December 20, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year B
Micah 5:2-5a, Canticle 15, Hebrews 10:5-10, Luke 1:39-55
God is a marginal character.
God likes to operate on the margins, on the edges.
God operates on the margins because it is where we are able to be most aware of God’s presence. As conscious beings we are mostly caught up in the center of our world or the world created by human beings.
The margins are places of change, of transition, of transformation. Prayer is a marginal place; we pray far less of the time than we work or sleep or eat or play. Worship is a marginal place. We worship far less than we work or sleep or eat or play. Dawn, dusk, oceans, mountains, rivers, islands, and deserts are all marginal places deeply associated with union and encounter with the divine. Transitions such as birth, and death are marginal moments. Margins are places of openness and connection. Margins are places where human power, pride and delusions of self-sufficiency are exposed as the folly and hubris they are. Margins are places where redemption happens, deeper awareness begins, and the kingdom of God can begin to be born into the world.
Social margins, I would suggest, follow the same pattern. It is those on the fringes-- the poor, the outcast, those without social power due to gender or race or other quantifiers—that so often have the most illumination to bring to social ills and injustice, to the dangers of human power. Those without worldly power are uniquely able to be divine catalysts. Being in positions of worldly power or ones benefiting from it make it hard to stand back and work to challenge and change it. Yet many do for they have grasped this essential tenet of the Good News. This is the one of the deep and difficult revelations of the Gospel; it is one of the deep and difficult understandings of orthodox Christianity as revealed in the story of God in Jesus: letting go of power, living a life of love on the margins, trusting that on the edges is where God is going to begin again and again the coming of the kingdom of heaven.
Where does this idea come from? The cross most certainly and the life of Jesus most definitely. But the idea is understood from the very start of the story of Jesus. The stories of the births of Jesus and John came later in the life of the early Church, yet the idea of margins and power revealed in the resurrection was woven into these genesis tales. Unless we grasp this from the very start, Christian faith as lived easily becomes another version of worldly power being divinely sanctioned. It easily becomes a civic religion rather than a holy one.
Enter Elizabeth and Mary. I must confess that these stories make my woman’s heart joyful. Sorry, gents, but your off-stage in this one! For nearly the entire first chapter of Luke the main characters are women. In fact, for most of the chapter they are the main actors, the main speakers. Zechariah is struck dumb by God’s angel for not believing that Elizabeth will conceive. God dramatically silences the social voice of power—that of the male—in pretty stunning fashion. Zechariah comes out of the temple not sharing his vision, but unable to speak. We must look elsewhere for where God is going to tell us what the divine plan is. In time Elizabeth indeed becomes pregnant with a child that will be a prophet for the people.
Then the action moves to Mary. The angel tells her she will conceive a child by the power of God before her marriage and that he is to be a savior. In this incredible place on the edge of human experience she says yes to God’s outrageous plan. Unlike Zechariah, Joseph’s opinion is not even sought. The whole story of God’s plan for salvation in Jesus happens in the margins, starting at his very conception.
Women are the ones, in Luke, who are entrusted through their very femaleness to nurture and bear God and the witness to God into the world. Women too are images of the divine and seen by God as part of the divine drama in primary, not subservient, ways. God is being a radical again! Women were property strictly speaking in those days. Women had virtually no independent power or control of person. They were not public figures. They lived in the margins of a world defined by men. Elizabeth, as the wife of a temple priest, was less marginalized than others, but she was still defined as Zechariah’s wife. Mary was even more the edge: a woman, marrying a craftsman, poorer, and not connected to an institution of social power through her husband-to-be or family. Yet, God says, here is where I am working. Here is where my plan, my salvation begins and lives. In the margins, in these faithful women who can perceive me because they are not living at the center of worldly power. It is not a man in this story that can birth the savior into the world. It is a woman. Pay attention!, God is saying. Do not dismiss the creative, life-giving, God-revealing strength of women and who they are! Revisit the definitions and roles. Not just of women, but of everyone!
These two women are not just faithful, trusting and courageous women who believe and accept God’s audacious plan for them, standing tall among people’s stares and questions and derision. They are filled with the Holy Spirit. They are chosen to have intimate union with God, something primarily heard of in Scripture as happening to men. Mary is overcome with the Holy Spirit. Elizabeth as we hear today is filled with it as is her unborn child.
