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.

At the Edge of the Rubble Pile--December 11, 2024

 

At the Edge of the Rubble Pile--December 11, 2024

(Zechariah said:) "Thus (God) has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days." (Luke 1:72-75)

These words hit differently when you remember where they came from and when they were spoken.  Even though the church has borrowed and refitted these words of Zechariah to become a part of its timeless liturgy (Zechariah's song, sometimes called the "Benedictus" from its Latin translation, is traditionally used as part of Morning Prayer or Matins services around the world), Luke doesn't give it to us as just a random song that plopped down out of heaven.  These are words that come from the experience of a people living under the power of a brutal and bloodthirsty empire, which was actually just the latest in a long line of conquerors and oppressors who had occupied the land and dominated the people for centuries.  

By the time Zechariah lived, there had been basically five hundred years of foreign rule, from the Babylonians to the Medes and the Persians to the Greeks, and then the Romans came along as the latest bully on the block to play King of the Hill.  Each empire had different ways of profaning the worship life of the Judeans, too. The Babylonians had destroyed the Temple back in 586BC or so and likely plundered the Ark of the Covenant; the Greeks had turned the site of the Temple into a pagan altar for their god Zeus and even sacrificed a pig on its altar; and the Romans boasted about Caesar as a "Son of God" and a "Savior," and declared that his birth was "good news for the whole world" (sound familiar?).  Each of those empires brought waves of violence and intimidation, through the legions of soldiers they marched through the streets, through the taxes they extorted from the peoples they conquered (which went to enrich the Empire, not to build schools and libraries or roads and bridges, like we might think of today), and with the threat that they could torture or crucify anybody they saw as a threat--even just to make an example of some poor unlucky person. All of that stands in the background as Zechariah sings about God delivering them from fear and enemy empires.  He had seen the cruelty of the Romans firsthand.  He had heard the stories of the empires that had come before.  For as far back as anybody could remember, there was always some threat, some dominating power, breathing down their necks.  Of course he--and all of his people--longed to be free from the fear of them.  Of course they all prayed for God to keep the ancient promises to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants of a land in which they could live in peace and justice (the word translated "righteousness" here is the same word they used for "justice" in Greek--they are synonymous concepts in the world of the New Testament).

The right way to hear Zechariah's words, then, is from the underside of the world.  The perspective from which Zechariah sings is a place on the margins--on the edges of society--not from a position of power, prestige, or privilege.  He sings with a hope that things could be better, that the powers of greed and violence will not always win the day, and that they will not always have to live in fear.  If we try to take these words and make them our own without forgetting that they come from the experience of oppression, we will be distorting and abusing their power.  If we forget that Zechariah's prayer comes from someone who had certainly seen occupying armies marching past his door, and who had likely lost friends or neighbors at the hands of their soldiers, we misunderstand the meaning of his words. Zechariah longs for a life without the constant fear and persistent trauma of having people who wouldn't think twice about killing him goosestepping around every corner.  He sings of a life where people who hate him just for existing will no longer have the power to terrorize, brutalize, or dehumanize him and his people.  And he brings all of this to God, confident that God cares and that God is moving in history to free them.

It is easy to forget on this day that there are many who still share Zechariah's longings.  There are still many who tremble when they hear the sound of planes overhead, because the roar of those jets does not signify friendly travelers or helpful protectors, but incoming bombs and drones.  There are many who have only known fear under the rule of brutal dictators, and who are also yet frightened about what will replace the tyrants when they are deposed (as many Christians with ancient roots in Syria are feeling right now).  There are many who fear missiles from the sky or their homes crumbling to rubble beneath them.  And by contrast, I live at the height of comfort and safety, complaining about gas prices or long lines at department stores bustling with people buying more stuff to be exchanged and opened in a flurry of consumerism under Christmas trees in a couple of weeks.  I have a lot to learn if I want to hear Zechariah's words honestly--much less to sing his words as my own.

These days, when I hear the sound of Zechariah's song, I hear echoes of a contemporary Palestinian poet named Marwan Makhoul, who wrote these haunting lines:  

"In order for me to write poetry that isn't political,
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
​the warplanes must be silent."

It is probably difficult for any of us who are used to hearing Zechariah's song chanted harmlessly in suburban congregations where everyone knew their houses would still be standing when they got home from church to know, truly, what he meant by praying to be "rescued from the hands of our enemies." But if we want to understand his words, we need to hear them coming from a voice at the edge of the rubble pile.

