursting out of the heavens in the most powerful of military interventions, to God envisioned as an artisan: a potter who molds and fashions us from dust of the earth, continually forming us as a people, until all that we are and all that we do shows forth our Maker’s purpose. This is where our hope is rooted, in God’s loving and faithful attention. This is where we become who we are as God’s own: people of loving and faithful attention.

[1] Thomas Merton, The Springs of Contemplation: A Retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, ed. by Jane Marie Richardson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 155.

[2] Kathleen Norris, “Apocalypse Now,” The Christian Century, November, 15, 2005, 19.

[3] Isaiah 63:15

[4] Walter Brueggemann in Texts for Preaching, Walter Brueggemann e.a., eds., Year B, 1993, 1.

[5] Isaiah 63:19

Mercy song

Mary Gauthier came to Nashville from Baton Rouge, by way of Boston. Her song, Mercy Now, was released in 2005. I loved it when it first came out, and I’ve loved it ever since.

My brother could use a little mercy now. He’s a stranger to freedom, he’s shackled to his fear and his doubt. The pain that he lives in, it’s almost more than living will allow — I love my bother, he could use some mercy now.

Her song just resonates, her words, her voice, as she sings about her father, her brother, her church and her country, and every living thing. People in power, they’ll do anything to keep their crown, she sings, a line that’s perhaps never rung more true than in these past couple of weeks. We love our little crowns.

I love life and life itself could use some mercy now, … and every single one of us could use some mercy now.

Let life simmer, let it boil down to its essence, and name what you taste — Mary sings, mercy, now. Your story and all the ways it’s connected to all the other stories on this little planet — let it sit like a jar of muddy water, let it sit for a few good, deep breaths, and let the mud settle, and name the clarity that emerges before your eyes — Mary sings, mercy, now.

The universe is an expanding vastness of 13.8 billion years. If the history of the universe, all 13.8 billion years of it, were compressed into one calendar year, just for the sake of comparison, our sun was formed at the end of August, and just about all of known human history happened in the last few seconds before midnight on December 31. My head starts spinning whenever I try to think about it — creation is so immense, unfathomable, awesome, and we are so small. What was the line in Psalm 90? The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong.

There’s a place in Washington, D.C. that’s built to human scale. Perched on a hill above the town, it is like something out of a dream, a place of grandeur and great beauty. The National Cathedral is only stone and light, yet entering the cathedral is like stepping into the mystery of life itself. Above the front entrance, carved in bright lime stone, is a dramatic depiction of the creation of humankind, human bodies emerging from whirling, swirling textures fluid as water. Stepping across the threshold you find yourself immersed in light filtering through magnificent stained glass windows, in a place filled only with hushed whispers. The tall pillars envelop sacred silence, interrupted only by the proclamation of God’s word and the prayers of God’s people. As you make your way to the altar on the opposite end of the sanctuary, you journey through human history, past the monuments of faith and of the saints, memorials to achievements in science and art, and testimonials to what we honor as good and true and beautiful.

At the end of your walk down the nave, your passage from humanity’s beginnings to the end of time, you arrive before the finely carved high altar: Here Jesus sits on the throne of his glory, surrounded by the whole company of heaven, balancing the earth like a ball in the palm of his left hand, his right hand raised in blessing. Christ crucified, risen from the dead, reigns the universe and he speaks the final word on all things come into being from the foundation of the world.

All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.

Our journey through the grand cathedral of time does come to an end, and we are invited to picture ourselves standing before the throne of glory, naked and empty-handed, and Jesus speaks.

Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.

In the end, the last word about our life is not spoken by ourselves, or by those who remember us, or by those who may wish to delete our memory — the final word is spoken by Jesus, the crucified Son of God, risen in glory.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established — what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?[1]

In the vastness of spacetime and among billions of human beings, a single lifetime seems small, but in the eyes of the one seated on the throne, the one who has been crowned Lord of life, in the eyes of the judge, every life is seen, every story is known, every name is spoken. And the judge is none other than Jesus of Nazareth whom human beings judged, sentenced, and executed. The judge is the Son of God who walks barefoot with the poor and declares them blessed, who sleeps among those who have no place to lay their head, and who knows betrayal and torture and death row without parole.

