A sermon by The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland on Christmas Eve

Isaiah 62:6-12

Psalm 97

Titus 3:4-7

Luke 2:1-20

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.

Tonight is a shepherd’s night.

We who are church gather in the morning. We come together in the light of day to worship, and praise, and seek. We celebrate by day—God for us is called the Light in the Darkness. We yearn to be people of joy and salvation—people of the Light—and we sing our yearning in the morning.

There are two important exceptions to this rule. One is the Easter Vigil and the other is Christmas Eve.  At the Easter Vigil we gather at dusk and look to the past. We remember who God is, and who God has been for us. We recall our roots, our ancestors, our history of faith. Easter is the Feast of the Resurrection, and in the dark of the night before the reality of resurrection is made known we remember that we have been slaves, that we have been liberated, but that we will always have the desert with us. The Easter Vigil is a night for refugees.

But Christmas Eve is a night for shepherds.

Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.

The other exception to our general rule about worshiping in the morning is this night. On Christmas Eve we look to the future. We remember who God is, and who God became for us. We recall the mystery at the core of our faith. Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation, and in the dark of the night before the reality of incarnation is made known we recall that we were once alone, but that we are alone no longer; we remember that it was once possible to imagine that God did not love us, but that now we know that God is love. Christmas Eve is a night for shepherds.

…the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see– I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people…

It is no wonder the shepherds were afraid. It was night, and it was dark. Shepherding isn’t really a great job to start with, and to have drawn the night shift put these shepherds at the bottom of a pretty short corporate ladder. More of a corporate step-stool, really. On top of the bad reputation and the low pay, shepherding is both boring and frightening, by turns. Generally it’s just a lot of standing around, until a dangerous animal comes to make a snack out of your charges, or an even more dangerous human comes along to steal some of them.

Also, it was night. The night is dark, and scary. Today we have electricity, and streetlights, and flashlights, and halogen headlights, and LED keychain lights, and brighter-than-daylight stadium lights, and even with all of our lights we still find it possible to be afraid of the dark. The night is not afraid of our lights; it just waits patiently at the edge of our high-beams, until it can come back in again behind us.

So here they are, the shepherds who have the overnight shift, maybe a candle or two between them, and all of a sudden an angel of the lord appears. You can perhaps understand why they were terrified.

“…unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place…

It’s easy for me to imagine that the shepherds were afraid. What’s harder to understand is that, once they’d got over their initial fear, they believed. The one angel tells them that the Messiah is being born as they speak in the town of Bethlehem, and that they can go find him themselves. Then the rest of the angel chorus line also appears, and they sing a song, then they vanish.

And what do the shepherds do? Do they panic and run away? No. Do they pretend it never happened and go back to keeping watch over their flocks by night? No. Do they check themselves into a mental institution due to shared hallucinations? Also, no. They don’t even turn to each other and say, “Huh. That’s somethin’ ya don’t see every day!”.  Instead, they simply say to one another, “OK, let’s go check it out.”

Some of you will have heard me say this before, and most of you will hear me say it again: one of my favorite things about history is how the people in it are both just like us, and completely different from us. Even two thousand years ago, people were people. There is more the same between us and those shepherds than there is different. Yet the differences are important, and one of the differences is here: belief.

We worry a lot about belief. What do you believe? Do you believe? Can you believe that? This I believe. Unless you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ you shall not have eternal life. We are very concerned with beliefs, and having them, and having them be the exact right beliefs. When someone who knows nothing about our denomination discovers that I’m a priest, their first question is not, “how do you worship,” but “what does your church believe?”

In this way, twenty-first century people are very different from first century people. Believe is not the same word now that it was then. Easier for them, you might say, when what they had to believe in manifested itself right in front of their eyes. But was it easier? Let’s leave aside for now the fact that we are perfectly capable of not believing things right in front of our eyes even today. If those shepherds believed, they too believed in something they couldn’t verify, at least not for thirty-some years. They found a baby, sure, lying in a manger and wrapped in bands of cloth, but to believe that baby something special was still an act of faith that took years to mature.

So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them.

Tonight is a shepherd’s night. We remember tonight… A mother and father… a newborn child… a humble place and a humble birth for our God. We remember too that before long there will be wise men of the East, and a angry king, and a flight to Egypt. Then there will be a child presented in the temple, a baptism in the river Jordan, teaching, and healing, and a trial, and suffering, and death. All of these things are to come, but tonight there are just these humble shepherds, who were called and chose to come simply to see.

