Christmas Eve



December 24, 2013

+ A story I LOVE to tell on Christmas Eve is not the typical Christmas Eve story. My poor mother has had to hear this story so many times, she just rolls her eyes at it.  I think I tell it every Christmas.  But…this Christmas Eve story does not involve your usual cast of characters.  It involves rather a very famous Episcopal parish in New York City and a very famous actress from a by-gone era.

 The story involves Tallulah Bankhead.  Now some of you are thinking: I haven’t heard that name in years. Others are maybe saying: I have never heard that name before in my life. But Tallulah Bankhead, star of stage and screen, including, most famously, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, was also an Episcopalian. And in fact quite the Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian.

 When she was in New York, she attended the Church of St. Mary the Virgin just off
Times Square.  If you have never been there, it is truly the place to see—if in fact you can see it. This church is so High and is notorious for using so much incense it is affection ally called “Smoky Mary’s” (and it is one of my favorite places to visit in Manhattan).

 In the 1950s, the priest at smoky Mary’s, Fr. Grieg Taber. Fr. Taber was one of the interesting and eccentric characters in the Episcopal church in the day. There have been many stories of Fr. Tabor. But this one is one of the best…

 One Christmas Eve in the 1950s Fr. Taber—good and loyal priest that he was—was sequestered in his confessional.  Back then, even some Episcopalians felt compelled to go to confession before receiving Holy Communion at the midnight Mass. Fr. Taber was there in his confessional, awaiting penitents, when he heard the oh-so-very-familiar, low, smoky voice of Miss Tallulah Bankhead. There was certainly no mistaking who it could be. As he peeked out through his curtain, there he saw her making her way through the church.  She paused and looked up at the giant crucifix above the altar, with its almost life-sized figure of the crucified Jesus. Suddenly she exclaimed, in her wonderfully Tallulah Bankhead way,

 "Smile, Dahling! It’s your birthday!”

 
It’s one of the great stories of Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians and one that, at first hearing, might sound irreverent or possibly even downright sacrilegious.  Ah…but if you believe that, then you miss the whole point of that wonderful little anecdote.

Douglass Shand-Tucci, in his wonderful biography of the great Episcopal architect Ralph Adams Cram, writes of this incident at Smoky Mary’s:

“Greig Taber…found not irreverence but a useful truth in Bankhead’s salutation to Christ on his natal day. [He] knew it was one New Yorker’s way of joining in ‘Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning!’”

 In other words, what some people might perceive as sacrilegious and disrespectful I see as wonderfully intimate.  And intimacy is what Christmas is about.  An intimacy from God to us.  An intimacy very unlike any other kind of intimacy.

 When we think long and hard about this night, when we ponder it and let it take hold in our lives, what we realized happened on that night when Jesus was born was not just some mythical story.  It was not just the birth of a child under dire circumstances, in some distant, exotic land.  What happened on that night was a joining together—a joining of us and God. God met us half-way. God came to us in our darkness, in our blindness, in our fear—and cast a light that destroyed that darkness, that blindness, that fear.

 In this dark, cold night, we celebrate Light.  We celebrate the Light that has come to us in our collective and personal darknesses.  We celebrate the Light that has come to us in our despair and our fear, in our sadness and in our frustration.  And as it does, we realize---there is an intimacy to that action on God’s part.

 God didn’t have to do what God did.  God didn’t have to descend among us and be one of us. But by doing so, God showed us a remarkable intimacy. Or, as the great Anglican poet Christina Rosetti put more eloquently:

 Love came down at Christmas,

love, all lovely, love divine;
love was born at Christmas:
star and angels gave the sign.

We will never fully understand how or why Jesus—God made flesh—has come to us as this little child in a dark stable in the Middle East, but it has happened and, because it happened, we are a different people. We realize that we are a people loved by our God. And that love is all powerful. It is all encompassing. It is all accepting. No matter who we are, no matter we are, no matter what we do, we are loved and loved fully.

Our lives are different because of that love that descended into our lives. This baby—this love personified—has taken away, by the love he encompasses, everything we feared and dreaded.  When we look at it from that perspective, suddenly we find our emotions heightened.  We find ourselves expressing our intimacy back to God.  Each of expresses our love differently.  People like Tallulah Bankhead cry out happy birthdays to crucifixes on Christmas Eve.  The rest of us probably aren’t quite that dramatic. Or maybe some of us actually are.

