3 Advent

Gaudete Sunday

December 17, 2017

Isaiah 61.1-4, 8-11;1 Thes. 5.16-24; John 1.6-8, 19-28

+ Today is, of course, Gaudete Sunday. Or Rose Sunday.  It is always a special Sunday here at St. Stephen’s and for the Church as a whole.  Today is just a bit more special for us here at St. Stephen’s.

Of course, we are dedicating our brand new Sts. Benedict and Scholastica window. I am especially happy about that. Traditionally, on Gaudete Sunday, we light the pink candle on the Advent wreath.

And Gaudete for us at St. Stephen’s always seems to be a special Sunday. It was on Gaudete Sunday two years ago that we as a congregation voted to seek Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight (DEPO), which was a great decision on our part, and very much a part of who we are and what we do here of welcoming all people and accepting all people.

And today, we commemorate our ministry of radical acceptance and welcoming with this

window dedicated to Sts. Benedict and Scholastica. The message emblazoned on the window is:

Welcome all who arrive as Christ

And that is certainly what our ministry of acceptance does.   I think that all ties in so well to what this Sunday represents.

Lighting the pink candle is a sign to us that the shift has happened.  Now there are more candles lit than are unlit on the wreath.  The light has won out and the darkness, we are realizing, is not an eternal darkness.

But most importantly, Gaudete means “rejoice.”  And that is exactly what we should be doing on this Sunday.  We should rejoice in the light that is winning out.  We should rejoice in the fact that darkness has no lasting power over us. We should rejoice in all that God has done for us and continues to do for us in our lives, in our ministries and her particularly at St. Stephen’s.

This Sunday sets a tone different than the one we’ve had so-far in Advent.  We find this word—rejoice—ringing out throughout our scriptural readings today.  It is the theme of the day.  It is the emotion that permeates everything we hear in the Liturgy of the Word on this Sunday.

In our reading from the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah, we hear

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,

my whole being shall exult in my God;

In our Epistle, we find even Paul—who seems a bit, shall we say, dour at times— rejoicing.

“Rejoice always,”

he writes to the church at Thessalonika.

And, although the word “rejoice” cannot be found in our Gospel reading for today, the sentiment is there. John the Baptist, we are told, was not the light, but came to testify to the light—that light being, of course, Jesus. Again, something about which to rejoice.

This emotion of joy is something we oftentimes take for granted.  Let’s face it, joy doesn’t happen often enough in our lives.  It certainly doesn’t happen enough in my life. I wish it did.  It is a rare occurrence for the most part.  And maybe, just maybe,  it should be.  It is certainly not something we want to take for granted.

When joy comes to us, we want to let it flow through us.  We want it to overwhelm us.

But we often don’t think about how essential joy is to us.  Joy is essential to all of us as Christians. It is one of those marks that make us who we are as Christians. Or it should anyway.

We should be joyful. We have a God who loves us, who knows us, who wants the very best for us. We have a God who reaches out to us in the Light of Jesus that we celebrate at this time of the year. That alone is a reason to be joyful.

But, sadly, as we all know, there aren’t always that many joyful Christians.  We have all known those dour-faced Christians, those Christians who are angry or bitter or false.  There are those Christians for whom a smile is a chore.  

That is not what God intends for us.  We all should be joyful Christians.  Should is the word.

Still, as we all know, there are moments.  There are moments when we simply cannot muster joy.  No matter how many parties we might plan or host or go to, no matter how much we try to break the hold the hard, difficult things of life have placed on us, it is hard sometimes to feel joy.  Cultivating joy in the midst of overwhelming sorrow or pain or loneliness or depression can seems overwhelming and impossible.

That’s why joy really is a discipline. When things like sorrow or pain or loneliness or depression descend upon—and they descend upon us all—we need, in those moments, to realize that joy might not be with us in that moment, but—and here’s the important thing—joy always returns.

Joy always returns.