Tonight is a shepherd’s night, and tonight we are all shepherds, come to see a baby, and to  hope he can change the world. AMEN.

A sermon by The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland on the fourth Sunday of Advent

Micah 5:2-4

Psalm 80:1-7

Hebrews 10:5-10

Luke 1:39-56

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; because he has looked upon the humiliation of his servant. Yes, from now onwards all generations will call me blessed, for the almighty has done great things for me. Holy is his name, and his faithful love extends age after age to those who fear him. He has used the power of his arm, he has routed the arrogant of heart. He has pulled down princes from their thrones and raised high the lowly. He has filled the starving with good things, sent the rich away empty. He has come to the help of Israel his servant, mindful of his faithful love.

-The Magnificat, Luke 1:46-54, New Jerusalem Bible

I for one cannot read these words without hearing music. The Magnificat is not so much a text to be read as it is a poem to be sung. Most people do not go about nowadays interspersing their conversations with the recitation of poems or lyric speeches. Believe it or not, people in Mary’s time did. In a culture that was mostly illiterate, memorized pieces of oral literature were in common use. It is feasible that Mary, upon meeting her much older and also pregnant cousin Elizabeth, actually did wax poetical with a spontaneous hymn of praise and prophecy that she built out of pieces of Hebrew scripture she knew by heart.

However it came to be, Mary’s Magnificat is the church’s original Christmas carol. It is easy, in the midst of the beautiful poetry and surrounded by the wonderful musical tradition we’ve built around these words, to loose sight of what Mary is actually saying. We call this hymn the Magnificat, because when you write it in Latin that is the first word of the poem: Magnificat anima mea Dominum, My soul magnifies the Lord. But Mary is not signing of magnificence, Mary is singing a manifesto.

She begins with praise of God and her joy that God has found her, who is without honor, worthy of bringing God’s son into the world. Then her song blossoms into a subversive prophecy of God’s acting in the world. God routes the arrogant of heart; and make no mistake, this is a violent metaphor of war between God and those who’s center of intention and feeling is selfish and disdainful. God lifts up the lowly, but only after he has torn the lofty from their thrones and cast them down. God feeds the starving (and here I like the NJB translation better than the NRSV’s less serious ‘hungry’) and sends those who have plenty off to starve in turn. Mary sings of God, and of the advent of God’s incarnation in the world, but her song is not an ode to beauty and peace. Her song is a political manifesto.

I am not making this up. Throughout the centuries theologians, biblical scholars, and revolutionaries have found solace in Mary’s words to Elizabeth. Mary announces God’s preferential option for the powerless throughout history, and then tells of God’s continuing preference as shown through her, and her role as the one who will bear God’s incarnated presence into the world. When God acts, the world is turned upside down. The Kingdom of God, we are reminded, looks both exactly like, and nothing like, the world we know.

Before I can finish, I need to use another word in an unfamiliar language. Having already read to you in Latin, I beg your indulgence, but I feel like this word is important enough to merit the effort. In the various Eastern Orthodox traditions of Christianity, Mary is known by a unique Greek word: Theotokos. The word is built from the Greek words for God and for Childbearing. Roughly translated, the Theotokos is the God-bearer, although the meanings of this word are subtle enough that it is usually left untranslated for the purpose of liturgy and in painting icons.

The reason I want to share this word with you is that I think it cuts through the centuries of worship, art, theology, and controversy that have arisen around the Biblical figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and gets back to that poor, unwed peasant girl who was chosen to bear God to a world that had abandoned her. Mary Theotokos is possibly the best example of the powerful role that women have always played and must always play in the life of our faith.

Consider the circumstances surrounding Mary as she journeys to her cousin’s home. These are tough times. The leaders of Judea and Israel seek to consolidate their power, which is always tenuous, under the new Emperor Caesar Tiberius. This requires tributes, and building projects, and armies, which are expensive. Taxes are high, and people are desperate, and the roads are not safe for a young woman traveling alone.

In the face of God’s impending incarnation, all the men have abandoned her. Zechariah, who is a priest and the husband of Elizabeth, has been struck dumb because he doubted the importance of his own child to come (John the Baptist) and Mary’s child. Joseph, to whom she was engaged, wants to break off that engagement. The shepherds, upon hearing the news, are afraid. Herod, hearing of the coming King, is enraged.

