Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York on the First Sunday after Christmas: Isaiah 61:10--62:4; Galatians 3:23-29, 4:4-7; John 1:1-18
“Christmas Day is the feast of God’s humanity.”[1] Thus says Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx. This declaration comes to the fore in our readings this morning in all its radicalness.
I take Schillebeeckx’ declaration, as well as Christmas itself, to be a manifesto for our fundamental stance that Christianity is a religion of inclusion rather than exclusion. There is no purity code in Christianity; there is no clean and unclean. Christmas has erased all that.
Isaiah this morning proclaims newness for Zion, a newness so profound that a name change is necessary. It’s why I added the next verse to the official reading, because it is the verse that gives the new names. Zion is now to be called “Hephzibah” and “Beulah,” in English, “Delight” and “Married.”
Zion is now Beulahland, the state of being married to God. The relationship is sealed as permanent (the divorce rate in marriage with the divine is zero). The relationship excludes only any sense of desolation or forsakenness or impurity. God is now wedded to his people.
St. Paul speaks this morning of the implications of this wedding. All the old distinctions between us are gone. In Paul’s day these distinctions were predominantly male or female, slave or free, and Gentile or Jew. There is no theological or biblical reason why the erasure should be limited to these expressions, however. Paul clearly means to say that all distinctions are now simply gone in the eyes of God. So we rightly add such distinctions as black or white and gay or straight. None of this is to say that these distinctions do not exist or deny the reality that they shape our identity in some very fundamental ways. It is to say that they do not ultimately matter to God. God is on all sides of all distinctions.
Why? Paul goes on to say because all are equally adopted. There is no longer any distinction between godly or ungodly. All may pray as Jesus prayed, “Abba! Father!” And an important thing happens in Greek in verses six and seven of chapter four that we miss in English. Paul begins, “And because you are children…” the “you” being plural. This is how we are used to Paul speaking, to the broad audiences of his letters. But then he shifts to the personal: “So you are no longer a slave but a child.” The “you” is now singular. It had to have been a deliberate shift on his part. Paul is saying to whomever is listening, “You are a child,” and you and you and you, without distinction.
And then there is John’s magisterial poem about the incarnation, or, as he puts it, the Word becoming flesh and living among us. He says, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” “Light” is an important image for John, contrasting with the darkness or night. Equally important, however, is the word “true,” contrasting to lies or falsehood. “You will know the truth,” he will later say, “and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31). (This is the motto, by the way, of the Anglican Communion[2]). So when John puts these two images—light and truth—together, you know something really important is going on.
There is “true light” as opposed to “the darkness of lies.” And what makes the light true? It enlightens everyone, he says. The light is true that enlightens everyone, without distinction. Then, like Paul, John uses the image of being a child. All are children of God, born of God. The only distinction left between persons is whether or not one knows, receives, and accepts this truth.
Again and again in these readings, the images are of inclusion, of the end of distinctions, and the universalizing of the delight of God. In becoming human, God has put an end to the ways in which we divide ourselves. Our divisions inevitably lead to systems of pure or impure, clean or unclean, worthy or unworthy. All these distinctions are swept aside in the humanity of God.
Christmas is the feast of God’s humanity. Christmas is the feast of God’s taking on all human flesh and thus making it a fit receptacle for divine delight and glory. All, all, and you and you and you, are included in this amazing explosion of holiness.
We have nothing of which to be ashamed when we preach and practice this gospel, this good news. It is not, as some say, our twisting the Bible to say what we want it to say. It is what the Bible says, clearly and plainly from Isaiah to Paul to John. All are included in the delight of God as adopted daughters and sons of the Most High.
If this were not true then Christmas would be nothing but an embarrassment, and I suppose in a way it is. Christmas is the feast of God lowering his standards to become flesh and blood and live among us, without distinction.
Christmas is the feast of God’s humanity…and ours. To follow Isaiah, our identity as married to God, living in God’s delight. Or to follow Paul and John, our identity as God’s adopted children, living in the true light.
[1] God Among Us: the Gospel Proclaimed (Crossroad, 1983), p. 12.
[2] It is the inscription, in Greek, around the seal of the Anglican Communion.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Saturday, December 27, 2008
A Pentecostal Christmas
Sermon preached on Chritmas Eve at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York: Luke 1:5--2:21
The one Christmas morning I remember as a child is the day I awoke to a “Mighty Mike.” It was one part redemption and one part hope.
The redemption part is that the Christmas before had been somewhat meager. You see, I had stumbled upon the Christmas cache in our basement and had discovered that one of my dreams was coming through, receiving a farm set with tractor and various machinery like a plow and a hay baler. The next thing I knew my mother was standing over me and I never saw that tractor again.
The next year all I wanted was a “Mighty Mike.” It was this vehicle you put together that the commercials said would travel through any terrain and climb anything you put in its way. When the ad came on television I could barely sit still with excitement.
The name didn’t hurt. I was anything but “mighty.” Not particularly athletic and certainly not among the popular in my class, I was what we called in those days a “book worm,” who largely kept to himself. So there was a bit of fantasy at play in owning a “Mighty Mike.”
When I saw Mighty Mike under the Christmas tree as a ran into the room I was overcome with joy. I saw it right away because it was one of the unwrapped presents, which meant Santa himself had delivered it! It may have been the single happiest moment in my young life.
It was short-lived, of course. Mighty Mike did not live up to what the commercials promised. They rarely do, do they. Thus my ecstasy was short-lived and my fantasy dimmed. Might Mike ended up being just an “Average Mike,” and so was I.
There is much ecstasy in the long story we have just heard. Everyone seems to break into song: Zechariah, once his tongue is loosened at his son’s naming; Mary, as she greets Elizabeth to share in the good news of their miraculous pregnancies; and angels fill the heavens with song as they announce the coming of Messiah to the lowly shepherds. There is joy everywhere. But is it the kind that will last?
Who is the main character in this play of joy? It is not Elizabeth or Zechariah, Mary or Joseph, Gabriel (although he gets two appearances) or even John or Jesus. It is, rather the Holy Spirit who is the main character, showing up again and again.
The angel says to Zechariah about his son-to-be,
Even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit.