All of this reminds me that the Bible's words are not simply slogans or mantras to be pulled out of context and turned into vaguely inspirational catch-phrases.  We don't have the right to yank lovely sounding words out of Scripture and separate them from the pain of those who suffer or the cry of those living under threats of violence in order to make them into memorable praise choruses or Hallmark card sentiments.  To hear Zechariah's song rightly is to hear it as both a cry of trust that God cares about the plight of all who are oppressed and a lament that so many continue to suffer at the hands of a long line of enemies.

If we dare to mouth his words after him, we cannot avoid caring about those who still suffer like this today.  We cannot sing his words with hearts that are numbed to apathy.  

Do we dare to take up Zechariah's song on our lips today?

Lord God, move us out of our complacency to care for all who suffer today and who cry out to you.

An Accomplished Fact--December 10, 2024

An Accomplished Fact--December 10, 2024    

"Then Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy:

 ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
     for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.
He has raised up a mighty savior for us
    in the house of his servant David,
as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
   that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us...'" (Luke 1:67-71)

Hope has a way of messing with your mind's sense of time--in the best possible way.

At least, in the Biblical story, the folks who have been captivated by a hope in God often find themselves so sure of what God has promised that they speak of it as already accomplished, even when it is still off in the future.  And even though that might sound bizarre, it's really kind of beautiful.

Here's a case in point. In the opening chapter of Luke's gospel, we are introduced to Zechariah, who will be the father of John the Baptizer.  After an unexpected pregnancy (reminiscent of Sarah and Abraham) and a visit from an angel, Zechariah bursts into praise when his son his born after nine months of silence.  And when he looks into his newborn boy's eyes for the first time, he speaks of what God is  going to do through this child... in the past tense.

Look at the verbs in the opening lines of this song, which many of us heard read in worship this past Sunday, and channel your inner grammarian to note the tenses of those action words:  God, he says, "has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a mighty savior for us."  Those are all stated as accomplished facts, as a done deal, as a past reality rather than a future potentiality.  And yet, his son, who will be the opening act who comes before the promised Savior himself, has only just been born and named! 

All of this begs the question: what's going on with Zechariah's sense of time?  Why is he talking about future events like they are already past?  Why is he saying God "has raised up a mighty Savior" when the Savior is, at that time, still forming in Mary's womb?  And why does Zechariah say that God has "redeemed" God's people when they are still under the boot of the occupying Roman Empire? 

Well, once we rule out the science-fiction based hypotheses (time-travel, extra-dimensional perception, or becoming the human companion of a traveling Time Lord who bops around the universe in an old British police box), we are left with a theological answer: hope.  For Zechariah, who has at long last learned (after nine months of reflecting in contemplative silence) that God keeps even the promises that sound impossible, this is about the assurance of hope that is grounded in God.  Zechariah dares to trust that when God says a savior is being raised up, a savior really is being raised up.  In fact, from God's vantage point, it is already a certainty.  Zechariah has learned to trust that when God makes a commitment, God keeps it.  You can count on it as sure as the sun shines and the rain falls.  You can take one of God's promises to the bank.  And because Zechariah knows that God's promised future is reliable, he acts and speaks and thinks as if it is already a present reality.  His hope in God enables him to step into that future now, taking it as such a certainty he can speak of it as something God has already done.

In a sense, then, being people of hope is something like having birthright citizenship. We live in a country with a long and honorable heritage of saying that if you are born on this soil you are automatically a citizen here.  There are rights and privileges and protections that you can count on--and which your parents could trust would be granted to you--even before you have done a thing, learned to speak, or paid a cent in taxes.  Expecting parents here know that their child will be a citizen and take it as a given even during the pregnancy. It is technically a future reality, which happens only after the child is born, but it is a certainty within that future. So they count on it during the nine months of the pregnancy as something assured.  Zechariah sees his son's future story in much the same way.  He speaks of God's saving action--through John and through the One who comes after John (Jesus)--as an accomplished fact, something so certain that he can speak of it as a completed action rather than a future possibility.  

That's what it is like for us to live on the edge of hope as well.  We are people who dare to take God's promised future so seriously that we live in light of it now as an accomplished reality, like it is the kingdom in which we are citizens already by birthright. Hope is what pulls us forward to act, think, and speak as though God really has redeemed us, really has raised up a savior for us, and really has looked on this world with love to make all things new.