But the intimacy we feel between ourselves and God is a very real one tonight—in this very holy moment.  We find that this love we feel—for God and for each other and for those we maybe don’t always love, or find difficult to love—that radical love is more tangible—more real—than anything we have ever thought possible. And that is what we are experiencing this evening.

Love came down. Love became flesh and blood. Love became human. And in the face of that realization, we are rejoicing tonight. We are rejoicing in that love personified. We are rejoicing in each other.  We are rejoicing in the glorious beauty of this one holy moment in time. And we are rejoicing in that almighty and incredible God who would come to us, not on some celestial cloud with a sword in his hand and armies of angels flying about him.  We are rejoicing in a God who comes to us in this innocent child, born to a humble teenager in a dusty third world land.  We rejoice in a God who comes with a face like our face and flesh like our flesh—a God who is born, like we are born—of a human mother—and who dies like we all must die.  We rejoice in a God who comes and accepts us and loves us for who we are and what we are—a God who understands what it means to live this sometimes frightening uncertain life we live.

But who, by that very birth, makes all births unique and holy and who, by that death, takes away the fear of death for all of us. If that isn’t intimacy, I don’t know what is. This beautiful night, let us each cling to this love that we are experiencing tonight and let us hope that it will not fade from us when this night is over.

Let us cling to this holy moment and make sure that it will continue to live on and be renewed again and again. Love is here.  Love is in our very midst tonight.  Love is so near, we can feel its presence in our very bodies and souls.

So, let us share this love in any way we can and let us especially welcome this love— love, all lovely, love divine—this love made human into the shelter of our hearts.

 

 

 

 

10 Things You can't do at Christmas and Follow Jesus

I came across this wonderful post by Presbyterian Pastor Mark Sandlin, which I think is so apt now as we are heading into the Christmas season:

Ah, Christmas! The most wonderful time of the year. A time to gather with family and friends, and, with a smile on our faces, pretend we aren't quietly measuring who received the best present and which relative really, really needs to stop drinking. A time to hang tinsel and baubles from the tree, and time to hangup our hopes of losing that last 10 pounds this year. Such a joyous season!

The real point here is that Christmas is what we make of it. For Christians, however, there are some very specific things you can't do if you want to actually honor and follow the person we celebrate this season. So, I give you my “10 Things You Can't Do AT CHRSTMAS While Following Jesus.” As with my other “10 Things” lists (which are linked at the end of this post), this is not intended to be a complete list, but it is a pretty good start.

10) Celebrate Consumeristmas.
For many folks, Christmas starts standing in line on Thanksgiving Day. 'Tis the season for mass consumerism. Regardless of where you think it began, Christmas has slowly drifted into the bog of consumer madness. Like frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water, we never saw it coming. For Christians, this is particularly problematic because the guy we are celebrating this time of year told us that collecting stuff here on Earth is not the way to follow him.

---

9) Forget Those Without Food.Jesus once said that when we feed the hungry we are feeding him. Anyone want to guess what it means when we ignore the hungry? How about ignoring the hungry as we scrape the leftover Christmas ham from our plates into the trash? Maybe we need to change the name of the season to Gluttonousmas? Too many presents, too much food – too little consideration for those in need.

8) Forget Those Without Shelter.No room at the inn. One of the key moments in the story Christians celebrate is the moment when Jesus was almost born in the streets of Bethlehem. Our need to clean up the Christmas story assumes that the innkeeper told them to use the manger but the Bible says no such thing. There was no room at the inn, leaving Mary to place her newborn child in a smelly feeding trough. For that night they were without shelter. Throughout his life Jesus would spend his ministry with no place to lay his head. This time of year we celebrate a homeless man. Do our actions, do the places we place our money, honor that?

