Listening to the Women--December 20, 2024

Listening to the Women--December 20, 2024

"In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and exclaimed with a loud cry, 'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord'." (Luke 1:39-45)

The women in this story know what they are talking about. The men are struck silent.

The untrained and unschooled turn out to understand the ways of the Divine in these scenes. It is the Respectable Religious Professionals who are dumbfounded.

The people in positions of power, prestige, and privilege are skipped right over as God breaks into history. The anybodies (who are more often than not treated as nobodies by the world) are the ones whom God seeks out and works through.  In fact, given the identity of the child forming in Mary's womb, I suppose you could say that they are the ones God comes to dwell inside of.

This is one of those patterns in the Christmas story that is there just shouting from the pages of the Gospels, and yet it is so easy to miss staring us in the face.  As Luke tells it to us, the story of Jesus' birth has the women speak and the men quiet--Zechariah is struck mute during Elizabeth's pregnancy, and Joseph doesn't get a speaking line at all.  Meanwhile, Mary and Elizabeth are open to trusting what God has told them, and they understand how their children will be a part of God's great sweeping new movement in history.  Zechariah is a trained, ordained, and pedigreed priest--a supposed expert on the way God is "supposed" to operate, and yet he can't bring himself to believe what the angel tells him. And at the same time, Mary and Elizabeth dare to believe that God is moving in their lives and through them in ways that will change the whole world. Over and over again, it's the ones who have been regarded as less-than who end up having the greatest awareness of what God is really doing--and the greatest openness to letting God do it.

In this scene from Luke, Mary and Elizabeth meet and embrace, both in awe and amazement at how God is working in their lives. Even the child in Elizabeth's womb seems to know what's going on, kicking at the presence of Mary and her unborn son, Jesus. These are not the ones you expect to be "in the know," so to speak.  Women often had much less formal education, and neither of them would have had the status or social standing of someone like Zechariah, a priest. And of course nobody expects a baby still in utero to know anything going on in the world beyond the womb! And yet, that's part of how God operates, isn't it? God is always finding the people on the margins, seeking the folks who have been disregarded, and showing divine power and wisdom through the ones counted as "weak" or "foolish."

The very fact that it's Mary and Elizabeth who are reflecting on the meaning of their pregnancies, rather than a conclave of learned priests, public officials, and religion scholars, is the dead giveaway that God is behind the scenes.  Lifting up the lowly and claiming the ones who have been overlooked for special purposes turns out to be God's calling card--this is precisely the sort of thing we should be looking for as the mark of divine fingerprints.  Mary and Elizabeth, it turns out, are attuned to the way God works and can see their place within the bigger picture of God's design, because they know that God is the sort of character who, as Mary will sing it, "fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty."

If this seems strange to our ears, maybe it's time for us to sit silently with Zechariah and listen to the wisdom Mary and Elizabeth have to share with us.  If God's choice to bypass the Big Deals and to silence the pompous Guardians of Respectable Religion makes us squirm, perhaps we need to let these women speak and allow ourselves to learn from these mothers who were the first teachers of Jesus and John the Baptizer. And once we do, we'll start to see the recurring pattern everywhere--we'll see signs of the God who finds the forgotten and bypasses the Big Deals all around us.  Maybe it will even start to rub off on us and the choices we make, too.

Let's dare to listen to these women... and see how it changes our perspective of God and the world.

Lord God, we give you thanks for your ways of choosing unlikely people to work through, for raising up the lowly, and for breaking beyond the boxes that the experts would put you in. Allow us to see your way of moving through the world in our lives, too.

God Waits, Too--December 19, 2024

God Waits, Too--December 19, 2024

"The angel said to Mary, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.' Then Mary said, 'Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.' Then the angel departed from her." [Luke 1:35-38]

In this moment, something amazing happens. Mary begins to wait for what the angel has promised... but so does God.