They are also prophets. Elizabeth understands that her child’s leap isn’t simply a baby’s normal movement or a response to her happy greeting to see her cousin Mary. She interprets its meaning and understands that Mary carries the Messiah. This is what prophets do. She is also a priest for she blesses three times: “Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb…Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.”
Mary, too, is a prophet. She sets out immediately after her encounter with the angel and goes as fast as she can to see Elizabeth. Prophets act with urgency, without delay. Her reply to Elizabeth is a prophetic poem about the way God works, has worked, and will work in the world.
The Magnificat, as it is called, is a glorious summation of salvation history. It speaks that God’s power is not the world’s idea of power. Princes and presidents are brought low and the masses, the humble of the world have a place given to them. The hungry are fed; the proud are unmasked. Mercy is given. All are invited into a new heaven and a new earth and if the invitation is missed you will find your hands holding dust. It is utterly and completely about life here and now in this world. It is about the nature of our communities. This is not only about personal, private piety. This about the dangerous work of building new structures in our lives.
And even more striking is Mary’s bold assertion that this work has already begun. For indeed it has in God’s partnership with her to bear the Christ child. Notice that the verb tenses are not future. It is not God will show strength, or the hungry will be filled. It is already begun. God has done these things and continues to do these things. Which throws us once again back on to the margins. Women are the principal prophets of this new revelation, not men, though their sons, with the participation of women and men, will bring it to pass. God chose a poor unmarried girl not the wife of the local Jerusalem nobility. Herod’s wife, powerful, a princess, was not selected to bear John or Jesus. Mary and Elizabeth have been filled with good things—the Holy Spirit, the children they will bear, the power to bless and to understand God’s activity. All on the margins, all on the fringes. This is where it begins and from where it grows.
For us, we are invited to remember the marginal nature of our confession of Jesus as the Messiah—it’s not a confession of power and way of life as the world generally understands it. We are reminded that we are to live in faith on the edges of the new creation and the margins of this one. We are invited to pay careful attention to the voices and the peoples on the margins of our societies for we are told today quite clearly God is acting here. If we are on the margins we are told that our lives and experiences are places of prophetic action, that we have important, God-filled things to share with the world. The voices of those on the margins matter profoundly to God and are to be heard. We are invited to pay attention to the margins of our own lives for it is there we will certainly encounter God’s activity. The margins are the places where hope and expectation begin to be transformed into something real, perhaps small, perhaps fragile, perhaps the tiniest of movements, but this is how God works.
Can we this Advent say yes again to be a marginal people, who believe the outrageous way God works, who chose to sing Mary’s song, and who accept once again a God that comes to us in the most vulnerable, powerless and beautiful of ways? Will something in us leap when the announcement of the birth happens? Will we believe that in this child and this child’s life lie all the hope that God’s promises will be fulfilled?
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
December 13, 2009, Third Sunday in Advent
December 13, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Garrison Brubaker
Zephaniah 3:14-20, Canticle 9, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18
Third Sunday of Advent, Year B
One of the strongest temptations for those of us who have identified ourselves as Christians for a while or come from a culture or family that considers itself Christian is to believe that we have it mostly together. The temptation is to hear a hard and provocative voice like John’s and think deep down, he’s talking to somebody else. We would already be one of his disciples, not part of that crowd that seems to be gathering around him now that he is becoming popular, that seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of what was at first dismissed. It’s almost as if John had become trendy!
To be honest, John intimidates me. I’m not sure how I would have reacted to him. I know that the Johnes I meet in my life today unnerve me and my first reaction is often to defend myself. I can slip into that false sense of security or self-righteousness that says, but I’m a Christian, I’m a decent person, or as we hear in the story, I’m a child of Abraham. John is hard; he is asking a lot. He is asking us to do soul-searching about what we really are living for. It can feel very negative, this passage. But I think actually it is quite hope-filled. And here is why: I think it and the passage from Zephaniah are about homecoming and coming home.
The word repent comes from a root that means turn around, come back to where you are supposed to be and to whom you are meant to be. It means to tell us that we’ve gotten off track somehow. We’ve gone off on our own way, often dragging our God-talk with us, and have gotten in a mess. The Bible, as it usually is, is speaking in both communal and personal terms. What we do as persons shapes our society and the society we have shapes the persons that are raised within it.