7) Forget About Immigrants.We three kings from orient are. Beside sounding like Yoda wrote a Christmas carol, there are a number of things messed up about that line. We don't actually know how many there were. They were magi, not kings. We also do not know where they were really from other than “from the East.” What we do know is they were foreigners and their revelation of the real king's plans to kill all newborn boys to put an end to Jesus turned Jesus' family into immigrants in Egypt. Our Christmas story is replete with images of people journeying to new lands. Christmas should cause Christians to recommit to embracing immigrants.

6) Miss The Message About Resisting Abusive Power.Mary and Joseph and their family had to flee their homeland because King Herod strong-handedly used his power to squash out what he saw as a threat to his power. I can guarantee you two things; One, in the house where Jesus grew up, the narrative of why they had to flee to Egypt and of the senseless deaths imposed on other families by the powerful was a story that was told time and time again. Two, the focus on abuse of power in Jesus' teaching and his constant willingness to confront it was no accident. Christmas should cause Christians to recommit to confronting those who abuse power.

5) Forget Those Without Presents.If you have two coats give one away. In announcing the coming of Jesus, John the Baptist told us what God was asking of us. Coats were just an example – a place holder if you will. If you have two Christmas presents give one away.

4) Insist Your Religious Celebration Rule Them All.This time of year far too many Christians remind me of Gollum and his Precious. (A LoTR shout out in a Christian Christmas post! C'mon Peter Jackson, give me some promo love!) One holiday to rule them all: “We nee-eeds it. They stole it from us!” Never mind that Jesus was Jewish or that there is a list of other celebrations that occur this time of year, there's a certain cultural privilege in the air that seems so very un-Christian to me. You can just about bet that the folks calling out for the dominance of Christmas would be singing a new song if Judaism were the dominant religious culture and this time of year radio stations across the land played Chanukah songs. Well,metaphorically they would be singing a new song – maybe a few even literally.

3) Get Mad About “Happy Holidays.”On a related note, you know what “holiday” is short for, right? Holy day. Do you really have a problem with people calling Christmas a holy day?

2) Think That It Is Actually Jesus' Birthday .Um. So... dang, this is hard and I'm really sorry to be the one telling you. Um, let's see. Remember how when you were growing up the Sunday school teacher told you it was Jesus' birthday? Yeah. Well, um... they lied. Yeah. Sorry about that. We don't actually know when Jesus was born. It was probably in the spring or summer because “the shepherds watched their flocks by night” – something which definitely didn't happen in the winter.

1) Confuse The Religious Observance With the Secular Holiday.
It may be that December the 25th was picked as the date to celebrate Jesus' birth to compete with or even to adopt the followers of the pagan celebration of Saturnalia, which included decorating with evergreens, gift giving and parties. (Hmmm, why does that seems so familiar?) I bring this up to make a simple point; A lot of our “War on Christmas” problems would rightfully go away if we simply acknowledged that there are two celebrations of Christmas each year. One is religious and one is not. Most of this article actually points to the issues that happen when we conflate them. So, let's stop doing it.

4 Advent

December 22, 2013

 Isaiah 7.10-16; Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-25

 + 26 years ago years ago today my dear grandmother, Phoebe Olson, died. Now none of you knew her. But she is someone I have referenced before in sermons.She was a very devoutly Lutheran, firm, no nonsense person. And her mother, Mary McFadden Nelson, who died 72 years ago on December 31^st was a not very devout Scots-Irish Congregationalist, who was, as far as I knew, a very kind, though long-suffering woman who died of Parkinson’s Disease in the State Hospital in Jamestown just three weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

 My grandmother and great-grandmother might not be that interesting to you. But I know someone’s great-grandmother who might be interesting to you. Well, to most of you. I don’t think she would be too interesting to our own Thom Marubbio.

 Yes, I am talking Jesus’ great-grandmother.  What? You didn’t know Jesus had a great-grandmother? Of course Jesus had a great-grandmother. And a grandmother too.

 This from a story from a couple of years ago:

 A historian has identified the great-grandmother of Jesus.

According to Florentine medieval manuscripts analyzed by a historian, the great-grandmother of Jesus was a woman named St. Ismeria. St. Ismeria likely served as a role model for older women during the 14th and 15th centuries. The legend of St. Ismeria sheds light on both the Biblical Virgin Mary's family and also on religious and cultural values of 14th-century Florence….

