Ash Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Today's first reader and I were discussing last night today’s reading from Isaiah: Its tone is harsh, God is sarcastic, specifically about the religious behaviors of the people, lying down in sackcloth and ashes. God is basically accusing the people of merely playing at living the covenant, of pretending righteousness, while they oppress their workers and ignore the starving. In other, more strident places in this prophet and others, God says when he smells the burnt sacrifices of the Israelites, their injustice makes him want to throw up.

Jesus today is equally straightforward about “piety”: Don’t pray where others can see you. Don’t fast in ways that others know it. Don’t give money in a way that draws attention to yourself. All of which must seem like the most ignored advice Jesus ever gave, since today we will put ashes on our faces, and gather to pray together in public (as we often do). And as for money, well, not only do we take a public collection, our church is literally covered with the names of people who have given money to the church, as is every university campus, hospital, and most other charitable institutions.

So if both the God of Israel and Jesus are telling us not to do these things, why are we doing them? Wouldn’t it be better if we started Ash Wednesday searching out the homeless, or agitating with the Fight for Fifteen workers, or for that matter, spending every Sunday morning in the soup kitchen, instead of in church?

Oddly enough, we do these things because God has asked us to: After all, the same covenant that demands justice for immigrants and widows and orphans also is heavy on descriptions of how to eat with God, how to do penance for failure to live up to the covenant, and how to do all that stuff in public, in community. All those sacrifices were the outward signs, communal acknowledgments, of every Israelite’s and of all Israel’s dependence on God.

And Jesus never says that we shouldn’t fast, or give alms, or pray— in fact we need to do them to be shaped in the ways of justice and mercy. None of them is optional. The issue is that they must be done with integrity.

Integrity—there’s the rub—and it’s opposite, hypocrisy. And the difference between them is simply whether our religious practices have their intended effect: whether both our insides —our spirits, our minds, our wills— and our outsides —both our own behaviors and the society they create and shape— are transformed by the religion we practice.

And I think that makes Lent really hard, because it is a 40-day-long invitation to examine ourselves for integrity as people of faith. And that kind of examination is bound to turn up problems.

We celebrate Eucharist every Sunday, for example, a ritual meal that enacts what God intends for food, and by extension what God intends for all the material things that sustain life. Every Sunday we enact in ritual God’s vision of the world, in which everyone has enough, even the same amount, with some left over, all fed from the same table as one family.

How is that Sunday-by-Sunday celebration transforming our attitudes about food, how it is produced and allocated, about how it is shared and not? How is that Sunday-by-Sunday celebration changing how we actually share food? How does it change the way we interact with those around us about food, or about any of the created goods that God intends for us all to share? I imagine if Isaiah were around today, he might have something to say about the integrity of the church’s, and this church’s, celebration of the Eucharist.

We celebrate baptism to initiate new members, and we routinely renew our baptismal covenant of commitment to the life of faith and works of justice. And every time we do so we affirm the goodness and belovedness of every human being and of all creation.

How is that celebration of baptism shaping our hearts to see in every person the image of Christ, and to serve Christ in every person. How is the celebration of that sacrament healing us of the prejudice, the racism, the sexism, all those attitudes baked into our culture, that thwart the full expression of God’s image in so many? And how is that celebration of baptism shaping our response to the world around us, whether our society’s use and consumption of the earth, or the violence and poverty and prejudice that continue to disfigure the image of Christ? I think the prophet Isaiah might have something to say to us about baptism, too.

The long and short of it, I guess, is that Lent, taken seriously, is not an easy journey. It definitely shouldn’t be attempted alone, which I imagine is one reason why gather together, in public, despite Jesus’ warnings, to pray, and to fast, and to put ash on our foreheads. And for me those ashes, accepted in public, as part of a community, help make this Lenten journey both easier and harder to bear.

They make it easier because they help me remember that I am dust: fallible, fragile, limited, mortal. There’s no way I’m ever going to “achieve” perfect integrity, and no one knows that better than God. I will always be on the way, and eventually, my time will be up. God has other partners who can take up where I left off, or make up for my limits. That’s one reason is why I am glad we are doing this together, because it reminds me that none of this depends on me alone.