John points out the communal by responding to three groups of people who are power-brokers within the society: the crowd that tends to follow what is the norm of the powers that be, tax collectors and soldiers. Without digressing into a detailed discussion, suffice it to say that these last two in particular were in positions to abuse their power and they did. This is what John is countering. It’s not hard to find contemporary corollaries: the abuse of markets and financial power by firms on Wall Street, banks and others in pursuit of that highly-valued dream of wealth; paramilitaries or occupying soldiers who intimidate populations and who all too often kill or abuse the innocent. John points out the collective problem that needs to be turned away from, but he really gets to the heart of the matter by saying that it is the work of each person. Without our individual change of heart, society will not be able to take another course. It is always about both our selves and our participation in the larger community. And this change of heart is about coming home to God.
Coming home to God is the hope. It is where we can come with all our mistakes and scars and selfishness and hurts and say here it is God; I know it isn’t pretty, but you love me anyway and can use me for your will and to be a bearer of good fruit, your fruit, in this world. God promises in Zephaniah that he will bring us home, that he will gather us together. We will be restored to wholeness. But we must turn towards it or we will continue to miss it. How we respond, for instance, at Copenhagen or not is a very vivid example among many of this call to turn…and our ability to miss it. The turning makes possible the fruit; it isn’t having so many bushels of apples to give to God or so many flats of blueberries that gives us the seal of repentance. Repentance, which is the turning and that coming home to God, happens when we open ourselves to God and the fruits are the next manifestation. It’s not about earning, it’s about turning and trusting the fruits will be there in our hearts and lives. Often that’s the hardest part—trusting, trusting that if we turn or do the hard inner work we will indeed come home to God, to a place of wholeness.
When I was in Seattle I found myself in a dead-end job at a non-profit. I was frustrated because I wanted and could do more, but also was scared to leave since the job had benefits and I’d only been there for about a year. I didn’t want another employer to think I was flaky. Out of the blue I got a call from a company I had come into contact with before in a previous position. While working at a fishing company I had worked with them to arrange bunkering of our vessels while out at sea with fuel. They had an opening, remembered me and my Russian language skills, and offered me a job. At first it seemed like a godsend. The pay was much better and the work was much more challenging. The downside was it was more of a sales position, which didn’t thrill me. But I talked myself into it for ego reasons, for the lure of more financial security (including the most pious rationale of saving money for seminary!), for experience that would make me more marketable, etc.
I started work, and it just felt wrong. I found myself for all the “right” reasons working in a situation that was drawing me away from myself and from what I hoped for the world. I knew how fishing was done in the Russian Far East. I knew that quotas were being ignored, that overfishing was happening at an alarming rate, that the desire for as much profit as possible by large companies, the habit we have of expecting things such as cod to be available all the time and for an affordable price, and desperation for income by fisherman on the edge were all contributing to it. I saw a future that would mean no fish within a few years and all the despair that would come along, but a system that couldn’t adjust. I saw co-workers who were so lured by the idea of bonuses that they never saw their families. All that mattered was the money. I literally started to feel like I was losing my mind. It got so bad that I couldn’t even speak Russian, a language I was quite proficient in at the time. I was getting lost. No one would question my decision to stay for it was a good job, with very good people, at heart providing a necessary service, but something was just off kilter. I realized that I could not stay there and stay sane, stay true to who I was and the hope I had for a world where we could fish and at the same time sustain the seas for the future.
Terrified, I left the job with $3,000 to my name and no employment lined up. Yet as scary as that new situation was, it was different. I had come home to myself. I had listened and trusted that God was inviting me to something else that I wouldn’t find there. I had to make the turn not knowing the future, but believing that it would bring light to my soul and drive out that darkness that was crowding in. John came to me as a voice of breaking apart in the night. John came as nightmares. It was like being in the firestorm though whether of the Holy Spirit or burning chaff I couldn't tell. And John finally came as the courage through the encouragement of a friend to say I will not stay and it will be okay.
This is one story in my life of repenting and being brought home. It deepened my trust in God and in Jesus. It confirmed some of the core ideas of Christianity for me and how I believe we are to live with each other, even if at times following that is costly or out of step with the rhythm of the world around us. I touched again that light of Christ within that could give me a deep peace and sense of God’s presence even in the midst of all the struggle and anxiety. I came home to God that was residing within me, inviting me to a new place of peace and hope and possibility to bear fruits of compassion and justice and service.
