January 24, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
3rd Sunday after Epiphany, Year C
Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10, Ps 19, 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a, Luke 4:14-21
There is a common thread woven throughout all our readings today. It is the idea of interpretation. Interpretation is central to our faith and how we understand our Holy Scripture. Every age and every person who reads the Bible engages in interpretation. Its meaning is neither static nor is there only one, unequivocal understanding. This has always been the case. We read it in the context of our personal lives; we read it in the context of our social setting. And this is a good thing, for if it didn’t continue to raise up questions for us it would be a dead text. It is a vehicle, a sacrament, I think, of God’s ongoing revelation and working in the world.
Of course, there is the need for an appropriate starting point and understanding about the texts in order to interpret them well. We see this in the reading of Nehemiah where all the people “who could understand” listened to the book of the law and this book was read to them “with interpretation”. Nehemiah was written after the return of the people from their exile in Babylon. They had been away for three hundred years and they were different. The law was reinterpreted to fit new times and places while holding to its essence. The law also helped people interpret the world and times around them. And it was interpreted by those believed to be wise enough and prayerful enough to give a sound rendering.
The wisdom spoken of in the Psalm is a variation of interpretation. Jesus engages in a bold and audacious act of interpretation by saying that this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing, meaning that he was the fulfillment. We take that as a given, but imagine if I or someone else here made that statement today. We’d be shocked and understandably skeptical. Jesus’ claim is vitally important to us, though. We as Christians believe he is correct in that daring speech. Jesus is the Word of God for us, and it is this Word that we worship, not the words of the Bible. Those words, beautiful, essential and utterly necessary, point to him and to God and to a path of understanding. A very real temptation and reality is that all too often we begin to worship the Bible and that is idolatry. It is Jesus who is our ultimate and primary interpretive lens on our faith and our world.
This theme of interpretation is not as visible in the letter to the Corinthians, but it is there. It is not so much an interpretation of the written word, but an existential interpretation, an interpretation of who we are and how we see and understand ourselves. The image Paul gives is powerful and profoundly important. We have heard it so much that it is almost a cliché, but we do ourselves a disservice by passing over it lightly. It deserves our time and willingness to stop and really examine what this image is meant to help us understand.
Paul grounds us in the point I made earlier: Jesus the Christ is our starting point, the place from which our understanding and interpretation flows. Without that as a starting point the inclusive picture he paints would not have emerged so clearly and so quickly—one body of Jews and Greeks, slaves and free. And therein is the second vital point: we are a body.
We are a body. We are described as part of Christ’s body and that body is clearly described and understood by analogy to a human body. Here are some of the implications of such an image. It is organic. It is unified, though diverse. It is utterly interdependent and mutually dependent in ways clearly seen and ways that we can’t even comprehend. Every part is essential, necessary. If part of the body is lost or injured it affects all the rest; it may compensate, but is not ever again quite the same. Though there are perceived hierarchies, they are completely interwoven with a basic horizontal equity. One cannot exist without the other. No part is expendable. No part can be exploited or used without damage and detriment to the rest. This is how God sees us…absolutely necessary and needed, indispensible. No matter what we hear out there or at times within our own hearts, we are seen by God as part of this body. We each matter profoundly. And that type of love and connection is indeed Good News.
It is a tremendously powerful image of community within which resides autonomy and independence. It is a collective understanding in which individuals live and from which they are shaped and formed. But they never leave it and they cannot exist without it.
This is a radically different understanding of self, I believe, than that of our culture and the institutions we have created. There, the individual is seen as completely discreet, independent, mostly unattached to others by nature or need. Hierarchies sort people into separate groups and obscure notions of commonality. We believe we are self-defined and able to act on the world around us as if our ties to it were voluntary, not intrinsic. It is a picture of isolation presented as freedom. It is individuality presented as true identity. It is disconnection presented as common reality. It severs ties and mutuality in their existential sense and creates ties that are artifice and construct, often without much commitment or sense of accountability. To me that is a lonely and bleak prospect.