And as for the harder part of these Lenten ashes, well, as Kristin points out often, life is short, and we have only so much time to try to live with integrity. And it’s worth trying, because it matters to God, evidently a great deal, and it matters to the world God loves, evidently a great deal. To receive these ashes with you is to commit myself with you to keep trying, in Lent and outside it. How grateful I am not to have to bear this burden alone.

February 1, 2015, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

1 Corinthians 8:1-13, Mark 1:21-28

Bryan Cones

Does anyone else find it odd that Jesus, when someone first recognizes who he really is, responds by telling him to be quiet? And he doesn’t just say, “Shhh… Don’t tell anyone.” He says something we’re not allowed to say in my house: He tells that evil spirit: “Shut up!” or more literally, “Muzzle it!”—like a dog. (We have to be careful about being too Jesus-like sometimes; he could be pretty rude!)

But why didn’t he want that unclean spirit running around telling everyone that he was God’s Holy One? Wasn’t it good to get the word out—even if it’s from an unclean spirit?

I wonder if Jesus, instead of telling everyone who he was, or having an unclean spirit do it, wanted to show everyone what it means to be God’s Holy One. Unlike some of the religious leaders of his time, in particular some of them who were know-it-alls, telling people all the time what God wanted, but not really doing it, Jesus was showing people what God wanted. So instead of letting that evil spirit tell everyone who he was, he showed who he was as God’s Holy One, by healing the man who was in the power of that evil spirit.

Showing, not telling, is what Jesus wanted to do. Jesus wanted to show us God’s power to heal, not shine the spotlight on himself. And I’ll bet that’s what he would want us to do, too: Show that we are his followers by doing the work of healing God gives us to do, instead of telling everyone that we go to church. That sounds easy enough, right?

Well, maybe not—and it wasn’t easy from the very beginning. In that first reading, St. Paul is having an argument with some people in his church. They think that they are showing how much they believe in Jesus by eating meat sacrificed to the Greek and Roman gods. Since they don’t believe in those “idols,” they eat that food and they don’t worry about it, even though what they are doing is upsetting some other people in the church. They have been telling the more scrupulous people to get over it.

But Paul tells the meat-eaters that they are wrong: They aren’t showing what it means to follow Jesus; they are just “showing off,” being the same kind of religious know-it-alls that made Jesus mad. Paul says that their showing off is actually the opposite of showing that they follow Jesus, because what they are doing isn’t loving to their fellow Christians. Paul says he’d rather be a vegetarian than make it harder for people who are struggling in their faith. The difference between showing that we follow Jesus and showing off is how we are loving one another.

So how to do we show that we follow Jesus, without showing off? How do we know we are on the right track? I think Jesus and Paul both give us something to go on.

First, if we want to show the work that God is doing in Jesus, we will be taking part in the healing work that he did. After all, the religious word “salvation” means “health,” and “Savior” is a word for Jesus that means “healer.” If what we do helps people get better, and helps us get better, if it feeds hungry people and helps them get a fair share, if it heals sick people and helps them be well, if it makes our school or our workplace safer for everyone, if it helps cast out the evil spirits of racism and bullying and other kinds meanness to and fear of people, then we are probably on the right track.

And second, whatever we do, however we show that we follow Jesus, we must work always to be loving: patient and kind, not puffed up, not know-it-alls, always ready to listen, and always concerned about the people who struggle, always careful not to make things harder for anyone.

And if we do all that healing, loving work, we won’t really need to tell anyone that we follow Jesus, because we’ll be showing them. Maybe if we do it really well, people might ask us why we do it. And then we could tell them that it’s because we follow Jesus, and this is how we show it. And then maybe they would want to follow Jesus, too.

January 11, 2015, Baptism of the Lord

Mark 1:4-11
Bryan Cones

Imagine for a moment being Jesus on his way to the Jordan. Imagine him for a moment really as a human being, with every human limitation and concern, joining so many others on his way out to the desert prophet, seeking also a “baptism of repentance.” Why was he going there? What was he looking for?

Did he feel like a failure, that he wasn’t a good Jew. Maybe he didn’t think he had been a good son to his mother, or a good provider for her. Maybe he had failed to create a family to bear his father’s name. Maybe he wasn’t very good at carpentry or building or whatever trade he had inherited from his father. Maybe he feared his life had lost direction, that he was unworthy.