And the same angel says to Mary,
The Holy Spirit will come upon you…
And when Mary arrives at her aunt’s home it is said
Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women…”
And once he indicates that Elizabeth is right and the boy is to be named John,
Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy…
Everywhere the Holy Spirit shows up to direct the action. Only in the story of Jesus itself is there no mention of her presence, although anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can see her handiwork by this time. Angel hosts do not burst from the heavens with song without the Holy Spirit present to conduct them. At this point in the story we know that when angels show up and people burst into song, the Holy Spirit is the director.
It is the Holy Spirit who is the bringer of miracle and ecstasy. It is the Holy Spirit who makes this cast of ordinary people into extraordinary bearers of good news. It is the Holy Spirit, who, in the words of our sister Mary, “casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly.”
As St. Luke tells his story this is a crucial detail. The Holy Spirit’s presence at the beginning of the story of Jesus will later be mirrored by the Holy Spirit’s presence at another birth, the birth of the church at the beginning of his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles. The first believers will be filled with this same Spirit and they will themselves say and do extraordinary things, so much so that they become known as “those people who turn the world upside down.”
This is the joy that lasts, the gift of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Jesus may be the one we are called to follow this night, but it is Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph who are our companions on the journey, ordinary people like us, called to say and do extraordinary things, to become mighty not in the things of this world, but in the glory of God which brings peace to all in whom God delights. And it is the Holy Spirit that makes all of us, indeed, delightful in God’s eyes and thus worthy recipients of his peace.
In short, this Christmas is a Pentecostal experience. Everywhere we look, the Holy Spirit is acting, making people pregnant with possibility, filling the hungry with good things, and liberating all whose lives she touches from fear.
It is the Holy Spirit that is the tender compassion of our God, dawning from the heavens to shine on us who live in darkness and the shadow of death.
It is the Holy Spirit who creates a community out of those gathered together in a barn, huddled before an ordinary but miraculous baby, who himself, filled with the same Spirit, will turn the world upside down.
And the good news for us this night, better than we could have ever expected, is that this same Spirit is God’s gift to us, better than any toy we might receive tomorrow, because this gift will last, will not disappoint, will never let us down, because this Spirit always lifts up, makes each one of us a delight, equally mighty in the eyes of God.
So when God says to us, “Merry Christmas,” and hands us our gift, it is not we who open this gift, but this gift that opens us, opens us to say and do extraordinary things with our ordinary lives, beginning with the way we say “peace be with you” tonight to friend and stranger alike, and then all approach this Table and hold out our hands to receive the miracle of God’s own life given for us now and forever.
It ought to be enough, it is enough, to make our Christmas merry no matter what tomorrow brings, or especially the next day and the next. God has gifted us, has indeed gifted the whole creation with Spirit-filled glory in spite of all signs to the contrary, come what may.
We are present tonight at what our Pentecostal brothers and sisters would call “a Holy Ghost Party,” and we are called, whatever the circumstances of our life, to dance and to sing with our brothers Zechariah and John and our sisters Elizabeth and Mary with Gabriel on the trumpet and the angels providing the song and the Holy Spirit conducting it all in grand gestures of glory.
Let me close with a favorite poem by a favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which he both acknowledges our sometimes dreary ordinariness, but calls us to see in the very air we breathe the glory of God and the activity of the Holy Spirit.
God’s Grandeur
THE world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade;
bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge
and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast
and with ah! bright wings.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods
With warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Merry Christmas, my friends and fellow receivers of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Let it open up our lives that we, too, might be people who turn this old world upside down.
The one Christmas morning I remember as a child is the day I awoke to a “Mighty Mike.” It was one part redemption and one part hope.
The redemption part is that the Christmas before had been somewhat meager. You see, I had stumbled upon the Christmas cache in our basement and had discovered that one of my dreams was coming through, receiving a farm set with tractor and various machinery like a plow and a hay baler. The next thing I knew my mother was standing over me and I never saw that tractor again.
The next year all I wanted was a “Mighty Mike.” It was this vehicle you put together that the commercials said would travel through any terrain and climb anything you put in its way. When the ad came on television I could barely sit still with excitement.
The name didn’t hurt. I was anything but “mighty.” Not particularly athletic and certainly not among the popular in my class, I was what we called in those days a “book worm,” who largely kept to himself. So there was a bit of fantasy at play in owning a “Mighty Mike.”
When I saw Mighty Mike under the Christmas tree as a ran into the room I was overcome with joy. I saw it right away because it was one of the unwrapped presents, which meant Santa himself had delivered it! It may have been the single happiest moment in my young life.
It was short-lived, of course. Mighty Mike did not live up to what the commercials promised. They rarely do, do they. Thus my ecstasy was short-lived and my fantasy dimmed. Might Mike ended up being just an “Average Mike,” and so was I.
There is much ecstasy in the long story we have just heard. Everyone seems to break into song: Zechariah, once his tongue is loosened at his son’s naming; Mary, as she greets Elizabeth to share in the good news of their miraculous pregnancies; and angels fill the heavens with song as they announce the coming of Messiah to the lowly shepherds. There is joy everywhere. But is it the kind that will last?
Who is the main character in this play of joy? It is not Elizabeth or Zechariah, Mary or Joseph, Gabriel (although he gets two appearances) or even John or Jesus. It is, rather the Holy Spirit who is the main character, showing up again and again.
The angel says to Zechariah about his son-to-be,
Even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit.
And the same angel says to Mary,
The Holy Spirit will come upon you…
And when Mary arrives at her aunt’s home it is said
Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women…”
And once he indicates that Elizabeth is right and the boy is to be named John,
Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy…
Everywhere the Holy Spirit shows up to direct the action. Only in the story of Jesus itself is there no mention of her presence, although anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can see her handiwork by this time. Angel hosts do not burst from the heavens with song without the Holy Spirit present to conduct them. At this point in the story we know that when angels show up and people burst into song, the Holy Spirit is the director.
It is the Holy Spirit who is the bringer of miracle and ecstasy. It is the Holy Spirit who makes this cast of ordinary people into extraordinary bearers of good news. It is the Holy Spirit, who, in the words of our sister Mary, “casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly.”
