What Sweeter Music (Chrismas Daily Office Year 1)

 

What Sweeter Music?

25 December 2010 

Daily Office Christmas Year 1

Zech 2:10-13; 1 John 4:7-16; John 3:31-36

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (1 John 4:7-16)

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

“Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God; … those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” 

We often miss the point of these phrases in the first letter of John.  We tend to turn them on their head and read them as if they say “whoever knows God and is born of God learns how to love, and those who abide in God and in whom God abides practice love.”  We might be lead to do so by the fact that the passage says “God abides in those who confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God” 

But this text argues in the opposite direction—the author says the practice of love brings about and embodies personal closeness to God, not the other way around.   The distinction is an important one, since we generally tend to think that the experience of love in some form or another is more generally common and shared among human beings than is having knowledge of God or being born of God, particularly when we associate such “God-talk” with submission to a particular religious tradition. 

The “love” referred to here, of course, is not just our love for other human beings: “God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son.”  

This is not an argument that we simply “confess Jesus as Lord” with our lips and “God will take care of everything.”   For 1 John, love comes first, and God’s action in our lives takes care of the rest, including the personal attachment to Jesus that he says from his experience is at the heart of having abiding love.  This is not a sectarian call to sign up for a doctrinal program or a partisan religious affiliation.   It is a call to love and trust, with all that those words imply.  And he bases this call on the fact that God sent Jesus, i.e., that God took on flesh and became truly human.

At root here is a key element in classic Christian theology of the incarnation.   Christians have long reflected on what it means when we say, together with the Gospel of John that “the Word of God took on flesh and became truly human.”

That God somehow took on flesh and became truly human marks a radical continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies a sacredness in all it means to be human.   Human love, friendship, the enjoyment of the simple pleasures of our world, and even our sorrows and pain—all these are taken up into God the moment God takes on our flesh.  As one of the great theological doctors of the Eastern Church, Saint Athanasius, wrote: “[God], indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God.” (De Incarnation 54). 

We often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us. This “God incognito” paid for our sins and somehow made it possible for us to be more like God, and less like human beings.  That is a total warping of the meaning of the incarnation.

God became truly human in all ways (except in resisting God), and that means it’s O.K. to be fully human.  In fact, it means God calls us to be fully human, and to do that he calls us to follow his example when he was among us, and not resist God so much. It is only thus that we can find our true and full humanity.
We often hear this time of year calls to “put Christ back in Christmas.” People complain about commercialization, too much partying, and not enough praying.  This phrasing of the question gets the issues all wrong. It separates the partying and celebration from spirituality. Granted, some people see the holiday solely as a consumer or marketing event. The holiday is thus diminished, often becoming a source of stress and depression.

The problem, however, is not too much celebration, but too little. “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God” says Isaiah. It is not just “the spiritual side” of us that should rejoice. To want to turn Christmas into a sectarian prayer meeting rather than the public, boisterous, and commonly shared party that it currently is—regardless of beliefs—stems from bad theology.

In the history of the Church in England, this issue once came to a real crisis point and literally caused the government of England to “cancel Christmas” for two decades.  After the English Reformation, some Christians there believed that the Church had not been reformed thoroughly enough, that it was not sufficiently “biblical,” and that it still was corrupted by what the early reformers called “the enormities of Rome.”  They wanted to get rid of fancy vestments, bishops, organs, and even the daily or weekly celebration of the Eucharist itself.   These Puritans focused their political activism in Parliament on eliminating corruption and privileges of the Royal Court and the nobility, including the bishops, whom they tended to call “certain popish persons.”  

When the Army raised by Parliament won the Civil War, the Puritan regime that came into power was narrow, fundamentalist, and harsh, somewhat like an English Taliban.  They banned Prayer Book worship and bishops, and set into Law a whole range of austere measures aimed at purifying the country.

One of these measures banned the celebration of Christmas.  Its very name—Christ’s Mass—was far too Roman for the Puritans’ tastes.  The fact that is was marked by twelve days of mid-winter partying, singing, drinking, and, for the more religious, Eucharists, were equally distasteful.  Special church services, mince pies, hanging holly, big parties were banned from 1644 to 1660.