Now step into the water with Jesus, and imagine seeing that mystical vision and hearing that heavenly voice: You are my son, the Beloved. With you I am well-pleased. And imagine for a moment the feeling of being freed from all your doubts, all your fear of failure, and discovering yourself entirely loved by God, without ever having done anything, accomplished anything, to “deserve” it.

Now step back again, on the way to John at the Jordan, except this time go as yourself: Imagine all your own self-doubts, your own fears: Am I a good parent? A productive person? Am I success?

Imagine all those other voices, all those other standards, the world proposes that we measure ourselves by: whether we are too fat or too thin, too old or too young, whether we have enough money, or if our job is important enough or prestigious enough, whether our marriage is good or happy, or our family fits the model, whichever model currently proposed.

And don’t forget those gnawing, terrible questions lying beneath all those measures: Am I good? Am I worthy? Am I loveable? Am I “normal”?

And now step into the water with Jesus and hear the good news, God’s loving judgment on all that fear and self-doubt: You are my child, my own, Beloved. With you I am well-pleased.

What is it like to have all that doubt, all that fear, washed away by Jordan waters, to feel ourselves beloved, not despite our differences or limitations, as the world judges them, but beloved by God in them and through them.

Beloved in our bodies, in their many shapes and sizes, in their many gifts and abilities and limitations, beloved in our ages, beloved through the spectrum of how our brains process the world around us, beloved through our moods, in our depression, in our joyfulness, beloved when we can pay attention and when we can’t, beloved in our families exactly as they are, beloved in every moment of our human stories, through both the highs and the lows.

Now let us feel ourselves together as the beloved community, that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King imagined, born of Jordan waters: beloved together in our all our blessed differences, all of them created by God, and blessed and redeemed in the waters of the baptism.

That is not to say, of course, that being beloved is without difficulty, or that every blessed difference is easy to hold in this or any beloved community, especially for the person whose difference is hard to bear.

I have been thinking this week of the death last month of a transgender teenager in Ohio named Leelah Alcorn, who could not find a community to see her difference, her change from being Joshua to Leelah, as something they could hold and bless as Beloved. And even for Leelah that difference became too much for her to bear alone, and she decided she could no longer go on living.

As I thought of Leelah, I longed to be part of a beloved community that could bless and affirm her difference as beloved of God, even if it’s a difference I don’t fully understand. And I wondered how this church might cultivate such a vision of all that is beloved of God, so that no matter who comes among us, we recognize God’s beloved child walking through the door, so that no one has to bear their difference alone.

I would like to think that this gathering is one place we do that, that here, Sunday by Sunday we notice with care, and never overlook or dismiss, all the beloved and blessed difference that gathers here.

Here, Sunday by Sunday, we remember in word and sacrament, as we will when we renew our baptismal covenant in a few minutes, that everybody, everybody, everybody is invited into the healing waters of the same font, that everybody, everybody, everybody is invited to a place at this table, and that everybody, everybody, everybody, is held in life beyond death in all our blessed difference by the loving gaze of the One who has created and restored us.

That is the vocation of being Beloved of God, to practice here the vision God has for creation, to gather as God’s outpost of belovedness in a world in desperate need of it, and to be sent to share this good news of God’s loving judgment on all the unkindness of the world: You, all of you, are my children, beloved. In you, all of you, I am well-pleased.

Second Sunday after Christmas, January 4, 2015

A sermon written and preached by Debbie Buesing

Luke 2:41-52

And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” (Luke 2:47)

In the long, 30-year gap between Jesus lying in the manger and Jesus stepping into the Jordan to be baptized, the gospels provide us only this view of a pre-adolescent Messiah. So it is natural for us to wonder – if you’ll pardon the old cliché – what did Jesus know, and when did he know it?

In one of my favorite modern or maybe post-modern takes on this question, in the novel Lamb, subtitled The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal*, the 12-year-old Jesus leaves this scene in the Temple still wrestling with his identity. His mother Mary reminds him, “When you were born, these three men showed up who seemed to understand something about you. Maybe they can help.” Jesus then spends the next 18 years traveling to Afghanistan, India, and China, in search of the Magi, who, one by one, ultimately come up short; and a resigned, grownup Jesus returns home to finish working out why he is here.