We need to search deep within us for that joy that we have as Christians.  And when we search for it, we will find it, even when life seems so miserable and so overwhelming.  That joy often comes when we put our pains into perspective.  That joy comes when we recognize that these dark moments that happen in our lives are not eternal.

They will not last forever. Darkness never lasts forever.  That, I think, is where we sometimes fail.

When we are in the midst of those negative emotions in our lives, we often feel as though they will never end.  We often feel as though we will always be lonely, we always be sad, we will always mourn. As Christians, we can’t allow ourselves to be boxed in by despair.  As followers of Jesus, we are forced, again and again, to look at the larger picture—at God’s larger picture.   We are forced to see that joy is always there, just beyond our grasp, awaiting us.

Joy is there when we realize that in the midst of our darkness, there is always light just beyond our reach.  And when it comes back into our lives, it truly is wonderful…  Because that is what God wants for us.

Joy not always something one is able to identify in a person.  Joy doesn’t mean walking around smiling all the time.  It doesn’t mean that we have force ourselves to be happy at all times in the face of every bad thing.  If we do that, joy becomes false and forced.

True joy comes bubbling up from within us.  It is a true grace. Remember last week when I talked about grace?  Last week, I defined grace in very simple terms:

Grace is a gift we receive from God we neither ask for nor anticipate.

In that way, joy is a gift we are given that we simply don’t ask for.  Rather, it comes from a deep place and it permeates our whole being, no matter what else is going on in our lives or in the world around us.  It is a joy that comes from deep within our very essence—from that place of our true selves.

And, let me tell you from my own experience, joy can still be present in times of mourning, in times of darkness, in times of despair.  It might not be joy at its greatest effect, but there are glimmers of joy even in those dark times.

Advent is, as I said on the first Sunday of Advent, essentially, a penitential season.  It is a time for us to recognize that we are slugging through the muck of our lives—a muck we are at least, in part, responsible for. But Advent is also a time for us to be able to rejoice even in the midst of that muck.  It is a time for us realize that we will not be in that muck forever.  The muck doesn’t win out.

God wins out. God’s light in this world is more powerful than any darkness.  And God’s light always wins out.

As you may know, we are also now past the half-way point of the Jewish season of Chanukah.  During this season, I always like to revisit a very famous photo from the 8th night of Chanukah, 1932 in Kiel, Germany showing a menorah in a window. Across the street we can see the Nazi Party headquarters, from which hangs a Nazi flag with a swastika. It is a powerful photo. But, what some people don’t know is that the photo was taken by Rachel Posner, the wife of Rabbi Akiva Baruch Posner. On the back of the photo, she wrote:  

“Our light will outlast their flag.”

That is true resistance.  That is defiance in the face of what seems to be overwhelming darkness.  And that is our message as well right now, in the Advent (and Chanukah)  season of hope and joy. Our light—God’s light—will outlast whatever darkness we are experiencing right now in our own lives, in our nation  or in the world.

See, even in the face of darkness, we find hope and we can find joy.  The joy we carry deep within is too powerful to die. This powerful joy will win out and outlast any darkness.

So, as we gather together this morning, and as we leave here this morning, let us remember the joy we feel at seeing this pink candle lit.  Let us carry the spirit of this rose-colored Sunday with us.  Yes, I will say it: let us look at life with rose-colored glasses (we can legitimately do that today!) We have made it this far.  The tide has shifted. The light is winning out.  The dawn is about to break upon our long dark night.

As we ponder this, as we meditate on this, as we take this with us in our hearts, let us pay special attention to the emotion this causes within us.  Let us embrace that welling up of joy from deep within.  And let it proclaim with our lips the words we, along the prophet Isaiah, long to say:

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,

my whole being shall exult in my God!

The moon

2 Advent

"John the Baptist" by Thomas Merton, who died on this day,
Dec. 10,  1968

December 10, 2017

Isaiah 40.1-11; Mark 1.1-8

+ When I was a kid, my beloved aunt was a member of the First Assemblies of God. The First Assemblies, for those of you who might not know, is very different than the Episcopal Church. It’s very Evangelical.