Paul’s vision calls us into a truly interdependent life. His community exists based on Christ, nothing else and nothing less. Today community often means a group of people who share the same viewpoint or who like the same activity as us. But beyond that there is often not much that ties us together, requires us to stay with each other and bear with each other. We might join a line-dancing group and share good times, but when we are feeling blue or a difficult time arises are these people we feel we could call to be with us? Or Tom Friedman who writes that technology has made the world flat. Is that true? We may be able to connect with people all over the world in a second, but is a connection done through an impersonal medium where we can present (or recreate) ourselves as we want the same as face-to-face interaction? Is there the possibility for true understanding when we can’t meet and experience each other’s realities?
Our world may indeed be more immediate, but it is not intimate. Paul’s vision is one of profound intimacy and caring. It is a redefined freedom and identity, not one that negates our individual-ness and particular gifts, rather it rejoices in them, but one that puts them into a richer context and a deep understanding that we exist for each other first, even if that means that we can’t always do what we want or have all that we want. We discover that his image though gives us so much more of what we need and truly taps into who we are as created beings. Paul believes we find this by a deep recognition that our fullest life is found by understanding ourselves as part of Christ at all times and in all places. We are communal creatures defined and guided by his life. This is the community the Church aims to be at its best. It’s a grand and wonderful vision. It takes work and awareness and an openness to growth within us all.
I would suggest that this vision is not just valid for Christians. We aren’t the first people to have a similar idea of self and community. It exists in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, native traditions and so on. Ours has its particular aspects that are unique and that we hold to be divinely revealed. All to the good. But if we believe our understanding has a divine source, it is not just for us, but also saying something about the whole world and its character. This vision of Paul’s has something to offer the secular world. We have something to offer it based from this understanding. We have something of value to say to a world where suddenly corporations, artificial constructs of the state, are defined as and given all the rights of people and citizens. Such entities are not people; rather, they are collections of people and legal arrangements and constructions defined on paper and in practices. The interface with them is through lawyers and boards and ultimately many persons and yet no one. The relationship is ephemeral. They can be created and they can be undone overnight. Function is confused with essence. Corporations are necessary and needed for many things, but I think this is a symptom of confused interpretation and understanding. It is so very different from the body image.
Fragmentation and disconnect are the force pulling in the other direction depending on how we see ourselves. I am reminded of the words of the “Grapes of Wrath” where the farmers who are struggling to survive in a natural calamity are being forced off their land, even though they have not been negligent or irresponsible. The refrain from the representatives is it’s not me it’s the bank. Impersonal, everywhere yet nowhere, not in connection to the men and women who grow the very food they eat.
There is much in the world that will be shaped based on our images of who we are: the situation in Haiti, the vote this week, the ideas being put forward around our economic activity and actors, our annual meeting next week, and surely our own private concerns and situations.
My invitation to us this week is to ponder and pray with Paul’s image. What does it mean to us? What does it invite us to? Where is it good news and where does it challenge us? What does it mean to how we understand ourselves? What does it mean to be Church, to be part of this community? What does it call us to do in how we look at the world outside these walls and take part in it? What hope can it offer in times that are so very hard and where the tension is very real between highly differing visions of society? Where is the Word, Jesus, present to us here and now?
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
January 17, 2010, Second Sunday after Ephiphany
January 17, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 62:1-5, Ps 36:5-10, 1 Cor. 12:1-11, John 2:1-11
When I hear the words of the steward in this story, “everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk”, I always give a wry smile. In the midst of this amazing story of grace, overflowing grace, there is a moment of subtle humor…and within it the crucial point for us. The steward reminds me of those music clubs that entice one in with “select 10 free and only buy 5 more at regular club prices” type of deals. Reading through that list of options is a music-lovers’ dream. All these latest and greatest groups! And so one blithely signs up only to discover down the road that it seems like the future selections aren’t as good and neither are the prices. We are given categories and definitions that may or may not be very good or accurate. Or on a more serious note we see it in our social discourse that seems so stuck in old and tired, virtually meaningless clichés, such as choice, freedom, socialism, development, free market, the American Dream, that we end up not really having much of a discussion at all. We’ve been hearing words and definitions of the way things are for so long that even when reality is truly presenting a starkly different picture we struggle to adjust our view. It must fit the old category!