At the other end of the artistic and perhaps theological spectrum, I have a photograph of a stained-glass window in the 17th-century church of Saint-Eustache in Paris, showing a young Jesus sitting in the Temple on a cathedral-style throne that’s too big for him, looking every bit the medieval prince with his blonde hair in a bob, wearing a gold crown and brilliant brocade robe. At his feet, a tonsure-headed monk holds an open book, leaning in towards the boy and hanging on his every word.

There are scholars who posit that this strange little story arose in a very early Christian community that did not have access to the other narratives of Christ’s birth. So in the absence of heavenly angels and wild stars, they told of a Jesus born with innate knowledge, including his own status as Son of God. I don’t know what the real origin of the story is, but what I do know is that it contains some valuable wisdom about teenagers, parents, and the Church.

A few weeks ago I spent some time kicking this passage around with our high school youth and asked them how they pictured the whole scenario unfolding. Before we got into it, there were some things to clarify. It was incomprehensible to them, in this over-protective and over-scheduled age, that Mary and Joseph would not know where their son was. For those of us who are used to single-family road trips, it helps to know that entire villages walked together to Jerusalem. While the men walked apart from the women and children, a 12-year old boy, on the cusp of Jewish manhood, could easily float between groups, particularly a boy as bold and sociable as I imagine Jesus was.

When we tell this story to very small children, we typically frame it as “Jesus being lost but then found,” because when you are four or five years old, it is terrifying to think of being separated like that. But as our young people pointed out, it is not Jesus who was lost. He was exactly where he wanted to be.

With that established, then, how did they picture the scene in the Temple unfolding? Our high school group pictured a lively dialog, lots of give-and-take. (The text, in fact, refers to Jesus both asking and answering questions.) As one of our young people put it, “Here were men who had spent their whole lives thinking about God, studying about God. They probably had very strong opinions about God. But maybe, just maybe – Jesus offered them an insight that caused them to stop and reconsider what it was that they thought they knew.”

In other words – in the words of Luke’s Gospel – they were amazed. This is a word that goes beyond astonishment. It is that breathtaking moment of recognition that one is in the presence of something truly extraordinary, even holy. It is the way the Gospels describe frightened disciples on the Sea of Galilee, who exclaim, “Who is this, that the winds and seas obey him?” It is the word used to describe the crowds who witness Jesus’ acts of healing and his teaching with authority. It is a word that calls us to pay attention.

I asked our young people who it is that makes them feel that they are amazing. Not surprisingly they mentioned coaches and directors and a few teachers in their particular areas of interest. The mentors who help them discover their gifts and vocations, in the places they are drawn to, much like the 12-year-old messiah who was drawn to the Temple because that was where he knew he needed to be.

And HOW do these adults make you feel that you are amazing, I asked. The answer surprised me: “These are the ones who don’t flatter us. They tell us when we are not doing well and how to do it better.” It seems to me that there is a meeting at the intersection of honesty, respect, and kindness, and perhaps that is what the young Jesus found in that Temple as well.

And where are you in this story? Where are we, as church? For many years I included reflections on this passage whenever I did youth ministry training at churches in our diocese. For the most part, adults see themselves as Mary or Joseph, many of them remembering that same, heart-stopping moment when you realize that your child is missing. (My moment was at Disney World, probably as bad as Jerusalem at Passover.) Typically, just a few will see themselves in Jesus. These are the ones who haven’t forgotten being a curious and adventuresome and even headstrong teenager. But no one ever seems to remember those other characters in the story – the ones in the Temple. And so this is what I remind them (and myself):

As Church, it is our job to be the ones who are amazed. To listen when our young people are ready to give us their truth, and to have the grace to let everything we thought we knew about God be shaped by their wisdom. To be patient, because as one of our youth told me, “Sometimes we don’t answer your questions right away because we are still figuring it out,” and so we wait with them in that holy silence, because in all honesty, we are still figuring it out, too. To listen, to be present with, to be amazed, is not just the province of a few volunteers or youth ministers. The most significant factor in a young person’s choice to continue in a faith community is having had a positive relationship with one other adult in their congregation.