Now in fairness to the Puritans, it must be said that they were rightly concerned at the excesses of some of the partying:  then, as now, serious public drunkenness and debauchery were among the abuses attendant to the celebration of the season by some. 

 Sir John Hutchinson

(I feel the need here to be fair to the Puritans.  One of my ancestors, Col. John Hutchinson of Nottingham Castle, was one of the “Parliament men” who signed the death warrant of King Charles I after Charles was tried and found guilty of war crimes and mass murder.  Col. Hutchinson, concerned with the excesses of the Court of Charles I, had initially supported the Roundhead Army in opposing the “King’s men” or Cavaliers.  But he was spared a traitor’s execution after the restoration of the monarchy because he equally opposed  the excesses of the Puritan regime headed by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell and had prevented retaliatory war atrocities being perpetrated on Cavalier prisoners of war.  The fact that his wife Lucy’s father was a royalist nobleman who helped in restoring the monarchy after the Commonwealth did not hurt either.  Despite the fact that the Puritans “won the war but lost the peace” only to have the monarchy restored, the whole affair changed the nature of the British crown, and prevented in England the kind of traumatic revolution that happened in France in 1789.   Many of the political ideas and slogans of the Roundhead puritans were taken up part and parcel by the American revolutionaries in 1776.)   

The Puritans, throwing away the baby Jesus with the bathwater of overdoing it in Christmas partying, banned the holiday outright.  “Christmas is a pagan celebration,” they said, “and must be done away with by true Christians.”

Note the theology at work here—it was exclusionary, not inclusive:  “true Christians” needed to show their “trueness” (and, in so doing, point out who were “false” Christians and pagans).  It shows a contempt for many of the simple pleasures shared by people regardless of their belief or tradition.   It gets the "first love, then know Jesus" process described in 1 John backward. 

 

At Midnight Mass last evening at the American Cathedral in Paris, I was moved very deeply when the choir sang John Rutter’s setting of a modern adaptation of a poem by Cavalier poet Robert Herrick written just after the monarchy and Christmas celebrations were restored.  Herrick, an Anglican priest who had lost his living during the Parliamentary interregnum, wrote the poem for a Christmas party of the newly-restored King.  In it he argues for the celebration of Christmas against the position taken by the Puritans, and he does so wholly on religious and theological grounds.  He uses good incarnational theology:  the sacredness of all of human life , love, and enjoyment in the wake of God becoming flesh.    I love the poem, and have sung it with other choirs over the years:

What Sweeter Music

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Awake the voice! Awake the string!

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honor to this day,
That sees December turned to May.

Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile, like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.

We see him come, and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who’s our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.

What sweeter music can we bring,
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?

--Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

May we all during this season sing, eat, drink, and love each other well.  Let us reconcile with each other and mend family and friend relationships that have gone bad.  Let us celebrate with our whole being, since in Christ our whole being is being made one with God.   Let’s not begrudge our neighbors who celebrate and love without recognizing the source of their joy and love, the source that our experience tells us is God made flesh in Jesus Christ.  Merry Christmas, one and all.

In the name of God,  Amen.  

Imagine (Advent 2A, 3A, 4A Isaiah passages)

The Jesee Tree

Imagine

--The Rev. Anthony A. Hutchinson, Ph.D.

5 December 2010 Advent 2A Isaiah 11:1-10 

12 December 2010 Advent 3A Isaiah 35:1-10

19 December 2010 Advent 4A  Isaiah 7:10-16

A Comment on Advent Isaiah Readings

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

There is a traditional West African story that in various forms has often been retold in literature and films.  A scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well. The frog then agrees.  But in mid-river, the scorpion stings him, dooming them both.  When asked why, the scorpion explains, "I'm a scorpion; it's my nature."  They both then drown.