The steward gets all confused and lost in conventional categories. He thinks that the bridegroom has broken etiquette, that something got confused in the planning. He tries to explain this miracle of superabundant and superb quality wine by the usual rational means. Consequently, he misses the whole point. The disciples, in contrast, and this is the point, recognize that God has worked in an unexpected and transformative way through our world to shower us with abundant grace. It is a gift larger than we can explain in our limited capacities; it is running straight into God’s glory and accepting it.
This story of the miraculous is John’s first showing of who and what Jesus is and offers. After the lyrical prologue, after his baptism, and after his calling together his disciples, the first major act of Jesus in this Gospel is the story we hear today. It is a story that gives us a first definition of God who can and desires to transform our world into a place saturated with grace. It is God that offers us the very best wine, that can convert our lives into vessels of beauty and holiness, plenty and good. It is a God that meets our needs if we are open to give God the space to act in ways that are unexpected yet so truly meeting our needs and our places of brokenness.
This is the God the disciples meet in Jesus. It is the God we meet in Jesus: God with us to shower us with this grace. We meet God in the face of a fellow human who can take what we have and through his love and holiness turn it into the kingdom of God. We can’t do it without him, but with him we can do things, as Jesus says later in this Gospel, even greater than these. Jesus, we are told, is the well of life of which the psalmist speaks. Jesus is that good wine drawn from the jars. He is the wine we drink after we have drunk the wine of the world and realize it can only offer so much. Even the best wine from the finest vineyards in France is inferior, eventually gives out, when compared to the wine of Jesus, which he freely gives.
The community that gave us the Gospel of John experienced intensely this grace found in Jesus. It is why it is the first and foundational story of this Gospel. Through that grace they withstood being kicked out of the synagogue (this community was Jewish), they withstood rejection, and they flourished because they continued to draw on the love and grace of Christ. This was the Jesus they shared with the world. It invited them into living in this world but within new definitions, new categories, and the trust that through Jesus working in them they too could be the initiators of miracles as great as providing abundant wine to others—be it spiritual or material sustenance. What a glorious vision they held! And even in the face of their own losses and adjustments, they knew they had the better portion.
Which leads me to Martin Luther King, Jr. He is honored tomorrow in our calendar of saints, but our music today is in tribute to him and the movement that he represents is worthy of our attention, gratitude and continued allegiance. In preparing this sermon I spent time watching footage of his speeches and of the larger struggle of for civil rights. The images are arresting: thousands of people gathered, stirring speeches, vibrant, hope-filled faces, dogs, fire hoses, lynchings, beatings, the hate-twisted faces of other Americans yelling at men and women forcefully yet peacefully demonstrating their utter humanity and demand to be acknowledged as people of dignity and worth, equal in the eyes of God. What sustained them was not only the belief in the justice of their cause, not only great leaders, not only a desire that their children be given a better world, but a drawing on the wine of Jesus, a continual drawing on the grace and power of the crucified and risen one that enfolded them in a hope and a truth that was larger than the world.
They drank of the wine of that grace, relied on it, and trusted it would see them through years of struggle. In drinking that wine they lived into different categories—who they were and who they were to become; and how to reach the end for which they were aiming. If they had chosen violence to match the violence inflicted on them nothing would have been transformed. If they had chosen to adopt a belief of racial superiority over whites that would justify inverting the system nothing would have been transformed. If they had chosen to work within the established categories of media, lawsuits and so on, nothing would have changed or it would have been a continuation of the snail-like pace they already knew. They drank the wine and created new categories…categories founded on a justice rooted in love and reconciliation.
For us the invitation is to believe in the outpouring of God’s grace as revealed in Jesus Christ. He draws wine from the water jar and offers it to us if we can open our hearts to a larger world. He offers that wine so that our hearts will open for this is his desire for us. To drink of his wine is to live into a new category: living members of the Christ. Before all else, this is who we are. It can’t be put on a passport or seen in our language or ethnicity. It is a reality that can’t be made to fit into the world’s categories. But it is our reality, and we are reminded of it and nourished from it each time we receive Holy Communion, each time we look with Christ’s eyes on the world, each time we step out and offer our lives to be incarnations of the kingdom of God.
