First Thursday in Advent

Amos 4:6-13;; 2 Peter 3:11-18; Matthew 21:33-46

I don’t want to believe Jesus told this parable.  Sorry, but there it is.  It’s a great parable, but I believe it was crafted by the early writers to make a point that has been misused too often.   Matthew says the parable was told against “the chief priests and the Pharisees,” but Christians have used it to justify their hatred of Jews.  The Jews have been made into the “bad tenants” who lose their vineyard to the “good tenants” (that’s us Christians, if you’re wondering).  It’s hard to undo 2000 years of supercessionism.  This Advent is a good time to try.

This was a story to distinguish the new Christian path from other groups within Judaism, to say “we are the real heirs.”  It might have been useful then, but now, after millennia of imperial, triumphal Christianity, the only way to redeem this parable is to ask: Is this about me?

So often the Advent readings, the readings about judgment, sound as though the pain of judgment will land on those “others” who have failed to follow Jesus (see yesterday’s reading from Second Peter, for example).  But what if I’m the one who has been taking the vineyard for granted?  Have I forgotten that I’m just a steward on God’s land?  Well, yes.

Our modern cultures are all about “mine”: my achievements, my money, my people.  But Jesus claimed only one thing as his: his relationship to God, a relationship he wanted to share with us.  All I have comes from God, and is meant to serve God.  And I forget, and I “kill” those who come to remind me.  I do that by drowning them out, ignoring them, ridiculing them, patronizing them, diagnosing them.  And in killing them, I commit suicide.  I lose my chance for the abundant life Jesus wants for me.

Take some time today to ponder where God’s messengers have been trying to collect from you, and how you might respond.  This parable is not about those other sinners.  It’s about us.  

Oh God, make speed to save us.

First Wednesday in Advent

Amos 3:12-4:5; 2 Peter 3:1-10; Matthew 21:23-32

“. . . in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming?  For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!”  (2 Pet. 3:3-4).  How much more in our day?  It’s not a question just for scoffers.  It’s hard to see the world as it is, as it has been, and imagine a future that is different.  We might imagine it without really believing it is possible.  We might especially give up on the hope that God will do this, even as we become more and more knowledgeable about how to fight disease, poverty, and injustice.  We have the tools we need, even if we don’t use them or misuse them; who needs God?  We don’t expect the heavens to “pass away with a loud noise” unless we blow up the earth.  So what is our hope?  Where is our hope?

Not in ourselves.  For ever since our ancestors died, we have been a race of distorted perceptions and appetites, with mental capacities and technologies that outstrip our spiritual maturity.  We are children playing, not with fire, but with nuclear weapons.

Our hope must lie in God, in the Spirit that teaches and comforts and strengthens us to do God’s will.  Our hope cannot, need not lie in a Daddy God who will take care of everything, who will avenge us or punish us; our hope lies in a God who knows what it’s like to be human and invites us to become divine, to step up as partners in the healing of the world. 

The shift toward hoping rather than self-reliance is the beginning.  Seeing our role in the disasters of the world, seeing our inability to end them by our own volition, leads us to repent and turn to the Source of life.  Like the “tax collectors and prostitutes” who turned, we can still find and participate in God’s realm.  But do it now!  Don’t wait.  We’ve all had enough pain.

Where is your hope today?

First Tuesday in Advent

Amos 3:1-11; 2 Peter 1:12-21; Matthew 21:12-22

So Jesus enters Jerusalem, and a party turns into a riot.  Jesus goes to the temple and overturns everything - not only tables, but hierarchies and expectations.  He heals people, he calls his people to return to prayer, but the religious authorities are outraged: such disorder cannot be of God.  Such costly chaos, such unauthorized teaching and healing, cannot be of God.  Because we know how God works - right?  God follows the rubrics in the Prayer Book and the resolutions of convention.  Where would we be if everyone just followed Jesus, prayed from their heart, and worshipped together?  Where would we be if we just turned to one another and shared?  Where would we be if we listened to the prophets who warn us to turn to God?  It would be a mess, for sure.  A holy mess.

But if we do continue to do business as usual, then an unholy mess awaits.  When we confuse our buildings and budgets with the Gospel, or shrink from preaching the Gospel because of the impact on giving, or tailor our message to not offend, at some point we find ourselves captured as surely as the temple authorities in Jesus’ day.  The glorious advent of Jesus comes to look like a problem rather than the sum of all our desires and dreams.  