Now if the moral you draw from this story is “watch out—people do not always base their actions on rationally considered self-interest,” good.  But if you draw the moral, “there is no hope for anyone ever changing for the good,” I think you have made a serious mistake. 

The call throughout the Hebrew scriptures is, “Turn back,  turn back, O Israel—Shuvu, shuvu, Yisrael.”  And though we may have lost our freedom—whether through some primordial missing of the mark in the origin of our race (“Original Sin”), or through bad actions of our own that have become habits, that in turn have become addiction of one sort or another—the gist of much of the Christian Testament is that for God, nothing is impossible.    That doesn’t mean necessarily that God will take us where we want to go, but that God will take us where God wants us to be, no matter how hard it may appear.  Our job is to try get out of the way, to try to attune ourselves in such a way that we are working with God and not against him.  

Isaiah the Prophet, in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling 

The Isaiah readings we often hear this time of year about “Immanuel,” and a shoot sprouting up from the stump of Jessee are both from the first part of the Book of Isaiah, and come from the lifetime of the prophet, living in the eighth century before the Common Era.  They address the question of whether what we see before our eyes at the present time is “all there is,” is “as good as it gets,” or is “as good as it can get.”   Their answer is an emphatic “No, there is much more and there will be much more.”

Isaiah lived in a world of great and horrifying change.  The first great two international Empires in world history—Assyria and Egypt—had arisen in the suite of turmoil caused by climate change that had disrupted the political arrangements of a thousand years.  Between the two lay the tiny kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the split remnants of the glory days of the early Hebrews, the united kingdom of Jesse’s son David and David’s son Solomon.  Most of the politics of both Israel, Judah, and their neighbor kingdom Aram, centered on the question of how to best survive with such threatening super states all around:  factions supported either allying with Egypt and standing up to the Assyrians or simply paying the exorbitant taxes the Assyrians demanded. 

Isaiah was called to be a prophet the year that king Uzziah died (Isa. 6:1).  This is significant because the short term of Uzziah’s successor was immediately followed by Ahaz, whom the Biblical authors considered to be one of the worst kings in the history of Judah.  Where Biblical authors say that Uzziah "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord" (2 Kings 15:3; 2 Chronicles 26:4-5), Ahaz was another thing altogether.   He was allured the various religious around him, cults that personified wealth, power, sexual pleasure, and fertility in the figures of such deities as Baal and Astarte his consort.  Ahaz even put their sculpted images and altars in the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem, probably arguing that Yahweh and Baal were different names for the same reality. Worst of all, when his international policies failed and he lost wars, he took this as evidence that he had done not enough to honor the gods of the “winners,” and thus revived the practice of human sacrifice, even sacrificing one of his own children. 

Isaiah saw all of this as an unmitigated disaster, one that basically had ended the line of Judah’s kings—going back to Jesse’s son David—and all that mattered in Judah’s national life. 

A new form of political leader had arisen in Assyria—Tiglath-Pileser III, who took power in a military coup and then proceeded to form the first Imperial Power in world history truly based on a centralized military and bureaucracy.  In 735 BCE, King Pekah of Israel (also called “Ephraim”) joined with Rezin, king of Aram with his capital at Damascus, in a tax revolt against Assyria.  The two threatened the king of Judah, Ahaz, to force him to join the revolt. 

In Isaiah 7, the prophet goes out to meet Ahaz as he is inspecting the city’s water works to insure he can withstand a siege from Aram and Israel.  He is contemplating throwing in his lot with the biggest “winner” of all, Assyria.   In a passage we often hear this time of year (Isa 7:1-17), he tells Ahaz,

Be careful, keep calm and don’t be afraid. Do not lose heart because of  . . . Aram and of [Israel], Yet this is what the Lord Yahweh says:
  ‘It will not take place,
   it will not happen, …
   Within sixty-five years
   [both countries will cease to exist]
If you do not stand firm in your faith,
   you will not stand at all. …’

Then Isaiah offers proof of the validity of his words by predicting that Ahaz will soon have a son, and that before that child old enough to know right and wrong (and reject Ahaz’s bad ways), the two nations that Ahaz is fearing will be destroyed and a great national disaster will make reduce the population to the degree that the boy will be raised eating the food of a changed economy:

… the Lord himself will give you^[ a sign: a young woman [that is what the Hebrew says, the Greek translation of it makes this sign all the more marvelous by suggesting, “a young woman who is as of now still a virgin”] will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him “God with us.” He will be eating curds and honey before he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right,  for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.  Yahweh will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah—he will bring the king of Assyria.