As St. Luke tells his story this is a crucial detail. The Holy Spirit’s presence at the beginning of the story of Jesus will later be mirrored by the Holy Spirit’s presence at another birth, the birth of the church at the beginning of his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles. The first believers will be filled with this same Spirit and they will themselves say and do extraordinary things, so much so that they become known as “those people who turn the world upside down.”
This is the joy that lasts, the gift of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Jesus may be the one we are called to follow this night, but it is Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph who are our companions on the journey, ordinary people like us, called to say and do extraordinary things, to become mighty not in the things of this world, but in the glory of God which brings peace to all in whom God delights. And it is the Holy Spirit that makes all of us, indeed, delightful in God’s eyes and thus worthy recipients of his peace.
In short, this Christmas is a Pentecostal experience. Everywhere we look, the Holy Spirit is acting, making people pregnant with possibility, filling the hungry with good things, and liberating all whose lives she touches from fear.
It is the Holy Spirit that is the tender compassion of our God, dawning from the heavens to shine on us who live in darkness and the shadow of death.
It is the Holy Spirit who creates a community out of those gathered together in a barn, huddled before an ordinary but miraculous baby, who himself, filled with the same Spirit, will turn the world upside down.
And the good news for us this night, better than we could have ever expected, is that this same Spirit is God’s gift to us, better than any toy we might receive tomorrow, because this gift will last, will not disappoint, will never let us down, because this Spirit always lifts up, makes each one of us a delight, equally mighty in the eyes of God.
So when God says to us, “Merry Christmas,” and hands us our gift, it is not we who open this gift, but this gift that opens us, opens us to say and do extraordinary things with our ordinary lives, beginning with the way we say “peace be with you” tonight to friend and stranger alike, and then all approach this Table and hold out our hands to receive the miracle of God’s own life given for us now and forever.
It ought to be enough, it is enough, to make our Christmas merry no matter what tomorrow brings, or especially the next day and the next. God has gifted us, has indeed gifted the whole creation with Spirit-filled glory in spite of all signs to the contrary, come what may.
We are present tonight at what our Pentecostal brothers and sisters would call “a Holy Ghost Party,” and we are called, whatever the circumstances of our life, to dance and to sing with our brothers Zechariah and John and our sisters Elizabeth and Mary with Gabriel on the trumpet and the angels providing the song and the Holy Spirit conducting it all in grand gestures of glory.
Let me close with a favorite poem by a favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which he both acknowledges our sometimes dreary ordinariness, but calls us to see in the very air we breathe the glory of God and the activity of the Holy Spirit.
God’s Grandeur
THE world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade;
bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge
and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast
and with ah! bright wings.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods
With warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Merry Christmas, my friends and fellow receivers of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Let it open up our lives that we, too, might be people who turn this old world upside down.
Monday, December 22, 2008
TO: Mr. President-elect; Re: Pastor Rick Warren
Dear Mr. President-elect,
Like many others I greet your inauguration with great joy, with a great sense of hope for a new future together. Your choice of Pastor Rick Warren puzzles and disappoints me in this regard, however. Overall, he is a divisive figure. Both as a gay man and as a religious leader I am left wondering what price you will be willing to pay to bring all to the table. I want Rick Warren to be at the table, mind you, but I don't want him leading the call, because people like me then cannot follow, by definition. It would be as if you chose an openly gay pastor to deliver the invocation. I would not support that either at this time in our nation's history even though it would be a great step forward for me personally.
I understand at this point you cannot back down. Please, then, make sure lesbian and gay folk get included in your speech and take action early on in your administration on something that strengthens our families. Let us know without a doubt that the protection of our families is on your agenda.
Respectfully,
(The Rev.) Michael W. Hopkins
Rector, the Episcopal Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene
Rochester, NY
Like many others I greet your inauguration with great joy, with a great sense of hope for a new future together. Your choice of Pastor Rick Warren puzzles and disappoints me in this regard, however. Overall, he is a divisive figure. Both as a gay man and as a religious leader I am left wondering what price you will be willing to pay to bring all to the table. I want Rick Warren to be at the table, mind you, but I don't want him leading the call, because people like me then cannot follow, by definition. It would be as if you chose an openly gay pastor to deliver the invocation. I would not support that either at this time in our nation's history even though it would be a great step forward for me personally.
I understand at this point you cannot back down. Please, then, make sure lesbian and gay folk get included in your speech and take action early on in your administration on something that strengthens our families. Let us know without a doubt that the protection of our families is on your agenda.
Respectfully,
(The Rev.) Michael W. Hopkins
Rector, the Episcopal Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene
Rochester, NY
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Personal Apocalypse
Sermon preachedon the 4th Sunday of Advent, 2008 at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York: Luke 1:26-38.
Advent has always had two poles—the two “comings” of Christ. We prepare to celebrate the first coming as we pray and wait for the second coming. We began the season with the latter, with a bit of apocalyptic writing.
In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. (Mark 13:24)
Apocalyptic writing is poetry under pressure. The writing is symbol in a state of crisis.
This morning that seems long behind us as we hear the story of Gabriel’s visit to Mary. It is a quiet, but awesome, story, about as far from apocalyptic as one might get.
Or is it? I want to speak this morning about Mary’s personal apocalypse and ours.
Most readers and commentators on the story we just heard marvel at Mary’s calm acceptance of the news that Gabriel brings. She does ask “How can this be?” but then accepts the explanation wholeheartedly. “Be it unto me according to thy word.”
In this she is held up as a model of faithful response to God. This oversimplification is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because it is impossible for any of us to live up to this model. There is some major work to be done between, “How can this be?” and, “I am the servant of the Lord.”
I believe that was true even for our sister Mary. True, it may have happened as quickly as they story seems to say, although I like to think there was a very long, tense, pause between Gabriel’s explanation and her acquiescence. A long, tense, pause in which the world—both hers and God’s—hung in the balance.
It is to her eternal credit that she said, “Yes.” But what went on in her mind during that long pause? Whatever it was, it was a vision of her life being turned upside down, having to grasp an impossibility, and deciding that the most unlikely path was actually hers to take. And to go through that process of thought—whether it takes moments or months—is a personal apocalypse.
I take it to be true, that Mary had her own personal apocalypse, because her answer, as well as every word she speaks from here on out, is in the language of poetry. She can only speak in symbol, and symbol born in crisis as we also just heard in her song.