Such a reception of Jesus’ abundant grace may draw us into struggles just as intense and profound as that of the Civil Rights. God knows they are out there. It will help us be open to new categories in our perception. God knows they are needed. But first and always we must take our empty vessels to Jesus and ask that he fill them and transform them so that it is indeed his wine that we are drawing from and that it is his grace that is sustaining our lives. As members of the Body of Christ we are invited to live constantly into new categories or to challenge the categories of this world with the radical categories of Jesus. It is his concern and he will freely and lovingly fill us in ways expected and unexpected, known and unknown, for it is his very nature to lavish us with grace. And as his people it is our nature to lavish others from that same grace. May it be that we serve the good wine to this world. Amen.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 62:1-5, Ps 36:5-10, 1 Cor. 12:1-11, John 2:1-11
When I hear the words of the steward in this story, “everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk”, I always give a wry smile. In the midst of this amazing story of grace, overflowing grace, there is a moment of subtle humor…and within it the crucial point for us. The steward reminds me of those music clubs that entice one in with “select 10 free and only buy 5 more at regular club prices” type of deals. Reading through that list of options is a music-lovers’ dream. All these latest and greatest groups! And so one blithely signs up only to discover down the road that it seems like the future selections aren’t as good and neither are the prices. We are given categories and definitions that may or may not be very good or accurate. Or on a more serious note we see it in our social discourse that seems so stuck in old and tired, virtually meaningless clichés, such as choice, freedom, socialism, development, free market, the American Dream, that we end up not really having much of a discussion at all. We’ve been hearing words and definitions of the way things are for so long that even when reality is truly presenting a starkly different picture we struggle to adjust our view. It must fit the old category!
The steward gets all confused and lost in conventional categories. He thinks that the bridegroom has broken etiquette, that something got confused in the planning. He tries to explain this miracle of superabundant and superb quality wine by the usual rational means. Consequently, he misses the whole point. The disciples, in contrast, and this is the point, recognize that God has worked in an unexpected and transformative way through our world to shower us with abundant grace. It is a gift larger than we can explain in our limited capacities; it is running straight into God’s glory and accepting it.
This story of the miraculous is John’s first showing of who and what Jesus is and offers. After the lyrical prologue, after his baptism, and after his calling together his disciples, the first major act of Jesus in this Gospel is the story we hear today. It is a story that gives us a first definition of God who can and desires to transform our world into a place saturated with grace. It is God that offers us the very best wine, that can convert our lives into vessels of beauty and holiness, plenty and good. It is a God that meets our needs if we are open to give God the space to act in ways that are unexpected yet so truly meeting our needs and our places of brokenness.
This is the God the disciples meet in Jesus. It is the God we meet in Jesus: God with us to shower us with this grace. We meet God in the face of a fellow human who can take what we have and through his love and holiness turn it into the kingdom of God. We can’t do it without him, but with him we can do things, as Jesus says later in this Gospel, even greater than these. Jesus, we are told, is the well of life of which the psalmist speaks. Jesus is that good wine drawn from the jars. He is the wine we drink after we have drunk the wine of the world and realize it can only offer so much. Even the best wine from the finest vineyards in France is inferior, eventually gives out, when compared to the wine of Jesus, which he freely gives.
The community that gave us the Gospel of John experienced intensely this grace found in Jesus. It is why it is the first and foundational story of this Gospel. Through that grace they withstood being kicked out of the synagogue (this community was Jewish), they withstood rejection, and they flourished because they continued to draw on the love and grace of Christ. This was the Jesus they shared with the world. It invited them into living in this world but within new definitions, new categories, and the trust that through Jesus working in them they too could be the initiators of miracles as great as providing abundant wine to others—be it spiritual or material sustenance. What a glorious vision they held! And even in the face of their own losses and adjustments, they knew they had the better portion.
