O Figgy Tree, O Figgy Tree

 

 

 

 

 

Before Thanksgiving, I got into my car after a long day and absent-mindedly turned on the radio. I was ready for some nice cheery music to accompany me home down McCaslin. When I heard the familiar strains of “White Christmas” come floating over the airwaves, I groaned inwardly. “You’ve got  to be kidding me. Christmas music already?!” I sighed.

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know. Waves will crash and people faint, as the planets in the heavens start to glow …”

          “What!?” I thought, frantically tapping on the screen on my dashboard.

          The music suddenly changed, and I heard:

          “Have yourself a merry little Christmas … the Son of Man draws near. From now on our troubles will grow worse each year,” I hit the screen harder.

Now someone was singing: “O figgy tree, o figgy tree, how full are all your branches. The reign of God will soon be here, with signs and portents, far and near …”

          Let me tell you—I was so shocked that I nearly ran off the road!

                                                ______________

I know, I know. These songs didn’t really come over the radio like that, but the mixed messages that we do hear during Advent are enough to boggle our minds. The media pours out syrupy-sweet nostalgia by the bucketful; the advertising industry cultivates our longing for immediate happiness; and the church urges us to wait patiently for something huge that we don’t quite understand. As we plop into our cars after a long day at the office, it makes sense that we feel confusion over what exactly we are waiting and preparing for this season. Are we preparing for warm and snuggly family time? Or are we preparing for earthquakes and tribulation? Are we preparing for feasts and gifts? Or for chances to walk the way of the Cross? Are we preparing to remember the sweet baby in the manger? Or to welcome the Son of Man coming in the clouds? If we are being asked to prepare for all of this at once, it seems that we have been given a difficult task indeed.

Before we run off the Advent road, I’d like to point to a common thread that runs through all of these seemingly conflicting messages. That thread is righteousness, as it is found in our reading from Jeremiah. I believe that, in all aspects of the season, we are to prepare for God’s righteousness. Now, “righteousness” has gotten a bad rap in our minds these days. Sometimes we tune it out as a meaningless “theology word,” something from old hymns or incomprehensible Bible verses. Most often, we hear it as a form of pious self-righteousness. We associate it with perfection-seeking, with those intolerant Christians who think that they are better than everyone else. I’m not so sure that any of us would rejoice if our friends described us as a “righteous” man or woman. We would much rather be called “loving” or “good” or “honest.”

Righteousness for Jeremiah, though, and throughout the Hebrew scriptures, doesn’t have these unpleasantly pious connotations. Righteousness, or “Tsedekah,” means “rightness.” It’s the state of being in right relationship, in right order. For example, Don once told me a story that he had heard about an American pastor traveling in Israel. This pastor had some car trouble and pulled over to the side of the road. An Israeli soldier stopped by to help the stranded tourist, and after the soldier finished putting things right under the hood of the car, the American heard a familiar Hebrew word pop out of the soldier’s mouth: “Tsedek,” he said. All is in right working order again, all the parts of the engine are working together to do what they should. Because of the frequency of the word “tsedekah” in the Bible, every seminarian who has ever taken Hebrew class knows that it means righteousness. But to hear it in a real-life situation on the side of a road in Israel, referring to the workings of a car engine, helps to free the word of its pious connotations.

The prophet Jeremiah, then, speaking to his suffering and exiled nation, reassures them that one day soon, God will once again put everything right for God’s people. The broken parts will someday fit together as they were meant to. One day soon, God’s people will live in a world where justice and right order reign, and that right order will come from the people’s right relationship with God. When the Lord is our righteousness, every part of creation—the natural world and the human world—will work together for the good of the whole, choreographed by a God who redeems and makes all things new.

Isn’t that what we are all longing for, as we get into our cars after a long day, or as we read the latest tragedy in the newspapers, or as we pray for our loved ones ….?

--We do long for a white Christmas … where the right weather for the season reflects right human relationship with the earth and skies.