I know, I know, Joseph would come around, and Zachariah would get his voice back, and the shepherds would come to Bethlehem, and Herod would be circumvented by wise men. But at this point in history—at this turning point in time—now, when the whole world waits, however unknowing, for the birth of God in the world, it is the women who keep faith.  It is Elizabeth, despised and honorless because of her long barrenness; and Mary, young and unwed and honorless, who bear the faith of all people on their shoulders. It is Mary who is Theotokos, not the religious leaders, not the men of power, not even the prophets themselves, but Mary, pregnant on behalf of all creation, who keeps and bears God for us.

The early Christians would forget this after a few generations. Soon, Mary would be remembered in the West not so much because she was faithful, but because she was a virgin. Soon, we forgot that Jesus had as many women disciples as men. Soon, we would not think twice about sainting men who taught that women were lesser beings than men. Even today, in our modern world and in our recent history, we have forgotten Mary, or been witness to places where Mary and the power of women that she represents to us has been forgotten, and women have been neglected, tortured, or killed.

We must not forget Mary. We cannot, in Christian faith, ignore Mary Theotokos, who bears God to us. It is popular among politically correct writers these days to say that, without the women, Jesus’s ministry would never have succeeded. Which overlooks the fact, I think, that without Mary—or a woman exactly like her—God could not even have entered the world as Jesus in the first place.

Remember then—as we make our final preparations for the birth of Jesus, as we prepare to approach the Nativity of God Incarnate—remember Mary, and what she did, and what she said, and what that has to mean for us as we seek to build the Kingdom of God.

View archived copy of The eClarion here.

The Friday Letters

18 December 2009

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

One week ago, last Friday, Jieun and I went to Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley in Seattle to hear Chick Corea. Jazz bands have been a part of my life since Jr. High School, though it’s been many years since I heard anything this good live. Those of you familiar with the public education system in the Northwest will already know (and perhaps take for granted, as jazz is not so common in other parts of the country) that Jazz is a strong part of the music curriculum. When I was in school the jazz band was the elite music group—kind of a built in gifted program due to the necessarily restricted size. Everyone got to play in the concert band, because in a concert band 13 flutes is kinda cool. The jazz band was smaller, because there just aren’t 13 flute parts on a jazz chart. False modesty aside, I was a pretty good trumpet player, so I got to be in the jazz band from 7^th grade until I gave it up my junior year in college.

That academic/musical career got me exposed to many great musicians over the years. I learned the names of the greats and their songs through CDs if not by playing the music myself. I also participated in the many jazz festivals and competitions around the area, which meant hearing many other academic bands that were both far better and occasionally much worse than mine was that year. These festivals also generally had featured performers: famous musicians from the jazz world. As a high school student, and then as a community college enrollee, I got to hear, live, some fairly big names: Ray Brown, Winton Marsalis, Lionel Hampton. Not that I appreciated it at the time.

At the end of this past summer I was looking for some live jazz. Most of you will know already that Jieun is the real musician in the family. Consequently most of the live music I end up hearing in concert these days is classical in nature. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m really enjoying the Early Music Guild’s season to which we have a subscription. At heart though, I’m a jazz guy. I think maybe it’s like being a cat person or a dog person. You don’t have to hate the other to prefer the one. I will freely admit that cats are interesting as a species, and I have personally met a couple of lovely individuals therein. Nevertheless, if I had to make a choice, I’d side with the canines every time.

So when I signed us up for the early music program, I bought tickets to Corea’s show the same day. I was all eager anticipation for the months leading up to it. I even thought about what I might wear to the concert in advance, which, if you ask Jieun, is simply not something I do. We arrived early, had a bite to eat, and made our way through the will-call line. Dimitriou’s is a blast from the past. You enter at the top of a staircase and have to descend to the floor as if into a 1920’s gangster’s lair. The tiny tables are crammed into the space, right up against the stage. We were the third table out from the base player, but I still felt like I could reach out and touch.

We ordered drinks, and I asked for a Manhattan, which I’d never had before, because that seemed like what you ought to drink when removed from your century and placed firmly into the jazz age. We listened to the piano technician work on the instrument for half an hour, then Corea and his two accomplices came out on stage to some restrained applause. They sat down, Corea tinkled a few notes, and almost before we’d stopped welcoming them onstage they were off on the first tune.