The judge himself is the Least of These: rejected and ridiculed, spat upon, sneered at and yelled at, beaten, abandoned, killed and forgotten. The judge is the Least of These, raised by the power of God. And this judge shows little interest in the sincerity of our confession, or the orthodoxy of our doctrine, or our knowledge, our wisdom, or our list of accomplishments. What he’s looking for is mercy. We would not know, had he not told us, that when we look into the eyes of another human being who needs us to be and act as their neighbor, we are looking into the eyes of the Lord of life.

Hungry and thirsty, ailing, lonely, unsheltered, unwelcome, weighed down, excluded, abandoned — every one of these words speaks of a situation of need, and each presents the need as a question awaiting an answer. And the answer is mercy. The need for mercy calls forth deeds of mercy, and the Lord of life is present in both the need and in the kindness that meets it. That is all that matters in the end, says Jesus: Ordinary, everyday people and all the ways in which we give shape to mercy in ordinary, everyday actions; it’s lovely in its simplicity.

There are, of course, those of us who will ask, “How much mercy is enough? And isn’t there a limit? How much mercy is too much? And what about those whose need for mercy outweighs our capacity to offer it?” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote,

On the one hand it is true that it makes a difference whether [humans] are good or evil, loving or selfish, honest or dishonest. It makes a real difference, that is, an ultimate difference in the sight of God. On the other hand it makes no difference. No life can justify itself ultimately in the sight of God. The evil and the good, and even the more and the less good are equally in need of the mercy of God. … Love is both the fulfilment and the negation of law. Forgiveness is the highest justice and the end of justice.[2]

We are all equally in need of the mercy of God. Every single one of us could use some mercy now. The more fully we know and remember this, the more fully we will live and give mercy. The one who comes to judge us is no stranger, but the one who has come to redeem us, to free us from sin and fear and every shackle that keeps us from living in freedom as the children of God that we are. The one who comes looking for mercy among us is the one who was and is and forever will be the very mercy of God. Worry and fear will not free us. Worry and fear will not set us free for a life of loving service to others, but faith will — trust in God whose love drew us into life and continues to draw us toward life’s fulfillment.

Every human life is a marvelous journey in time and a unique verse in the song of creation. But every human life participates in the one life of God, and therefore we are not solitary, disconnected travelers, here today and gone tomorrow. We are made for communion, in time and beyond the vast expanse of time. We are made for the one life given shape by God’s loving attention to us and our needs and our loving response to the needs of others. We are made in the image of God whose mercy is from everlasting to everlasting.

[1] Psalm 8:3-4

[2] Beyond Tragedy, 1937; quote from http://www.lectionarycentral.com/septuag/Neibuhr.html

To live gladly

In the northern hemisphere, as the days grow shorter, the lectionary readings also grow a little darker. We’re invited to reflect on endings – the end of the world, our own mortality, the final judgment. I don’t know how preachers in South Africa, Argentina, or New Zealand are dealing with this – talk about endings when your world is bathed in spring, in colors and light and beginnings. November is just right. Light is dimming. Colors are fading. Leaves are falling. Everybody’s feeling a little melancholy anyway.

The psalm for this Sunday, Psalm 90, opens with the grand vision of God who has been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. The words breathe eternity and awe. And then the psalmist quickly turns to the impermanence and brevity of human life, speaking of years passing like a dream, and lives briefly flourishing before withering like grass. There’s no room here for celebrating our being fearfully and wonderfully made, no room for marveling at the wondrous beauty of creation, no room for rejoicing in life’s gifts. The psalmist is looking at life in a crisis moment when apparently none of that matters, a moment when loss is threatening to overwhelm hope.

The book of Psalms is divided into five smaller books, and the individual compositions aren’t randomly thrown together, but carefully arranged. In Psalms 73-89, Book III of the collection, prayers lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem are given voice, and Psalm 89 concludes that section with a powerful plea in the face of profound loss, God’s rejection of the covenant with David and of Jerusalem as the center of that covenant: How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? Lord, where is your steadfast love of old? Remember, O Lord, how your servant is taunted![1]

Psalm 90 opens a new section, and it moves from lament to confession, inviting those who say it, to follow its movement: We are consumed by your anger. We are overwhelmed by your wrath. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance.

There’s a recognition, or at least an invitation to recognize, that the overwhelming experience of losing the city, the temple, and the throne of David was not caused by an arbitrary withdrawal of divine favor, but was an act of judgment, a justified act of judgment.