But occasionally, I would find these terrible little cartoon tracts at her church when I went with her, little booklets put out by an evangelist by the name of Jack Chick. Jack Chick was the perfect example of a Christian hatemonger.  He hated everyone who didn’t accept Jesus Christ as his or her personal Lord and Savior.  Everyone was going to hell except those who had made one simple confession of faith.

All one had to do to gain heaven and glorious eternity, according to Jack Chick, was make this simple statement: I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.  The rest of us, who didn’t make this statement, were in deep trouble.

Catholics, for example, were going to hell because they were being led astray by the Pope, whom Jack Chick saw as the Antichrist on earth.

For example he blamed Catholics even for the Assassinations of Abraham Lincoln (he said that was John Wilkes Booth was a Jesuit priest—I guess he never knew that Booth was in fact an Episcopalian).

Protestants that belonged to churches other than “Bible-believing,” “Holy spirit-inspired” churches—the Episcopal Church was lumped into this group—were going to hell because they were being led stray by liberal Bible Scholars who polluted the scriptures with false interpretations.

The only interpretation to follow, Jack Chick said, was the KJV and none other.  It truly was the inspired and unerring Word of God.

Now, as you know, I LOVE the KJV. I think it is one of the most beautiful translations of scripture. But it’s not perfect, and it’s not without error.

He also believed that there were Satanists everywhere, seeking to destroy true Christians.  They were in our schools, they were in our seminaries, they were even in the White House.

But for the most part, these awful little books would tell the story of some person or another who led a destitute life and who had died without accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. Of course, they ended up in hell—usually pictured as a cavernous place full of fire and disgusting devils.

The moral of these stories revolved around the main character crying out in anguish: 

“If only I had accepted Jesus as my Personal Lord and Savior, I wouldn’t be here.”

At the time, as a teenager, these stories made sense to me. It was simple.  Christ should turn his back on those who didn’t accept him. I would turn my back on those who would not accept me. And there should be a place where we had to pay for the wrongs we did. We simply can’t sin and expect not to pay for it in some way, right?

But as I grew older, as I grew into my relationship with Christ and as I started to look long and hard at everything I had believed up to that point, I realized there was one thing Jack Chick and all those people who believed that way missed. It was one simple little word:

Grace.

Now, my very simplistic definition of grace is this: Grace is a gift we receive from God that we neither ask for nor necessarily deserve.

In the Gospel we heard this morning, we hear the echoing words of John the Baptist.

The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me;

He is that lone voice calling to us in the wilderness. It is a voice of hope. It is a voice of substance. It is a voice of salvation.

More importantly, John’s message is a message of Grace.

This powerful One is coming! There’s no avoiding it.  God is coming to us. This is the ultimate grace in a very real sense. Although we have been hoping for God to come to us and save us, it is not something that we have necessarily asked for or deserve.

God comes to us in God’s own time.

It is this one fact—grace—that makes all the difference in the world. It is what makes the difference between eternal life and eternal damnation.

Jack Chick and those who believe like him are very quick to say that there is an eternal hell.  And if you’re not right with God, they say, that’s exactly where you’re going.

The fault in this message is simple: none of us are right with God.  As long as we are on this side of the veil, so to speak, we fall short of what God wants for us. We have all sinned and we will all sin again.  That’s the fact.

But that’s where grace comes in.   Grace is, excuse my language, the trump card. Grace sets us free. Grace involves one simple little fact that so many Christians seem to overlook. And this is the biggest realization for me as a Christian:

Just because one doesn’t accept Christ doesn’t mean that Christ doesn’t accept us.

Christ accepts us.  Plain and simple.  Even if we turn our backs on Christ.  Even if we do everything in our limited powers to separate ourselves from Christ, the fact of the matter is that nothing can separates from Christ.  Christ accepts every single person—no matter what we believe, or don’t believe, no matter if Christ is some abstract concept to us or a close, personal friend.