Mary doesn’t have any other way of speaking than poetry because there is nothing rational to be said. The situation cannot result in careful prose or rational speech. She can only sing of “generations calling me blessed” as if she were a prophet, and “the lowly having been raised up and the mighty cast down” as if that had already happened even though it was perfectly, painfully obvious to the rational mind that this was and is not the case.
You can only speak this way out of a personal apocalypse.
Now I submit to you two things: God wants each one of us to have the same kind of personal apocalypse (many times over, actually), and we are terrified of it because we instinctively know that it means that life can never be the same.
You may already have had several of these apocalyptic moments in your life. What I am talking about may actually sound familiar to you. Chances are that you’ve had one and didn’t have any language for it. Many different kinds of experiences cause them, but they all follow the pattern of this story.
They all involve a moment when we can hear the voice, as of an angel, “Hail! Favored one! The Lord is with you!” It is actually the moment of our baptism when we are declared to be God’s child no matter what and forever. Our personal apocalypses are always moments when that divine truth becomes a little truer in our lives.
The hard part is that such a moment often comes as a sharp contrast to the situation at hand. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, we have to be in crisis for apocalypse to happen. Of course, we don’t know if Mary was in crisis, the story doesn’t say. In fact, the story doesn’t say anything about her at all. She’s a nobody, literally.
That alone is important. We don’t have to be “somebody” to receive a revelation like Mary’s. But sometimes, as I said, our state of “nobodiness” is a time of personal crisis, an apocalyptic moment, a time of suffering or other personal trial. It is when we are at our lowest and then, suddenly, the good news is at our feet. You are my child. You are my beloved.
And then, as in the story, we have our doubts, our fears, even our quite negative reactions. Everybody in the Bible who learns something revelatory about themselves and God has these kinds of reactions. Moses complains that he can’t speak very well. Isaiah says he is unworthy. Jeremiah protests that he is too young. Jonah literally tries to run away when he has one. He could not deal with a God this merciful.
And then we are called through our doubt and fears to say simply, “Here am I.” We’re not called to haul ourselves up into a fit of righteousness to prove somehow that we are worthy of this revelation. We are called simply to say, “OK. It’s me. This is what you get.” And, in spite of that, God has called me beloved.
That is a personal apocalypse. You never know when you’re going to meet that angel. It will probably be in the unlikeliest of places and times. Now I know some of you know exactly what I’m talking about but some of you are not so sure and want an example. I’ve got one, but it’s personal and feels somewhat risky, but I trust you.
I met just such an angel one day this week in one of those unexpected places. It was in my psychiatrist’s office. Now a psychiatrist’s office is not the kind of place that the average person ever wants to be found—witness that I am very nervous talking about this in public. How will I be judged for having—needing—a psychiatrist?
And that is actually the place I was in when the angel came to me. I was in that place of wishing that I could be anywhere else in the world. I was in a state of grief and frustration and anger over my ongoing illness. And I blurted out one of my greatest fears: I will now and forever be perceived as being damaged. That was the exact used I word—damaged. That is how I felt.
The angel came to me in my psychiatrist. How he responded to me was all in proper psychiatrist-talk, but I heard divine language, especially in the days since that I have had to ponder it in my heart.
I heard, “Who are you to call yourself damaged? I know who you are. I know the illness from which you suffer. You will hurt sometimes, sometimes badly, but you are never damaged. I said quite the opposite when you were baptized and I meant it. I never say anything I don’t mean. You are my beloved. I know it’s hard to accept, but it is just possible that what you call ‘damaged’ is actually a gift you can give to others. You can offer good news out of your own experience of bad news; you can offer healing out of woundedness. So don’t come before me saying you are ‘damaged.’ Say the only thing I have ever wanted you to say and will ever want you to say, ‘Here am I, just me, this is what you get.’”
Well that was my most recent personal apocalypse. It’s the same kind of experience God wants to offer you, albeit in perhaps a vastly different way. Yet the pattern is the same.
“Hey you, nobody special, you are favored.”
“How can this be?”
“Everything is possible with God. Are you willing to be pregnant with possibility?”
“Here am I. This is what you have to work with, but here am I.”
And life is not the same—the low are lifted high, the damaged repaired.
Advent has always had two poles—the two “comings” of Christ. We prepare to celebrate the first coming as we pray and wait for the second coming. We began the season with the latter, with a bit of apocalyptic writing.
In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. (Mark 13:24)
Apocalyptic writing is poetry under pressure. The writing is symbol in a state of crisis.
This morning that seems long behind us as we hear the story of Gabriel’s visit to Mary. It is a quiet, but awesome, story, about as far from apocalyptic as one might get.
Or is it? I want to speak this morning about Mary’s personal apocalypse and ours.
Most readers and commentators on the story we just heard marvel at Mary’s calm acceptance of the news that Gabriel brings. She does ask “How can this be?” but then accepts the explanation wholeheartedly. “Be it unto me according to thy word.”
In this she is held up as a model of faithful response to God. This oversimplification is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because it is impossible for any of us to live up to this model. There is some major work to be done between, “How can this be?” and, “I am the servant of the Lord.”
I believe that was true even for our sister Mary. True, it may have happened as quickly as they story seems to say, although I like to think there was a very long, tense, pause between Gabriel’s explanation and her acquiescence. A long, tense, pause in which the world—both hers and God’s—hung in the balance.
It is to her eternal credit that she said, “Yes.” But what went on in her mind during that long pause? Whatever it was, it was a vision of her life being turned upside down, having to grasp an impossibility, and deciding that the most unlikely path was actually hers to take. And to go through that process of thought—whether it takes moments or months—is a personal apocalypse.
I take it to be true, that Mary had her own personal apocalypse, because her answer, as well as every word she speaks from here on out, is in the language of poetry. She can only speak in symbol, and symbol born in crisis as we also just heard in her song.
Mary doesn’t have any other way of speaking than poetry because there is nothing rational to be said. The situation cannot result in careful prose or rational speech. She can only sing of “generations calling me blessed” as if she were a prophet, and “the lowly having been raised up and the mighty cast down” as if that had already happened even though it was perfectly, painfully obvious to the rational mind that this was and is not the case.
