The underside of Christmas

          After watching “A Sanders’ Family Christmas” over at Derby Dinner Playhouse with the Under the Hill Gang this week, I believe that we American Christians are still just as perplexed about Christmas as Mary was about Gabriel’s astounding message to her.

The play takes the form of a Christmas Eve service in a little Baptist Church in rural Kentucky, a service in which we, the audience, become the members in the pews. There are some fun songs and some good comedy, and I am not here today as theater critic. What boggled my mind, however, was the confusing and contradictory hodgepodge of Christmas that completely filled the script for this play. Secular songs and down-homey Hallmark sweetness were seamlessly interwoven with talk of the Baby Jesus and Salvation. And as a crowning jewel, there was a number about Santa’s elves--the bad, lazy little elves, and the good hard-working ones--with an injunction to the audience from Santa/Jesus for us to be like the good elves, doing our work and behaving, so that we would not burn in Hell. The trouble with this play was precisely that one could not tell if it was a parody of such hell-fire religion or whether it was preaching these beliefs. The trouble with this play was that it was perfectly OK for the authors to offer up all kinds of mix-and-match Christmas theology, all kinds of looks at Christmas, as if none of them mattered or made sense at all …. And all of the many church groups in attendance sat there and clapped for every one of them.

Truly, I understand the confusion. One minute we are watching the cute little messages in Rudolf and Frosty the Snowman, and the next minute we are falling on our knees for “O Holy Night” and breaking the chains of oppression. One minute we are drinking eggnog at the office party, and the next minute we are lighting candles in a darkened church. One minute we are wondering how to understand the idea of a Virgin Birth, and the next minute we are putting out milk and cookies for Santa Claus’ arrival down the chimney. The religious and the secular, the mundane and the mysterious--It does all just kind of blend together, doesn’t it, so that it is hard to know which is which? Pretty soon, it all starts sounding like one big trivial story.

In the play that we saw, the only overarching message that emerged from this confusing Christmas collage was that we had better behave ourselves. “Be Good!” “Work hard!” we heard, loud and clear. Well, I was waiting to start chapel in the preschool last week and was chatting with the children in the pews, when one four-year-old raised her hand. I called on her, and she blurted out for all to hear, “My mommy says that my daddy is on the naughty list!”

“What does that mean?” I stuttered, not sure where this conversation was going and buying time to think of a way to divert it.

“He’s going to get coal in his stocking!” she said with great disdain.

Trying to help me out, one of the teachers offered, “Well, he still has two weeks to improve his behavior …”

Indeed, the song that the children sang with the most gusto at the preschool Christmas program was “You better watch out … You better not pout… Santa Claus is coming to town.” It seems that, everywhere I look, all that we can salvage from our Christmas confusion is the solid little nugget of reputation and reward.

The message of our Gospel reading today seems to be just the opposite, however. If the message of Christmas were that the good, hard-working ones are to be rewarded, then wouldn’t the angel Gabriel have paid a visit to a nice, respectable Roman matron, searching out a married mother of good standing, to bear God’s Son? Would he really have come to Mary, who is as powerless and as insignificant as any human being can be? After all, she is a woman in a patriarchal society; she is young in a world in which age brings social standing; she is unmarried and has no children to give her worth; she is poor and belongs to a powerless, oppressed people. If God’s love is not poured out generously upon every single one of us, why call this young girl, “Favored Lady of God?”

And Mary, she doesn’t turn out to be much of a good rule-follower for her society, either, does she? In accepting God’s plans for her, she turns away from all that is respectable in her world. All of Gabriel’s promises for her son’s future must have seemed like distant dreams in the face of a present that would be filled with scandal, risk, and reproach, as an unmarried pregnant girl. Yet Mary lets go of her respectability and her reputation to accept what God has placed upon her. She gives up control over her life and opens herself up to God’s vision for the world. The annunciation hints at the same kind of scandalously self-giving, world-loving sacrifice that the Baby himself will show upon the Cross.

While I was studying today’s lessons at my desk at home, I happened to catch a glimpse of a photo of Michangelo’s Pieta that my daughter had brought me from Italy. Reading Mary’s trusting reply to the angel, while looking up at her grief-stricken face as she holds her dead son on her lap, brought home to me the magnitude of the heart-breaking risk that she took as a mother. Faithful, naïve Mary did not ask the angel how her son was to save his people. She didn’t ask for details on what kind of king he would be. Could she ever have imagined that he would be a crucified King, a savior who would love and forgive a world that could only send him to a shameful death? Would she have said “yes,” if she had known, I wondered. Of course she would have. For, deep down, we all know that Love is always worth the risk and the pain that comes wrapped up in it. The powerless young girl holding a divine baby to her breast, and the sorrowful young woman with her grown-up child sprawled lifeless in her lap, both proclaim the sobering paradox of God’s love in our lives. Rowan Williams describes incarnation as “the utter strangeness of God that waits in the heart of what is familiar.”[1] God’s love abides quietly, patiently, enduring risk and obscurity, waiting for the chance to transform the familiar into the strange and to make strange the familiar. It waits to turn a poor, unmarried girl into the Mother of God, a mother whose own heartbreak gives life to the world. It waits to pour out divine favor in all of the places that one least expects such favor, to spread incomprehensible love over all those whom we are certain do not deserve it, including ourselves. “A virgin giving birth?” we gasp with Mary, rolling our eyes. “Nothing is impossible with God,” responds our text. “The likes of me entering the kingdom of God is about like a camel going through the eye of a needle,” we mumble with the crowds around Jesus. “Nothing is impossible with God,” responds Jesus.