Listening to Zechariah's song will indeed mess with our sense of time--we will start to take God's promised future as more definitive of our identity than anything in our past.  Today, then, is a chance to live with his kind of hope, and to make his song our own.

Lord God, give us such confident hope in your promises that we can live now in light of when you keep them.

Bypassing the Big Deals--December 9, 2024

Bypassing the Big Deals--December 9, 2024

"In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins..." (Luke 3:1-3)

God knew who all the movers and shakers were.

God knew the names of all Big Deals and the So-and-Sos.

God knew the locations of all the Centers of Power and Influence... and then promptly bypassed all of them in order to set up shop in the wilderness.

And God did all this, the Scriptures tell us, for the sake of getting through to all the folks who were NOT the Big Deals or powerbrokers, the ones who had been told they had messed up too many times for God to have anything to do with them, and who lived on the margins rather than in the spotlight or center of attention.

Now this whole choice of God's, which many of us heard about in worship yesterday, shouldn't come as a surprise--at least, not if we have ever listened to Luke the storyteller here in the Gospel attributed to him.  Luke is the one who gives us Mary's Magnificat song, the lullaby of her firstborn son the Messiah, about how God "fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty," and how God "pulls the mighty down from their thrones and lifts up the lowly."  Luke is the one who tells us about Jesus' declaration of blessing on the poor and hungry--and of Jesus' lament for the apathetically affluent. Luke is the one who reminds us, too, that when the Christ-child is born, the news is sent from God to a bunch of nobodies outside of town on the margins of society--the night-shift shepherds--rather than Caesar or Herod or even the Respectable Religious Leaders. Luke wants us to know that God's way, so often, is to seek out the scattered, the gather in the lost, and to lift up the ones treated as unimportant and unworthy by the rest of the world. 

So when Luke introduces us to John the Baptizer, who sets the stage for Jesus' public ministry, he is up to his old habits.  Luke wants us to know that God was fully aware of who the so-called Important People were, and God just deliberately chose to take a detour around their capital cities and impressive institutions, in order to tell John the wildly dressed desert prophet to invite anybody and everybody to turn around and be a part of God's new thing.  

This is what God is really like, if we listen to the gospel-writers. This is how the Reign of God works, if we take Jesus seriously.  We should expect to find God's handiwork, not among the leverage-brokers of the empire or influence-peddlers in the palace, but as the left-out and left-behind are gathered in.  We should look for the presence of God, not in the center ring propping up whichever clown of a Caesar happens to be on the throne at the moment, but on the margins. And we will come to recognize the dwelling of God, not in the capital of the empire, but in the midst of our ordinary routines... in the wilderness... and on the edges.

Where might God lead us to look today?  Where have we been looking so far, with no results?

Lord God, let us find you where you choose to be revealed--away from the supposedly successful and important, and among the forgotten and forsaken.

Love, In The Mean-Time--December 6, 2024

Love, In The Mean-Time--December 6, 2024   

"And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints." (1 Thessalonians 3:12-13)

It's not about building a bomb shelter or hoarding emergency food rations inside your bunker.  

It's not about stockpiling ammo to fight off some ominous enemy like on a zombie-apocalypse TV show, either. 

Nobody in the Bible is what you might call today a "doomsday prepper." No, if you ask the leaders of the early church how to be ready for the coming of Jesus, they will tell you to grow in love and to let your life stand out with the kind of countercultural goodness we call being "holy."

And mind you, it's not that the apostle Paul or the church to whom he was writing in Thessalonica didn't think Jesus was coming back.  They fervently believed and deeply hoped that they would live to see "the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints" within their lifetime!  In fact, long before we had hymnals, creeds, or catechisms, one of the earliest common expressions of the first-generation church was the single-sentence Aramaic acclamation, "Maranatha!" which meant, "Our Lord, come!" (See 1 Corinthians 16:22.)  From our earliest existence, Christians have centered their faith on the assertion that Jesus is coming in glory--and yet, just as surely, those first Christians understood that love was the way to best prepare for his coming. 