That’s right, I did say “personal.”  Because, yes, it’s wonderful and beautiful to have a personal relationship with Christ.  Our personal relationship with God is essential to our faith, as you have heard me say many, many times.

But the fact is, Christ isn’t the personal savior to any one of us in this place.  He saves all of us, equally.

That is grace. That is how much God loves us.

Now, I have preached this message my entire adult life as a Christian, and certainly as priest. And, as you can imagine, there have been, shall we say, a few critics. And some of these critics—actually quite a few of these critics—have been quite vocal.

In fact, I once preached this very same message one evening not long after I was ordained to the priesthood in a very diverse venue of     what I thought were somewhat progressive Lutherans. Later, I learned, I was essentially blackballed from that venue for that sermon.

I also preached it once at another congregation, at which I was a guest. After I preached it, the presider at the service actually got up and “corrected” my sermon in front of everybody.

Critics of this message say that what I am talking about is cheap grace.

Cheap grace?

No, I counter. And I still counter! Again and again.

No, not cheap grace.  It’s actually quite expensive grace. It was grace bought at quite a price.

And no, I’m not being naïve or fluffy here.   Trust me, I have known some truly despicable people in my life.  I have been hurt by some of these people and I have seen others hurt by these people. The world is full of people who are awful and terrible.  Some of them are running for office in Alabama, for example. And sometimes the most awful and terrible person we know is the one staring back at us in our own mirrors.

But the fact is, that even when we can’t love them or ourselves, when we can’t do anything else but feel anger and hatred toward them, Christ does love them.  

Christ accepts them, just as Christ accepts each of us. Christ doesn’t necessarily accept their actions. Christ doesn’t accept their sins, or their failings, or their blatant embrace of what is wrong.

But, not even their despicable nature can separate them from Christ’s love.  

Nothing can separate us from Christ’s love and from Christ’s promise to eternal life.  That is how God works in this world. That is why God sent Christ to us.

I believe in that image we hear from our reading from the prophecies of Isaiah today:

[God] will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms,

and carry them in his bosom,

We will be gathered up by our God, and we will be carried into our God’s bosom. I love that image! Because it conveys God’s true and abiding love for us.  It’s a hard concept for those us who were taught otherwise.  It was a hard concept for me, who read those Jack Chick tracts, to accept.

But I do believe it.  I believe it because of the personal relationship I have with Christ.  The Christ I have come to know and to love and to serve is simply that full of love.

So, do I believe we’re all going to heaven when we die? I don’t know. It’s not up to me.  But I sure hope so.  And I lean toward the direction of “yes,” we do all get to go.

Why?

Because, the love of Christ is just that big.  It is just that wonderful and just that all-encompassing. It is just that powerful.  If one person is in some metaphysical, eternal hell for being a despicable person, then, you know what?  the love of Christ has failed.  Something has, in fact, come between that person and Christ. I do not believe that hell or Satan or sin or anything else is big enough to separate us fully and completely from Christ.  Not even we, ourselves, can turn our backs on Christ because wherever we turn, Christ is there for us.

So, listen.  In this Advent season of hope,  John’s voice is calling to us from the wilderness.  He is saying,

Christ is near.

Christ is coming to us.

Let us go out, in grace, to meet him!

Come, Lord Jesus!

I Advent

December 3, 2017

1 Corinthians 1.3-9; Mark 13.24-37

+ In case you haven’t noticed, it is the first Sunday of Advent. It is a beautiful time in the Church, and here at St. Stephen’s. This morning, we have the beautiful Sarum blue frontal on the altar made by Gin Templeton.  I get to wear the beautiful blue vestments.  We have the first candle lit on the Advent wreath.

It is a time in which we, as the Church, turn our attention, just like the rest of the world, toward Christmas.