"According to the legend, Ismeria is the daughter of Nabon of the people of Judea, and of the tribe of King David," wrote the historian who found the legend.

She married "Santo Liseo," who is described as "a patriarch of the people of God." The legend continues that the couple had a daughter named Anne who married Joachim [who, of course, are the paretns of the Blessed Virgin Mary—yes, we actually commemorate them in our Episcopal book of saints, Holy Women, Holy Men]. After 12 years, Liseo died. Relatives then left Ismeria penniless.
I enjoy stories like St. Ismeria, mother of St. Anne, mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Yes, I know it’s a fiction.  Yes, I know there is no scriptural basis for any of it.  But, I enjoy it nonetheless.

I love the story of St. Ismeria and the story of Sts. Anne and Joachim  because it’s in our nature as questioning, creative human beings to try to fill in and make sense of this person Jesus and how he has come to us.  It’s part of what it means to be human. And being human is what the Incarnation is all about.

This coming week, like almost no other time in the Church Year, we are forced to take a good, hard long look at what is it we believe regarding this event of the Incarnation—this even in which God—GOD—stops becoming some distant, strange force in our lives, and becomes one of us. God, coming among us in the form of Jesus, in the form of this child, born to the Virgin Mary, suddenly breaks every single barrier we ever thought we had to God.  No longer are there barriers.  No longer is there is a distance.  No longer is there a veil separating us from God.

In Jesus, we find that meeting place between us as humans and God.  God has reached out to us and has touched us not with a finger of fire, not with the divine hand of judgments, but rather with tender, loving touch of a Child.

 This is what Incarnation is all about.

 And because it is, because this event changes everything, because we and our very humanity, our very physical bodies, are redeemed by this event, we want to glorify in it.  We want to make sense of it.  We want to tell stories—sometimes even fictional stories—about how long-ranging and lasting this event is.

 Because Jesus is like us in his humanity, we want relate to him.  We want to say, yes, he had a mother like ours.  And naturally we expand from there.  Yes, he had a grandmother (whether her name was Anne or not).  Yes, he then had a great-grandmother.

 Of course, some of us might think of these things as frivolous.  But, for those us who do find meaning in our own lives when we study things like genealogy, we realize is not frivolous. When we study things like genealogy, we doing more than just studying history and the differing, sometimes very complicated genealogical threads.  When we study genealogy, what we are studying is ourselves.  We are studying who are we and what we are and where we have been.  The blood that flowed in the veins of great-grandparents and grandparents and parents, is the same blood that flows in our veins.  There is a lineage there.

 Our scripture this morning are filled with references to God working through the lineage of David.  In our reading from Isaiah today, we find God speaking through the prophet announcing that, through the lineage of David, Immanuel will come.

 Paul today talks of how God worked through the lineage of David to bring about this revelation of God’s self in human form.  Paul says he is “set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets from David according to the flesh…”

 And in our Gospel reading, the angel calls Joseph, “son of David” and that through this lineage, through this virgin, we have Emmanuel.  We have “God with us.”

 So when we celebrate Mary, when we celebrate Mary’s mother (whoever that might be) and Mary’s mother’s mother, we are celebrating Jesus.

 Today, remembering and praying for my grandmother, I realize that she is a part of me. I am celebrating a part of myself in her and her in me.  

 When we think about Jesus’ lineage, we are attempting to say to ourselves, Yes, this makes Jesus even more like us.  We consider Jesus relatives, the same way we consider those prophets throughout the centuries before Jesus came who foretold Jesus.  All of them, point forward for to Jesus.  All of them point to that point when God and humanity meets. And when we consider these forbearers of Jesus, we realize that this wasn’t some last-minute movement of God’s part.  We realize that God was on the move, priming us and preparing us over centuries for this event.  God was paving the way for Jesus to come to us as one of us.

 That is what the story of Ismeria and Anne and Joachim and the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Josephare all about.  That is also what the Hebrew Bible is about for us Christians.  And that, too is, what this season of Advent is about as well.

 This coming week, we will celebrate an event that is unlike any other event.  It is the even in which God finally break through the barriers and, in doing, destroy those very barriers.  This week we celebrate that cataclysmic event in which heaven and earth are finally merged, in which the veil is torn aside, in which all that we are and all that we long for finally come together.  Nothing will ever be the same as it was before.  And thank God!