And what of their parents? Mary and Joseph searched, the story says, for three days before they got to the Temple. Perhaps they were too overwhelmed with anxiety to think through the implications of this messiah business. Or maybe with anger. (As our Deacon Bryan’s reading suggested, The Blessed Mother was in possession of the “Mom Voice,” and not afraid to use it.) But there are other echoes in this story. Those three days just might be a foreshadowing of another three days: surely Jesus’ parents’ despair at his disappearance hint at the disciples’ grief and terror after his death. His retort to his mother – that he needed to be here, not with them – is not so different from his admonition to Mary Magdalene in the garden: “do not hold onto me.” These are painful words to hear – and so as Church, we embrace the parents too, and reassure them that their sons and daughters are amazing, in those times when they are too close to the action to perceive it.

If I have a prayer for Saint Augustine’s, it is that this may always be a place where our young people can come,

And question,

And answer,

And know that they are amazing.

*Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Christopher Moore, 2002.

First Sunday after Christmas, December 28, 2014

Bryan Cones

Luke 2:22-40

So how did Simeon know? How did he know that baby was the one—out of all the little 40-day-old babies coming to the Temple, that this one was him, the Messiah he had been waiting for.

And how did Anna know? She had been waiting for a very, very long time. The story makes her sound almost unbelievably old—84 years is common now, but back then she had lived almost three times as long as most people.

Luke says it was the Holy Spirit who told Simeon, but unless the Holy Spirit operated differently back then, whispering in people’s ears, I think maybe it was a little more complicated. How did they know?

And what was it like for them to have to wait for so, so long? Was it a fun kind of waiting—like waiting for Santa Claus to come, or waiting for your birthday—the kind of waiting that is exciting, when a surprise is just around the corner?

Was it like being pregnant, an almost unbearable combination of hopefulness and joy and uncertainty that comes with knowing things are about to change big time, and will probably never be the same. The coming of Jesus has certainly changed things.

Or maybe it was the boring kind of waiting, like on a long car trip, or being a senior in high school, in February. I wonder if Anna ever said, “Are we there yet?” while she was fasting and praying in the Temple all those decades.

Was it like waiting for good news, like sitting by the phone expecting the job offer of your dreams? Or maybe like waiting for news not knowing if it will be good or bad—like being in the oncologist’s waiting room. Simeon says that Jesus is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, so while we might call him “good news,” he wasn’t good news for everyone.

Or was it the frustrating kind of waiting for a change that never seems to come, like peace in the Middle East, or an end to gun violence.

Maybe waiting all that time was like waiting with someone who is dying, that sad and hard and beautiful kind of waiting, or maybe it was like the waiting that comes with grief, when we are wondering when we might find our new normal after a loss, when things will be bearable again.

There are lots of kinds of waiting, and I imagine Simeon and Anna experienced a lot of them in their long lives of waiting for the Messiah. And even if it was at times unpleasant, or joyful, or boring, or uncertain, it was actually all that waiting that made Anna and Simeon ready to recognize the Messiah when he appeared. That’s how they knew.

The time of waiting was when the Holy Spirit was doing her work, making space in Simeon and Anna to receive Jesus, preparing their eyes to recognize him, their spirits to announce him.

Maybe Anna and Simeon knew Jesus when they saw him, because they had gotten very good at waiting for him. Jesus finally showing up on his presentation day was merely the climax for what God had been preparing Simeon and Anna for all along.

And preparing us as well. It might be easier to recognize God—at least it is for me—in the moments of the “big reveal,” when the baby is born, or that good news comes through, or even in the grace of a good death. What might be harder is recognizing God in the waiting, in both the excitement and the discomfort, in the anxiety and the expectation.

But surely in the waiting God is also present to us, the Holy Spirit is doing something in us, discovering and nurturing the gifts we need to face whatever life has in store for us, opening our eyes to how God works, or opening our ears to be ready to receive good news when it comes.

A good part of the Christian life is waiting, and part of the discipline of being Christian, or of just being human, is getting good at waiting. In all that waiting, God is making us ready to recognize Christ when he appears, so that we can say: There you are, I recognize you—I’ve been waiting for you. So that we can sing our own version of the Song of Simeon: “Now my eyes have seen your salvation for me, which you have prepared in the presence of all people, all light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” 

Christmas Day, December 25, 2014

Bryan Cones

Isaiah 52:7-10, John 1:1-14

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."

Beautiful feet indeed, especially when they are a baby’s feet, astonishing in their brand-newness, so unbelievably small, bearing the good news that God has indeed appeared among us, as one of us.