But Ahaz did not heed Isaiah’s call, and instead actually called upon Tiglath-Pileser (the Bible calls him “Pul” in 2 Kings 15:19) to come to his aid and put down the revolt.  This the Assyrian did with a vengeance.  By 732, the he had destroyed Damascus, installed an Assyrian governor, and made Aram a province of the Assyrian Empire.  By 722, Tiglath-Pileser’s successor had destroyed Israel as well.   He annexed all of Israel, killed its king, installed an Assyrian governor, and deported tens of thousands of the leading elites of the tiny rebellious state.  Israel, simply, had ceased to exist as a nation.  

 

Hezekiah's Water Tunnel

But the sign offered by Isaiah, the birth of a son to Ahaz, took place.  His name was Hezekiah, one of the kings of Judah most praised by the Biblical writers.   Hezekiah took the idols out of the Temple and reformed worship.  Much of the Bible’s treasure of Wisdom literature was written during Hezekiah’s reign, including Ecclessiastes, Proverbs, and the Song of Songs.  Hezekiah built the Broad Wall, which doubled the space protected from attack in the city, including for the first time the city’s western suburbs.  To keep the city supplied with water during an extended siege (a reasonable precaution, given the Assyrians’ methods) he had a 500 meter tunnel known as Hezekiah’s Tunnel (still there today) dug to bring in spring water underground.  

So Isaiah had some reason to hope against hope that finally things would be put to right.  He saw the death of Ahaz and Hezekiah’s accession to the throne as a break with the past, a new hope.    He described the line of the Davidic kings as a tree springing from David’s father Jesse.  As far as Isaiah was concerned, Ahaz had all but destroyed that tree.  It was now but the dead stump of a tree that had been cut down.  But the prospects for Hezekiah’s reign were good.  So he describes it as a sprout springing up from the dead stump: 

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.

This is a loaded image rich with Isaiah’s acerbic irony.  He calls the Davidic dynasty a dead stump.  It is cut down and useless, seemingly at an end.  But this bit of satire contains a hope rooted in Isaiah’s trust in God to be faithful to his promises.

  

Portrayal of good king Hezekiah in crown of Holy Roman Emperors

He makes Hezekiah a tender sprout or shoot coming up from the apparently dead stump.  He describes the qualities of an ideal ruler that he thinks will make such a revival possible: 

His delight shall be in awe before Yahweh.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide by what his ears hear;

but with justice he shall vindicate the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,

and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

Justice shall be the belt around his waist,

and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

But then in a leap of fantastic imagination, he says that this ideal king of the future will make all things right:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze,

their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.

No one will hurt or destroy

On all my holy mountain;

For the earth will be full of the knowledge of Yahweh

As the waters cover the sea.

On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Modern readers can look at this and think, “Clearly, Isaiah was getting carried away by his own enthusiasm for the new king.”  We do this because we have become somewhat jaded about what political leaders can do.  We all remember what high expectations everyone had (sympathetically or otherwise) when Barrack Obama became President of the U.S.  Many at the time said that there was no way that this man who was elected on a platform of hope for change could reasonably fulfill his supporters expectations.   They did so based on prior experience with new Presidents:  the job is just too hard and complicated for anyone to do it perfectly.  The Onion satirically headlined at the time. “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

Hezekiah did turn things around in many ways for Judah, but did not end up being the ideal king of the future in Isaiah’s rich poetry.   He faced the same international relations problems as Ahaz, and eventually revolted against Assyria too, unsuccessfully trying to get Egypt to come to his aid.  Archaeology suggests that his reforms in putting down irregular worship domestically were not as thorough as the Biblical authors describe.  At one point later in his life, Isaiah even had to chastise Hezekiah for getting too cozy with another Assyrian rival, Babylon (2 Kings 20:12-19). 