 It is an event that transformed us and changed in ways we might not even fully realize or appreciate even at this point. Christmas is almost here.  I don’t think any of us would doubt that.  We see the trees, the lights, the Santas and the reindeer.

 But the real Christmas—that life-altering event in which God took on flesh like our flesh, when God allowed blood like our blood to flow in veins, when a heart like our hearts beat with love and care, is here, about the dawn into our lives.  Truly this is Emmanuel. This is “God with us.”

 God is with us.

 The star that was promised to us, that was prepared for us through generations and generations, through the countless lives of those who went before it, has appeared into the darkest night of our existence is now shining brightly, burning the clouds of doubt and despair away.

 

 

Gaudete Sunday 2013

 

 

 

Here are some photos of Bishop Michael Smith's visit to St. Stephen's yesterday. He confirmed three, received three and we welcomed two new members (our third New Member Sunday of 2013)

Chet Gebert dies

Chet Gebert, who took the photo that graced the cover of my book, Fargo, 1957, died on Saturday. Here's an article about him from today's Fargo Forum.

 

 

Chet Gebert, member of Forum’s Pulitzer-winning team, dies at 86

 

By: Emily Welker, INFORUM

 

FARGO – Even though she knew he’d made it a point to tidy his room in the memory care center at Edgewood Vista, Kim Stephens still found old spiral reporter’s notebooks among her father’s things.

Then again, he might very well have been using them, almost until the very end.

 

“I remember him always having them out – he would always take notes,” she said.

 

Chester “Chet” Gebert, 86, a longtime Forum reporter and photographer, died here Saturday, one of the team that covered the historic 1957 tornado for the paper’s only Pulitzer Prize.

 

Stephens was just a year old the night her father put her, her older sister, Valerie, and her mother in the basement of their home and went out to take pictures of the devastation left by the killer twister.

“My mom wasn’t really pleased about that one,” she chuckles.

 

She also recalls a visit with her father years after he retired from professional writing, on a trip with him to the Hjemkomst Center.

 

Gebert was the Forum reporter who followed the journey of the replica Viking ship, the Hjemkomst, all the way from its genesis in builder Robert Asp’s brain to its eventual entry into the harbor of Bergen, Norway, in July 1982.

 

Stephens had forgotten, until that moment, that her father had been so involved in the ship’s journey, and that of Asp, who died half a year before its Norway voyage.

 

“My dad just had a big heart for people’s dreams,” she said.

 

Among his other stories was that of a chat over breakfast with Gerald Ford, nine years before the then-minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives stepped in to take over running the country from disgraced President Richard Nixon.

 

His fellow reporter Mikkel Pates recalled how Gebert used to give the new reporters his “oddball” tour of the city he loved – including the water treatment plant, the sewage plant and the landfill.

 

“He was somebody who had a great exuberance for being a reporter,” Pates said.

Stephens said her father never stopped having adventures, even after he stopped writing about them for The Forum.

 

He traveled to Australia, New Zealand, China and Mexico with his second wife, Sharon, and throughout the U.S., including Alaska, often in a recreational vehicle the couple owned.

His wide-traveling habits were lifelong ones. Gebert hitchhiked across the U.S. from the East Coast to the West Coast at 17.

 

“My dad was the coolest dad ever. … (To him) everyone has a story and no one was a stranger,” Stephens said.

 

He would often come home from his travels having made a lifelong friend on the other side of the world, she said.

 

But for all his adventures, he never lost sight of the people in his stories who had opened the doors of adventure to him.

 

Throughout his retirement, Pates said, Gebert collected the hundreds of story photos he’d taken and mailed them to the families of the people in the stories, because he knew they would value them.

 

“He would end every conversation with ‘thank you kindly,’ ” said Pates.

 

“Humorous, loving, nonjudgmental … always had a sense of humor,” said Stephens. “He knew he was dying. Someone would come in and he couldn’t sit up. (He) would say, ‘Am I dead yet?’ ”

 

Stephens’ father lost his wife in 2010 and leaves behind Stephens, her older sister and her younger sister, Peggy.

