December 23, 2012, The 4th Sunday of Advent

December 23, 2012, Year C, The 4th Sunday of Advent

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “My soul doth magnify the Lord!”  “My soul magnifies the Lord!”  “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…”

          Christmas is right here, a rising glimmer on the horizon.  Christmas trees stand in most of our homes draped in all forms of family tradition; glowing, beautiful.  Wreathes greet us on doors everywhere we go, what a welcome; rich, living fragrant greens at the precise moment we are furthest from the sun.  We have bushels of greens to deck these halls with after Mass for the big day tomorrow.  I was here late on Thursday night and I paused looking East towards the ridge.  Beautiful. The twinkling lights, wood smoke on the air.  I stood out on the porch, bundled up, warm and cozy on a drizzly Oregon Solstice eve. The words of today’s closing hymn have been bubbling in me this past week. “Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, God of glory, Lord of love;/Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee, opening to the sun above.”  Beautiful.  It doesn’t get much better than that.  The English language shines this time of year. “My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior…”  “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.  And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?”  Hail Mary, thou art full of grace without a doubt.  Beautiful. 

          By beautiful I am mean beautiful in the way Plato talks about beauty, the way St. Thomas talks about beauty, a statement of pure perfection that reflects an actuality about the nature of things, or as Thomas would say, God.  We don’t do that much, describe God, because the act of even describing God domesticates, limits, shackles God to humanly graspable proportions.  But beauty, true, graceful, elegant, serendipitous and utter beauty is self-evident.  It, like God, just is, so the great doctors of the church tell us that yes, God is beautiful.  “All thy works with joy surround Thee earth and heaven reflect Thy rays, Stars and angels sing around Thee, center of the Trinity.”  This song carries us God-ward in its sheer joyous beauty.  This season, this annual journey towards the Christ event, our Holy remembrance of the coming of the Lord, the Word made flesh, is all about beauty, all about a beautiful, precious light coming into a darkened world, As St. John reveals to us, “A light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”     

          There is a lot of darkness, though.  This week I found myself vacillating between tears of many colors.  I teared up in joy in the beauty of the words of “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.” Dave Fenton sent me a viral video of a flash mob in a mall singing this hymn.  I usually hate stuff like that, but this one saved my week.  I shed tears of being overwhelmed by God in the words of the King James Bible placed in the mouth of a child, Linus, who explained the true meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown, saying, “Fear not: for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” At this, Hannah Maeve leaned over and excitedly said, “He got it right!”  And we all shed tears, too many tears, or maybe not enough tears as funerals radiated out from Newtown.  There were five on Friday.  Darkness.  Horror and deep darkness. 

          This is a dark season, winter, truly dark, which is precisely why our European spiritual ancestors celebrated the good news of the Nativity of our Lord at the solstice.  With bright candles and tenacious greens daring to live while everything else is dead or dormant reminds us that a light does shine in the darkness and the darkness, no matter how inky, how vast, how impenetrable it seems will not overcome it.

          While the light shines, it does not make everything OK.  It can not explain tragedy.  God doesn’t offer explanations and nor can we. Nor in and of itself can this Light, God, relieve suffering.  There is no comfort for those who grieve intimately in the community of Newtown, nor us who grieve from afar.  The only consolation in the face of unmitigated horror is that God is with us, everyone, God’s arms are open, God sheds tears with and for the dead, the grieving, the angry, the guilty.  God in Jesus Christ knows fully the suffering of the world, and with us, God’s heart breaks, too. 

          God offers no easy solutions, ours is not a vengeful god.  Our God offers only the hard pills of empathy and forgiveness that are difficult to choke down with a throat so full of grief, but that is the Christian way, or it is supposed to be.  Our God, the mighty counselor, Prince of Peace entered this world in the city of David, not Jerusalem, the city of King David whose line Christ was heralded to restore, but in Bethlehem, the city of an anonymous David, an illiterate shepherd boy turned warlord of dubious character.  Jesus Christ, the beloved of God was not born to a princess which would be befitting the King of Kings, but to a 13 or 14 year old peasant girl who probably could have been stoned to death for adultery, obviously apparent in her pregnancy before her betrothal to a man likely twice her age.  Only the graciousness of Joseph prevented this fate. The paradox of Christianity also leads us to the abomination of the Cross which leads to the glory of the resurrection, though of course Cross-like suffering is not reserved for Christ, as the murders last week makes obvious.

          Abominations, darkness, horrendous evil and tragedy are not preludes to Gods favor.  Someone dies and the comforting words offered are, “Oh, she’s in a better place now.”  That is a load of horsecocky but from a bull.  A clergyman prayed that over my dead grandmother’s body and I almost punched him in the nose, almost as Christian a sentiment as his blasphemous prayer.  Horror is not a fast track to God as evidenced by the volume of meaningless suffering throughout the ages, but… but… the presence of vast suffering, the horrendous evil that shrouds specific times and places does not keep God out.  No matter how dark the night, how deep the suffering, how senseless the slaughter or how innocent the slaughtered, God is always there wading into the darkness, shining a light as bright as the Christ Child into the world, a beacon on dark and stormy seas for the lost of every age, and the broken, suffering, the confused, ambivalent, the mean and the bored.  For everyone.