That's a strange thought, probably. We tend to think that one of the perks of being God should be not having to wait for things. After all, God could choose to snap a divine finger and make a baby appear, right? God just speaks the universe into existence, right? Jesus just shouts to Lazarus, and the dead man comes back to life, right? Surely a God who can launch creation with a simple, "Let there be light" and pulls off a resurrection by simply saying, "Lazarus, come out!" can also make a fully formed human being at the drop of a hat. Why even start with a baby, while we're on the subject? Why not just speak a cosmic, "Bazinga!" and have a fully-grown adult Jesus appear out of the smoke?

Because, of course, this moment is about God's complete embrace of humanity--God goes "all the way down," so to speak, to be completely immersed in our human life. And, whether we like it or not, human life involves existing within the bounds of time. That means waiting... both Mary waiting for a child now growing inside her to be born, and also God waiting for the same thing. God waits doubly, you could say: God waits on the outside, alongside Mary, for the nine months to pass, and God waits in the womb, too, as cells divide, as fingers form, as life grows there in the darkness. God waits because God chooses to--because fully entering into humanity requires the time for growing, developing, and becoming.

This waiting is really an amazing thing, both on Mary's part, and on God's. For her part, Mary commits to an entirely new course of her life with her "Yes" to the angel. Her consent is important, and maybe we don't often consider what a wonder it is that God hangs the whole story of the universe's salvation on the consenting response of a teenage girl (and, to be quite frank, teenagers as a rule are not known for their excellence in patience). But there, as everything depends on what Mary will say--and her willingness to live into the "Yes" she speaks. Because with her sentence, "Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word," she consents to the waiting of the nine months... and then the years of raising this child... and the heartache and sorrow that are waiting along the way, too. It won't be long once the child is born, after all, that old Simeon will warn Mary that there is a pierced heart in store for her, too, because she will ache over the suffering of her boy.

Whatever other life plans Mary had made, whatever other cookie cutter vision of Plan A for a Successful Life she had grown up with, whatever other dreams for how her life would go, these things were set aside with her "Yes" to the pregnancy. That is a wonder, just by itself. It is a radical break from the childish way we have of demanding our own way, right away, "or else." Children (and childish grown-ups as well) like to bellow threats that go, "If I don't get my way, I'll knock it all down!" We who live in this age of push-button ordering of merchandise on our phones and computer screens, we who can instantly download movies on a whim, we who are used to instant gratification, we demand our wishes be granted, and we want it now, like we are a whole society full of Veruca Salts. But Mary doesn't insist on getting her way, right away. Instead, she agrees to be a part of what the angel has asked her to be a part of, even when the first step of that plan is to wait... for nine months... allowing her body to be changed, her comfort to be set aside, her plans to be put on hold, and her life turned upside down.

And God waits, too. After centuries of promises, centuries of working through (and working in spite of, sometimes) obstinate, ornery people, here the moment for the arrival of the Promised One was so close! We might have been tempted, if we had been in God's shoes, to rush through this last step, to short-circuit human biology and just have a Messiah emerge from the wilderness a full-grown adult, or beam down on one of those fiery chariots. But instead God waits as well--waiting even to have the angel speak to Mary first before just charging ahead with the divine design. God waits--and all of creation, too, in that moment--for Mary's "Yes." And then God waits the months of pregnancy, the years of childhood, the drama of adolescence, and the beginnings of adulthood, before Mary's boy Jesus steps onto the scene ready to live out the calling of "messiah."

All of those things--the teachings, the miracles, the dinner parties with outcasts, the foot-washing, the cross, and the resurrection--all of those are off in a distant future as the angel speaks with Mary here. And yet, with her "Yes," something has begun, and now God is present in and with Mary, within her own body, her own life, even in the waiting.

We keep coming back to this surprising and life-giving truth: even when we are waiting for God to act in some big way, God is with us in the waiting now. Unlike the childish voices of our day that shout, "If I don't get MY way, RIGHT away, I'm walking out!" ours is a God who stays with us in our waiting, who goes to Mary for her consent to share in the waiting too, and who endures the necessary waiting as a part of completely entering into our humanity.