Which leads me to Martin Luther King, Jr. He is honored tomorrow in our calendar of saints, but our music today is in tribute to him and the movement that he represents is worthy of our attention, gratitude and continued allegiance. In preparing this sermon I spent time watching footage of his speeches and of the larger struggle of for civil rights. The images are arresting: thousands of people gathered, stirring speeches, vibrant, hope-filled faces, dogs, fire hoses, lynchings, beatings, the hate-twisted faces of other Americans yelling at men and women forcefully yet peacefully demonstrating their utter humanity and demand to be acknowledged as people of dignity and worth, equal in the eyes of God. What sustained them was not only the belief in the justice of their cause, not only great leaders, not only a desire that their children be given a better world, but a drawing on the wine of Jesus, a continual drawing on the grace and power of the crucified and risen one that enfolded them in a hope and a truth that was larger than the world.
They drank of the wine of that grace, relied on it, and trusted it would see them through years of struggle. In drinking that wine they lived into different categories—who they were and who they were to become; and how to reach the end for which they were aiming. If they had chosen violence to match the violence inflicted on them nothing would have been transformed. If they had chosen to adopt a belief of racial superiority over whites that would justify inverting the system nothing would have been transformed. If they had chosen to work within the established categories of media, lawsuits and so on, nothing would have changed or it would have been a continuation of the snail-like pace they already knew. They drank the wine and created new categories…categories founded on a justice rooted in love and reconciliation.
For us the invitation is to believe in the outpouring of God’s grace as revealed in Jesus Christ. He draws wine from the water jar and offers it to us if we can open our hearts to a larger world. He offers that wine so that our hearts will open for this is his desire for us. To drink of his wine is to live into a new category: living members of the Christ. Before all else, this is who we are. It can’t be put on a passport or seen in our language or ethnicity. It is a reality that can’t be made to fit into the world’s categories. But it is our reality, and we are reminded of it and nourished from it each time we receive Holy Communion, each time we look with Christ’s eyes on the world, each time we step out and offer our lives to be incarnations of the kingdom of God.
Such a reception of Jesus’ abundant grace may draw us into struggles just as intense and profound as that of the Civil Rights. God knows they are out there. It will help us be open to new categories in our perception. God knows they are needed. But first and always we must take our empty vessels to Jesus and ask that he fill them and transform them so that it is indeed his wine that we are drawing from and that it is his grace that is sustaining our lives. As members of the Body of Christ we are invited to live constantly into new categories or to challenge the categories of this world with the radical categories of Jesus. It is his concern and he will freely and lovingly fill us in ways expected and unexpected, known and unknown, for it is his very nature to lavish us with grace. And as his people it is our nature to lavish others from that same grace. May it be that we serve the good wine to this world. Amen.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
January 10, 2010, The Baptism of Our Lord
Mother Tasha did a Question and Answer sermon on January 10. Replies to unanswered questions and will soon be posted in the church.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
January 3, 2010, The Second Sunday of Christmas
January 3, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Jeremiah 31:7-14, Ps. 84, Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a, Matthew 2:1-12
Year C, Christmas 2
One of the more interesting things one can do while preparing a sermon is to look at what others have written on the same passage. All I can say is be glad that Martin Luther or St. Chrysostom are not your preacher today. They took this passage from Matthew and talked about it for at least an hour if not longer, traveling all through both testaments to make their points. I promise you I will be much briefer and not nearly so comprehensive! Aside from their rather lengthy eloquence, it was also very instructive to see where their emphasis lay. There was a lot of concern around the issue of astrology and sorcery, disproving it or showing how God worked through the Magi beyond that, and explaining the star and all that. There was a lot of concern with buttressing the story as the fulfillment of various prophecies or earlier Biblical stories other than the one reference made in the story itself. There was quite a bit of talk, particularly in Luther, focusing on the laws of Scripture and proper behavior. Only in passing do we hear of Herod’s fear of an insurrection and what God might be saying to us about our way of doing business and that of Jesus. Of course, that habit is not unique to Luther; we find it alive and well at all points in Christian history. But it’s rather odd given that the Wise Men came in order to pay homage, that is the reverence due a king and only a king, an earthly ruler, to Jesus, not to go and pray over him.