For us, the ultimate gathering is being gathered into the Body of Christ. We await his coming again into the world so that we can renew our experience of that coming home, of us coming home to God and God coming home to us. This two-step dance is the pulse of the universe and of the divine. It is there, beckoning us, if we stop and turn and say yes. It is the dance of a lifetime. We always have further to dance, more steps to learn, more joy and light to discover. We are promised that our trust is exactly what opens the door for God to come in. We are asked to trust so that we can be prepared for God to come home and find a welcome, a ripe field full of wheat ready to be shared.
We don’t have to have it all figured out, (who among us does?), or be perfect. We come and turn where we are so that we can begin to go towards where we want to be: ever more true imitators of Jesus in this world as a community, this part of the Church universal, and as persons. God will come; God is coming. Jesus is waiting once again to break into the world with the Good News of the Gospel. It is a never-ending story of hope and love and turning, and we are wanted for this dance. The light that enlightens all people is coming into the world; that is the promise of Advent, the turn God in Jesus is making towards us.
In this season of preparation and turning I think of a priest I knew in New York City. Every Sunday before celebrating communion he would pray that when we received Christ that day he would find our hearts to be a dwelling place prepared for him. I can think of no better prayer and no better hope for us this Advent season. Amen.
The Rev. Natasha Garrison Brubaker
Zephaniah 3:14-20, Canticle 9, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18
Third Sunday of Advent, Year B
One of the strongest temptations for those of us who have identified ourselves as Christians for a while or come from a culture or family that considers itself Christian is to believe that we have it mostly together. The temptation is to hear a hard and provocative voice like John’s and think deep down, he’s talking to somebody else. We would already be one of his disciples, not part of that crowd that seems to be gathering around him now that he is becoming popular, that seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of what was at first dismissed. It’s almost as if John had become trendy!
To be honest, John intimidates me. I’m not sure how I would have reacted to him. I know that the Johnes I meet in my life today unnerve me and my first reaction is often to defend myself. I can slip into that false sense of security or self-righteousness that says, but I’m a Christian, I’m a decent person, or as we hear in the story, I’m a child of Abraham. John is hard; he is asking a lot. He is asking us to do soul-searching about what we really are living for. It can feel very negative, this passage. But I think actually it is quite hope-filled. And here is why: I think it and the passage from Zephaniah are about homecoming and coming home.
The word repent comes from a root that means turn around, come back to where you are supposed to be and to whom you are meant to be. It means to tell us that we’ve gotten off track somehow. We’ve gone off on our own way, often dragging our God-talk with us, and have gotten in a mess. The Bible, as it usually is, is speaking in both communal and personal terms. What we do as persons shapes our society and the society we have shapes the persons that are raised within it.
John points out the communal by responding to three groups of people who are power-brokers within the society: the crowd that tends to follow what is the norm of the powers that be, tax collectors and soldiers. Without digressing into a detailed discussion, suffice it to say that these last two in particular were in positions to abuse their power and they did. This is what John is countering. It’s not hard to find contemporary corollaries: the abuse of markets and financial power by firms on Wall Street, banks and others in pursuit of that highly-valued dream of wealth; paramilitaries or occupying soldiers who intimidate populations and who all too often kill or abuse the innocent. John points out the collective problem that needs to be turned away from, but he really gets to the heart of the matter by saying that it is the work of each person. Without our individual change of heart, society will not be able to take another course. It is always about both our selves and our participation in the larger community. And this change of heart is about coming home to God.
Coming home to God is the hope. It is where we can come with all our mistakes and scars and selfishness and hurts and say here it is God; I know it isn’t pretty, but you love me anyway and can use me for your will and to be a bearer of good fruit, your fruit, in this world. God promises in Zephaniah that he will bring us home, that he will gather us together. We will be restored to wholeness. But we must turn towards it or we will continue to miss it. How we respond, for instance, at Copenhagen or not is a very vivid example among many of this call to turn…and our ability to miss it. The turning makes possible the fruit; it isn’t having so many bushels of apples to give to God or so many flats of blueberries that gives us the seal of repentance. Repentance, which is the turning and that coming home to God, happens when we open ourselves to God and the fruits are the next manifestation. It’s not about earning, it’s about turning and trusting the fruits will be there in our hearts and lives. Often that’s the hardest part—trusting, trusting that if we turn or do the hard inner work we will indeed come home to God, to a place of wholeness.