But…we need to be clear: it is not Christmas yet for us Christians. Christmas starts on Christmas eve, on the evening of December 24.

For now, we are in this almost limbo-like season of Advent.  All the major Church feast days—namely Christmas and Easter—are preceded by a time of preparation.

Before Easter, we go through the season of Lent—a time for us to collect our thoughts, prepare spiritually for the glorious mystery of the Resurrection.

Advent of course is similar.  We go through Advent as a way of preparing, spiritually,  for Christmas, for the birth of Jesus.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that Advent is as much of a penitential time—a time in which we should spend time fasting and pondering about our place in life—as Lent is, to some extent.

In this way, I think the Church year reflects our own lives in many ways.  In our lives, we go through periods of fasting and feasting.  We have our lean times and we have our prosperous times.

And with the latest Tax Bill just passed by Congress on Saturday morning, it looks there are lean times coming for many people.  An aside about this Tax Bill: this is one of the most un-Christians I have seen recently by our government (and there have been a lot in this past year). It is absolutely appalling.  

But, my hope is that it will all somehow balance out in the end.  Because there is a balance to our lives in the world and there is a balance, as well, to our church lives.  We will feast—as we do on Christmas and on Easter—but first we must fast, as we do during Advent and Lent.

Do you ever notice how, when you know you’re going out to eat with friends at a nice restaurant, you cut back on your food during the day?  You maybe eat a little less at breakfast and only a very light lunch.  Or if you’re like me, you just don’t eat at all.  You avoid snacking between meals, just so you can truly enjoy the supper that night (even if you are a bit lightheaded) .

That is what Advent is like. We know this joyous event is coming, but to truly enjoy it, we need to hold back a bit now.  

Advent then is also a time of deep anticipation.  And in that way, I think is represents our own spiritual lives in a way other times of the church year don’t.  We are, after all, a people anticipating something.

Something.

But what?

Well, our scriptures give us a clue. But what they talk about isn’t something that we should necessarily welcome with joy.

In our reading from Isaiah this morning, we find the prophet saying to God,

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence--

as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil--

to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

That doesn’t sound like a pleasant day to be anticipating. Even Jesus, echoing Isaiah, says in our Gospel reading:  In those days,

the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,

and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. 

Well, that’s maybe a bit better, but it’s still pretty foreboding.

However, it doesn’t need to be all that foreboding.  Essentially, all of this is talk about “the day of the Lord” or the day when the Son of Man will come in the clouds” is really  all about waiting for God, or for God’s Messiah.

It is all about God breaking through to us.

That is what Advent (and Christmas) is all about.

God breaking through to us.

God coming to us where are we are.

God cutting through the darkness of our lives, with a glorious light.

For the Jews before Jesus’ time, waiting like we are, for the Messiah, they had specific ideas of what this Messiah would do. Oppressed as they were by a foreign government—the Romans—with an even more foreign religion—paganism—, they expected someone to come to them and take up a sword. This Messiah would drive away these foreign influences and allow them, as a people, to rise up and gain their rightful place. And for those hearing the prophet Isaiah, the God who came in glory on that day would strike down the sinful, but also raise up those who were sorry.

The fact is, as we all know by now,  God doesn’t work according to our human plans.

God isn’t Santa Claus.

We can’t control God or make God do what we want.

And if we try, let me tell you, we will be deeply disappointed.

The Messiah that came to the people of Jesus’ day—and to us—was no solider.  There was no sword in Jesus’ hand. The “Son of Man” that came to them—and to us--was a baby, a child who was destined to suffer, just as we suffer to some extent, and to die, as we all must die.

But, what we are reminded of is that Jesus will come again.

It is about what happened then, and what will happen. This time of Advent is a time of attentiveness to the past, the present, and the future.

Attentiveness is the key word.

 Actually, in our Gospel reading for today, we get a different way of stating it.  We get a kind of verbal alarm clock.  And we hear it in two different ways:

“Keep alert.”

“Keep awake.”