 

Stephens was with him when he died, and said the hardest part was that the old storyteller was having a hard time articulating much.

 

“But he could still say, ‘I love you,’ ” she said, her voice crumbling into tears.

 

The family plans to gather at Hanson-Runsvold Funeral Home on Saturday for what Stephens said would be a celebration of her father’s life – an adventure that she thinks he is probably continuing, wherever he is.

 

“He’s writing a story now, where he is,” she said.

2 Advent

December 8, 2013

Romans 15.4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

+ So, do you want to feel good on this Second Sunday in Advent? I feel this good this morning. I feel really good this morning.

It is my birthday today. I’m 44 years old. I’ve just this past week kicked the diet soda habit. I’ve been ordained for ten years. My twelfth book of poems is due to be published in March.  I am in the end process of finishing a new book—a book of short fiction.  I am very fortunate to be in charge of a rapidly growing and expanding congregation of eclectic, visionary prophets who are leading the way into what the Church of the future will no doubt be. I have a great mother. I have great friends and family and colleagues.

So, I’m feeling very good and very thankful this this morning.

But do you want to feel good this morning? Do you want to remember something that will warm the cockles of your hearts (I don’t know what cockles are or where they are, but it sounds nice to have them warmed).

OK. So, let’s go back. Let’s go back to when we young and innocent. Let’s go back to this time of the year when we were kids. We have just turned on our big 1960s 1970s 1980s console TV.

And what do we see? We see a blizzard, people pushing their cars from snow drifts. We see newspaper headlines coming at us:  COLD WAVE IN 12^TH DAY and FOUL WEATHER MAY POSTPONE CHRISTMAS.

Then we see the credits: RANKIN/BASS PRESENT

There’s Sam the Snowman, voiced by none other than the great Burl Ives, who proceeds to sing the title song.

RUDOLPH THE REDNOSED REINDEER.

You feel pretty good right now don’t you? And no, this is NOT a Christmas sermon. I heard a Christmas sermon last Sunday at the Cathedral on 1 Advent, so I am making clear: this is NOT a Christmas sermon!

Well, this past week I was reminded of this wonderful Christmas tradition after our own James Mackay posted this Facebook update:

As a child, and even today, sometimes, I could identify with the Island of Misfit Toys.

The Island of Misfit Toys is that magical place where all the misfit, slightly off toys went.  A place where the toy train has square wheels on its caboose, or the cowboy who rides an ostrich, or a water  pistol the quirts jelly. I responded to his post with this:

If there was an Episcopal Church on the Island of Misfit Toys, I could be the Priest and you could be the organist. It could be called St. Rudolph's-in-the-Breech. Or the Church of the Holy Fools of Christ.

I think the Island of Misfit Toys is a great analogy of what the Kingdom of God is like. Probably some pop theologian has already made this connection somewhere.  A kingdom built up not of the perfect, the best, the brightest. But a Kingdom built up of Misfits, thought misfits made perfect in the eyes of God.

Well, this morning in our Gospel we are encountering the person who probably could’ve been the Prophet on the Island of Misfit Toys.  Just imagine: St. John the Baptist on the Island of Misfit Toys.  I think he’s actually fit in pretty well, though would scare those poor toys.  He’d really scare poor Charlie-in-the-Box.

In this morning’s Gospel, we are faced with this formidable figure of John the Baptist. There is no getting around him.  There he is—loud and, excuse me for saying, but he sounds a bit crazy to me and I’m sure to a few of the people who heard him.  The impression we get from Matthew is of someone we probably wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.  He comes across to us through the ages as a kind of gnarled mountain man.  He is dirty.  He is not very well mannered.  He is shouting strange words and prophecies. He is frightening.  I would probably guess his hygiene wasn’t that great.  And, no doubt, he may have smelled.

Certainly it would be difficult for any of us to take the words of a man like this seriously.  Especially when he’s saying things like, “prepare, for the Kingdom of heaven draws near” “the axe is being laid to the root of the trees” and “the chaff will be burned in an unquenchable fire. “

Somehow, in the way John the Baptist proclaims it, this is not so much hopeful as frightening.  It is a message that startles us and jolts us at our very core. But this is the true message of Advent.