Frosty and Rudolf and eggnog and Santa are for us the familiar. Abundant love poured out upon us is the strange. Our task this last week before Christmas is to listen for the divine strangeness within the familiarity of our culture—to welcome the divine strangeness that turns our focus on reward and reputation upside down and inside out. God is just waiting for us to utter the risky words: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word,” the burning, hidden word of Love that melts away all triviality like candle wax.

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[1] Rowan Williams, Ponder These Things, xvii.

Salvation: Dancing Home

          My young adult children have figured out a way to get my undivided attention at the dinner table, while at the same time avoiding all of my motherly probing into their private affairs: they ask impossible theological questions! Unfortunately, I fall for the bait every time and usually end up tripping over my attempts at smooth apologetics. This Thanksgiving, as I tried to win an argument by appealing to the promise of salvation, my son asked, “What exactly is salvation? What does it look like? Isn’t it that stuff about going to heaven while everyone else is going to hell?”

          “No, of course not,” my yoga-practicing daughter piped up. “Salvation is just inner peace. God saves us by giving us inner peace.”

          While I muttered that salvation is best seen neither as merely a reprieve from eternal hellfire nor simply as inner peace, I quietly began to wonder, “What exactly does salvation look like?” At Easter, we can play around in the realm of theological abstraction, as we try to explain the cosmic, saving death of Jesus on the Cross. But the incarnational nature of Christmas forces us back down to earth. During Advent, we wait for salvation, for deliverance, in the form of the baby in the manger—the baby whose name, Jesus, actually comes from the Hebrew word for “salvation.”

How do we explain the kind of salvation that the baby Jesus brings into the world? If I had to paint a picture of salvation, what would I paint?

          Imagine my delight to find that our psalm for today paints a beautiful picture for me. In Psalm 85, salvation resembles a joyful meeting, a divine dance, if you will, between God’s steadfast love and faithfulness and between God’s righteousness and peace: “Steadfast love and faithfulness have met together; righteousness and peace have embraced,” sings our psalmist. “Faithfulness will spring up from the earth, and righteousness will go before [God] and make a pathway for his steps.”

          Four divine characteristics meet on earth, become part of our world, and recognize and embrace each other as they begin to mold and transform creation from the inside out. I imagine flowing forms when I read these words—graceful, holy forms that pour into each other and into us and mix to create a smooth, wavy landscape, filled with the divine.

          First, God’s steadfast love steps out of the shadows. Grace and loving-kindness, the love that forgives again and again, the desire for covenant-building relationship, God’s love opens wide its arms here on earth. This love is our salvation.

          And then into God’s loving arms comes truth, or faithfulness. This is not a cold, abstract philosophical truth, but an active, all-encompassing faithfulness, full of good deeds and right response. It is the faithfulness that insists on feeding the hungry stranger and sheltering the pregnant, wayfaring mother when there is no room at the Inn. This response of faithfulness is our salvation.

          Then, as God’s love and God’s all-encompassing goodness come together in the dance, God’s righteousness rises up to join them. God’s righteousness isn’t some prissy obedience to a list of rules, but it is the eternal correctness that orders all of creation. It is what gives life stability, what keeps relationships in good balance. This right relationship is our salvation.

          Finally, last but not least, shalom—peace, well-being, happiness—springs up from the earth and greets righteousness with a kiss, joining right relationship to life-giving blessing. This shalom is our salvation.

          In all of this swirling, dancing divine outreach, it becomes clear that the salvation described here is a dynamic process, initiated by God. God pours out God’s love and right order upon us, to draw us into loving, right relationships ourselves. Salvation doesn’t happen up in heaven somewhere, though, independent of our actions on earth. Indeed, in our psalm, salvation doesn’t just involve humankind but includes all of creation, as the land flourishes and the earth itself yields faithfulness. Salvation is not our individual, once-for-all prize for believing the right set of words. Instead, it comes into our community, ordering and reordering, loving and shaping and transforming. It comes from the blessing of God’s presence, not merely as an absence of God’s judgment.