Jesus says it just those two ways in our reading from Mark: It seems simple enough.

“Keep alert” and “keep awake.”

Or to put it more bluntly, “Wake up!”

But is it that simple?

Our job as Christians is sometimes no more than this.  It is simply a matter of staying awake, of being attentive, of being alert, of not being lazy.  Our lives as Christians are sometimes simply responses to being spiritually alert.  

For those of us who are tired, who are worn down by life, who spiritually or emotionally fatigued, our sluggishness sometimes manifests itself in our spiritual life and in our relationship with others.  When we become impatient in our watching, we sometimes forget what it is we are watching for.  We sometimes, in fatigue, fail to see.

For us, that “something” that we are waiting for, that we are keeping alert for, is none other than that glorious “day of our Lord Jesus Christ,” that we hear St. Paul talk about in his epistle this morning.  That glorious day of God breaking through to us comes when, in our attentiveness, we see the rays of the light breaking through to us in our tiredness and in our fatigue.

It breaks through to us in various ways.  We, who are in this sometimes foggy present moment, peering forward, sometimes have this moments of wonderful spiritual clarity. Those moments are truly being alert—of being spiritually awake.  Sometimes we have it right here, in church, when we gather together.

I have shared with each of you at times when those moments sometimes come to me. There are those moments when we can say, without a doubt: Yes, God exists!

But, more than that. It is the moments when we say, God is real.

God is near.

God knows me.

God loves me.

And, in that wonderful moment, in that holy moment, the world about us blossoms!

This is what it means to be awake, to not be lazy.

See, the day the prophet talks about as a day of fear and trembling is only a day of fear and trembling if we aren’t awake. For those of us who are awake, who truly see with our spiritual eyes, it is a glorious day. For us, we see that God is our Parent. Or as Isaiah says,

 O Lord, you are our Father;

We are God’s fully loved and fully accepted children.  And then Isaiah goes on to say that

we are the clay, and you are our potter; 
we are all the work of your hand.

Certainly, in a very real sense, today—this First Sunday of Advent— is a day in which we realize this fact.

Advent is a time for us to allow God to form us and make us in God’s image. It is a time for us to maybe be kneaded and squeezed, but, through it all, we are being formed into something beautiful.

The rays of that glorious day when God breaks through to us is truly a glorious day!

In this beautiful Sarum blue Advent season, we are reminded that the day of God’s reaching out to us is truly about dawn upon us.  The rays of the bright sun-lit dawn are already starting to lighten the darkness of our lives.  We realize, in this moment, that, despite all that has happened, despite the disappointments, despite the losses, despite the pain each of us has had to bear, the ray of that glorious Light breaks through to us in that darkness and somehow, makes it all better.

But this is doesn’t happen in an instant.  Our job as Christians is somewhat basic.  I’m not saying it’s easy.  But I am saying that it is basic.

Our job, as Christians, especially in this Advent time, is to be alert.

To be awake.

Spiritually and emotionally.

And, in being alert, we must see clearly.

We cannot, when that Day of Christ dawns, be found to lazy and sloughing.

Rather, when that Day of our Lord Jesus dawns, we should greet it joyfully, with bright eyes and a clear mind.  We should run toward that dawn as we never have before in our lives.  We should let the joy within us—the joy we have hid, we have tried to kill—the joy we have not allowed ourselves to feel—come pouring forth on that glorious day.

And in that moment, all those miserable things we have been dealt—all that loss, all that failure, all that unfairness—will dissipate like a bad dream on awakening.

“Keep alert,” Jesus says to us.

“Keep awake.”

It’s almost time.  Keep awake because that “something” you have been longing for all your spiritual life is about to happen.  It is about to break through into our lives.  

And it is going to be glorious.

The cover of the new book of poems!

Here’s the cover of my next (lucky #13) full-length book of poems, ONLY THEN, which will be published in January 2018 by Pilgrim Soul Press, featuring this wonderful painting by Gin Templton.