Some people (jazz snobs, let’s call them) will tell you that the reason they don’t like classical music is all those silly rituals that go along with it. Clapping for the entrance of the conductor; how the first violin gets to stand and be acknowledged separately; how the performers leave the stage afterwards precisely three times before returning to play the encore, while the audience makes polite golf claps. I agree that those are fairly silly rituals, but not that much more silly that some of our church rituals, and to say that jazz doesn’t have them is to betray your lack of self-awareness. Jazz has it’s rituals too, they’re just different ones.

The thing I love about jazz—the reason I find the small jazz combo to be the pinnacle of musical artistry—is that outside of a few chords and a melody, the whole thing is made up as they go along. Jazz is improvisational. Corea’s most famous song, Spain, is nothing more than ten chords and a catchy melody that gets played at the beginning, the end, and wherever in between the three musicians decide to put it. The rest is created spontaneously in the minds of the three musicians as they play it. Who will take the first solo? A raised eyebrow might answer that question. When is the soloist finished? Well, the soloist might bring it to an end, but then again, one of the other two might take something the soloist was doing and spin it off into a new place. The intercommunication between the musicians borders on paranormal when performed by such accomplished artists.

When the trio finally got to Spain (you knew they would) it was barely recognizable. You’d have to know the song pretty well to follow what was happening on stage. Many in the audience must have known it that well, because there were chuckles all around as Corea and company turned their famous tune inside out, inverted it, and made it into a bullet train of improvisational virtuosity. The drummer did things with his drum set I didn’t know could be done. The bass player made his instrument give up sounds at a speed nearly unbelievable. Corea, apparently not content with being a complete master of the piano keys, reached into the case of the instrument itself and, without looking, started pulling strings by hand. Jieun, the most gifted musician I know and possessor of that much envied gift of perfect pitch, said she started out analyzing the chords Corea was using, but got a headache after following him into some modal shift or another.

When they finished, the applause was not polite. It was demanding. There is no back stage at Jazz Alley, so the three just walked off to the side and stood next to a table chatting and sipping water bottles. The applause didn’t fade. The crowd wanted more. Here is a master, we thought, three of them, actually. They have delivered unto us transcendence, and we will have more of it!

A religious experience? I guess that depends on how loosely you’re willing to define religion. A spiritual one? Yes. Oh, yes.

In Hope, for the Immanent Transcendence,

Ben.

A sermon by The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland on the 3rd Sunday of Advent

Zephaniah 3:14-20

Canticle 9

Philippians 4:4-7

Luke 3:7-18

I have a love/hate relationship with movie previews. One the one hand, it is exciting to see a glimpse of upcoming movies, and the trailers usually manage to raise my expectations for movies I haven’t heard of or raise my anticipation for movies I know are coming. Sometimes the previews are better than the movie. I don’t even remember what movie I had paid for when I saw the trailer for the first Lord of the Rings movie, the preview so out shown the feature attraction. On the other hand, movie previews often give away the best parts of an upcoming film, robbing the actual experience of any excitement or tension.

On my office shelf sits a book entitled, Genesis: the Movie. The author suggests that if we were to view the first six chapters of the book of Genesis as a movie rather than as exact historical chronology we might have less difficulty with the particulars while noticing more of the significant spiritual themes.

And so into my head full of movie thoughts comes today’s gospel lesson from Luke, in which we have the most complete summary of the preaching of John the Baptist in the scriptures. And it occurs to me that this summary, and the life of John the Baptist more generally, serve as a great theatrical trailer for the life and teaching of Jesus himself. John the Baptist is like the original screenplay for the Jesus story, kind of a pre-production Jesus, released to limited audiences who were then asked for their input in small focus groups.

Well, enough of that metaphor for now. What is it that John is saying? Essentially, there are three parts to what John teaches in the Gospel reading today. First, he warns of the coming judgment of God. Second, he calls for real ethical reforms. And third, he announces the coming of the messiah. These three points serve as a succinct preview of the life and teaching of Jesus, and provide a fairly handy guide for churches on how to be a balanced Christian community.