This story is read on the Feast of Epiphany, which is on the 6th of January, when we celebrate traditionally the baptism of Jesus and the discovery of seeing and realizing that what we have been looking for, searching for, has broken into this world and into our hearts. An epiphany! The wise men are looking, looking hard for God, for the holy. Unlike the shepherds they aren’t given the answer, but are invited to walk a road. They see something and believe it may reveal more than what is on the surface. So they collect themselves, gather precious gifts, and head off on a long journey into a foreign land. They are not mere tourists out on a spiritual holiday; they are searching for God. They are searching for the source, for what it is we are to look at, gaze at, so that we can enter into truth and life.
In those days of Roman rule the only person who could be called a Son of God was Caesar. It was on his coins. He was divine, end of discussion. The will of the gods was indistinguishable from earthly power. Herod was a crafty politico trying to maintain power in his petty kingdom and this depended on the continuing benevolence of Rome and the guarantee on his part of no political upheaval. Thus, when three foreigners walk in and announce that they have seen someone else’s star rising and that they want to go and recognize this person’s authority, rule and kingship, Herod is not pleased. Kings had one purpose and that was earthly rule in the model of earthly kings. In other words, Herod had a challenger to the throne, his throne, and this was not welcome news. Herod is not interested in his star waning. He has plans. Herod overlooks the treasonous claim of the wise men and at first consults the other leaders for background. There is the public conversation. Then, the backroom deals and secret talks begin as he calls the wise men to him in private and makes an arrangement. Go and find this child, read upstart, for me so that I too may worship him, read find out where he is and get rid of this threat. The wise men leave with their heads still attached to their shoulders, which is almost a miracle in and of itself, and continue their search.
The essential question, though, has been posed: what we look to for guidance and the way we are to live will call us to one road or another. Do we look to Herods and Romes, or do we look to God as revealed in Jesus? The heart of this story is about looking and gazing and being transformed by that gaze. Where we focus that gaze has the possibility of being a place of glorious change and transformation if it is searching for God. Do we look with the eyes of the Magi or do we look with the eyes of Herod?
The wise men in all their elegance and wealth continue to search, looking, looking for this true king, this divine king, the one to whom they are to give ultimate and full allegiance. And finally, their search ends at a humble house in Bethlehem. Jesus is not a newborn baby any longer; he is a child, probably out toddling around and exploring his world. What must he make of these strangers who come in such grandeur to see him. What must Mary make of these nobles coming to her modest home. In some sense she knows her child is destined to be a special servant of God, perhaps as a temple priest or a teacher or prophet, but who are these strangers that treat her son as if he were the rightful ruler of the world? And the mystery grows as they greet them all with joy; in fact, they are overwhelmed with joy--speechless and gazing with pure adoration at a child, an innocent, a powerless and growing one. This is not the reaction of people to rulers generally or of the power of the world. Herod’s reaction and that of all Jerusalem is the norm: fear, awe, compliance, but not joy, not a sense that something wonderful has come to us.
The power of the gaze and of recognition is at the heart of the Magis’ encounter with Jesus. It is a transforming event. Their eyes have seen something of the will of God and it is an invitation to another road, another way of being. In the face of such a recognition there are two reactions: fear or joy. We see both in this story, but it is the reaction of the wise men that we are to listen to most closely and to imitate, for they are worshipping the right thing. In him they have found themselves in the presence of the God of Psalm 84, a place of springs, a safe haven for the sparrow not just the eagle, a nest for the youngest and most vulnerable not just a castle for the wealthy and powerful. They see a new world opening up through this gaze of men and child that is enfolded by God. Where are they looking, these wise men from afar? And thus, where are we looking? And what happens as we allow that gaze to linger, to lengthen, to penetrate us to our core? What happens when our gaze no longer focuses on the world defined by the powers that be, but instead gazes on the world around us with intent, with a deep understanding of God’s action in the everyday and the face of Jesus revealed in all?