But there is something larger at work here than simple naïve enthusiasm for a new king.  The transcendent hope expressed in the image of transformed nature is found elsewhere in the first part of Isaiah in passages not directly addressing the ideal future king, but rather addressing in general Yahweh’s goodness and ultimate triumph over what is wrong in the world. In Isaiah 35 (perhaps written after Hezekiah had turned out not to be the true ideal king of the future), we read:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,

the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

…

They shall see the glory of the LORD,

the majesty of our God.

…

Here is your God.

He will come with vengeance,

with terrible recompense.

He will come and save you."

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,

and the thirsty ground springs of water.

Such hope and poetic power ensured that the words of Isaiah would live, and his imaginative portrayal of an ideal future king who would set all things right lived on with them.  When the early Gospel writers were trying to find the words to describe Jesus, they turned to Isaiah’s ideal future king regularly.    “Son of David,” “Prince of Peace,” “Immanuel,” “son of a virgin”—all of these images and more come from Isaiah or Greek versions of Isaiah.But are the Gospel writers’ use of Isaiah in this way just a case of a tall tale growing in the retelling?   I think that Christian faith requires us to say “No.”

Note that Isaiah’s image of the ideal king of the future contains elements that are patently self-contradictory and impossible from a literal reading:  he says that as a result of the future king’s rule, carnivores and herbivores will all eat grass, and no natural predation will occur.    Isaiah was not an ignorant man.  He knew very well that cows and sheep had different digestive systems from lions and panthers, and that predation was in the very nature of some animals.  Yet he says that in the ideal future reign, all animals would live without the battle of “nature red in tooth and claw.”   

He is basically saying that as the result of the future ideal king, even nature itself will be transcended, and the seeming impossible will be made possible.  I doubt that he meant such words literally applying to Hezekiah.  He intended them metaphorically.  He was imagining a world where predation ceased, whether it was Assyrians on petty states, the rich on the poor, or lions and bears on sheep and cows. 

And here we come to the central point I want to take from these passages today—imagination.  In a world that is perhaps too concerned about the literal meaning of things, about the practical, and about the realistically feasible or likely, our imagination is a great gift. 

“He’s imagining things.”  “Isaiah has let his imagination get the better of him.”  “The Gospel writers simply imagined that Isaiah foretold the birth of Jesus.”  All of these phrases betray a contempt, or at least a healthy suspicion, of the human imagination. 

We tend to see the imagination as a creative activity of the mind.  But the great Church fathers, most specifically St. Thomas Aquinas, saw the imagination as an instrument of perception, as a way of seeing things that were not otherwise readily apparent to the senses.  The basis of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises is trained use of the imagination in reflection on scriptural passages.

The metaphorical use of the “heart” (“of one heart and mind” “follow your heart”) has suffered a similar fate in the West as the idea of the imagination.  We tend to think the heart is merely the center of emotion or feeling, and as a result it is sometimes seen as a mere epiphenomenon.   But, as Cynthia Bourgeault points out, traditionally in Western and Eastern spiritualities, the heart too is an organ of perception, something with which we see that which is not otherwise readily apparent.   Paying attention to how we emotionally react to things can tell us many things about ourselves, and with this, about our world. 

Isaiah here is imagining what he certainly knew was impossible under normal circumstances.  He imagines the transformation of nature itself—not only of lions, bears, panthers, asps, and vipers, but of human beings and their rulers.  His imagination is based on trust in God’s promise, and on God’s goodness and justice. 

When we Christians apply these prophecies about the ideal future Davidic king, this anointed one (or “Messiah”) , to Jesus of Nazareth, it is based on our experience of the Risen One’s power to transform us and those around us.  It is an act of imagination, to be sure, but one that we believe  describes the underlying realities of the world around us.  