Today’s Gospel gives us our alternatives.  While the establishment folks are complaining, the blind and the lame and the children are rejoicing - over the same events! One sees usurpation and disorder; the other sees salvation.

Which do you choose to be today?  What holy mess is awaiting you?

First Monday in Advent

Amos 2:6-16; 2 Peter 1:1-11; Matthew 21:1-11

Advent means “coming to.”  How fitting, then, that we begin by reading of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, a reading usually read on Palm Sunday.  If this is fitting, though, it’s not what we expect in Advent.  But isn’t that how it should be?  

Advent is not a time to expect what we already know.  As we count the days and hum the familiar tunes, we already know what’s coming - or so we think.  Parties.  Shopping.  Maybe Lessons and Carols.  A pageant.  A tree.  We know how it goes.

Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “We persist in saying that we keep vigil in expectation of the Master.  But in reality we should have to admit, if we were sincere, that we no longer expect anything.”  And in this, he says, we lose what is “perhaps the supreme Christian function and the most distinctive characteristic of our religion” - expectation for what we cannot know.

To expect to be surprised - to expect God to do more than we can ask or imagine: this is our wild hope.  

The crowds who welcomed Jesus included many who knew what they expected in a Messiah.  They could only shrug at this clown on a donkey.  Later, they joined the crowd in turning on Jesus.  They knew what was coming: the Empire would win.  But they were wrong.  Long after Rome crumbled, in an age when we study Rome as an artifact, people’s lives continue to be transformed by encountering this surprising Human One.  The kingdom of God continues to break into our lives, if we will but look.

What do you expect this season?  What seems likely, given your circumstances and hopes?

Let it go.

Expect miracles.  Expect to be surprised, and to be a surprise.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

First Sunday in Advent

Amos 1:1-5,13-28; 1 Thess. 5:1-11; Luke 21:5-19

And we’re off!  Advent seems like a gentle season, a time of quiet anticipation, but in fact it’s a time of preparation for Christ’s return: a time to pull up our socks and light our lamps and look around for signs.  Our readings throughout will call us to reflect and return to God.

We begin with Amos’ foreboding message: God roars from Zion, speaking punishment for those who have oppressed the poor and helpless (including that “same girl” that “father and son go in to”), and profaned God’s house.  Luke’s Jesus predicts war and famine and earthquake and persecution.  Paul writes of sudden destruction.  The Day of the Lord is not a Hallmark event.  It is a time of accounting and revealing.

If Advent is not a cozy time, neither is it something to fear.  Paul tells us to use the time to encourage one another and build up each other.  If we live well, if we “belong to the day,” we need not fear.  

I spend a lot of time outside in the dark.  The dark is a time for seeing things that we miss during the day, like the moon and the stars.  But even in the dark I aim to “belong to the day.”  Through daily practices of prayer, reflection, service, exercise, and stewardship, I cultivate the light I need to see Jesus coming.  I don't need weapons; I need only protect myself with “faith and love, and . . .  the hope of salvation.”  That’s all!  Just open my heart, stand firm, change my whole life!  

As I begin this Advent journey, I pray that my light is sufficient to illumine my path.  I pray to keep awake, to look for signs of God’s grace, to testify to what I see.  I pray to prepare.  And I pray for all of you.  May God give us grace to encourage one another, and to be encouraged.  Blessed Advent to you!

Sister Shane’s Advent Blog Starts Tomorrow!

Join me for reflections on the daily readings following the Episcopal lectionary.  Jesus will be telling parables about the kingdom of God and the end times, on his way to death and resurrection.   What’s that got to do with a baby in a manger?  Stay tuned!

Sermon at Holy Cross Monastery, October 25 2015

Today’s readings seem so reassuring.  They offer us the promise that we long for.  God rewards Job for his righteousness.  Jesus heals Bartimaeus, who then follows him on the way.  What good news!  God is faithful and powerful.  Happy days are here again!

Our passage from Job comes at the very end of the book.  Commentators agree that the beginning and the end of the book were written separately from the long contest that occupies most of the book.  In the beginning, God bets Satan that Job will be faithful no matter what.  He lets Satan take everything from Job: his children die, his livestock dies, he contracts painful diseases.  He is bereft.

Job’s friends come by to “comfort” him, to be “helpful” by telling him what to do.  They insist that he must have sinned, and that if he confesses he will be restored.  Job stands in the truth that he has done nothing to deserve what has happened.  He will not curse God, but he will also not pretend a repentance he does not feel.  God eventually overwhelms him, reminding him who is God and who is dust, but the issue of justice is not resolved.  God never answers Job’s challenge.