For whatever places in your life you feel like you are waiting for big things to happen, or are caught in one of those big transitions in life where everything else is in flux, this is a moment to remember that God waits, too. Not passively sitting on hands up in heaven, but waiting all the same. God waits with us, and for us, and within us... even while we are looking ahead to God's great and promised future.

What else can we say back to a God who goes through all of that with us, but, "Here we are, servants of the Lord; let it be with us just as you have said"?

Lord God, here we are, your servants. Let it be with us as you say, and we will wait, while you wait, too, as you bring about great things among us and within us.

No Mascot for Bullies--December 18, 2024

No Mascot for Bullies--December 18, 2024

"The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
  a warrior who gives victory;
 he will rejoice over you with gladness,
  he will renew you in his love;
 he will exult over you with loud singing
  as on a day of festival.
 I will remove disaster from you,
  so that you will not bear reproach for it.
 I will deal with all your oppressors
  at that time.
 And I will save the lame
  and gather the outcast,
 and I will change their shame into praise
  and renown in all the earth.
  At that time I will bring you home,
  at the time when I gather you;
 for I will make you renowned and praised
  among all the peoples of the earth,
 when I restore your fortunes
  before your eyes, says the LORD." (Zephaniah 3:17-20)

Just in case it needed to be said, the God of the Scriptures does not take the side of the bullies.

God does not "punch down," as it were, either, to pick on those who are already being harassed. 

And while we are on the subject, the real and living God (as opposed to an inert or imagined idol) has a reputation for lifting up the ones who are beaten down, gathering the ones who have been cast out and left behind, and silencing the bullies to stop them.

Like I say, that much should be obvious--it's sort of Bible 101 stuff, since the Bible shows us God as the One who liberates of the enslaved Hebrews and humbles Pharaoh, who gives children to the childless, and who insists on special protections for vulnerable people like widows, orphans, and foreigners.  When the ancient Israelites thought about who God really was, these were the kinds of answers that came to them, over and over again: God was the One who healed the hurting, rather than inflicting more injuries. God was the One who carried the sick and the weak, rather than leaving them behind to fend for themselves.  And most certainly, God was not endorsing bullies or oppressors to give them permission to intimidate other people.  In other words, if you asked Joe or Joann Israelite on the street to define "God" for you, they would have started with phrases like "the One who gathers outcasts in" or "the One who saves the troubled," before nebulous answers like, "the Big Guy in the Sky" or some ambiguous "higher power." 

We need to start there because our hope as Christians is rooted in who God is--in the sort of character God has and the particular priorities that God has shown.  What makes our hope more than mere wishful thinking is that we count on God to be who God has always been, and we trust that God's character is reliable--that God will always be the One on the side of the bullied, the troubled, and the harassed, rather than the puppet of the power-hungry Pharaohs, Caesars, and Herods.  We are hopeful about the coming of God's Reign and the appearance of God's Messiah because we are convinced that the promised Christ is no mascot for bullies nor an ally of tyrants, but a binder of wounds and a gatherer of outcasts. It is because God is reliable that we can hope, rather than fear, the coming Christ.

These words from Zephaniah, then, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, are a reminder of why this season of looking ahead to Christ's coming (both at Bethlehem and in God's promised future) is one of expectation rather than dread.  This season called Advent is a time of hope because of who God is, rather than fear as if we didn't know what sort of deity would show up or which side of the bed God will wake up on each day.

To be honest, a lot of the other things, events, and people we have put our hopes in before have let us down because the folks we counted on didn't prove reliable.  We've all been let down by the broken promises of politicians and demagogues.  We've heard stories of abusers and addicts who all swear, "This time will be different!" only to slide back into the same old patterns.  We've been sold shoddy merchandise and misled by pundits on TV screens.  But the bedrock claim of the Scriptures is that we know ours is the sort of God who sides with the bullied and beaten rather than amplifying the blowhards who do the bullying and the beating. We know who God is, and that gives us reason to hope for the coming of God's Reign and the arrival of God's Chosen One--the Christ.