First off, the warning of coming judgment. John accomplishes this with typical prophetic flair. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” he screams at the crowds presenting themselves to him for baptism, conjuring up an image of snakes writhing over each other in an attempt to flee from a fire. This is the same Gospel that just a couple chapters ago was full of images of Baby Jesus, tender and mild. Now it’s hellfire and brimstone as John excoriates those who come to him hoping just to cover all their bases. He ridicules their self-justification as children of Abraham, mocking them, saying that God could make children of Abraham from rocks and would still not stand for their injustice and selfish ways.

Before I go on to John’s second and third points, I’d like to take a brief side trip into the reading from Zephaniah, because something very important has happened in the prophetic tone of Advent. You may have noticed that Advent is something of a schizophrenic time in the Church Calendar. On the one hand, we are quietly preparing and waiting for the arrival of  God’s incarnate Son, come into the world as a baby, meek and humble. On the other hand, we read again and again from the prophetic literature which cries out for repentance and judgment and the end of days. I personally think we reflect this two-minded confusion of the church pretty well in secular society. On the one hand, we make plans to gather with family and friends in the quiet comfort of home and hearth. On the other, we willingly plunge into the apocalyptic shopping world of WalMart and the Mall.

In today’s reading from Zephaniah however, we have turned a corner. The portion read is the ninth of Zephaniah’s nine oracles and the end of his book, and at the last, the prophet changes his tone from “beware” to “be glad”. He will not give up the fire of his earlier words, but while God is still coming to judge, such judgment is to be cause for rejoicing among the people of God. Zephaniah marks a shift in prophetic tone from lament to joyous confidence.

John the Baptist is a prophet too, however, and he will not let the crowds off lightly. After warning them in no uncertain terms that God would be displeased when God arrived, the crowds ask him what they can do. John again foreshadows Jesus by recommending a very practical, and very personal, set of ethical reforms. Anyone with two coats is to share one with one who has none. Toll collectors are to collect no more than is fair, and soldiers no more than their wages. In the first century economy of the Roman Empire, toll collectors paid the empire for rights to collect tolls, then charged whatever they could get away with for their own profit. Soldiers were paid a very humble wage and expected to supplement their earnings by threat of violence or plunder. It was a system set-up for abuse, and to refrain from such abuse would have been radical indeed, and put the one who refrained in a precarious social and financial situation.

John’s ethical prescriptions were a very personal and practical way to go about the repentance he required. Unlike many of his contemporaries, John advocated not withdrawal from the world like the Essene community at Qumran, nor a military solution like the Zealots calling for revolution. John’s ethics were intensely personal, just as Jesus’ would be.

In the third pillar of his speech, John announces the coming of Jesus. As his teaching unfolds, the people gathered begin to wonder if John is the Messiah they have been expecting. He responds by announcing the coming of the true Messiah, one whose greatness is so much more than John’s own that John would not be worthy even to perform the duties of a slave for this Messiah.

And thus you have the complete theatrical trailer for Jesus: the Movie. In John the Baptist’s teaching you have warning of the coming of God’s kingdom and judgment, you have call for personal ethical reform, and you have announcement of Jesus as God’s messiah. Any of these three points, taken alone, is insufficient to be Gospel proclamation, but taken together they form an accurate preview of the core of Jesus’ message in the Gospels.

Advent is a weird kind of season. If we take the metaphor of John the Baptist as preview for Jesus Christ, we’d have to conclude that the trailer really over-hyped the movie. Here John goes and gets all these people in the crowds excited about the coming Messiah/Movie, but when it finally arrives it’s nothing like what they expected. John promised pyrotechnics and an action movie hero. Jesus delivers only mystical philosophy and gets executed like a criminal. It’s as if you went to the theatre and saw a preview for a great new blockbuster movie with millions of dollars of special effects in which the good guy would win, get the girl, retire rich, and save the planet. Then when you went to the movie it was some bizarre art-house film about a moody Jew who got killed because he wouldn’t do what the authorities wanted him to. Also, the movie went straight to video.

This backwardness of Advent hype is reflected again in our modern practice of secular Christmas. All the excitement is in the building up of the Big Day, the anticipation, the lighting effects, the musical score. Then when Christmas comes it’s almost a let down. Except in the church of course. We know that this movie may start slow, but we also know that all the special effects come at the end of the film, at Easter, when the good guys do win, although not in a way anyone could have imagined.

And so I’m back to my love/hate relationship with previews. I actually like all the Christmas hype, the music, the Santa Claus decorations, even the goofy, animated Christmas light elves and reindeer. But I don’t like that all of this noise distracts from the events to come rather than really getting me ready for them. I guess I’ll just have to see the movie to spite the preview. I hope you will too. AMEN.