Clearly, someone could not stand this dangling ending.  So we get the final chapter, where Job’s fortunes are restored.  Ironically, the author apparently agrees with Job’s friends about what God is like.  He wants us to forget the mysterious, awful, even capricious nature of God in favor of a Disney God.  

That Disney God is always around to tempt us.  When we focus on Jesus’ healing and teaching and forget the cross, we’re in Disneyland.  When we celebrate the messiah and reject the despised and rejected one, we’re in Disneyland.

But I’m not in Disneyland.  I’m in a haunted house, surrounded by ghosts.  Job’s sons and daughters crowd in around me.  With them are all the victims of trauma, all those who can’t forget or be forgotten.  What sort of restoration, what sort of healing, follows from trauma like Job’s?

On the way to raising four children, my mother had five miscarriages.  We carry a genetic defect that causes this.  My sister has two living children, but she has never forgotten Benjamin, who she lost at five months.  Her daughter has not had children yet, but she has lost one.  And I, when I was young, miscarried the only child I was to carry.  For years after that I would imagine my daughter.  I would count the years and think, “she would be in high school now.”  Then college, then law school.  (I don’t know why law school, it just showed up.)  Finally I stopped counting.  I eventually had a liturgy to put her to rest, the child I never knew.

Do you think Job was restored as good as new?

Do you think his wife recovered, having ten more children?

Do you think that Holocaust survivors got over it, that veterans get over it if they come back and find good jobs?

Are you over it?

29 months after Hurricane Katrina, Deacon Julius Lee stood in his yard in New Orleans and said  “The storm is gone, but the “after the storm” is always here.”  Already residents were feeling pressured to move on, to get over it, to show the world that things were normal.  But trauma does not just move on.  Trauma lives on.

In her book, Spirit and Trauma, Shelly Rambo listens to trauma in Scripture and in theology.  Following the growing field of trauma studies, she looks at the ways that trauma lingers and asks how that might shape our understanding of Christian life.  She suggests, I think rightly, that our resurrection story can too often become like Job’s happy ending, suppressing the memory of trauma that the disciples would have experienced.  Resurrection can’t just meaning getting over the cross.  The cross haunts the Christian imagination, as it must have haunted the disciples even after seeing the risen Christ.  And Bartimaeus’ healing would not mean that his years of suffering were erased.  We do not simply get over our histories.  Bartimaeus has built a whole world around the loss of his sight.  He has spent years shunned or ignored; in fact he is told by the crowd to be quiet even when Jesus appears.  He has strength of will and desire, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t scarred.

So what is his life like on the road, in the wake of his healing?  I imagine he might be a bit suspicious of those who suddenly warm up to him.  Like the friends who return to Job, these new friends might have some work to do to prove their friendship.  And in the midst of their shared excitement and joy on the road, Bartimaeus will have fears and anxieties that the others will not share.  He has knowledge of the world in a way that those who have always seen do not.  Like Jesus, he has scars to mark his trauma.  They just aren’t always visible.

So the happy ending may not be the faithful ending.  It’s not faithful to the reality of human life, or of the ways we encounter God.

Where is God when children are gunned down at school, or die of drug overdoses?  

Where is God when some have no food or shelter, and others walk by them on their way to their BMWs?  

Where is the resurrection in our inner cities?  

Rather than a story of triumph, perhaps the story we need is a story of remaining, of enduring and sustaining.

We are in the hands of a God who is beyond our understanding.  

Job’s story reminds us that creeds and doctrines are not the heart of our faith.  At the heart of our faith is an experience, an encounter with God in Christ.  This encounter can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying.  

And, like any true encounter, it is transforming.  The real presence of God exceeds our Disney imagination, even the imagination of our worst fears.  

God is beyond comprehension, but not beyond relationship.

Job’s strength lies in his authenticity.  He does not pretend or try to “be good.”  He does not mouth pieties in order to placate God.  What, after all, can happen to him now?  Job is out on the vast sea of God, beyond nice phrases, and he has nothing but his fidelity.  

But out there, with nothing in the way, he can find God’s presence.  He remains, he endures, and he is transformed.

We owe it to ourselves, to one another, to our children to speak the truth about God.  God stands with us in suffering and injustice, but not as one who would magically erase the effects of sin.  God endures with us, and promises to abide with us if we abide with Her.  Better than a fairy tale, this opens us to real healing, real insight, real discipleship.  

May we never settle for easy answers, but demand mercy and healing.  

And may God grant us more than we can ask or imagine.