Don't forget that in these remaining days before the hoopla and hurry of Christmas.  Don't forget the reason why we can be filled with hope rather than dread in all this talk about the coming of the Christ: we know who God is, reliably and faithfully. We trust God to be the One who lifts up the lowly, and who gathers in the ones left on the margins.

Lord God, be your authentic self for this whole hurting world, and we will rejoice to see you at work.

 

The Beginning of a Turn--December 17, 2024

The Beginning of a Turn--December 17, 2024

"John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, 'The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit'." [Mark 1:4-8]

Nobody "decides" to be loved.

You can't. It's not your choice.

If you are loved, it is a reality entirely out of your control, and depends on the choice of the one doing the loving--the "Lov-ER", so to speak.

But what can--and does--happen, and with some regularity on this planet in fact, is that people realize that they are beloved. Now that is a thing. And, I suppose, you could also say that once you realize you are beloved by someone, you do get to decide what you will do about that reality. Will you allow yourself to be loved, or will you run from it? Will you return the love, or will it go unrequited? Will you allow love to shape you (because love, like the river that carved the Grand Canyon will shape you in its likeness over time), or will you harden your heart? These are open questions, but to be clear, they are responses to finding yourself beloved, not conditions for acquiring that love.

The same is true with being forgiven, honestly--and this is a point about which we seem to be rather confused. You can't "decide" to be forgiven. It is, like being loved, a condition that one receives. Someone else does the forgiving (or not). Someone else decides not to weaponize the past and hold it against you anymore. But you cannot choose to be forgiven any more than you can choose to be found "not guilty" by the judge in court. It is a status that is given by someone else's choice--the real question is how you will respond to the gift of being forgiven. You can act like it is true, and allow the burying of hatchets (and the shovels that buried those hatchets, too) to restore the relationship you once had. You can decide to walk away, never to darken the other person's doorstep again. You can decide to stay bent in on yourself as though the forgiveness had not been extended. You can act like you never did anything wrong and never needed forgiveness in the first place. Those are all possible options, I suppose--but notice that among all of them, they are all responses (or non-responses, in some cases) to being forgiven, not conditions one must fulfill in order to "win" or "earn" or "deserve" forgiveness.

And, as with finding yourself beloved, you can choose whether or not to allow the reality of being forgiven to shape you--to allow it to leave its mark on you like the wind carving the hills in the Painted Desert. And that is indeed your choice--to be turned in the direction of the forgiver, or to hold on to your damned pride (and I mean that literally), dig your heels in, and turn away from the free gift of a new beginning. You may choose not to "like" the fact of being forgiven, and you may choose to continue doing the terrible things that broke relationship in the first place. But you cannot decide to be forgiven--that can only be given to you.

We need to be clear about all of those things to rightly understand the message of John, who prepares us for the coming of Jesus.  We need to be clear that being forgiven, like being loved, comes first, if we are going to understand what John the Baptizer was all about. When Mark the Gospel-writer summarizes John's project, he says John came on the scene "proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." And that could sound very much like John imagined that if you prayed the right prayer, or said you were sorry enough, or did enough good deeds to prove your contrition along with his Jordan River Dunking ceremony, you would be forgiven. It could sound like John's offer was that if you participated in his water ritual and then promised God that you would be a good little Gallant instead of a naughty ol' Goofus, then you would acquire forgiveness.

This would be a mistake.

I say that, not only because the nature of forgiveness itself is that, like being loved, it is someone else's choice to love you, not your choice to "be loved," but also because the deeper Biblical concept we translate as "repentance" has more to do with a change of mind and a new way of thinking, seeing, and responding to the world than it does with saying you are sorry, or feeling guilty, or walking up to the altar at church. "Repenting," at least as the Greek word was used in the first-century AD, looks more like a change of allegiance, a rearranging of priorities, or a change of mindset based on new information, rather than a matter of feeling "guilty enough" for sins or earning brownie points to get in good with the Divine.