You can only speak this way out of a personal apocalypse.
Now I submit to you two things: God wants each one of us to have the same kind of personal apocalypse (many times over, actually), and we are terrified of it because we instinctively know that it means that life can never be the same.
You may already have had several of these apocalyptic moments in your life. What I am talking about may actually sound familiar to you. Chances are that you’ve had one and didn’t have any language for it. Many different kinds of experiences cause them, but they all follow the pattern of this story.
They all involve a moment when we can hear the voice, as of an angel, “Hail! Favored one! The Lord is with you!” It is actually the moment of our baptism when we are declared to be God’s child no matter what and forever. Our personal apocalypses are always moments when that divine truth becomes a little truer in our lives.
The hard part is that such a moment often comes as a sharp contrast to the situation at hand. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, we have to be in crisis for apocalypse to happen. Of course, we don’t know if Mary was in crisis, the story doesn’t say. In fact, the story doesn’t say anything about her at all. She’s a nobody, literally.
That alone is important. We don’t have to be “somebody” to receive a revelation like Mary’s. But sometimes, as I said, our state of “nobodiness” is a time of personal crisis, an apocalyptic moment, a time of suffering or other personal trial. It is when we are at our lowest and then, suddenly, the good news is at our feet. You are my child. You are my beloved.
And then, as in the story, we have our doubts, our fears, even our quite negative reactions. Everybody in the Bible who learns something revelatory about themselves and God has these kinds of reactions. Moses complains that he can’t speak very well. Isaiah says he is unworthy. Jeremiah protests that he is too young. Jonah literally tries to run away when he has one. He could not deal with a God this merciful.
And then we are called through our doubt and fears to say simply, “Here am I.” We’re not called to haul ourselves up into a fit of righteousness to prove somehow that we are worthy of this revelation. We are called simply to say, “OK. It’s me. This is what you get.” And, in spite of that, God has called me beloved.
That is a personal apocalypse. You never know when you’re going to meet that angel. It will probably be in the unlikeliest of places and times. Now I know some of you know exactly what I’m talking about but some of you are not so sure and want an example. I’ve got one, but it’s personal and feels somewhat risky, but I trust you.
I met just such an angel one day this week in one of those unexpected places. It was in my psychiatrist’s office. Now a psychiatrist’s office is not the kind of place that the average person ever wants to be found—witness that I am very nervous talking about this in public. How will I be judged for having—needing—a psychiatrist?
And that is actually the place I was in when the angel came to me. I was in that place of wishing that I could be anywhere else in the world. I was in a state of grief and frustration and anger over my ongoing illness. And I blurted out one of my greatest fears: I will now and forever be perceived as being damaged. That was the exact used I word—damaged. That is how I felt.
The angel came to me in my psychiatrist. How he responded to me was all in proper psychiatrist-talk, but I heard divine language, especially in the days since that I have had to ponder it in my heart.
I heard, “Who are you to call yourself damaged? I know who you are. I know the illness from which you suffer. You will hurt sometimes, sometimes badly, but you are never damaged. I said quite the opposite when you were baptized and I meant it. I never say anything I don’t mean. You are my beloved. I know it’s hard to accept, but it is just possible that what you call ‘damaged’ is actually a gift you can give to others. You can offer good news out of your own experience of bad news; you can offer healing out of woundedness. So don’t come before me saying you are ‘damaged.’ Say the only thing I have ever wanted you to say and will ever want you to say, ‘Here am I, just me, this is what you get.’”
Well that was my most recent personal apocalypse. It’s the same kind of experience God wants to offer you, albeit in perhaps a vastly different way. Yet the pattern is the same.
“Hey you, nobody special, you are favored.”
“How can this be?”
“Everything is possible with God. Are you willing to be pregnant with possibility?”
“Here am I. This is what you have to work with, but here am I.”
And life is not the same—the low are lifted high, the damaged repaired.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Monday, December 08, 2008
Good News in Exile and Fear
Sermon for Advent 2 2008: Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-8
The context of two of our readings this morning is so important for us to be able to hear them with their fill impact:
It is approximately the year 540 b.c.e. The adult Jews who live in Babylon have largely been born there. They never knew life in and around Jerusalem. They have made a life in the Empire and they are raising their children to do so as well. Assimilation is taking place. Perhaps the children think of themselves more as Babylonians than Jews.
There is no Temple, there are no priests. There are a few who try to tell the old stories about the deeds of Israel’s God, Yahweh, but they ring hollow. Nothing has been heard from this Yahweh for a long, long time. Many assume he had been defeated by Marduk, the war god of the Babylonians, or perhaps he had always been a figment of the imagination. Whatever, it is time to move on. Life in the Empire is all that we have.
Into this moment of silence and acquiescence and despair comes a new voice. Even if you are just reading through the Book of Isaiah and you finish chapter 39, chapter 40 begins as if coming out of a different world.
Chapter 39 is Isaiah of Jerusalem’s final prediction of the exile itself. “All that is yours… shall be carried to Babylon, nothing shall be left…some of your own sons…shall be eunuchs” (39:6-7). You can’t see it in the text, but there is then a long pause, a very long pause, 160 years or so, time enough for the despair to sink in deeply, for all that Isaiah had predicted had come true.
And then this remarkable voice bearing what he calls “good tidings, good news, gospel.” Mr. Handel made the words even more well-known than Isaiah
Comfort, comfort my people…
Yahweh speaks! It is a vision new, fresh, impossible, perhaps, but reviving old hopes of freedom and restoration. Might what once was be again?
Fast forward. It is Judea sometime between the years 60 and 70 c.e. Judea has been a puppet kingdom of the Roman Empire for more than 100 years. A few benefit from the Empire, most do not. The peasant class is huge, and, particularly in the rural areas of the region called Galilee, they are restless. Little insurrections flare up from time to time which are brutally put down by the Romans with the full cooperation of the Jewish civic and religious authorities. One treated in such a way had been Jesus of Nazareth.
Some still follow the teachings of this Jesus and believe him to have been resurrected from the dead. But that was at least thirty years ago and the stories told about him are starting to fade. And what relevance do they have to the oppression experienced at the hands of the Romans and their Jewish puppets?