Oddly enough, it’s not the story of that baby that we hear in this Christmas morning gospel passage: Instead of a story, it is a song: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

This opening hymn from the Gospel of John, speaks of God’s Word becoming flesh, but not specifically of Luke’s poor little Jesus boy in a manger, or Matthew’s star child visited by Magi, then fleeing in danger to Egypt. John’s song is more like an overture, the ballad that tells the backstory of what God had in mind all along, a plan that started way back in the beginning, at the very beginning, when God first sang the Word that became the World, a creation whose purpose, its reason for being, is to make a place for God to live with God’s people.

And though we speak today of a “Savior, Christ the Lord,” John’s song isn’t yet ready to be that specific: For John there is something more to the Word than any baby can capture. After all, in the gospel of John, there is no baby at all: The Word didn’t become flesh for its own sake, to be God’s one-and-only, but to give those who believe the “power to become children of God,” to give us, who today sing John’s song, that power to be God’s children here and now.

The mystery of Christmas is our own mystery. The Word became flesh and dwells among us, so that we in our flesh might dwell with God.

Which makes me wonder just whose beautiful feet Isaiah is talking about: For us this Christmas they are surely the newborn feet of the Christ-child, both the messenger of peace, and the message himself. And, for us who join in singing the Gospel of John’s opening song, they are also our feet, whether showroom new and unmarked by a step, or calloused and worn by the twists and turns of life’s long road.

It is our beautiful feet, our bodies, our voices, our lives, that bear the Word-made-flesh, each of us the Words God is still singing into creation, each of us notes in the Christmas harmony God has been singing since the beginning. 

Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 21, 2014

Bryan Cones

Year B: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16, Luke 1:26-38

Two characters frame this Fourth Sunday of Advent: a king at the height of his power and a young woman, little more than a girl, with no power at all, and not likely to ever have any. They are both God’s partners in the story of salvation, but the difference between them tells us something about the kind of human partners God is looking for.

First is David: We can imagine him in today’s passage having an “it’s good to be the king” kind of moment: finally having secured his throne, captured Jerusalem, and delivered the ark of the covenant—basically God’s presence—into the holy city, in a particularly shrewd political move. Now he lives in a fine palace, probably believing a little too much his own press, telling the court over and over again about that Goliath guy.

At the height of his strength he makes some not uncommon human mistakes when it comes to God: First, he imagines God to be a lot like him, a king (and therefore in need of a palace), and second, he is eager to do “for God” what God neither wills nor wants.

And so God has to step in through the prophet Nathan: “Slow your roll, there, buddy,” to paraphrase a bit: “Remember, I plucked you out of the fields and made you king, when you were little more than a boy. I’m the one who will build you a house.”

How God builds that house brings us to the young woman, Mary, with a whole lot of nothing to call her own, except herself. Probably the furthest thing from her mind was that God would have anything for her to do. And yet it is to Mary that the angel Gabriel, “sent from God,” comes: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you,” the angel says, “God wants you to build a house.”

But unlike the house of cedar David offered, which would set him back only the cost of building it, Mary’s task is a bit more involved, and, we can safely say, more complicated. I’ve always wondered if Mary’s perplexed statement of the obvious—“How can this be, since I am a virgin?”—was said also with some trepidation, some knowledge that God is asking for a lot, maybe for everything. Her marriageability is Mary’s most precious and only asset, and building God this house is going to put that in jeopardy. In fact, when this same story is told another way in the Gospel of Matthew, God’s sends an angelic messenger to Joseph instead, counseling him to overlook Mary’s untimely pregnancy.

And yet, Mary, says yes, she goes all in, even as she has everything to lose. And in doing so, she opens the door to the salvation of the world.

A king and a young woman, and God chooses the girl with nothing, the one who goes all in with God with what little she has, so that God can go all in with the world God has made.

Which leads me to wonder how and when God might choose to partner with us. Perhaps it’s not those times when we are at the height of our strength or our success, not the times we think we know what God needs and wants from us. With Mary as the pattern, it is more likely to be those times when we feel we have nothing to offer, or we don’t know what to do, or we don’t think we can even survive what life has brought us, times when the idea that we could do anything for or with God is furthest from our minds.

Maybe it’s when we are stripped of any pretensions, when we are most aware of our weakness, that’s the time when God sends the messenger with Good News: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid. You have found favor with God.”