          From here, from Advent, we ascend to the heights of incarnational joy in Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas.  We then move through the Epiphany and the proclamation of God’s arrival, and then are right on to the long march from Galilee to Jerusalem, from Bethlehem to Golgatha, from the manger to the cross and the terror of Good Friday.  We then descend with Christ to the realm of the dead and we rise in the miracle of Resurrection into Easter. From the true beauty of a proper Anglican Advent and Christmas… the Marian blues, the joyful scripture, the glorious music, “Thou art giving and forgiving, ever blessing, ever blessed/Wellspring of the joy of living, ocean depth of happy rest;”  to the abject suffering of parents grieving the murder of young children and to the cold, wet people begging from street corners made quiet because most people are home enjoying the most important feast day in our American culture at home with their families.  And then there is simply the brokenness we each carry in our hearts this time of year, loved ones made distant through death, estrangement or simple geography, memories of Christmas past that haunt us, or the melanchoia of seeing another year slip away, another year closer to the kids leaving home, another year closer to our common destiny in the grave.  From billowing joy to the most mournful suffering, Jesus Christ comes, eternally comes with the one very simple promise: I am with you.  He solves no problems, He answers no questions, He doesn’t explain why things are so bad or are so good, but His presence in our lives, in so much as we will have it, in so much as we make room for Him in our soul, the mystery and presence of Jesus Christ is our salvation.  That is the promise from old, from ancient days.  That is what we wait for in Advent, what we celebrate in our high feast tomorrow.  These are very good tidings of an even greater joy.  This is the heart of Jesus Christ, this is the true meaning of the Christmas we approach on the horizon; and it is beautiful. “Thou our Father, Christ our Brother all who live in love are Thine;/Teach us how to love each other, lift us to the joy divine.”  AMEN

December 9, 2012, 2nd Sunday in Advent

December 9, 2012

Year C, Advent 2

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” 

          Prophecy. We are now right in the middle of Adventide.  This is a season given to us, prepared for us by prophets.  Remember, Advent is Latin for the Greek word Parousia: holy waiting, in this case, the blessed anticipation of the Incarnation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ promised to us of old.  That is pretty important.  We never would have known to be waiting for a savior had it not been for the prophets.  Isaiah, Zechariah and his son John, even the little known Baruch, the friend and secretary to the venerable Jeremiah: to these servants of God we owe a great spiritual debt.  The thing about prophecy is that it is a debt that demands repayment, and demands it in the very tangible currency of right and immediate action.

          What is a prophet? ______ In the very simple words of the Jesuit master Karl Rahner, the prophet “is the envoy of God… The bearer of revelation.”  The prophet is a person, not a mouthpiece, but a fully alive human being touched by God for a very specific purpose: to reveal the will and nature of God.  How’s that for a job description. 

So then what is prophecy?_____  I think Abraham Heschel, the great 20^th century Rabbi and Hasidic theologian puts it best, writing, “Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words.”  That quotation begins to illuminate the opening line to Heschel’s classic treatment of this subject, The Prophets, which reads, “This book is about some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived.”

On the ground, the prophet does his or her work mostly along two lines, the predictive (this is going to happen), and the accusatory (things are NOT as they are supposed to be, woe, woe, woe).  Both modes of prophecy are holy, divinely sanctioned responses to a world that is not in keeping with the will of God, a world that is not in line with the true nature of things, at least not yet.  Both are equally potent clarion calls to do things differently than we are doing them now because either something big is going to happen and we need to be prepared, OR, somewhere along the way we came to a fork in the woods and we took the wrong road.  In either case, we need to get our acts together, reformulate the very structure of society and/or be prepared for whatever divinely ordained occurrence is to come. 

The Adventide prophets tend towards the former, the revelation that something in particular is coming from God.  Baruch tells us, people look east, like the song, “see your children gathered… at the word of the holy one… God will bring them back to you, carried in glory, as on a royal throne.”  Baruck passes on a promise of salvation. Or Micah’s prophesy to a humble city, “But you, O Bethlehem… from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from old, from ancient days.” Or the more familiar words of Isaiah, “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us… and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”  There is something on the horizon, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