Like John the Baptist and those who eagerly awaited the Messiah, this time of waiting—this time of hope—can be almost painful. When we look at it from that perspective, we see that maybe John isn’t being quite as difficult and windy as we initially thought. Rather his message is one of almost excruciating expectation and hope.

Hope.

It’s something we all feel occasionally, but it’s something we very rarely ever discuss or personally examine.

Hope.

What is hope in our lives?  What do we honestly hope for?  Or do we?  Do we hope anymore?

I think we do.  I hope we still hope. I don’t know if we necessarily name it as hope.  I don’t know if we articulate it as such.  But I think we all live with a certain hope.  Because when we think for one moment about having no hope, everything suddenly seems bleak and horrendous.

Now to put it in its proper context, maybe the only thing we hope in anymore is God.  Of course, if that’s all we hope in, I think we’re doing pretty well.  But even then, I don’t think we ever really think about the hope we might feel. Hope for us, as Christians, is a matter of confidence.  It is a matter of believing that no matter how fractured and crazy this life gets, there is the promise of newness and fullness to this life.  And, as this season of Advent promises us, it is also a matter of waiting for Christ to come in glory.

Like John, we are waiting in joyful hope for our God to come to us, to appear to us as one of us in Jesus.  As we know, waiting, even in hope, can be excruciating.  It can be more difficult than anything we can possibly imagine.

So, what do we, as Christians, do with this hopeful waiting?  This season of Advent offers us a time to slow down a bit spiritually and to look long and hard at our lives as hopeful Christians.  It is a time for us to prepare for God’s coming to us.  It is a time for us to shed some of those things that separate us from God.  It is a time for us to find a place in ourselves, if no where else, in which we can go off and be alone with God.  A place in which we can wait for God longingly.

In Advent we can fully express our hope.  Because, we are hoping.  We are looking longingly for God to come to us.  So, yes, John’s message in the wilderness is a frightening one at times.  It is frightening because the Light he is telling us is coming to us can be frightening, especially when we’re used to the darkness.

But it is also a message of hope and longing.  It is a message meant to wake us from our slumbering complacency.  His is a voice calling us to sit up and take notice.

The kingdom of heaven is near.  That Kingdom of people like us here at St. Stephen’s, misfits, people on the fringe, people who swim against the stream, people who step outside the expected boundaries of the world a bit.  That Kingdom is near.  In fact it’s nearer than we can probably ever hope or imagine.

So, let us be prepared.  Let us watch.  Let us wait.  Most importantly, let us hope.  For this anticipation—this wonderful and beautiful hope—is merely a pathway on which the Christ Child can come to us here in our darkness and appear before us as one of us.

1 Advent

December 1, 2013

Romans13.11-14

+ You may notice that I am a bit…well, a bit “off,” shall we say? OK. More “off” than usual. The reason for my being off has nothing to do with the fact that I just got here after doing a baptism this morning at Gethsemane Cathedral. My reason for being off this morning is because I am going through major withdrawal.

No, not withdrawal from alcohol or drugs. Well, unless you consider aspartame a drug (which some people do, I suppose).

I am now four days into withdrawal from Diet Coke. For anyone who has ever been around me for any period of time, you know of my horrible addiction to Diet Coke. It was pretty awful.  Well, after reading some interesting things about diet soda, and as part of my attempt to live a healthier vegetarian lifestyle, I decided to give it up on Wednesday. As in cold turkey. And, let me tell you, it has been rough. Very rough.

I have been drinking Diet Coke at least since I was sixteen years old. To be honest, I drank soda ever since I can remember. And not just a little here and little there. I drank a lot of it. In these last twenty or so years, we’re talking at least three every day. Usually more. Certainly much more these past three or four years. Not pleasant to give up an addiction that strong.

And if anybody thinks it is not an addiction—I stand here before you as living proof, that yes, it is an addiction. What’s been sobering for me about it all has been the fact that Diet Coke, until very recently, seemed so innocuous.  It was DIET Coke, as opposed to sugary regular Coke. What harm could it do? What harm could it do, indeed?