So, rather than imagining that John the Baptizer's message boiled down to, "If you want to convince God to grant you forgiveness in the future, come out into the river with me and you will procure it for yourself," it's much more like John was saying, "Are you ready to decide to live in response to what God has already decided about you? Good--then let this be the moment you remember as the time you quit being defined by the old orientation of your life, and let this water be an object lesson for you of the way forgiveness shapes you like erosion carves rock." It was the beginning of a turn--a turning toward the direction of the Forgiver rather than being further bent in on oneself. But John, who was never one to be impressed by empty ritual, certainly wasn't saying that if you did his little aquatic ceremony, that you could earn something that can only be given to you in the first place.

That means, in the end, that preparing for Jesus' entry into our lives is less about trying to make ourselves look good in order to impress the Messiah when he comes (as though he couldn't see our present messes!), and more about whether we will decide to see the world as Jesus would have us... whether we will see ourselves as Jesus would have us... whether we will see our priorities and choices, our actions and words, through the same lens of love that Jesus does. There is a cost, to be sure, to taking John up on his offer of repentance--the cost of the old orientation in exchange for the new. There is a loss, you could say, but it is a loss like the lumpy jagged boulders that are smoothed out and transformed by the shape of the wind over eons, until they are works of art in stone in the desert. What is lost is only what was not the shape of the wind.

I am reminded of a lyric from Jon Foreman of the band Switchfoot, who sings as in a prayer, "Oh Erosion--Spirit, fall like rain on my thirsty soul... Erosion, Oh sweet Erosion, break me and make me whole." Such a prayer is what repentance looks like--a choice to let Love shape us into Love's own likeness, a turning toward the One who has already done the forgiving, a daring to see the world from the vantage point of finding yourself forgiven and to act like it is true. Like the old hymn goes, "Love to the loveless shown... that they might lovely be."

To prepare for Jesus' entry onto the scene in our own lives is not about trying to show enough effort to win the status of being forgiven or being loved. It is to make the choice to see the world and ourselves as Jesus teaches us to see it, to give our allegiance to Jesus' way in the world rather than our own, to let his Spirit shape us like the wind and the rain and the river shaping rocks. That's what John was getting people riled up in the desert about, and that is what his witness calls us to on this day, too.

Hear this now, then: you are beloved. You are forgiven. You cannot do a thing about it, neither to make it happen or undo it. Being loved and forgiven is not your choice--it is God's, who does the loving and the forgiving.

The only question that remains, then, is--how will you respond to God's choice to love and forgive you? And dare we let the Spirit shape us in the direction of such Love, like the boulders yield to take the shape of the wind?

Lord Jesus, we dare to believe what you say about us. We dare to pledge our allegiance to you and to your Reign. We dare to let your Holy Wind, your Divine Breath, shape us according to your love.

The Cutting Edge--December 16, 2024

The Cutting Edge--December 16, 2024

"And the crowds asked [John the Baptizer], 'What then should we do?' In reply he said to them, 'Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.' Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, 'Teacher, what should we do?' He said to them, 'Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.' Soldiers also asked him, 'And we, what should we do?' He said to them, 'Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages'." [Luke 3:10-14]

How do you get ready for the turning point of history? You share your food and clothes.

How about that?

It some how seems too... ordinary... too routine, maybe, for the arrival of a deliverer your people have been waiting on for centuries. It has the feel of telling the French citizens living under the Vichy government and Nazi occupiers, "The Allies are coming soon! Get ready for D-Day by donating shoes to the local homeless shelter, reforming your business practices, and making sure not to undertip your waiters and waitresses!" These actions seem so small and insignificant compared to the big and important events for which we are hoping.

And yet, that's precisely what John says: the Messiah is coming--share your abundance, and treat people justly rather than for selfish gain. So his counsel to the crowds is, "If you have more than you need, give away the excess to people who are without." And his direction to the tax collectors, who were widely seen as sell-outs to the Romans and cheats who used their position to extort money from people with impunity, "Don't cheat people. Don't use your position to get more for yourself." The same to the soldiers--these would likely have been more like law-enforcement or police under the authority of Herod--they were supposed to use their positions, like we see on police cars today, "to protect and serve," rather than to shake people down for money or falsely accuse people. In other words, justice and mercy.