Someone in this situation (he came to be identified as Mark) decided it was time the stories got written down, and in such a way to make it clear whose side God was on in these hard days. He believed Jesus would have criticized the Romans and the collaborating Jewish religious authorities alike and that he desired to establish a new community outside of these dark realities: a kingdom of freedom, a kingdom of God.
So he writes, and to begin his writing he reaches back to Isaiah and his bringing astounding good news at the end of the exile. He uses the same word Isaiah used to name his story: “good tidings, good news, gospel.”
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
It’s a simple opening sentence, but it packs a one-two punch. It signals that what he is to write will be deeply subversive of the powers that be. For that word “gospel,” in Greek euangellion, had been co-opted by the Romans for their political propaganda. It was used to announce the birth of emperors, themselves thought to be gods. In using the language of his ancestor Isaiah he was also taking a slap at Rome.
And then the titles “Christ” and “Son of God,” deeply subversive in a religious sense, outlandish for him to say. Who was he to make such claims? Only the scribes, the keepers of the law, could make such a claim. Without their authority it was simply blasphemy.
Mark’s “good news” is set from the beginning to take on the powers that be.
Like Isaiah before him, Mark’s speech is outlandish, impossible, but reaching deeply into the people’s memory and their hope. Whether the exile of the Jews in Babylon, or of the peasants in Galilee, there was now a taste of freedom in the air.
The road ahead for neither group of people was easy. The story of Jesus that Mark tells is a difficult one, ending in his crucifixion, feeling abandoned by God, followed only by a rumor of resurrection. The exiles in Babylon will return home, but find a land in utter devastation and a city, Jerusalem, that will need to be re-built from the ground up.
But, and it is big, massive, biblical “but.” They knew euangellion. They had heard good tidings. They knew good news. They looked forward to gospel. God was for them.
These stories are from long ago and they may inspire us as such, as stories of long ago do from time to time. But I would submit to you that they remain our stories, as present to us as they were to Isaiah and Mark.
We know what exile feels like. Particularly we in the mainline church, and most particularly we in the urban mainline church. The glory days of Jerusalem are long behind us when the Temple was full and anyone who wanted a religious experience came to us for it. Our Temples were not destroyed, at least not quickly. One could argue that they are being destroyed as we less and less have the capacity to maintain them. And we no longer have much if any influence in the Empire.
And we know what the restlessness of poverty feels like—the enormous gap between rich and poor that was true in Mark’s day, breeding violence in his day as well as ours. And true justice slain on the altar of expediency year after year after year. We hope in a new administration maybe it will be different. But will any of us be surprised if it is not? Our cynicism runs deep, as well it should. You’re not paranoid if someone is actually following you.
And one could easily personalize these stories of exile and restlessness that borders on fear in each one of our lives. We know them both, and the current economic crisis is making new ways for many of us to know them.
I talked last week about the hidden God, the silent, mysterious God with whom we have to come to terms and live. I talked about how our spiritual life is spent straining to hear just a whisper from this God. Both Isaiah and Mark allow us to hear that whisper if we listen hard enough. Even in the midst of exile and fear it is there.
Comfort, comfort…the beginning of the good news.
We are not alone after all and the news about God is good. God is for us. Here is our God! He will feed us like a shepherd, gather us and carry us like lambs and gently lead us like ewes.
Exile and the fear of powers outside our control do not have the last word. They shall not stand for ever. They wither, they fade, but this word of good news from God shall stand for ever.
The context of two of our readings this morning is so important for us to be able to hear them with their fill impact:
It is approximately the year 540 b.c.e. The adult Jews who live in Babylon have largely been born there. They never knew life in and around Jerusalem. They have made a life in the Empire and they are raising their children to do so as well. Assimilation is taking place. Perhaps the children think of themselves more as Babylonians than Jews.
There is no Temple, there are no priests. There are a few who try to tell the old stories about the deeds of Israel’s God, Yahweh, but they ring hollow. Nothing has been heard from this Yahweh for a long, long time. Many assume he had been defeated by Marduk, the war god of the Babylonians, or perhaps he had always been a figment of the imagination. Whatever, it is time to move on. Life in the Empire is all that we have.
Into this moment of silence and acquiescence and despair comes a new voice. Even if you are just reading through the Book of Isaiah and you finish chapter 39, chapter 40 begins as if coming out of a different world.
Chapter 39 is Isaiah of Jerusalem’s final prediction of the exile itself. “All that is yours… shall be carried to Babylon, nothing shall be left…some of your own sons…shall be eunuchs” (39:6-7). You can’t see it in the text, but there is then a long pause, a very long pause, 160 years or so, time enough for the despair to sink in deeply, for all that Isaiah had predicted had come true.
And then this remarkable voice bearing what he calls “good tidings, good news, gospel.” Mr. Handel made the words even more well-known than Isaiah
Comfort, comfort my people…
Yahweh speaks! It is a vision new, fresh, impossible, perhaps, but reviving old hopes of freedom and restoration. Might what once was be again?
Fast forward. It is Judea sometime between the years 60 and 70 c.e. Judea has been a puppet kingdom of the Roman Empire for more than 100 years. A few benefit from the Empire, most do not. The peasant class is huge, and, particularly in the rural areas of the region called Galilee, they are restless. Little insurrections flare up from time to time which are brutally put down by the Romans with the full cooperation of the Jewish civic and religious authorities. One treated in such a way had been Jesus of Nazareth.
Some still follow the teachings of this Jesus and believe him to have been resurrected from the dead. But that was at least thirty years ago and the stories told about him are starting to fade. And what relevance do they have to the oppression experienced at the hands of the Romans and their Jewish puppets?
Someone in this situation (he came to be identified as Mark) decided it was time the stories got written down, and in such a way to make it clear whose side God was on in these hard days. He believed Jesus would have criticized the Romans and the collaborating Jewish religious authorities alike and that he desired to establish a new community outside of these dark realities: a kingdom of freedom, a kingdom of God.
So he writes, and to begin his writing he reaches back to Isaiah and his bringing astounding good news at the end of the exile. He uses the same word Isaiah used to name his story: “good tidings, good news, gospel.”