James Allison, a brilliant Roman Catholic theologian and one whose piercing gaze has caused the powers of the Roman Church to marginalize him, writes this about our passage and the wise men:
“…at the center of this feast is a mystery of looking. Who looks at whom? As adults we tend to focus on adult looks. Matthew, with his picturesque details, trains our gaze on the strangeness of the kings, the determination and persistence of their journey, their exotic dress, their laden beasts, their rich and symbolic gifts. What might this One be who is the desire of the nations?
We are taught by the Magi to value the One who lies in the manger. He acquires worth and splendor through their eyes. That is part of what the feast gives us: models for our desire, for our adoration. With each gift we are offered a way to shift the weight of our heart in an unaccustomed direction. When the Magi offer him gold, which indicates a king, we are invited to lessen the tribute we offer to the power structures to which we belong and on which we depend; when they offer him frankincense, which indicates a priest, we are invited to tiptoe out from under the delusions of our sacred canopies, to be drawn into the jagged-edged sacrifice of presence that this Priest will carry out; and when they offer him myrrh, which indicates a prophet's death, the Magi invite our hearts to lighten as death loses its hold over our drives and desires.”
We, like the Magi, are invited to realize that if our gaze is shaped by Jesus and if our lens on all the world is shaped by Jesus, then we too must take another road, a different way. This discovery should be one that overwhelms us with joy, not fear. The old road and the old glasses don’t fit any more, not after they have adored the Christ. So, come, let us adore him…and let us follow the other road that invites us to shift our hearts in unaccustomed directions. Amen.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Jeremiah 31:7-14, Ps. 84, Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a, Matthew 2:1-12
Year C, Christmas 2
One of the more interesting things one can do while preparing a sermon is to look at what others have written on the same passage. All I can say is be glad that Martin Luther or St. Chrysostom are not your preacher today. They took this passage from Matthew and talked about it for at least an hour if not longer, traveling all through both testaments to make their points. I promise you I will be much briefer and not nearly so comprehensive! Aside from their rather lengthy eloquence, it was also very instructive to see where their emphasis lay. There was a lot of concern around the issue of astrology and sorcery, disproving it or showing how God worked through the Magi beyond that, and explaining the star and all that. There was a lot of concern with buttressing the story as the fulfillment of various prophecies or earlier Biblical stories other than the one reference made in the story itself. There was quite a bit of talk, particularly in Luther, focusing on the laws of Scripture and proper behavior. Only in passing do we hear of Herod’s fear of an insurrection and what God might be saying to us about our way of doing business and that of Jesus. Of course, that habit is not unique to Luther; we find it alive and well at all points in Christian history. But it’s rather odd given that the Wise Men came in order to pay homage, that is the reverence due a king and only a king, an earthly ruler, to Jesus, not to go and pray over him.
This story is read on the Feast of Epiphany, which is on the 6th of January, when we celebrate traditionally the baptism of Jesus and the discovery of seeing and realizing that what we have been looking for, searching for, has broken into this world and into our hearts. An epiphany! The wise men are looking, looking hard for God, for the holy. Unlike the shepherds they aren’t given the answer, but are invited to walk a road. They see something and believe it may reveal more than what is on the surface. So they collect themselves, gather precious gifts, and head off on a long journey into a foreign land. They are not mere tourists out on a spiritual holiday; they are searching for God. They are searching for the source, for what it is we are to look at, gaze at, so that we can enter into truth and life.
In those days of Roman rule the only person who could be called a Son of God was Caesar. It was on his coins. He was divine, end of discussion. The will of the gods was indistinguishable from earthly power. Herod was a crafty politico trying to maintain power in his petty kingdom and this depended on the continuing benevolence of Rome and the guarantee on his part of no political upheaval. Thus, when three foreigners walk in and announce that they have seen someone else’s star rising and that they want to go and recognize this person’s authority, rule and kingship, Herod is not pleased. Kings had one purpose and that was earthly rule in the model of earthly kings. In other words, Herod had a challenger to the throne, his throne, and this was not welcome news. Herod is not interested in his star waning. He has plans. Herod overlooks the treasonous claim of the wise men and at first consults the other leaders for background. There is the public conversation. Then, the backroom deals and secret talks begin as he calls the wise men to him in private and makes an arrangement. Go and find this child, read upstart, for me so that I too may worship him, read find out where he is and get rid of this threat. The wise men leave with their heads still attached to their shoulders, which is almost a miracle in and of itself, and continue their search.