The irony of Advent is, after all, that in answer to our prayers that God tear open the heavens, and shake the mountains and come in power to accomplish the Great Divine Cleanup of the World, God answers those prayers with weakness, with the abject powerlessness and utter vulnerability of a baby, born of a young woman, barely more than a girl, with nothing but herself to offer, God’s partner in opening the door to the salvation of the world.

Why should it be any different with us? For nothing will be impossible with God. 

First Sunday of Advent, November 30, 2014

Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-37

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas—out there anyway—actually it has looked that way since at least since October. In here, though, it is not yet looking at all like Christmas, with today’s scriptures being exhibit A: Isaiah with his frightening images of torn open heavens fire and shaking mountains, and Jesus with his dire predictions of the day Jerusalem would be destroyed. Not at all like Christmas.

Then again, even out there, out in the world, it isn’t looking like Christmas everywhere. As I watched TV Monday night, waiting with many for the judgment of the grand jury in Ferguson, looking at images of the crowds gathered, full of tension and worry and uncertainty, I noticed a lit sign at the bottom of the screen, strung across Florissant Ave. “Season’s Greetings” it said. But it wasn’t looking at all like Christmas.

Oddly enough, that sign did announce “Season’s Greetings”— but they were the tidings of Advent, like our readings today, full of the tension between the way the world is, and God’s promise of how it will be, how it is meant to be, when things are on earth as in heaven.

Watching the situation unfold in Ferguson, marked by anger and fear, distrust and the threat of violence from all sides, it struck me that it was not too unlike the scene in today’s gospel passage, written either just before or just after the terrible destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD: boots on the ground from Rome surrounding the city, soldiers dressed in a different kind of “riot gear” a population in revolt, armed and armored in its own way, and the little church in Jerusalem caught between them, still hoping for rescue in the glorious return of Jesus.

The ancient Hebrews speaking in the prophet Isaiah in the first reading were in a similar position, in exile in Babylon, Jerusalem a smoldering ruin, wondering if they would ever know God’s favor again. All these communities lament with the psalmist today: How long, O Lord? Let your face shine, they pray, that we may be saved!

How long? the lament rises from so many places. How long? lament the people of Sierra Leone, as Ebola ravages their country. How long? lament the millions of people living with HIV and AIDS, whom we remember this week with World AIDS Day. How long? lament immigrants here and elsewhere in the world without legal status or the protection of law. How long? lament the people of Syria and Israel/Palestine and Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan and Nigeria and South Sudan and every place where conflict seems without end. How long? lament people here in our city who struggle to get by day after day on poverty wages and hand-me-downs and the charity of others. How long? lament our neighbors in communities where violence and poverty are an everyday fact of life.

How long? we also lament, when our own personal Jerusalems seem surrounded and ready to fall, when our families fracture or fail us, or our communities or our friends abandon us, or our bodies fail us, whether we are in our hospital room or our living room.

And yes, how long? lament people in Ferguson and in other communities of color. How long will it be until our children get the same resources, have the same chances, the same protections, are treasured and loved and valued as much as children, at least some of them, whose skin is not black or brown? How long? is the lament of Advent. Let your face shine, that we may be saved, is its prayer.

And yet, there is good news to be had. Listen to Paul: In every way you have been enriched in Christ, in speech and knowledge of every kind, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

“Not lacking in any spiritual gift”—even as we lament “how long”? “Not lacking in any spiritual gift”—even as we struggle to respond to the world around us. “Not lacking in any spiritual gift”—even when our Jerusalems seem ready to fall.

Jesus has not abandoned us or left us empty-handed; in the spirit of Jesus we have everything we need, in “knowledge and speech” and I’d add in money and talent and energy to do the work God is sending us to do in this world of lament. In the spirit of Christ, we have the gifts and the grace to respond in helpful, meaningful ways to the great challenges that face us, whether the inequalities and injustices exposed once again in Ferguson, and which mark Cook County every bit as much as St. Louis County, or the root causes of hunger and homelessness, which are so much a part of the mission and ministry of St. Augustine’s. God has equipped us for this Advent work, and God is sending us to do it.

In that light, Advent seems less about waiting for Christ to come and rescue us, more about Christ waiting for us, the world waiting for us, to reveal the body of Christ we have been called and equipped by God’s grace to be. How long? our Christ laments. Let your light shine, he calls to us, that the world may be saved.