View archived copy of The eClarion here.

The Friday Letters

11 December 2009

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

The Collect prayer for the third Sunday in Advent goes like this:

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

The collect is a relatively small piece of our liturgy each week, but this one has always been a favorite of mine. The first sentence—phrase I guess, as a collect is only one sentence regardless of the grammatical abuses employed to achieve this—particularly is enjoyable. “Stir up your power, O Lord!” It is as if halfway through Advent we’ve decided it’s time to remind God that the big show is getting closer. “OK God, you ready? Christmas is coming fast, you know, and we imagine it takes a lot of divine energy to manage an incarnation. You up for this? You ready? Are you psyched?!”

So maybe I’m the only one for whom the collect is mentally transformed into a football coach’s halftime pep-talk. The only other image that jumps to mind is of God standing over a huge cauldron of bubbling power and literally stirring it up. This is God the divine chef. I suppose God would be a Cajun chef and the power being stirred up a great huge pot of jambalaya. Even regular jambalaya has the power to help and deliver us from hunger, so it stands to reason that divine jambalaya would be able to overcome our hindrance by sin.

Such ruminations are clearly silly, but I don’t really think they cross the line into blasphemy. I’m kind of counting on that, actually. I get a great deal of joy out of playing with the imagery and traditions that we use to talk about God, but it’s not only the joy that I’m after. I’m also looking for inspiration. A willingness to be flexible and playful with God language often leads me into paths of new understanding.

Advent is, of course, a serious time. The Feast of the Incarnation for which we are preparing is one of the two great days that bracket our faith between them. And yet, the act we are celebrating is one that was completely unprecedented, totally unpredictable, and really just off the wall crazy when you think about it.

 “Here is the Master of the Universe! Omnipotent! Omniscient! Omnibelevolent! Behold!!!”

 “Umm, are you pointing to that baby?”

 “Yes!”

 “OK, just making sure.”

Peace,

Ben.

A sermon by The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland on the 2nd Sunday of Advent, Year C.

Baruch 5:1-9

Canticle 16

Philippians 1:3-11

Luke 3:1-6

For several weeks now we have dealt with apocalyptic warnings about the end of the world. Now, on this second Sunday of Advent, we can begin to see what this season is all about: preparation.

It is year “C” now in our liturgical calendar, and while that particular letter need not mean anything significant to you, behind it is the liturgical reality that until Advent of next year our Sunday readings will come primarily from the Gospel of Luke. We’re saving the Christmassy bits of Luke—the first couple chapters about Mary and Joseph and the shepherds—for the 24^th and 25^th of this month. And so for the next two weeks we read from the third chapter and hear the story of John the Baptist.

The Gospel reading begins with a list of names. Now, if you are anything like me, when presented with a biblical list of names you tend to skip right over it. This is a particularly useful technique in the book of Numbers, if you don’t necessarily care who exactly begat who, who then went on to begat someone else, and so on and so on, until you begin to think that begat means not fathered but bored to death. This morning though there is something profound to learn from that list of names.

We start with the Emperor Tiberius: definitely top of the food chain and a reminder that the land and people we are about to read about are under occupation by a foreign power. Then we get Pontius Pilate, who you’ll all remember from Mel Gibson’s movie. Next is Herod (in case you’re wondering, this is Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great) and his lesser known brothers Philip and Lysanias, who wrap up the list of political and military rulers both Roman and local. The last two on the list are the religious authorities Annas and Caiaphas, high priests of the Jewish people and friends of the Emperor.

So now that we’ve named all the power brokers of that time and place, where is the lesson? Why begin the story of Jesus’s ministry by naming these people? The answer is at the end of that sentence. Consider who these people are: we have Tiberius, ruler of the known world; Pilate, his governor in the region; Herod and his brothers, local rulers risen to the height of local politics; and Annas and Caiaphas, leaders of the only religion Rome never consumed (up to that point); and the Word of God, when it came, came to none of them. The Word of God came, instead, to John, son of Zachariah, while he was searching for enlightenment in the desert. Of all the choices God could have made—of all the people God could have used to announce the advent of his own Son’s presence among them, God chose an unknown prophet from the fringes of society.