We all need hope desperately.  This is a world that is lost if it does not have hope.  Without hope, we are likely to think that change is impossible, that how things are now are as good as it possibly can get, and that isn’t too good.  Without hope, without our imaginations seeing the ground for hope beyond the current crisis or horror, we are likely to see the world wholly as described in the story of the scorpion and the frog.

In our prayers during the rest of Advent, let us use our hearts to perceive, let us use our imaginations to see.  Let us be taken up into these stories.  As we near Christmas, let us, in the words of the Nine Lessons and Carols Service, ourselves go with the shepherds and see this babe lying in a manger.   May we see the vision of a transformed world that Isaiah saw, and see it in the person of Christ.

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Let us pray.

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Night is Almost Over (Advent 1A)

Night is Almost Over

28 November 2010

Advent 1 A

Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44; Psalm 122

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

           

Romans 13:8-14

⁸Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for those who love others have fulfilled the law. ⁹The commandments, "Do not commit adultery," "Do not murder," "Do not steal," "Do not covet," and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: "Love your neighbor as yourself." ¹⁰Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. ¹¹And do this, because you recognize what time it is: The hour has come for you to wake up from your sleep, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first came to faith. ¹²The night is nearly over; day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. ¹³Let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy.¹⁴Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and stop worrying about how to gratify the raging desires of the you that resists God.  (trans. –AAH)

There are different ways of waking up.  There are bad ways of waking up and good ways.  When I am jolted from a comfortable and overly long dream by the sounding of the alarm clock and jump out of bed, it takes me an hour or more, and several cups of coffee to shake off the last remnants of the stupidity of sleep.  When I feel my wife lean over and kiss the back of my neck, and then we gently cuddle for a while before we start to say prayers of discuss plans for the day, I ease into the day more easily.  When I wake up without any external stimuli except perhaps the first rays of the new day peeking into the room or maybe the rich smell of coffee coming from the kitchen, and lie still, then maybe gently stretch like a cat, I gradually get out of bed and happily begin the day.  

Today’s epistle reading, all about waking up, comes from the closing section of Paul’s letter to the Christians living in Rome.  He is counseling them to be good, to amend their lives.  Importantly he says that they do not need to worry about rules or points of purity in and of themselves.  Rather, he says, they need to show love to each other.  He says that love in fact is the source of all truly good action.  If you truly love God and neighbor, everything else will take care of itself and there is no worry about the specifics of rules.  He then uses the graphic image of waking up in the morning and putting on clothes for the new day to describe why showing love and acting in love it is so important: “The hour has come for you to wake up from your sleep, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first came to faith. ¹²The night is nearly over; day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. … clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and stop worrying about how to gratify the raging desires of the flesh.”

“Salvation is nearer now than when we first came to the faith.”  Paul is talking about the end time, the day when God will act to save his people, the day when all wrong will be put to right and all accounts settled.  He places this in the future, and given the passage of time, he notes that whenever this Great Day of Salvation happens, it is always closer and closer to us.  Following Jesus’ teaching, he believes that in some ways the Great Day has already started, but is not here in fullness quite yet.  We are living in the “between time,” the twilight between night’s darkness and day’s brightness.”  

“Night is nearly over.”  Twilight is a curious state—part day, part night.  It can signal the onset of night, or precede the breaking of day.   Paul wants us to be sure that we look at the mixed signals around us and realize that God is at work and things are going to get better, not worse.  It is going to get lighter, not darker.  The between time we live in once we have come to faith is the twilight leading to day, not to night. 

In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet at daybreak gently argue whether they have heard the nightingale or the lark, because they want the night to be longer and do not want the day that will separate them to come.  But Paul wants the night to end and the day to come.  Night here is this messed-up world, the age in which we live, characterized by abuse of the good creation God has given us, of abuse of ourselves and fellow creatures.  Day here is the coming of God’s reign, the age to come, when all will be set to right.   