The Psalm paints a beautiful picture of salvation, doesn’t it? It is indeed more than an “I’m going to heaven and you’re not” attitude, and it is more than an individual’s of inner peace. But what happens to this gift of salvation when God calls us to dance, and we turn away our faces? The dance of salvation cannot be done without lots of turning, says our psalm. God approaches, and we turn away; God turns away and we turn back; God turns again, and we turn to meet God in an embrace. The verb “to turn” in Hebrew is the same as the verb, “to repent.” Salvation is a dance of constant repentance and change. One of my favorite nativity scenes, from a medieval fresco in the crypt of a cathedral in Switzerland, shows Joseph off pouting in the stable. Mary and Jesus sit together between docile oxen and adoring sheep, glowing with divine love, but Joseph, obviously jealous of the new baby, slumps dejectedly with his head on his hand all by himself in a corner. If St. Joseph can sulk at the moment of incarnation, should we be surprised that we cannot hold more tightly to the salvation poured out upon us?

In our psalm, the people of Israel have returned home to Jerusalem. They have been brought out of exile in Babylon. God has heard their cries and has delivered them from their suffering. But home is still not the ideal place that they have imagined it to be. The returning exiles have been forgiven, yet they still sin. God has lifted their guilt, yet they still live in discord. Back home in Jerusalem, officials are still corrupt, people still forget to worship God, just like they did before they were forced into exile in the first place.

For us, too, our relationship with God, played out in the dance of salvation, is kind of like coming home for the holidays. You know, when you return to your family childhood home, finding it filled with both sad and tender memories. You can sense the promise of well-being and right relationship just oozing from every familiar corner. The love is there, palpable, but then not there at the same time. Siblings and parents can be annoying; old hurts and unhealthy patterns are never far beneath the surface. Sometimes, though, grace can fill the room like children’s laughter, as you gather together with family under the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree. Righteousness and peace embrace in the candlelight, and truth springs up from the crèche. But then someone slips up and feelings get hurt, or memories of an absent loved-one slice right through your heart. Home carries both so much promise and so much room for error.

Marilynne Robinson, in her novel Home, subtly plays on the relationship between salvation and home-coming. A father, full of forgiveness and mercy for his wayward son, throws open his home and his heart as the son, long-absent like the Prodigal in Jesus’ parable, returns home after twenty years of disgrace. The elderly father, a Presbyterian minister, practices goodness and forgiveness and gratitude for God’s blessings in a pure, humble way that truly seems to mirror the attitudes of our heavenly Father. Yet the two adult children, who have been forced to come home by difficult life circumstances, struggle daily with all of their relationships: to the past, to their father, to each other, and to their home town, in all of the little ups and downs with which we are all familiar. Like ours, this family’s ordinary, daily life is filled with constant turning, constant repentance, yet it is also filled with a constant sense of peace, love, righteousness, and faithfulness. “Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be,” writes Robinson, “God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.”[1] The dance of salvation is like coming home, in all of its beauty and in all of its twisting, turning ambiguity.

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[1] Marilynne Robinson, Home, 102.

La Veillee

          Advent always begins with the command for us to “watch,” to remain alert to God’s action in our world. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus rather mysteriously says, “So be on your guard; I have told you everything ahead of time.” When I first read that line, I thought, “What a frustrating comment! He sounds like a pompous puzzle-maker, handing us an incredibly complex puzzle and then refusing to give out any hints about its solution, tantalizingly telling us instead that everything we need to know is right in front of us.” How are we supposed to know what to do? What does it mean to “be on our guard?” Surely it does not mean to look for signs of the end in all of our newspaper headlines or to stir up fear in the guise of Bible study, like the preachers on those early-morning cable shows.

Since I used to be a French teacher, I sometimes amuse myself by reading the Scriptures in French. This time it paid off! The French command to “watch!” in Mark 13 is “veillez!” That verb “veillez” jumped out at me, because it is related to the noun for a special kind of vigil. Down in the South of France, near where I used to live, there is an old tradition in which villagers meet at night in each others’ homes for what is called a “veillee.” Men and women, old and young, grandparents, sleeping babies and little children, gather in an old farmhouse kitchen, in front of a cozy fire, and they roast chestnuts and tell stories into the night. They live in a poor, desolate area of France, high on a windswept plateau, far removed from the weathy, tourist cities of the Mediterranean coast. Their land is poor and arid, and the cliffs and caves of the ominous-looking countryside resemble the rugged landscapes of the American West. It is a land full of fears, hardships, and wearying isolation. So the people gather at night for a vigil. They gather together to “watch” over the night. They tell ancient stories of ghosts, werewolves, and tales of encounters with supernatural beings that fill the dark hollows and shadows of their landscape. Their stories allow them to talk about their fears and to try to explain the difficulties of their lives, and their gatherings give them a sense of family and community and history in the midst of a poverty and an isolation that would otherwise crush their spirits completely. These people know what it means to have to stay alert, to watch, to be on their guard.