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
It’s a simple opening sentence, but it packs a one-two punch. It signals that what he is to write will be deeply subversive of the powers that be. For that word “gospel,” in Greek euangellion, had been co-opted by the Romans for their political propaganda. It was used to announce the birth of emperors, themselves thought to be gods. In using the language of his ancestor Isaiah he was also taking a slap at Rome.
And then the titles “Christ” and “Son of God,” deeply subversive in a religious sense, outlandish for him to say. Who was he to make such claims? Only the scribes, the keepers of the law, could make such a claim. Without their authority it was simply blasphemy.
Mark’s “good news” is set from the beginning to take on the powers that be.
Like Isaiah before him, Mark’s speech is outlandish, impossible, but reaching deeply into the people’s memory and their hope. Whether the exile of the Jews in Babylon, or of the peasants in Galilee, there was now a taste of freedom in the air.
The road ahead for neither group of people was easy. The story of Jesus that Mark tells is a difficult one, ending in his crucifixion, feeling abandoned by God, followed only by a rumor of resurrection. The exiles in Babylon will return home, but find a land in utter devastation and a city, Jerusalem, that will need to be re-built from the ground up.
But, and it is big, massive, biblical “but.” They knew euangellion. They had heard good tidings. They knew good news. They looked forward to gospel. God was for them.
These stories are from long ago and they may inspire us as such, as stories of long ago do from time to time. But I would submit to you that they remain our stories, as present to us as they were to Isaiah and Mark.
We know what exile feels like. Particularly we in the mainline church, and most particularly we in the urban mainline church. The glory days of Jerusalem are long behind us when the Temple was full and anyone who wanted a religious experience came to us for it. Our Temples were not destroyed, at least not quickly. One could argue that they are being destroyed as we less and less have the capacity to maintain them. And we no longer have much if any influence in the Empire.
And we know what the restlessness of poverty feels like—the enormous gap between rich and poor that was true in Mark’s day, breeding violence in his day as well as ours. And true justice slain on the altar of expediency year after year after year. We hope in a new administration maybe it will be different. But will any of us be surprised if it is not? Our cynicism runs deep, as well it should. You’re not paranoid if someone is actually following you.
And one could easily personalize these stories of exile and restlessness that borders on fear in each one of our lives. We know them both, and the current economic crisis is making new ways for many of us to know them.
I talked last week about the hidden God, the silent, mysterious God with whom we have to come to terms and live. I talked about how our spiritual life is spent straining to hear just a whisper from this God. Both Isaiah and Mark allow us to hear that whisper if we listen hard enough. Even in the midst of exile and fear it is there.
Comfort, comfort…the beginning of the good news.
We are not alone after all and the news about God is good. God is for us. Here is our God! He will feed us like a shepherd, gather us and carry us like lambs and gently lead us like ewes.
Exile and the fear of powers outside our control do not have the last word. They shall not stand for ever. They wither, they fade, but this word of good news from God shall stand for ever.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Straining for the Whisper
Sermon preached on the First Sunday of Advent in the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York: Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; Mark 13:24-37
For you have hidden yourself from us…
There is a great longing in the readings today. The prophet Isaiah gives voice to the people:
Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down!
And the psalmist repeats the cry:
Stir up your strength and come to help us.
And then there is Jesus’ own prophecy,
They will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.
And his followers, ever since these words, have asked, “When?”
Those voices may have all been in response to a particular moment in time, but they are also timeless, they echo into our own day and our own experience, as we wrestle with the hidden God.
If you read the Hebrew Scriptures, even in a cursory way, you will notice that as they progress, God becomes less and less obvious. There is a reason the people of Isaiah’s day longed for God to act, to intervene in history as he did in the days of their ancestors, because there was a point at which he stopped doing so in any obvious way.
Israel’s first impulse, and perhaps ours, is that we deserve this hiddenness. We have done something wrong and continue to do something wrong, and so God remains hidden to us.
But both Isaiah and the psalmist seem to being saying quite the opposite. Isaiah says
Because you hid yourself we transgressed…no one…calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us…
It is God’s doing, this hiddenness. And the psalmist agrees:
How long will you be angered despite the prayers of your people?
We are doing our part, God, why aren’t you doing yours?
This, by and large, is our experience. In nineteen years of ordained ministry, the vast number of people who come to me wanting to talk about God are wondering why God is not talking to them. Why can’t I get a word from God?
And, frankly, all I can do is commiserate. I don’t have an answer. It is my experience as well. Ordination does not mean that I get direct words from the Lord. People want to believe that people like me have a special connection to the Almighty. I do not, and I have never met a colleague who does.
Even the great mystics throughout history have known this to be the truth. The great 17th century mystic Blaise Paschal once said,
Every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden is not true.[1]
This is a dilemma for us. Like Isaiah and the psalmist, we want to believe it is not true. And frequently our words and our deeds seem to say that it is not true. It is possible to understand the act of thanksgiving that this family and their friends are making today to be saying that we know God has acted in their lives, broken into their history.
We do not in any way want to deny that this may be true, but we also must be very careful, because we certainly don’t mean to say that the next person whose cancer was not overcome is being ignored by God. All that we can do, all that we are doing in this act of thanksgiving is thanking God for being God and giving thanks that, in this case, illness has been overcome. We dare not say more than that. We dare not pretend that we know more than that.
As much as it frustrates us, the hiddenness of God must be protected, because in the end, that is the only way we have of letting God be God, outside of our control. It just may be that God stopped acting in Israel’s history because the people were acting to familiar with God, acting as if they had God under their control.
One of the reasons I am an Episcopalian is because I think, at our best, we are wise enough not to say too much. We are wise enough to protect God’s hiddenness.
But we also must acknowledge how painful this is, how frustrating, and even how it causes some of us to let go of God altogether. If God does not act in history, our history, than he must not exist. Why bother believing at all? Maybe it is why our churches are not full while those who boldly claim that God is doing definitive things in their life are.
How can we make sense of the hidden God? Well, of course, we cannot make sense of him, and that is partially the point. But I do think we can say something, something restrained and reverent and even, if you will, courteous to God.[2]
We can affirm that God is frequently, mostly, silent, but we long for it to be otherwise. We cry out with our ancestors, “Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” And that crying out is itself an imperative of our faith. We have to do it.