When I was young, I sometimes heard in Church sermons of what they called the “signs of the times,” or the signs of the end.  Most of these were disastrous indications of the world going to hell and destruction.   I only later learned that this was a gross misunderstanding of the New Testament idea of  “signs of the times.”  In Matthew 16:1-3, the Pharisees and Sadducees come to Jesus and ask him to show them a sign from heaven.   They have heard of his marvelous healings and acts, which he says is a sign that the reign of God has come near.  They want a proof before they’ll believe his claims.   He replies, “You know how to read the weather, but not read the signs of the times.^”  For Jesus, his marvelous acts that showed God’s grace and love and healing were the true signs of what time we live in.  

Paul agrees—this twilight is leading to light, not darkness.  He wants the night—with its “works of darkness”—to end. 

He uses the image of all night chaotic and promiscuous partying that will surely be cause for regret and headaches the next morning to describe such “works of darkness,” that is, the actions that are symptomatic of this messed up and unjust word.  He also adds jealousies and strife as other examples of the behavior in this age that will not be present in the age to come. “Because the day is coming,” he says, “stop this bad behavior right now.” 

 “Wake up,” he says, “and put away this age’s abuse of yourselves and of others, its injustice, its selfishness, its absorption in self, and put on new clothes for the new day.”  He calls them “armor of light” as if to say that the clothes we put on for the new day serve as a hedge or protection against the darkness of the current age.  “Actually,” he says, “put on as your new clothes Jesus Christ himself.”  In so doing we will stop “making provisions for the desires of the flesh,” a phrase that for him simply means “stop planning and doing all we can to satisfy the raging urges of the you that resists God.” 

Because he uses the image of flesh here, and describes the works of darkness as “orgies, drunkenness, licentiousness, promiscuity, anger, and rage,” we tend to think that Paul is calling us to wake up from our debaucheries and try to whip ourselves into submission to God’s commandments and rules.  But this misses Paul’s point.  Again, for him, all such rules are summed up in the commandments to love God and love one’s neighbor.  He is not asking us to resist and beat down our natural urges, forsake all pleasures and have contempt for our bodies.  He is simply asking us to stop worrying so much satisfying those raging urges that take us away from the love of God and of others.    By putting on Christ as clothing, he says, we take the step necessary to make all this take care of itself.   Like an armor that keeps us in the daylight and turns aside the remaining darkness of night, being clothed in Christ ensures that we stay awake, and remain surely in the coming day.   

It’s the difference between “good” waking up and “bad” waking up.  

Beating ourselves into submission and forcing ourselves to follow rules against “works of darkness” is a recipe for unhappiness and tension—the very kind of tension that leads us to feel compelled to engage in works of darkness.  “Clothing ourselves in Christ” will bring us to the light more and more, and actually empower us to show love, and the bad behaviors will of themselves drop off and cease. 

Paul is talking about putting the example of Christ before our eyes, putting gratitude for what he has done for us in our hearts.  A heart full of gratitude has little room for the selfishness that generates unjust, hurtful, abusive, and wanton acts. 

This is the first Sunday of Advent.  This is a penitential season.  I pray that sometime before the Christmas Feast begins in four weeks, we all may look into our own hearts, and try to see the darkness that remains there.  Let’s try to be honest.   What makes us uncomfortable, ashamed, angry, or annoyed are good indicators of possible problems.   And then turn them over to God.  If you think it might help, seek a wise and a discreet priest or counselor to talk things through.  And then rather than worrying about the problems that are you, reflect on Jesus.  Think on his life.  Read the Gospels.  And pray to him and through him.   Don’t try to take charge.  Let him take charge. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Let us pray.

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

 

Invocation for Beijing Marine Corps Ball 2010

Invocation Offered at the Beijing China Marine Corps Ball

on the Occasion of the 235th Anniversary of the Corps

China World Hotel, Beijing, November 20, 2010

Almighty God, you have given us our good country, the United States of America, for our heritage: We humbly pray you that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of your favor and glad to do your will. Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought together there out of many kindreds and tongues.