--We do long for a happy Christmas … where God will put right all of the brokenness that weighs so heavily upon our shoulders.

--We do long for a fig tree Christmas, where God’s blessing brings new life out of what lies barren.

--We do long for a just Christmas, where leaders promote right relationship in society, and everyone shares fairly in God’s blessings.

--We do long for a love-filled Christmas, where right relationship with God comes wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

--We do long for a hopeful Christmas, where we dream of time itself flowing like a stream into the rightness of a whole cosmos visibly structured by God’s eternal Word.

The thing about God’s righteousness is that it is built into creation. If we are alert to it, God’s righteousness can be found everywhere—even hidden within those annoying secular songs on the radio. It’s OK to leave the radio on—if we don’t let it lull us to sleep. Rightness requires all of the parts to come together and function as one—God’s handiwork, together with ours.

 

Chaos or Uncovering?

 

 

So, as Jesus and his disciples traveled down South Dakota Highway 244, one of the disciples, who had never visited Mount Rushmore before, cried out, “Wow! Look, teacher, what immense stones, what huge carvings! It looks like they reach all the way up to heaven ….!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great stones? Not one stone will be left here upon another, all will be thrown down.” Once they were settled at a picnic table near the memorial, Peter, James, John and Andrew addressed Jesus privately, in voices filled with both fear and complicity: “Tell us, did you really mean that our country will soon collapse into chaos? It’s the end of democracy, isn’t it? All that we love is going to come toppling down as we fall into fascism or anarchy, right? Last January 6 was surely just a sign of the ruin that is upon us?”

          I don’t think that it takes much of a stretch of the imagination to replace the power-structure of the Jerusalem Temple, over 2000 years ago, with the national power structures of our own day. As I’m sure you know, Mount Rushmore is a mixed symbol. It represents the birth, growth, development and preservation of American democratic ideals. Yet there is a shadow side: it also represents the injustice of sacred lands stolen from the Lakota Sioux and the scars inflicted on the natural beauty of the Black Hills. The Temple was a similarly mixed symbol for Jews in Jesus’ day. It was a powerful religious institution; some people made their living from its thriving, some found ultimate meaning there. Other Jews, though, recoiled from it, as a center of the political and religious corruption of their time. The Temple, with its immense stones and its holy origins, looked invincible. The prediction of its fall by Jesus signaled more than the collapse of a building; it signaled an entirely new way of being in the world. Indeed, only some forty years after Jesus’ death, the powerful Temple and the world of Jesus’ Jewish listeners lay in ruins—destroyed by war with Rome. Yet these ruins were also ripe for amazing new beginnings in both Judaism and, of course, in Christianity.

          The fear of the imminent collapse of the foundations that structure our world—that is something that we can identify with these days. Democracy, the institutional Church, the health care system, the economy, the caste system, even our very climate and coastlines … they all look like fair game for some kind of massive divine reordering. Christian humorist Anne Lamott once expressed our lament well: “It’s all hopeless. Even for a crabby optimist like me, things couldn’t be worse. Everywhere you turn, our lives and marriages and morale and government are falling to pieces… The planet does not seem long for this world. Repent! Oh, wait, never mind. I meant: Help.”[1]

Apocalyptic language, such as we see today in Mark 13, is a powerful response to the kind of despair that nags at our souls these days. God hears the world’s cries of pain and injustice, this language says, and God is going to act. “Apocalypse” doesn’t mean the end of the world; it means “uncovering,” the revealing of what has been hidden. Debbie Thomas describes experiencing apocalypse as experiencing “fresh sight. Honest disclosure.  Accurate revelation.  It is to apprehend reality as we’ve never apprehended it before.”[2]  Apocalyptic is powerful language for urgent times, for times when something new simply must be born, for times when the “birth pangs” of change can no longer be held back. Wild, apocalyptic language screams, “Turn around!” “Pay attention!” “Watch out!” “Hold on!” God is coming soon with power and great glory…. bringing disrupting change!”