But luckily, whenever I decide to do something like this—you know, like being a vegetarian or anything else like this—I really do it. I don’t cheat. I don’t sneak it. If I say I’m off it, I’m off it. No weaning. No gradual reduction. I am done.

So, pray for me. Please. It’s not been easy.  And I imagine it won’t be any time soon.

For some reason, our scripture reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans this morning reminds me so much of this withdrawal I’m going through.  We find Paul saying to us: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.”

I get that this morning. And so do any of us who have overcome something pretty major in our lives. For me, that realization that this seemingly innocuous drink that was so much a part of my life for so long wasn’t so innocent. Rather, it was quite bad for me. Let tell you, echoing Paul, I know what time it was. It is definitely the moment for me to wake from sleep.

Just a bit later Paul gives us that wonderful image, “…the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light…”

Again, a great image in my current situation, and for any of us who are survivors, who have overcomes obstacles.

But on this First Sunday of Advent—the beginning of the Church Year—there is no better image for us that this. This season of Advent is all about realizing that we, for the most part, are living in that hazy world.  Advent is all about realizing that we are living in that sleepy, fuzzy, half-world.  Advent is all about recognizing that we must put aside darkness—spiritual darkness, intellectual darkness, personal darkness, addictions, anything that separates us from God and the health God intends for us—and put on light.  For us, this Advent season is a time for us to look into that place—that future—that’s kind of out of focus, and to focus ourselves again.

I love the image that Paul puts forth this morning of “putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

That is perfect and precisely to the point of what this Advent season is all about.  Our job during Advent season is to “put on” the Lord Jesus. The “theme” of every Advent season is “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”  And, in a sense, we make that prayer a reality when we “put on” Jesus.

But how do we do this?  How do we put on Jesus, as though he were some sweatshirt or fancy vestment? The fact is, we have already put him on.  We put him on that wonderful day we were baptized.  Madeline Elizabeth Alsop, the baby I baptized this morning at Gethsemane Cathedral, put him on this morning.  We were clothed in Jesus on that day and we remained clothed in him to this day.

Still, even clothed in Jesus as we may be, we still occasionally fail to recognize this reality in our lives.  This moment of spiritual agitation and seeking after something more has been called the “Advent situation” by the great Anglican theologian Reginald Fuller. The “Advent situation” is recognizing the reality of our present situation.  We are living now—in this present moment.

At times this present moment does seem almost surreal. This moment is defined by the trials and frustration and tedium as well as the joys and all the other range of emotions and feelings that living entails. But, for the most part, we don’t feel like it “fits” for some reason.  It seems like there must be more than just this.  Instinctively, spiritually, we yearn for something more, though we aren’t certain exactly what that might be.  And that might possibly be the worst part of this situation.

We don’t know what it is we want.  The Advent situation of Reginald Fuller reminds us that yes, this is the reality.  Yes, we are here. But we are conditioned by (and for) what comes after this—the age to come.

A few months I ago I shared with you this quote from the great Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said, “We are not physical beings having spiritual experiences; we are spirits having a physical experience.”

Baptism—that physical event in which we were spiritually clothed with Christ, in which we “took on” the Lord Jesus—essentially translates us into this Advent situation.  And the Baptismal life—a life in which we are constantly reminded that we are clothed with Jesus—is one in which we realize that are constantly striving through this physical experience toward our ultimate fulfillment. We are spirits having this physical experience.  It is a wonderful experience, despite all the heartache, despite all the pains, despite all the set-backs and frustrations.  Despite the physical and sometimes spiritual withdrawal we occasionally go through from things we once enjoyed so much, but which were ultimately not good for us.

And this physical experience is making our spirits stronger.  It is sharpening our vision as we proceed so that we can see clearly what was once out of focus. In this Advent season, in which we are in that transparent, glass-like world, trying to break out, let us turn and look and see who it is there in the future.  Let us look and see that that person who is standing there, the one we have been looking for all along.  That person is the person we have been searching for all along.  That person is, in fact, the very person we have clothed ourselves with, but have been unable to recognize.

Advent is here.  Night is nearly over.  Day is about dawn.  He whom we are longing for and searching for is just within reach.  Our response to this Advent situation is simply a furtive cry in this blue season.

Come quickly, we are crying.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.