A little to the northeast of these villages, there is another village called “le Chambon sur Lignon” that has been the object of books, studies, and even films. Isolated on one of those cold, windswept plateaus, a community of poor, subsistence farmers, Le Chambon became famous for its “watching.” In addition to stories of ghosts and werewolves, villagers in the mostly protestant town of Le Chambon would gather in the evenings to tell stories of their Huguenot past: Stories of faith and of resistance in the midst of violent persecution, and steadfastness in the face of intolerance, stories linking them to their heroes of the Protestant Reformation. During the troubled times of the Second World War, a young, idealistic pastor, in disfavor with the church authorities because of his shocking pacifist beliefs, was shuttled off to be the pastor of poor, isolated Le Chambon. This pastor joined in the nightly vigils, adding Bible study to the local stories, spending days and hours examining with his little community the words of Jesus, those words that will never pass away.

Slowly, imperceptibly even, Jesus’ words became part of the hearts and minds of these ordinary villagers. And then, one day, strangers started to straggle into the village, knocking on farmhouse doors and asking for food, shelter, and refuge from persecution. They were Jews, hounded by their own governments, fleeing transport and death in concentration camps to the east. And the villagers of Le Chambon took them in. Working together, as a close community, they hid them, hundreds of them, in their homes. They shared their meager food with them. They provided them with false identity papers. They secretly filled their local school with their children …. For years, they did all of this without hesitation, disobeying the laws of their own Vichy government, helping perfect strangers very different from themselves, facing possible imprisonment and even death for them. When interviewed after the war by journalists eager to praise their actions and to make heroes out of them, the villagers of Le Chambon could not explain their actions. In a documentary, some of them say things like, “We did it ‘just because.’” “It was the normal thing to do.” “We didn’t have any theory. We just did what had to be done.” “People came to our doors and asked for help. How could we not open them?”

The people of Le Chambon, during the long winter nights of vigil, had huddled together sharing the transforming words of Jesus. Without realizing it, they had learned how to be on their guard. They were alert, when history knocked on their doors and called on them to act. They knew from the stories of their own history and from the stories of the Scriptures, what was expected of them as Christians. Together, they were ready to face trials and tribulations. They did not spend their time searching the heavens for signs or clamoring for control over the future—or even for control over their own lives. As their pastor himself wrote, “in times of crisis … Predictions are a refuge for cowards … There are dangers involved in trying to predict the effects of your actions on your own life, your family’s lives, the lives of your parish, and the lives of your countrymen.”[1] Instead of making predictions, this pastor and his flock chose to follow the words of Jesus, to love their neighbors as themselves, and to help the unjustly persecuted innocents around them.

In the words of our Scriptures, Jesus has truly “told us everything ahead of time.” It’s all there, as it has been for 2000 years: the good Samaritan, the woman caught in adultery, the prodigal son, the woman at the well, the healings, the resurrection encounters, the passion and Cross …
“Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will never pass away.” May we remember to watch with those words. To gather together in a dark, stormy world, to share the burdens of our worries and fears, and to listen to the stories. To teach them to our children. To pass them lovingly from hand to hand, like we pass the chalice and paten. To “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them,” as it says in one of my favorite Collects. I don’t think that we can be the courageous people that Jesus calls on us to be without making our Christian story a deep part of who we are. I hope that we will be able to find time at St. Thomas for more Bible Study, for more classes for adults and for our young people to study the words that will never pass away. For with the words of Jesus embedded in our minds and hearts, united as a Christian community with a story, we are awake to truth. We will not be sleeping when it is our turn to act responsibly in the insecurities of the present. Let us keep the “veillee,” the vigil. Let us watch together! Amen.

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[1] Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood be Shed.

Kingly Judgment Jesus-style

I once found myself in a toy store in the mall on a Saturday afternoon, late in November, on a day like today, and a strange kind of claustrophobia came over me. I suddenly felt trapped inside of tainted wrappings that needed to be ripped away. Weighing on my soul was the sight of rows of plastic guns thicker than a child’s arm, piles of hideous toy monsters lumbering through their own apocalypse, ranks of half-dressed Barbies trapped behind their plastic windows, and shelves of rigid baby-dolls with shocked mouths and jaded eyes. Glaring colors on cheap cardboard screamed from overburdened shelves, “Buy me, want me, need me now!” Tired music seemed forced out of loudspeakers against its will, sucking the very air from the room, while fluorescent light streamed down from the ceiling like yellowed curtains that I longed to part. My eyes searched the store desperately for an opening, for a tear in this gaudy, unwanted, and premature Christmas wrap. Scanning with judging eyes the ceiling and walls of this prison, I remember thinking frantically, “There has to be a corner somewhere that they forgot to tape up, an edge where I can start ripping, a tab that I can pull to yank away the world’s wrappings with a flourish of my hand.”