The essential question, though, has been posed: what we look to for guidance and the way we are to live will call us to one road or another. Do we look to Herods and Romes, or do we look to God as revealed in Jesus? The heart of this story is about looking and gazing and being transformed by that gaze. Where we focus that gaze has the possibility of being a place of glorious change and transformation if it is searching for God. Do we look with the eyes of the Magi or do we look with the eyes of Herod?
The wise men in all their elegance and wealth continue to search, looking, looking for this true king, this divine king, the one to whom they are to give ultimate and full allegiance. And finally, their search ends at a humble house in Bethlehem. Jesus is not a newborn baby any longer; he is a child, probably out toddling around and exploring his world. What must he make of these strangers who come in such grandeur to see him. What must Mary make of these nobles coming to her modest home. In some sense she knows her child is destined to be a special servant of God, perhaps as a temple priest or a teacher or prophet, but who are these strangers that treat her son as if he were the rightful ruler of the world? And the mystery grows as they greet them all with joy; in fact, they are overwhelmed with joy--speechless and gazing with pure adoration at a child, an innocent, a powerless and growing one. This is not the reaction of people to rulers generally or of the power of the world. Herod’s reaction and that of all Jerusalem is the norm: fear, awe, compliance, but not joy, not a sense that something wonderful has come to us.
The power of the gaze and of recognition is at the heart of the Magis’ encounter with Jesus. It is a transforming event. Their eyes have seen something of the will of God and it is an invitation to another road, another way of being. In the face of such a recognition there are two reactions: fear or joy. We see both in this story, but it is the reaction of the wise men that we are to listen to most closely and to imitate, for they are worshipping the right thing. In him they have found themselves in the presence of the God of Psalm 84, a place of springs, a safe haven for the sparrow not just the eagle, a nest for the youngest and most vulnerable not just a castle for the wealthy and powerful. They see a new world opening up through this gaze of men and child that is enfolded by God. Where are they looking, these wise men from afar? And thus, where are we looking? And what happens as we allow that gaze to linger, to lengthen, to penetrate us to our core? What happens when our gaze no longer focuses on the world defined by the powers that be, but instead gazes on the world around us with intent, with a deep understanding of God’s action in the everyday and the face of Jesus revealed in all?
James Allison, a brilliant Roman Catholic theologian and one whose piercing gaze has caused the powers of the Roman Church to marginalize him, writes this about our passage and the wise men:
“…at the center of this feast is a mystery of looking. Who looks at whom? As adults we tend to focus on adult looks. Matthew, with his picturesque details, trains our gaze on the strangeness of the kings, the determination and persistence of their journey, their exotic dress, their laden beasts, their rich and symbolic gifts. What might this One be who is the desire of the nations?
We are taught by the Magi to value the One who lies in the manger. He acquires worth and splendor through their eyes. That is part of what the feast gives us: models for our desire, for our adoration. With each gift we are offered a way to shift the weight of our heart in an unaccustomed direction. When the Magi offer him gold, which indicates a king, we are invited to lessen the tribute we offer to the power structures to which we belong and on which we depend; when they offer him frankincense, which indicates a priest, we are invited to tiptoe out from under the delusions of our sacred canopies, to be drawn into the jagged-edged sacrifice of presence that this Priest will carry out; and when they offer him myrrh, which indicates a prophet's death, the Magi invite our hearts to lighten as death loses its hold over our drives and desires.”
We, like the Magi, are invited to realize that if our gaze is shaped by Jesus and if our lens on all the world is shaped by Jesus, then we too must take another road, a different way. This discovery should be one that overwhelms us with joy, not fear. The old road and the old glasses don’t fit any more, not after they have adored the Christ. So, come, let us adore him…and let us follow the other road that invites us to shift our hearts in unaccustomed directions. Amen.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
December 20, 2009
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?
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 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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