These prophecies can be comforting in their way.  Don’t worry, a savior is coming.  Someday the lion will lay down with the lamb, the child will play over the asp’s den.  The other type of prophecy, well, not so comforting.  They are, as our basic definitions of prophecy point to, disconcerting, threatening, even, dire warnings that things have got to change not because something is immanent, other than perhaps your destruction or the directive to repent and believe because the Savior’s return is nigh, but because the will of God has been opposed.  Thus says Jeremiah, “Shall I not punish them for these things? says the Lord, Shall I not avenge Myself on a nation such as this?”  Thus says Hosea, “So I will be to them like a lion, like a leopard I will lurk beside the way, I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs…” And thus says the rather unsubtle Isaiah, “She despises you, she scorns you – the virgin daughter of Zion; she wags her head behind you – the daughter of Jerusalem.  Whom have you mocked and reviled?  Against whom have you raised your voice and haughtily lifted your eyes?  Against the Holy One of Israel!”  I read plenty of somewhat lefty opinion online and that critique of the current state of the world pales in comparison to what the prophets of old had to say about things, the whore of Babylon, you brood of vipers and the rest of it.  So prophets… they are telling us about things that are to come, and they are describing to us all of the terrible things going on in the world.  In both cases, they are telling us things are not as they are supposed to be, so turn to, do it differently, do it now, be prepared for what is to come.

The thing is, prophecy is not just words.  Prophecy follows the same pattern that preaching does as St. Francis’ legendarily described it, “Preach the Gospel at all times, use words if necessary.”  When I think of the Jesuits of El Salvador, Archbishop Tutu, of course Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X and Bobby Seale, even, I recognize the praxis of prophesies.  Words not made flesh, but alive.  Rosa Parks, a trained activist, trained in non-violent resistance, when she refused to stand up on that bus so many years ago, she prophesied as definitively and clearly as Isaiah or John the Baptist without a word uttered other than, “No sir, I will not give up my seat.”  Actions, prophetic actions, can and often do speak louder than words; which brings me to the meat of things.

Who saw the Register Guard yesterday?  What was on the cover?  “Huts for Homeless” was the headline over a picture of a cute little kiddo just climbing out of the first demonstration model of a hut being proposed for use by homeless folks in Eugene.  This is the work of Opportunity Village Eugene, whose board a sit on.  It is a project of homeless folks, activists, residents and clergy who are at a loss about the state of affairs in our fair city of Eugene.  2000 adults on the streets.  700 kids in 4j without stable housing.  An Hepatitis C epidemic that is fast surpassing HIV/AIDS in the acceleration of rates of infection.  940 breakfasts were served at First Christian in November.  It is terrible.  Nothing new, but terrible, as Amos pointed out so long ago:  “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying, when will the new moon be over that we may sell grain?  And the Sabbath over that we may offer wheat for sale… that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the refuse of the wheat?”  Some things change, and some things don’t.

In that Register Guard article, it was briefly mentioned that some churches might possibly hosting some of these little huts called Conestoga huts for their resemblance of the prairie schooners that carried some of your ancestors to Oregon 150 years ago.  Yep.  That is us.  There might be some others, I’m working on that.  But there is a good chance that we will, in conjunction with St. Vinnie’s parking lot program that we already participate in, that we will expand it and allow three of these little huts to be erected on these 2 ½ acres we have been entrusted with to do God’s work.  We’ll give up our car camper to another church that will take on a family, and we’ll get three adults or possibly some couples, the same port-a-potties, the same vetting and screening in conjunction with St. Vinnie’s.  Besides the loss of a couple of parking spaces, I imagine that it will largely be transparent to us, much like the program we are with right now.  

          I brought this to the vestry on Thursday and they unanimously voted to invite this program here to Hilyard Street.  I cannot tell you how proud I am of our vestry.  They are the first to commit to this in the entire city.  This is prophetic action happening.  I do not know how controversial this will be here in the congregation, in the neighborhood, in the city; it could be significant.  This too is prophetic action happening.  I don’t know how this pilot program here, if it happens, will work; it will be messy at times, inconvenient for sure.  And I am not sure if a self governing homeless village that we are working on for the longer term will work, but like the prophets of old, I, we know that things are not as they are supposed to be.  God’s will in the world is not being heeded, this fact is heralded in the countenance of each person behind a cardboard sign at a street corner, in each person suffering from trenchfoot, each man, woman and child who fears being robbed, beaten, raped, harassed by landowners or police for the terrible crime of not having a place to park their car or unroll their sleeping bag.  And I haven’t even mentioned the rain and mud and cold and wind, and the fact that this time of year many of the public bathrooms start closing, and the Mission is full and we are all expecting the Eagan warming center to overflow, too…

          This is not a Rosa Parks or Salvadoran Jesuit level of prophetic action.  Not by a long shot.  Really we are giving up 3 – 6 parking spaces, might get some flack from our neighbors and will probably cause some stress in out city government.  (I’ll work diligently on the neighbors).  But this is prophetic action.  The world is not as it ought to be and this action points that out in Technicolor.  When I brought this to your vestry, there was not even a hesitation.  Some prudent questions, some quite assurances were needed, but the moral uprightness, the prophetic character of the action was in a word, Christian.  If you have questions, comments, or complaints, I’ll be having a Q&A session after cookies.  

          This church is doing it right, paying off our prophetic debt with right and immediate action.  On behalf of Jesus Christ, thank you.  AMEN