Sometimes, we just feel as if the world stands in our way. We want to cast off what is broken and smash what is sinful in order to make room for God. Sometimes it feels as if there is such dissonance between the way things are and they way that they should be, and we want God to rip away what is false, to act in some powerful way to restore peace and joy and right relationship in the world. When Pope Pius the eleventh first established the Feast of Christ the King in 1925, it was in reaction to a world gone awry with war and hatred; it was a proclamation that God is in control and will bring justice in the face of chaos. Both the prophet Ezekiel and Jesus in our Gospel reading also describe for us today, in the language of sheep and shepherds, a vision of God acting to set things right in the world. In both readings, a powerful God swoops down to gather the nations and the peoples together and then sorts out good and evil once and for all, upholding the good and tossing away the bad.

We Episcopalians shy away from picturing God as judge, and I certainly wince and cringe internally as I hold up the Gospel Book today and proclaim to you Matthew’s words about the “accursed” departing into eternal fire. Threats of hell and images of a stern and judging God have done much damage in the hands of preachers over the centuries. But I also realize that, when I was in that toy store, my prayer would certainly have been to see Christ breaking through the ceiling with power and great glory, sweeping up all the tired children into his arms and casting those toys into the outer darkness. Like God does with the sheep in our lesson from Ezekiel, I can see God gently feeding the children, rocking them to sleep, and tenderly singing them angelic lullabies. I can picture God soothing the harried mothers and fathers, binding up the sore feet of the underpaid store clerks, and yes, tossing out anyone who is there to overcharge, sell dangerous merchandise, or otherwise harm the innocent. I can picture God tossing out all of those plastic guns and ripping the fangs and claws from the plastic figurines. I can see God bashing out the walls to let in sunshine and fresh air and hurling the harmful toys into a heap of broken plastic. “I will save my flock,” God says to Ezekiel, “and they shall no longer be ravaged …. I will feed them with justice.” Come, O King, with your justice and fix this broken world.

Justice is an important word throughout the entire Bible. As a people in covenant with a just God, our job, too, is to act with justice, treating all people with benevolence, caring for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—all those on the margins of society—treating them with the same love that God has for all human beings. In Ezekiel, it is the bullying sheep who push the weak ones around and who trample and despoil the pasture that all must share, who will face God’s displeasure. It should come as no surprise to us, then, that Jesus moves from divine judgment straight into his expectations for us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, care for the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner. Such concrete acts of compassion--of “suffering with” the suffering children of God until they suffer no longer--are clearly what our scriptures demand of us, no matter how desperately we try to focus on other things.

The real shocker in our Gospel lesson, however, is neither Jesus’ expectation of us, nor the scene of majestic judgment that he describes …. but it is his assertion that, in caring for the outcast, we are caring for him. As usual, Jesus takes the biblical call for justice and moves the expectations up a notch! We squirm and question in response. The majestic King of Glory, the One who has the power to judge and create and destroy—how can he abide quietly in the hearts of the hungry and naked ones, the persecuted and the prisoners? How can the Son of Man with all his angels be identified with the emaciated beggar slumped on the Temple steps? In Jesus’ story in our Gospel, the righteous don’t understand the paradox any more than the unrighteous do. “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry … or thirsty … or naked …?” they stutter in bewilderment.

At Diocesan Convention this week, we all watched an amazing video about just the kind of compassion that Jesus is asking of us in today’s Gospel. A harried business woman in her twenties is rushing through downtown streets on her way to a job interview, when she comes across a dirty, thin, unsmiling man carrying a sign saying, “Help me—I am dying of AIDS.” We see the woman stop in front of this man, disgust on her face. “What is she going to do?” we wonder. “What would I do in her place?” Then the film flashes forward, and we see her telling her friends about the encounter later, at a party. Her friends are generally dismissive of the dying man, even cruel, talking about how gross he must have been and how they would have ignored or even tortured him. Some friends talk about feeling guilty when they meet homeless people like that, but then throw up their hands in helplessness. The woman is clearly uncomfortable with their crass reactions, as are we. Finally, they ask her, “Well, what did you do?” When watching the movie, I expected the film to show her either running away or giving the man some money. But much to my surprise, the film did neither. It ended as the woman slowly reached out and took the dirty, dying stranger in her arms for a huge, long hug. It even took the man awhile to comprehend what was happening to him, but he finally put his arms around the woman and let himself be loved, as if the woman’s arms were God’s arms, as if the dying man were Jesus Christ. At Convention, as the film ended, you could have heard a pin drop. Clergy and lay deputies sat in tear-filled silence, awe-stuck in the presence of Truth and ashamed, in our hardness of heart, that we did not even see that hug coming.