Nobody was training in a militia to fight off invading evil enemies in the name of Jesus. Nobody was stockpiling resources for a life underground behind a vault door inscribed with a cross like a talisman.  Nobody was urging the Christian congregations to withdraw from the world or to show open hostility to outsiders who did not share their faith in Jesus.  In fact, just the opposite--Paul prays for the Thessalonian church to "abound in love," not just for their own in-group members, but "for one another and for all."  And whatever Paul had in mind when he prayed for their hearts to be "strengthened in holiness," it didn't look like animosity or fear toward the world around them.  It looked like decency in times that were awfully indecent.  It looked like a willingness to stand out by practicing integrity and honesty even when others only seemed to care about making a buck.  It looked like the commitment to share good things with neighbors in need around them, even when the surrounding culture thought it looked foolish. In other words, the early church certainly expected Jesus' coming to happen soon, but they knew they were called to spend their time on holy love in the mean-time. 

Today, while there is a lot beyond our power to change or fix in the world, you and I do have the ability to choose what we are going to do with the day in front of us. (It's rather like the well-known exchange from The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo tells Gandalf he wishes he didn't have to face the dark times they were living through, and Gandalf replies, "So do I... and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”) That's very much how the early church held their hope for Jesus' coming together alongside the hostility and rottenness of the wider world in which they lived.  They didn't live in fear or anger toward the rest of the world, nor did they conclude that their actions toward others didn't matter because Jesus was coming soon.  They were willing to stand out (which is what holiness does to you) in the ways that they loved. And as a result they knew what to do with the time that had been given to them, whether Jesus came back the very next day or they lived their whole lives out before his coming in glory. The same choice is put to us on this day: with whatever time we are given, will we dare to point to Jesus in the ways we love... in the mean-time?

Lord Jesus, grow love in us as we look toward the day of your coming in glory.

The Lord of the Lost and the Lowly--December 5, 2024

The Lord of the Lost and the Lowly--December 5, 2024

"Good and upright is the Lord; 

     therefore he instructs sinners in the way.

He leads the lowly in what is right,
     and teaches the lowly his way.
All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness,
     for those who keep his covenant and his decrees." (Psalm 25:8-10)

The shepherds aren't an exception to the rule. God is always drawing the least, the last, the losers, and the left-out and leading them by the hand. 

So when, in a few weeks' time, we hear the story of night-shift sheep ranchers and farm hands getting personal invitations from a whole choir of angels to come and meet the newborn Messiah, we shouldn't be surprised that God seeks out the lowly to welcome the Christ-child into the world.  We'll know that it's always been God's way to seek "the lowly"--the ones with no status, influence, or power--and to point them toward something good.  God seems much less interested in handing out gold stars for achievements and much more interested in gathering up the ones who have lost their way or who got left behind and walking with them all the way home.

Once you know that about God (and again, the psalm writer here just seems to think it is so obviously true that he takes it as a given), you start to see it everywhere. That's especially true in the Bible, including throughout the well-worn Nativity story we are rehearsing together over these coming weeks. Not only does God choose to send the angels to the folks on the margins--the literal edge of town--where the guys who got stuck working the graveyard shift are herding their flocks, but Mary herself is one of those "lowly" people the world regarded as a "nobody" until God invites her into the story.  Elizabeth, too, has felt overlooked and invisible without children, until the angel appears and changes her life forever.  And not to leave Joseph's part of the story out, when the angel comes to him to tell him to go ahead with his marriage to Mary, the message also includes the reminder to name the boy "Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."  The whole project is centered on God showing kindness to sinners and mess-ups and gathering the nobodies on the margins to lift them up.

Or, as the words of the psalm put it (as many of us heard this past Sunday), "Good and upright is the Lord; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. He leads the lowly in what is right..."  It's almost like the way you see God's goodness is the way God leads the lost and the left-out.  So often, we Respectable Religious People get it all backwards and think that you show off your "goodness" and "holiness" by who you leave out--who you won't be seen with, who you won't share a table with, who you don't want to be associated with "so that people don't get the wrong impression." God, however, turns the tables.  God's goodness isn't shown forth by who God leaves out, but by God's intention to gather in the people on the margins and to lead them all by the hand, walking the way with them.

So, if we are going to take the Scriptures seriously, it sure sounds like the place to meet God isn't by sealing ourselves off from the "sinners" or the "undesirables," but just the opposite.  If you want to encounter the living God, go to the margins, to the edges, to the folks who have been forgotten or ignored by the Big Deals, and discover that God is already there.  The God of the Bible is the Lord of the lost and the lowly.

It's not a secret or a surprise--the Scriptures have been telling us this about God all along. Maybe we're just slow to pay attention.