When I was in Seattle I found myself in a dead-end job at a non-profit. I was frustrated because I wanted and could do more, but also was scared to leave since the job had benefits and I’d only been there for about a year. I didn’t want another employer to think I was flaky. Out of the blue I got a call from a company I had come into contact with before in a previous position. While working at a fishing company I had worked with them to arrange bunkering of our vessels while out at sea with fuel. They had an opening, remembered me and my Russian language skills, and offered me a job. At first it seemed like a godsend. The pay was much better and the work was much more challenging. The downside was it was more of a sales position, which didn’t thrill me. But I talked myself into it for ego reasons, for the lure of more financial security (including the most pious rationale of saving money for seminary!), for experience that would make me more marketable, etc.
I started work, and it just felt wrong. I found myself for all the “right” reasons working in a situation that was drawing me away from myself and from what I hoped for the world. I knew how fishing was done in the Russian Far East. I knew that quotas were being ignored, that overfishing was happening at an alarming rate, that the desire for as much profit as possible by large companies, the habit we have of expecting things such as cod to be available all the time and for an affordable price, and desperation for income by fisherman on the edge were all contributing to it. I saw a future that would mean no fish within a few years and all the despair that would come along, but a system that couldn’t adjust. I saw co-workers who were so lured by the idea of bonuses that they never saw their families. All that mattered was the money. I literally started to feel like I was losing my mind. It got so bad that I couldn’t even speak Russian, a language I was quite proficient in at the time. I was getting lost. No one would question my decision to stay for it was a good job, with very good people, at heart providing a necessary service, but something was just off kilter. I realized that I could not stay there and stay sane, stay true to who I was and the hope I had for a world where we could fish and at the same time sustain the seas for the future.
Terrified, I left the job with $3,000 to my name and no employment lined up. Yet as scary as that new situation was, it was different. I had come home to myself. I had listened and trusted that God was inviting me to something else that I wouldn’t find there. I had to make the turn not knowing the future, but believing that it would bring light to my soul and drive out that darkness that was crowding in. John came to me as a voice of breaking apart in the night. John came as nightmares. It was like being in the firestorm though whether of the Holy Spirit or burning chaff I couldn't tell. And John finally came as the courage through the encouragement of a friend to say I will not stay and it will be okay.
This is one story in my life of repenting and being brought home. It deepened my trust in God and in Jesus. It confirmed some of the core ideas of Christianity for me and how I believe we are to live with each other, even if at times following that is costly or out of step with the rhythm of the world around us. I touched again that light of Christ within that could give me a deep peace and sense of God’s presence even in the midst of all the struggle and anxiety. I came home to God that was residing within me, inviting me to a new place of peace and hope and possibility to bear fruits of compassion and justice and service.
For us, the ultimate gathering is being gathered into the Body of Christ. We await his coming again into the world so that we can renew our experience of that coming home, of us coming home to God and God coming home to us. This two-step dance is the pulse of the universe and of the divine. It is there, beckoning us, if we stop and turn and say yes. It is the dance of a lifetime. We always have further to dance, more steps to learn, more joy and light to discover. We are promised that our trust is exactly what opens the door for God to come in. We are asked to trust so that we can be prepared for God to come home and find a welcome, a ripe field full of wheat ready to be shared.
We don’t have to have it all figured out, (who among us does?), or be perfect. We come and turn where we are so that we can begin to go towards where we want to be: ever more true imitators of Jesus in this world as a community, this part of the Church universal, and as persons. God will come; God is coming. Jesus is waiting once again to break into the world with the Good News of the Gospel. It is a never-ending story of hope and love and turning, and we are wanted for this dance. The light that enlightens all people is coming into the world; that is the promise of Advent, the turn God in Jesus is making towards us.
In this season of preparation and turning I think of a priest I knew in New York City. Every Sunday before celebrating communion he would pray that when we received Christ that day he would find our hearts to be a dwelling place prepared for him. I can think of no better prayer and no better hope for us this Advent season. Amen.
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