John's message to people waiting for the coming of the Messiah was to do justice and to practice mercy--to put the needs of others before your own, and not to abuse your position to make yourself rich at the expense of others. In a sense, none of this was new. John wasn't inventing new commandments--he was riffing on the same message of the prophets who came before him like a jazz musician. John was only taking the words of Micah, "Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God," and putting them into real life ordinary situations to keep those words from becoming empty slogans or vague concepts. The prophets had always said, "What God is really after with us is that we love one another with our actions, our words, and our possessions." John just gives concrete examples--the second coat, the shared meal, the refusal to leverage your position for selfish gain.

And notice in that: there is no additional talk from John about who "deserves" our sharing. There is no asterisk or fine print that adds, "But of course, not for freeloaders... or people who came from far away... or people you don't particularly like." John simply says, like both Deuteronomy and Mr. Rogers would say it as well, to care for the "neighbor" who is in front of you--whoever that happens to be. Similarly, John doesn't tell the tax collectors, "Look, you have gotten yourself a good position--of course you're going to want to get the perks from it! That's just how the world works!" Nor does he live in the illusion that the soldiers aren't tempted to abuse their authority and weaponry--nobody accuses John of "not supporting the troops" or of "undermining law enforcement" just because he calls them out on the abuses he has seen in the past. John just baldly says to anyone he meets that the right way to live in expectation of God's Messiah is to practice justice and to let mercy become a way of life, which is all that any of the other prophets had ever said, too.

But let's be very clear about something: John doesn't tell his listeners that they have to be good little boys and girls in order to make the Messiah come. He doesn't preach that enough good behavior and rule-following will bring about the Reign of God, and he doesn't really even want us to believe that the only reason to behave is just to avoid future divine zapping. We don't do justice in order to prime the pump so that the Messiah can come, nor is the Reign of God powered by our good deeds like Tinker Bell being brought back to life by enough audience clapping and belief in pixies. John calls people to act justly and practice generosity in their ordinary work lives and neighborhoods because justice and mercy are what the Reign of God look like. And when the Messiah comes, and when the Reign of God breaks out in fullness everywhere, justice and mercy will be the order of the day. John is just telling us to live ahead of the curve now and practice life like that already.

In other words, because we believe that in God's Reign, everybody gets to eat, we will practice that kind of life now and share our bread. And because we believe that in God's Reign, nobody will go without clothing, we share our clothes with others rather than hoarding closets full of clothes we will never wear and only donating things we don't like anymore or spilled tomato sauce on once. Because we believe that God runs the universe on grace and gives good things to people regardless of whether anybody else thinks they have "earned" it, we will practice grace in our lives, too, without getting all fussy about who is really "worthy" of help. And because we believe, John says, that God is able to provide enough for everybody, I don't have to use my power and privilege to put Me-and-My-Group-First, but instead can use our positions for the good of all. We live like that now, not in order to make the Messiah come, but because that's how life is wherever God reigns. John is just calling us to live ahead of the curve.  To take John's message seriously is simply to live at the cutting edge--living now in light of how the world will be in the fullness of God's reign.

And that happens in ordinary actions, in everyday situations, in the mundane and the routine as much as in the grand and monumental. The way to get ready for the coming of the new creation is not to wear sandwich board signs on the street corner announcing "The End Is Near" but to share with someone who can never pay you back, to refuse the perks of your position, to love someone who doesn't expect it. We live as though the Reign of God we are waiting for is already breaking out all around us.

Because it is.

Lord Jesus, give us the vision today to live in light of your promised future, in all the mundane details of our daily work and life.

Naked Hope--December 13, 2024

Naked Hope--December 13, 2024

(Zechariah said:) "By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:78-79)

So a few years ago, there was an author whose posts would appear on my social media feed regularly (her name is Jessica Kantrowitz), and for a good long while, she would tweet the same message, every evening, just to put it out there in the world for whoever needed it.  She would write these words: "You are not alone, and this will not last forever."  No other details. No other explanations or exceptions.  No asterisks or list of terms and conditions.  Just the declaration, to whomever would come across it: you are not alone, and this will not last forever.