We have to do it because in this cry is our faith, and it is only in this cry that we might get an occasional whisper from God. We must be in constant straining to hear this whisper, because in that straining lies our hope.
Over the centuries that is what the great mystics have taught us, that the only to experience God is to long for God, to want with every fiber of our being God, a wanting that, in this life, is never fulfilled. In this life God is in the seeking, God is in the journey not the destination. There is no destination in this life. Our steadfast hope is that there is in the next, that our ancestors who have gone before us are, in fact, there.
It is the great mystery of our faith, the paradox that we only find God when we seem to have lost him altogether in our death. That was true, though, even for our brother Jesus, who died thinking he had been abandoned. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
But it was not the last word for him and so we believe that it will not be the last word for us.
In the meantime we have our longing and we do have the occasional whisper, when we think we can hear God, faintly, on the wind. It is why we gather week by week around this Table and share this bit of bread and sip of wine. It is our experience that here, among all other places, we hear the whisper of God, enough so that we can cling, sometimes by our fingernails, to belief in spite of the overwhelming silence.
As people of God we cannot, must not, pretend that we have any answers. To do so is, I believe, actually blasphemy. Our only answer is our hope. We can only cry out. We can only say thank you to the mystery. We can only hope that Jesus was right, that this God we seek is for us, that this God who is silent is, nevertheless, love itself.
[1] Quoted by Barbara Brown Taylor in When God is Silent (Cowley, 1998), p. 88.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor uses these words to describe how preachers should approach their task in When God is Silent.
For you have hidden yourself from us…
There is a great longing in the readings today. The prophet Isaiah gives voice to the people:
Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down!
And the psalmist repeats the cry:
Stir up your strength and come to help us.
And then there is Jesus’ own prophecy,
They will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.
And his followers, ever since these words, have asked, “When?”
Those voices may have all been in response to a particular moment in time, but they are also timeless, they echo into our own day and our own experience, as we wrestle with the hidden God.
If you read the Hebrew Scriptures, even in a cursory way, you will notice that as they progress, God becomes less and less obvious. There is a reason the people of Isaiah’s day longed for God to act, to intervene in history as he did in the days of their ancestors, because there was a point at which he stopped doing so in any obvious way.
Israel’s first impulse, and perhaps ours, is that we deserve this hiddenness. We have done something wrong and continue to do something wrong, and so God remains hidden to us.
But both Isaiah and the psalmist seem to being saying quite the opposite. Isaiah says
Because you hid yourself we transgressed…no one…calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us…
It is God’s doing, this hiddenness. And the psalmist agrees:
How long will you be angered despite the prayers of your people?
We are doing our part, God, why aren’t you doing yours?
This, by and large, is our experience. In nineteen years of ordained ministry, the vast number of people who come to me wanting to talk about God are wondering why God is not talking to them. Why can’t I get a word from God?
And, frankly, all I can do is commiserate. I don’t have an answer. It is my experience as well. Ordination does not mean that I get direct words from the Lord. People want to believe that people like me have a special connection to the Almighty. I do not, and I have never met a colleague who does.
Even the great mystics throughout history have known this to be the truth. The great 17th century mystic Blaise Paschal once said,
Every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden is not true.[1]
This is a dilemma for us. Like Isaiah and the psalmist, we want to believe it is not true. And frequently our words and our deeds seem to say that it is not true. It is possible to understand the act of thanksgiving that this family and their friends are making today to be saying that we know God has acted in their lives, broken into their history.
We do not in any way want to deny that this may be true, but we also must be very careful, because we certainly don’t mean to say that the next person whose cancer was not overcome is being ignored by God. All that we can do, all that we are doing in this act of thanksgiving is thanking God for being God and giving thanks that, in this case, illness has been overcome. We dare not say more than that. We dare not pretend that we know more than that.
As much as it frustrates us, the hiddenness of God must be protected, because in the end, that is the only way we have of letting God be God, outside of our control. It just may be that God stopped acting in Israel’s history because the people were acting to familiar with God, acting as if they had God under their control.
One of the reasons I am an Episcopalian is because I think, at our best, we are wise enough not to say too much. We are wise enough to protect God’s hiddenness.
But we also must acknowledge how painful this is, how frustrating, and even how it causes some of us to let go of God altogether. If God does not act in history, our history, than he must not exist. Why bother believing at all? Maybe it is why our churches are not full while those who boldly claim that God is doing definitive things in their life are.
How can we make sense of the hidden God? Well, of course, we cannot make sense of him, and that is partially the point. But I do think we can say something, something restrained and reverent and even, if you will, courteous to God.[2]
We can affirm that God is frequently, mostly, silent, but we long for it to be otherwise. We cry out with our ancestors, “Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” And that crying out is itself an imperative of our faith. We have to do it.
We have to do it because in this cry is our faith, and it is only in this cry that we might get an occasional whisper from God. We must be in constant straining to hear this whisper, because in that straining lies our hope.
Over the centuries that is what the great mystics have taught us, that the only to experience God is to long for God, to want with every fiber of our being God, a wanting that, in this life, is never fulfilled. In this life God is in the seeking, God is in the journey not the destination. There is no destination in this life. Our steadfast hope is that there is in the next, that our ancestors who have gone before us are, in fact, there.
It is the great mystery of our faith, the paradox that we only find God when we seem to have lost him altogether in our death. That was true, though, even for our brother Jesus, who died thinking he had been abandoned. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
But it was not the last word for him and so we believe that it will not be the last word for us.
In the meantime we have our longing and we do have the occasional whisper, when we think we can hear God, faintly, on the wind. It is why we gather week by week around this Table and share this bit of bread and sip of wine. It is our experience that here, among all other places, we hear the whisper of God, enough so that we can cling, sometimes by our fingernails, to belief in spite of the overwhelming silence.
As people of God we cannot, must not, pretend that we have any answers. To do so is, I believe, actually blasphemy. Our only answer is our hope. We can only cry out. We can only say thank you to the mystery. We can only hope that Jesus was right, that this God we seek is for us, that this God who is silent is, nevertheless, love itself.
[1] Quoted by Barbara Brown Taylor in When God is Silent (Cowley, 1998), p. 88.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor uses these words to describe how preachers should approach their task in When God is Silent.
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