I hope that doesn’t surprise you any more. It is surprising, but I’ve told you about it before. You probably knew it even before I said anything. God displays a preference, in both testaments of the Bible and throughout the history of salvation, for choosing the weak, or the lowly, or the outcast, or whomever God can find that seems least likely to be able to get the job done. God seems to prefer losers.

And so when it is time for Jesus to begin his ministry on earth, God chooses John, whom we name the Baptist, to announce the coming of God’s Son. At the end of the first chapter of Luke, some thirty years before our reading this morning takes place, Mary sang of the future of her son in a prophetic hymn we have come to call the Magnificat. She sang, “[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” I love the Magnificat, both for the beauty of its poetry, and for the subversive proclamation at it’s heart. John comes to announce that the work Mary proclaimed begins now. As God passes over the rulers of the age, both temporal and spiritual, to choose John as his prophet, God begins that work Mary sang of. Begins it in Jesus, and has not yet stopped.

And so John comes back from his wilderness retreat and begins to proclaim. He offers baptism, the chance to be washed free from sin, whether those sins be specific acts of wrong or merely a life lived apart from God. John offers baptism, and implores people to turn, to repent, and to prepare. John will have a great deal more to say to us next week, as he preaches in his own words. For today we are left with a description of him and what he did, presented by Luke and quoted from Isaiah.

Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

John calls us to Advent as surely as he called those first century listeners to baptism. Prepare the way of the Lord; make ready yourselves and your society for the presence of God. Most of what Isaiah said in those verses could be accomplished, at least literally, by the deft employment of bulldozers, dump trucks, and earthmovers. Yet the ways we are called to make straight are the ways of our lives. The valleys we are called to fill are the valleys in our hearts where love is absent. The mountains we are called to bring low are those barriers we have erected between ourselves and others, so that we cannot see, or hear, or feel them. The crooked ways we are called to straighten, and the rough ways we are called to smooth are the ways that we, as a society, have placed between any people and the justice God wills for them.

Once again it is the last line of the passage that carries all the weight. Again and again in the Gospel of Luke (and we shall hear it all year) is that phrase “all flesh”. God desires nothing less than the redemption of every single living creature. There are no people left out of God’s compelling love; no races or groups or types of people that God does not call us to love. It is a gigantic calling. It is, probably, an impossible one.

Easter is my favorite day in the church year, but Advent is my favorite season. Partly because I love the liturgy, and the sense of anticipation, and the quiet beauty of waiting for God by the light of an Advent wreath. But the greater reason I love the Advent season is because of that impossible call. It may be impossible for me, and even for us: too huge to be contemplated let alone accomplished. Yet while John pulls no punches in delivering God’s demands to us, he also announces the coming of the one who will make us able to enter that call in faith. We are called to prepare the way of the Lord. We are called to make ready, to make ourselves and our communities into the kind of places where the Kingdom of God can thrive. Jesus will have something to say about the eventual perfection of that work; we are called to make ready, not to finish.

And while the task seems, may in fact be, impossible, there is something about this time of year—this season—that makes it feel like it might not be impossible after all. Maybe, if we all engaged in the kind of goodwill and hospitality and outreach that is so very popular in December not just in December but in all our lives, John’s call to prepare the way of the Lord would become a call that is within our reach after all. AMEN.

View archived copy of The eClarion here.

The Friday Letters

4 December 2009

John of Damascus

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

It is clear this morning that December has arrived, complete with the appropriate weather. Frost on the ground, frozen fog in the air, and temperatures a solid five degrees below freezing. December arrives as well in our scripture readings for this weekend. We’ve spent our time reading about apocalyptic eschatology and are moving into those Advent readings we know and love: Prepare the way of the Lord; A voice crying out in the wilderness; My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.

The week past has been full and this morning is packed to overflowing, so I will be brief. I remind you of and invite you to our Memorial Eucharist for Diane Childers this afternoon at four. I recommend to your reading today’s edition of The eClarion for there are many events and activities coming up over the next few weeks. In a lovely calendrical cooincidence, this Sunday, December 6^th, is actually Saint Nicholas day. Children’s Chapel at 9:00am will feature a lesson on this historical and seasonal saint, and the sermon at the 10am service will feature a visit from St. Nick himself.

I wish you the best Advent season possible and pray that you will make an effort to carve for yourself some times of reflection and rest. It is difficult to do, but worth it to have done. I hope to see you Sunday!

Peace,

Ben.