“Who considers the power of your anger?” the Psalmist asks. Who considers the power of your anger over our loveless, self-serving ways, our convenient idolatries, our endless justifications of injustice, our apathy, our numbness, our daily rebellion against the demands of your love? “Your wrath is as great as the fear due to you” we hear the Psalmist say, and like generations before us we struggle to make these words our own, to acknowledge, in the presence of God, “Your wrath is not some random explosion of divine fury triggered by who knows what. Your wrath fully corresponds to our lack of reverence for you and for each other! It is not you who, out of the blue, broke your covenant; we did it, with our countless, daily failures to love you with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our might.”

“The days of our life are seventy years,” the Psalmist muses in this moment of loss and recognition, “or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” “Only toil and trouble” may sound a little over the top for some of us, but we know that these words continue to ring true for many who never get a taste of life’s fullness and can only imagine it in their dreams. And so we hear these words with them and we say them prayerfully in solidarity with them, affirming that life is not full for any of us until all people and all living things share in its fullness.

But we also say these words remembering that the wrath of God is neither the only nor the final response to our failure to live faithfully in communion with God and with each other. As Paul assures us in today’s passage from 1 Thessalonians, “God has destined us not for wrath but for attaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.”[2] God has destined us for fullness of life through Jesus Christ.

Verses 13 and 14 of Psalm 90 are not included in today’s reading, but they should be. “Have compassion on your servants!” we are encouraged to pray, trusting that God’s compassion is greater than God’s wrath. “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days!” We believe and affirm that in the life of Jesus — his whole life, including his death and resurrection — God has answered our prayers and revealed to us the depth of God’s compassion and the boundless range of God’s mercy. We believe and affirm that on the cross, in the radical vulnerability of love, our sin is judged and sentenced, and we are set free to live fully in this love, now and forever. “The greatest honor we can give Almighty God,” wrote the English mystic, Julian of Norwich (1343-1416), “is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”

When we hear the words, “Teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart,” we may think of making the most of each day, of living each days to the fullest. When Warren Zevon, who was dying of cancer, was asked by David Letterman what his illness had taught him about living, he said, “How much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”[3] So true. Every sandwich. Every sip of coffee. Every glorious small thing we habitually take for granted. To taste and see the fullness of life in each moment.

But the wise heart is not merely mindful. The wise heart is joyful and hopeful. In Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry recommends,

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.[4]

It’s November. Light is dimming. Colors are fading. Leaves are falling. Everybody’s feeling a little melancholy. We’re open to thoughts about life’s brief span. We’re open to consider our mortality and the impermanence of all things, and the poet-farmer tells us to “expect the end of the world.” What do you expect the words after that to be? “Stay awake“? “Get ready”? “Accept the inevitable”?

He says, “Laugh … Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” I don’t know what he means, and I have wondered if that’s the farmer’s madness talking. But perhaps it’s not mad laughter at all. Perhaps it’s the laughter of one who is living gladly because of the knowledge of God’s love. Perhaps it’s the laughter of one who has heard the apostle Paul say that “when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.”[5] Perhaps he says, “Laugh” because he knows that the One who “formed the earth and the world” will not let creation fall into oblivion but bring an end to its incompleteness. Perhaps he says, “Laugh” because “when the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.”[6]

But who can laugh when they’re worried? Ann Lamott, back in 2003, wrote,

Some mornings I wake up and I instantly feel discouraged by the world and my government and by my own worried mind. It’s like my brain has already been up for awhile, sitting on the bed waiting for me to wake up. It’s already had coffee, and has some serious concerns about how far behind we are already. So I always pray, first thing upon awakening, very simple prayers like the one [my son] Sam prayed years ago when his head got caught in the slats of a chair: “I need help with me,” he whispered.[7]

We need help with us because we’re experts at getting ourselves caught in all kinds of situations that looked so promising before we got into them. We need the courage to let the One who has been our dwelling place in all generations be our dwelling place. The courage to be at home in the steadfast love of God.

[1] Psalm 89:46, 49, 50

[2] 1 Thessalonians 5:9

[3] Ann Lamott https://www.salon.com/2003/02/14/sandwich/

[4] https://cals.arizona.edu/~steidl/Liberation.html

[5] 1 Corinthians 13:10

[6] Psalm 126:1-2

[7] Ann Lamott https://www.salon.com/2003/02/14/sandwich/