In proclaiming Christ as our King, we receive a King who abides in the lowly, a King who is welcomed and cared for as we welcome the outcast and feed the poor. Come to think of it, why are we so surprised to find the risen Christ abiding in the needy and forlorn? After all, the only kind of crown put on Jesus’ head during his lifetime is a crown of thorns, and his only earthly throne is a Roman cross. He is a King surrounded by condemned criminals, rather than by emperors and empresses. He is a King who is shamed, scorned, and put to death by the powers of the world, rather than enthroned by them. He is a King who saves others, but not himself. He is a King who rejects the power that forces and controls others and embraces only the power of self-giving love.

With such a king as our judge, I’m actually not so sure that the images of hellfire, gnashing of teeth, and the wicked being thrown into outer darkness, need to fill our imaginations. As Rowan Williams says, reproach, fear, and condemnation are not the tools that our crucified King would use to shove us into his Kingdom.[1] Instead, he invites us to love. In that toy store, where consumerism and greed were strangling the life around me, what if, instead of begging for judgment, I had just bought some toys and walked out of that store with them and taken them over to Wayside Christian Mission or to the Home of the Innocents? What if I had put aside my schedule and spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the children there, hugging them, showering upon them God’s generous love? There, and only there, the children and I would have entered into “the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

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[1] [1] Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness, 103.

Brainstorming the Future

          The Parable of the Talents, hauled out by preachers so often in sermons on stewardship, has always made me feel terribly guilty. Over and over again, a certain interpretation of its message has been hammered into my heart, as an inner voice intones: “It is a terrible sin to waste the gifts that God has given to you. If you have received much from God, then you are expected to give back even more.”

          I can still remember sitting in the chapel service as a high school senior at my Episcopal prep school and feeling the 100-pound lead weights pile onto my skinny little shoulders, as the well-meaning preacher reminded us all that we were special, and that because of all of the gifts that had been showered upon us by parents, teachers, and even by God, God, in return, expected a great deal from us in our adult lives. God expected us to grow up to be leaders, to be movers and shakers in the community, to be important and influential people. The implication that rang in my ears that day was that, without extraordinary accomplishments, I stood before God as that third wicked, lazy, and worthless slave in our parable, bound for the outer darkness.

It is clearly the third servant with whom Matthew expects us all to identify. The first two servants are quickly commended and dismissed from the story. But the third servant’s surprisingly bold description of his master, as well as the master’s even more surprising condemnation of the third servant to the outer darkness, draw our attention to his plight.

“It’s not fair!” we fume. “The poor guy was afraid to invest the money, because he knew that his master was a greedy, fickle, and harsh absentee landlord, a powerful man who was quick to punish for mistakes and disloyalty. So of course he was careful with the property consigned to him. After all, just the one talent that he received was equal to a huge pot of gold, to a lifetime of earnings for the average worker. That is a lot of money, and a lot of responsibility!”

While we might be tempted to laugh at the poor man for going out into the yard with a shovel to bury the money, it is important to realize that burying money was the accepted financial practice in his day. Historians tell us that the first-century rabbis taught that the best way to guard money for someone was to bury it, and that if buried money was somehow lost, then the one who had buried it was not even liable for it, for he had done the prudent thing with it.[1] So our careful servant, clearly the less brilliant of the three, since he had been confided the least amount of money, “according to his ability,” decides to follow the custom and to bury the small fortune that he has been given, saving himself from the possibility of messing up and losing the property of an obviously strict master. Who among us here today would not have likely done the same? Don’t some of you now wish that you had buried your retirement accounts in the backyard, instead of submitting them to the risks of the stock market? Imagine that tomorrow, in the middle of this financial crisis, your cranky boss gives you a million dollars to keep for her for a few years? Wouldn’t you be tempted to hide it away somewhere safe, or at least to do the conventional, accepted thing with it, rather than trying some risky scheme? Paralyzed by the terrible weight of the high expectations that others place upon us, or that we place upon ourselves, we often shuffle guiltily forward, reluctant to act, and waiting for God’s judgment to fall upon our failures. Our parable, then, is a wake-up call to all of us fearful and carefully hesitating human beings.