I know it got difficult for the author to keep writing those words, because sometimes people would reply to her and unload all the heaviness of life they were carrying, and at some point she decided to stop writing that same post.  But I think about it often, and I think about those words, floating out there in the internet forever, and in my memory as well.  And I hear in them echoes of these final verses from Zechariah's song in Luke.  After all that we've heard in Zechariah's song over these recent days, we come at last to a final future-framed hope: that "the dawn from on high will break upon us."  Zechariah speaks of a hope that God will move in a new way to bring light for those who are currently stuck in the gloom of death, and to bring peace for people weary of violence, war, and fear.  And to my ears, Zechariah's words feel very much like those words, flung out for anybody whose eyes fell upon them on a screen: You are not alone, and this will not last forever.

We've looked some this week at the kinds of pain that Zechariah knew first-hand: he had seen the destruction wrought by Rome and the empires that had come before it.  He knew the weariness of waiting for God to act after literal centuries of foreign domination.  He likely knew that some kind of trouble and suffering were in store for his son, John, who would announce the coming of the Messiah.  And yet his song here ends with a deeply hopeful, but also very precarious, picture.  He is convinced that the pain of the world, and in particular the pain of his people under the boot of an empire, will not endure forever.  God's love, however, does endure forever, and it would outlast all the worst that the Romans and their predecessors could do.

One of the things I notice about how Zechariah speaks this last hopeful section of the song is that he doesn't offer us statistics to prove his hope is reasonable. He doesn't do a historical analysis about the average duration of an empire's rise and fall. He doesn't give us math or algorithms or astrological signs to back up his claim.  He just offers us the unadorned, unpolished, desperate and naked hope that God will not let the shadow of death last forever, and that God will be with those who sit in darkness while they wait for the dawn.  He only gives us the assertion that he deeply needs to be true: in spite of the evidence to the contrary, Zechariah tells us that we are not alone, and this will not last forever.

Look, I don't know what you are going through at this moment as you read these words.  That is one of the unavoidable realities of the internet-era--words are flung out there where anyone can read them, and we never know in what context someone else will find what we've said and how they'll hear our words.  But I'm willing to bet that there have been times--or maybe that you are living through one right now--where you've felt like you were sitting in the darkness like Zechariah sang about. I'm willing to bet you have been in the shadow of death before, too--and that you have needed the promise that the people of God have always held when we are in the valley of the shadow of death: "I will not fear, for you are with me."  For whatever things are swirling around you, whatever fears keep you up at night, and whatever struggles you cannot see the end of right now, the hope we hold onto keeps insisting: it will not last forever, and we are not alone.  We may not see how things will ever change, and we may strain to see the presence of God when we're in the gloom.  Sometimes we pass a hope still unfulfilled on to the generation that comes after us, and sometimes we are handed a hope from those who have come before us--but we do hope that God's new day will come, and that at last the night of death and violence will end. We wait with urgency, tenacity, and endurance--and we keep reminding one another until our hopes are fulfilled: that none of us is alone, and the power of death will not last forever.  God's new dawning day will outlast the worst.

For whoever needs to hear it, know it. Own it.  Take it and share the word.

Lord God, be with us to sustain our hope, and bring about the new day of peace and life for which we have been hoping.

Loved into Being--December 12, 2024

Loved into Being--December 12, 2024

(Zechariah said:) "And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
     for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
 to give knowledge of salvation to his people
     by the forgiveness of their sins." (Luke 1:76-77)

Fred Rogers (of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe and cardigan sweater fame) once gave a commencement address in which he asked all the graduates about to receive their diplomas to stop for a moment and think of the people who "have loved you into being."  He invited them to think of parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, teachers and mentors, and the like, all of whom helped to shepherd these students through childhood, into maturity, and now to a moment on stage with gowns and mortarboards.  