However, before we get swept away into too much fear or too much drama, I’d like for us to catch ourselves, following Anne Lamott’s lead in the quote that I just read. Our first lesson for today offers us another kind of language for desperate times, a quiet language just as urgent and just as powerful as “repent.” There’s another language that can herald earth-shattering change just as much as the apocalyptic can: faithful prayer of lament. In these turbulent times, we also need to listen to Hannah’s story.

Hannah is trapped and in trouble. In a world in which a woman’s worth and security are tied to her ability to give birth to sons, Hannah is a loser. Year after year, despite her prayers and her efforts and the love of her husband, she endures shame and ridicule for her childless state. Understandably, she has become “bitter of soul.” She’s angry at her destiny and at the end of her rope. She refers to herself as a woman of “hard days” and “troubled spirit.” In her lament to God, she begs God—and us—to “see, yes, see” into her misery and despair.

But her clueless husband doesn’t see; even the priest Eli doesn’t see. Representing the upstanding religious structures of her society, Eli feels as if he has the right to treat her sharply, and with judgement. He eyes her suspiciously; he calls her drunk; he orders her to get rid of her wine. How often we religious types, unseeing, react to someone else’s tragedy with heartless judgement.

Amazingly, Hannah continues her prayer with firm determination. This powerless, doomed woman speaks as if there is hope for her future. Even though she has no response from God, even though she leaves the Temple with no promise of a son, her lament before God transforms and heals her. Her countenance lifts, and she is able to go on. After her son Samuel is born, in the verses that follow today’s lesson, Hannah continues her prayers in the beautiful poem that we read together today as our canticle. Hannah’s private lament turns into a powerful song for the whole world. Hannah’s song later gives rise to Mary’s Magnificat, as both women praise God for raising up the lowly and bringing the mighty to their knees. The songs of these two women announce a change that sounds much like Jesus declaring that the great stones of the Temple will fall … They sound a lot like Mark proclaiming in the vocabulary of apocalypse that the Day of Judgment is at hand. “The bows of the mighty are broken,” Hannah cries, “but the feeble gird on strength …The Lord will judge the ends of the earth … and exalt the power of his anointed.”

Apocalyptic language says, “Look at the outside world and hang on, because God is going to fix what is broken!” Hannah’s lament says, “Know in your heart that you have been heard, that God is going to fix what is broken!” Looking from the outside in or from the inside out, we hear today that God’s presence means change, God’s healing action means our transformation, a total shaking of the foundations.

 

In 2016, American author and social activist Adrienne Maree Brown wrote about the Black Lives Matter movement: “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered.  We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.”[3]  We live in a time of much uncovering. And uncovering can be ever so painful. I have seen how many St. Ambrosians—almost a quarter of our average Sunday attendance—have bravely turned during this time of Pandemic to uncovering the history of race in this country. In book after book, and discussion after discussion on racism and caste and our place in the brokenness,  you in the Becoming Beloved Community group have held each other tight and struggled. Struggled with the unveiling of pain, struggled with hard things you would rather not see. It hasn’t been an easy journey. Yet in lament and with the persistence of Hannah, you have kept going.  

Yes, in these difficult days, when we cry out with Hannah for saving change-- Know in your hearts that you have been heard, that God will fix what is broken. With the disciples, when we tremble and ask when the earth-shattering change will come--hang on tightly to God, because God will fix what is broken. Behind our cries of lament and our calls for repentance lies the urgent intensity of a God who holds us, and all of our fragile constructions, in a strong and merciful embrace.

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[1] Anne Lamott, “My secret little prayer,” found at http://www.salon.com/2012/11/13/anne_lamott_my_secret_little_prayer.

[2] Debie Thomas, “Not One Stone,” Journey with Jesus, November 11, 2018. Found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2010-not-one-stone.

[3] Ibid.