          Moreover, Matthew places this parable in the middle of Jesus’ “eschatalogical discourse,” his vision of the end times, of his return, and of God’s judgment. In this parable, Jesus is trying to tell us something about how we are to spend the “waiting time” in which we live our lives here on earth. If we interpret the parable as an allegory, however, we end up with the unacceptable conclusion that the absentee landlord stands for God, for a cruel God who is to be feared above all things. In the same way, if we interpret the parable as an allegory in saying that the talents are symbols of our personal God-given gifts, such as friendliness, musical talent, or brains, then we are creating a nice little lesson about sharing and leadership that misses out on the whole “future” aspect of the parable. Instead, Jesus presents us in today’s parable with an image of different ways of claiming our future. Like the third servant, we naturally tend to act in safe, conventional ways, carefully trying to preserve Christ’s Good News to us in the face of uncertainty. Jesus calls us, instead, to act like the first two servants, claiming the future by freedom of action in the present, by venturing into precarious realms unprotected by predictable rules and guidelines.[2]

          Instead of looking to successful managers and influential public figures as our models of wise Christian guardianship of the future, we must look to people like Simon Peter and Andrew, who threw down their fishing nets and livelihoods to follow Jesus right on the spot. We must look to the Mary who anointed Jesus with exorbitantly expensive oil and wiped his feet with her hair. We must hold up saints like Joan of Arc, a teenager who confronted kings with her strange and incredible divine visions, and Martin Luther, a monk who let scripture break its bonds and speak in unsettling new ways. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are supposed to believe, not the great things that we can do with our own power, position, and brains, but the love of God that supports us on every side. Instead of holding over my head all of the great things that I was supposed to be in my adult life, the preacher at my high school should have made me tremble in my boots that I might forget to reflect God’s love in my life, or that I might always choose safety over freedom.

          We like to pretend that we have some control over our lives, that we can bring about a safe and secure world through our own careful actions. We build strong brick houses on straight, perpendicular streets. We take six kinds of vitamins and set up burglar alarms and purchase piles of insurance. But we can’t protect ourselves from the uncertainties of a future that is beyond our grasp. The future, says our reading from Thessalonians, is like “a thief in the night,” sneaking up quietly upon us, awakening us from sleep like the labor pains of a pregnant woman. The only thing that we can control is how we spend the present moment. Do we clothe ourselves in Christ, acting with the freedom that only Christ can give us? Of do we hide ourselves away under heavy, home-made protective armor? Do we take the love that God showers upon us and spread it around, knowing that it will never dry up or run out? Or do we take that love and dig a hole and bury it in the ground, afraid of losing it? 

Frederick Buechner writes of this parable that the third slave buries in the ground not just the pieces of money entrusted to him but the richest treasure that he has—that is, “the most alive part of himself.” By burying the treasure of the divine spark in his soul, the third slave is never able to become what he might have been.[3] Where have we buried the life and freedom in our souls, I wonder? Under a rock of fear or shame? Under a need to conform to what society tells us is important? Under the kind of burdens that pile up so gradually that we don’t even know how heavy they have become? As individuals, and as a parish, it is perhaps time to take a look at what we have buried in the ground and to sweep away the dirt, letting the sunny rays of God’s validation and love shine upon it. That spark that makes us alive—we need to start spreading it around creatively, finding ways to let it grow and multiply and escape our careful, worried control. Do you have a wild idea for sharing our divine spark at St. Thomas? Then tell us about it, and we will finally know how we can grow. Are you longing to reach out to someone that you fear might turn you away? Then take the risk. Brainstorm the Good News! Claim the future!

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[1] Bernard Scott, Hear Then the Parable, 227.

[2] Scott, 234-5.

[3] Frederick Buechner, "The Stewardship of Pain." http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/buechner_3416.htm.

What Was, What Is, and What Will Be

Years ago, when I led an Education for Ministry group, we would say a short prayer after each member shared his or her “spiritual autobiography,” the story of his or her life with God. After listening to a lifetime of both joy and struggle, we would affirm in unison: “For what was, for what is, and for what will be—Thanks be to God.”  I believe that this short prayer, attributed to Dag Hammarskjold, is the essence of our All Saints’ Day prayers, as well. Instead of just blessing our individual, private lives as God’s Saints (that is, God’s children) our All Saints’ Day reflections give us an encompassing, communal vision of our past with God, our present with God, and our future with God.

First we pray: “For what was, thanks be to God.”

When I was an overly imaginative little girl, I used to engage in the comforting fantasy that my deceased grandparents were up in heaven watching me live my life, marveling at technological wonders like the TV set or my parents’ Chevrolet, and participating with me in the simple events of my day. I never knew my grandparents, so it wasn’t that I missed them, but I was seeking some kind of grounding in a loving connection with my past.  This year in our parish, we have said farewell to many of our St. Thomas saints—saints whose loving spirits and faithful witnesses are still alive in all that we do here together. What a comfort it is on All Saints’ Day, to take a moment to place in our midst those whom we love and no longer see, as we call them by name and count them still here among us. What a comfort it is when the strength and love and blessedness of the past can brush softly by us, touching us for a moment in the present. “For all that was, thanks be to God.”

Next, we pray: “For all that is, thanks be to God.”