I have always loved that phrase of Mister Rogers--about "the people who have loved you into being"--because it feels very much like Christian hope.  We constantly find ourselves "loved into being" in Christ, nurtured into maturity by the Spirit, and pulled into God's good future.  Mister Rogers' phrasing speaks of a present reality that makes a new future possible--that sounds very much like what this Advent waiting season is all about.  We are becoming--like a seed sprouting into a new plant, like a dark sky beginning to turn colors in the east before the dawn of a new day, like the birth of a long-awaited child.

And I find myself hearing Mister Rogers, too, when I hear these words from Zechariah's song over his son, John, whom we have come to know as The Baptizer, the one who prepares the way for the Messiah, Jesus.  At this moment in the new father's song, he pauses his praise of God to turn to his infant son, and he speaks words that love him into being. "You, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High," he says. Zechariah is daring to trust what God has told him about his boy.  He is beginning to believe that God really is about to do something new in history, and that he and his son are perched right at the edge of hope to see it happen.  Zechariah's role in all this grand drama is to love his son into being--to encourage and nurture him into becoming what God is calling him to be.

Now, it feels important at this juncture to clarify the difference between what Zechariah does here and the strong temptation many parents face in grooming their children to be what they, the parents, want them to become, rather than enabling children to be who and what they need to become.  The dad who was a starting quarterback on the football team has to acknowledge the impulse to make his son try out for the football team, too, even if his son has no interest in the game and would rather play in the marching band.  The mom who was homecoming queen has to remember that her job is not to get her daughter to win the same prize.  The family that has lived on the farm for generations has to learn to be OK with a child who is drawn to the big city, and the household full of high-power urban professionals has to learn to be OK with the child who feels drawn to the soil.  Our job as parents and grandparents is never to force our children into some cookie cutter mold with a spouse, 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, and a dog.  Our calling, I think Zechariah and Fred would tell us, is to love our children into being--and to remember that God reserves the right to work through our nurture (and also in spite of us!) to bring our children to where God calls them to be.  I don't get to set my son or daughter's life-course based on what I want or wish them to become--I get to pour as much good into them and give them as many tools for their toolboxes as I can, and then I trust that God will guide them into become what they need to become.  That is hard to do, even in the best of times, but that is the nature of living by hope.

And that means, too, that for us who are ever in Zechariah's sandals, a recognition that it is not in our power to prevent any and all difficult things from ever happening to our kids, but rather than we prepare them as well as we can for life in a world where rotten things happen.  Zechariah's job is not to shelter baby John from anything rough or difficult, nor to hide him away from the meanness of a world of violence and greed.  But rather, Zechariah's calling is to equip John to be the voice the world will need that can speak up against the rottenness and cruelty, a voice that can offer a new beginning for people who have messed up and want to start over, a voice that can speak God's forgiveness and salvation to broken hearts who need to hear it.  Zechariah might not know it at this moment, but we know that John's story doesn't have a fairy tale ending, but leads to a prison cell and a silver platter, for the sake of being a prophetic voice that spoke up against a decadent and corrupt regime.  The fact that John eventually gets beheaded by the crooked king Herod doesn't mean that Zechariah has failed as a father, but rather that he has succeeded in helping to become the voice of truth and courage that God called John to be.  

I am reminded, then, of a beautiful but poignant line from Marilyn Robinson's gorgeous novel Gilead, in which her narrator, a late-in-life father, says this:

"Any father…must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness."  

This is what Zechariah does for his infant son John.  This is what Fred Rogers reminded a class of graduates had been done for them.  This is our calling as well, not just for our own children and grandchildren, but for all whom we are charged with loving into being as well--as guides, as mentors, as older voices of faith, as Sunday School teachers, as reliable friends who can listen over coffee. This is part of how we find our place within God's grand design of setting things right in the world and making all things new.  

It may not be our job to be the voice in the wilderness, like John.  It is definitely not our job to be the savior of the world (that's Jesus' job, and we are not here to play Messiah).  But it might be our job to be Zechariah, loving into being the lives God brings into our own, so that God's new thing can unfold.

Lord God, enable us to love into being the people you want us to nurture, and to live at the edge of hope watching what you will do through them, and through us.