O God, lead us when we are lost, and gather us in with all the people you have taken by the hand, who feel forgotten or who have been left out in lowly places.

Past the Luxury of Despair--December 4, 2024

Past the Luxury of Despair--December 4, 2024

[Jesus said:] "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly..." (Luke 21:34)

I want to say this gently, but firmly: we do not have the luxury of despair.

The world's ache in the present moment is too great, too urgent, and the news we have been given to share with the world is too beautiful, too compelling, to waste time sulking.  We cannot afford the indulgence of hopelessness.  We have too much good work to do.

That might sound surprising, I admit. We are not used to thinking of hope as something essential--we are more likely to treat "hope" as a frivolous bonus you might get as an unexpected extra in life, like the caffeine and sugar buzz of treating yourself to a latte as an afternoon splurge.  And my hunch is that we think pessimism is closer to realism in this world, so we teach ourselves to err on the side of disappointment.  "Better not get your hopes up," we tell ourselves, bracing in advance for the world to let us down.  It is easy, then, to look at the suffering and mess of the world and to just give up.

It seems like every disaster movie has one of those characters, doesn't it?  The asteroid is coming, or the hurricane is bearing down, or Godzilla is wreaking havoc on the city skyline--and there's always someone who has decided this is just too much for them to deal with.  And they give up hope.  They go home, or they break down into tears, or they start drinking themselves into a stupor, or they head off in search of a ledge they can jump off of--because they can't see a way out of despair.  That character trope keeps showing up because we know that feeling, don't we? We know that sometimes we are just ready to give up, either because the future seems so frightening, or we feel overwhelmed at the size of the troubles in front of us.  There is always the temptation to run away from it all, to seek solace at the bottom of a bottle, or to stick our heads in the sand.

But for the followers of Jesus, we don't have permission to do that.  He calls us away from the impulse to numb ourselves to the needs of the moment, and he pulls us up out of the water when we were about ready to let ourselves drown in worry.  Jesus is insistent that both the world in its pain and the goodness of God's Reign are too important to let us fall asleep or slip into despair to miss.  Jesus himself calls us to wake up--and to stay awake--because the world needs us, and because God is pulling us into the divine work of attending to that need.  We don't have the spare time or excess of energy to waste by throwing ourselves pity parties in the middle of the night; God has called us to reflect the coming dawn right now.  Sure, it can be tempting to tell ourselves that the world feels so dark that we'd rather not muster up the energy to shine a light now--but now is precisely when the world needs the light, because it feels so dark sometimes.  Hope is not a luxury we can get around to when we have more free time and the headlines don't feel so bleak.  Hope is the necessity we are summoned to take up right in this moment, because the world needs to hear it right in this moment.

I'll admit: for a long time I heard these words of Jesus more like they were a warning of something bad coming, like another disaster looming on the horizon in a movie sequel.  But the more I listen to Jesus on his own terms here, the more it seems to me he is not trying to scare us, but to shake us awake to the important needs of this time and place, and to our role in witnessing to God's Reign especially in times when folks feel ready to give up.  The more I listen to Jesus, the more I understand the fire in Dr. King's words in a theme he offered up, both at the March on Washington and at Riverside Church years later in an address called "Beyond Vietnam," when he spoke of "the fierce urgency of now."  King said:

"We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action."

King, like Jesus here in Luke 21, doesn't give us permission to give up, to check out, or to stick our heads in the sand.  We are called in this moment to pay attention; to the hurts of others, to the heartbreak around us, to the needs of those aching for love.  And we are called to speak God's words that heal, God's promise that restores, and God's declaration of love for the unloved and unlovely. The world needs it now, so now is the time we are called to do it.

So, yeah, we may find ourselves from time to time in a season of the doldrums; and yeah, the cold greys of early December while headlines worry us and wars continue to trouble us from a distance are a ripe time for the blues to hit. If that's where you're at, it's worth being honest and feeling what you're feeling.  But at the same time, we can't ignore the voice of Jesus who calls to us even when the world feels bleak, and pulls us forward into hope again, because we simply do not have the luxury of staying stuck in hopelessness. The good news of God's Reign is indispensable for just this moment in time, and so we are needed to bear it into the world, here and now.

Lord Jesus, keep us awake, alert, and attuned to your presence even in the mess of the world, and give us the courage to live out our calling here as reflections of your light.