The present is the tough place to be, isn’t it? The past is so often cast in a rosy light, and dreams of the future can be exciting, but the present is full of the struggles of real life in this world.  Christianity is often accused of a “pie in the sky” mentality, of excusing the injustices of the present by claiming that everything will be made right in the next life. In the Beatitudes that we read today in our Gospel, however, Jesus uses the image of God’s future reign to bless in the present the justice and mercy and righteousness and love hidden in the hearts of his poor, scraggly, persecuted and outcast bunch of followers. Before Jesus launches into what he expects of us in the Sermon on the Mount—all of the impossible demands that we love even our enemies and avoid all hypocrisy in our religious life—Jesus consoles us in the difficulties of our lives with the Beatitudes. When we read through all of them, as we did today, we cannot help but feel flickers of solace and hope, as blessings emerge in the midst of the tough present reality, as our struggles are seen through God’s eyes. As long as we don’t discard the present, tossing its reality aside as we dive for the morsels of future vision within it, we can use the biblical images of God’s Kingdom as a way to center ourselves in a reality in which the future is already present, pushing ourselves to grow into the vision that God is laying out for us, truly understanding what it means to be, as it says in our epistle today, “children of God.” “For all that is, thanks be to God.”

And finally: “For all that will be, thanks be to God.”

The problem that we often have with the book of Revelation is that we associate it with some kind of future timeline. So much misguided human effort has gone into trying to figure out what came first and what will come last according to this wildest book of our Bible, trying to decide if we are just about to witness the end of the world or if it will be in another thousand years … if an earthquake in Russia will come before or after a tidal wave in China … if the saints will see God before or after Jesus returns to earth. The images in the book of Revelation, however, cannot be put into such chronologies. They are created to break into our present like a dream, like a dream that pervades our waking consciousness with divine visions.  

Close your eyes for a minute and picture the vision in today’s reading: a limitless number of the saints, the children of God, stretching as far and wide as the eye can see. They are not just Americans, or Episcopalians, or the people that we like to hang out with, but they represent every nation, every ethnicity, speaking every language, representing every time period in the history of the universe. Their sin no longer clings to them. All that they have done and left undone no longer matters, no longer drags them down or keeps them from God. They all wear God’s pure, white robes. And what are they doing? Are they playing harps on clouds or looking for their relatives or taking heavenly naps? I used to listen to a song on the “Singing Nun” album back in the ‘60’s that described the saints in heaven as Anthony and Cleopatra listening to the music of Mozart while the emperor Charlemagne gets on a bicycle and visits Napoleon, and Michelangelo draws the Cro-Magnon man. Our text tells us, though, that the saints are not doing any of these things. Instead, the multitude before the heavenly throne is totally focused on Christ. They all face the Lamb, continually singing, worshipping and blessing the God who is at their very center. It is God who holds them all together, even in heaven, as He holds us together around the Altar. It is not just that the saints are all together. It is not just that they no longer suffer. It is that they are all gathered—and comforted--in perpetual worship of God.

The 16^th century artist Albrecht Durer has a painting called the “Adoration of the Trinity” that is often used as an illustration of our passage from Revelation. A papal-looking God the Father, surrounded by billows of smoke and crowned with the dove of the Spirit, is holding a large cross on which Jesus still hangs. This cross is at the very center of the painting. Around it, kings, popes, peasants, angels, men, women, and children all kneel, crowded into the margins of the painting and flowing out beyond its borders, a great multitude with heads bowed, hands folded in prayer, all directed toward the crucified Lamb. Yes, the Lamb that the saints are all worshipping is nailed to a cross! The purity and whiteness of the saints’ robes are a result of cleansing blood, not of sweet piety. The saints’ robes are also not being washed by God, but they themselves are doing the work of washing. Those who conquer are actively following their crucified Lord in the present. God can expect such costly discipleship from us because there is another plane that exists, no matter what evil assaults us, no matter what uncertainties plague our present. In God’s timeless place, there is victory: where heat and hunger, thirst and sin can no longer can claim us. It is this future that gives our mission in the present its context. “For all that will be, thanks be to God.”

Indeed, we live and move and have our being in the present moment, yet our memories of the past and our visions of the future hold us in the security of God’s embrace. Listen to T.S. Eliot, in part of the “Four Quartets,”

“But to apprehend / the point of intersection of the timeless/ With time, is an occupation for the saint--/ No occupation either, but something given/ And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender./ For most of us, there is only the unattended/ Moment, the moment in and out of time … [the] music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/ While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses, / Hints followed by guesses; and the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action./ The gift half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation…./ Here the past and future are conquered, and reconciled.”

Today, let us hold onto the past and the future--but not so tightly that we lose our freedom to act right now, to live fully, for we too are God’s saints, expected to take our turn in the dance, to pray, to act, and to love, no matter what. We will never be alone. Layers and layers of saints—followers of the Crucified One-- surround us, before and behind. Fear will not have the last word, even in this uncertain world, for we are surrounded by an infinitely strong net of love and communion, through which we can never fall into the abyss. “For all that was, and all that is, and all that will be: thanks be to God.”