Judge of the nations, endow with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in your Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and we may continue to be a sign of hope for all the nations of the earth. We pray that you sustain and support especially Barack, our President, and Jon, his representative here in China.  At this time of continuing economic woes, bless the leaders of all peoples to discern how best to restore and create effective means of providing for the needs to the world’s people. In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, do not let our trust in you fail.

Lord of hosts, we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad. Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be. As we prepare to celebrate the traditions and fellowship of the United States Marine Corps this evening, we pray especially for each Marine here present and throughout the world.

Give us grateful hearts, our Father, for all your gifts, and make us mindful of the needs of others. All this we ask for your tender mercy’s sake. Amen.

Jesus' Focus on Family (Proper 27C)

Jesus’ Focus on the Family

Homily Delivered at Spoken Eucharists 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.

Morrison Chapel Macau

7 November 2010

Proper 27C

Job 19:23-27a; 2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5; Luke 20:27(28-33)34-38; Psalm 17

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

In the main hallway of our home there’s a gallery of family photographs:  my wife and me and our four children in group poses over the years,  our parents and brothers and sisters and their families, two marriages of children,  cousins,  grandchildren.    Often guests comment on what a lovely family we have, picture perfect.  My wife and I smile politely in return, and say little.  For thankful as we are for our family and for each other, and for all the happy memories these photographs summarize, we realize the pictures capture only single moments and single threads of complicated stories.  

Our guests don’t realize that there are pictures not shown because they are just too painful.  Some risk  setting off a scene were they to be seen by some visiting family members.  Those not shown include ones taken close to deaths in the family, during episodes of mental illness of some family members, at funerals, or after the suicides of cousins and nephews, divorces, tragic accidents and illnesses.  

I understand about idealizing the family.  I was raised in a religious tradition that celebrated an idealized, romanticized family, patriarchal and conservative.   As in our hallway, often the ideal image was but a sanitized caricature of real families.  When women wanted equal say, or to have their own careers, the idealized family served as a club with which patriarchs and church leaders could beat them down.  The brutality of this was disguised by gentle, earnest “priesthood voices,” and the gentle playing of hymns extolling family love in the background.

Idealizing the family is big business.   Witness over the years the success of American television programs “Little House on the Prairies,” “the Waltons,” and “Leave it to Beaver.”   The Rev. James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” Ministry attracts every week millions of people struggling for happier, better lives and seeking direction on what it says is the Bible’s teaching’s on the family. 

Unfortunately, the Bible is not a particularly good place to find idealized families.  You just have to read it to realize how messy and twisted human families can be, and have always been.   If you think a patriarchal family is an ideal, just look at the horror stories told in Genesis about the families of the patriarchs themselves.  Hatred, deceit, disloyalty, rape, and murder all appear in those hallowed chapters. 

Rarely do people who claim to promote the “Biblical teaching on the family” refer to today’s Gospel reading, though it is a key text in trying to see what Jesus’ actual view of the matter was. 

Theological opponents of Jesus approach and ask him a question.  They are Sadducees, members of the priestly class known for their strict constructionist reading of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and their unwillingness to accept other books as scripture or entertain theological ideas not explicitly expressed there.  As a result, they do not believe in any life after death, since this idea is explicitly found only in later prophetic and wisdom writings. 

Their question has seven brothers dying in sequence, each marrying the first’s wife in accordance with an obscure provision in the Torah.  “If there is such a thing as a resurrection from the dead,” they ask Jesus, “to whom does the woman belong when they all come forth in this resurrection?”   For them marriage is a bond relationship, where wives and children have the status of property.  In their patriarchal society, a woman can ‘belong’ to only one man at a time, though men can ‘own’ several wives.  Thus she clearly can’t belong to all seven.  The resurrection is therefore an impossibility, and something akin to a dirty joke. 

Jesus replies by simply denying the underlying premise of the question:  “She belongs to none of them, for in the resurrection no one owns anyone else. They all belong to God.” 

The three great branches of Judaism in Palestine at this time had three completely different takes on the question of the messiness of life, the prospects for a future life after death, and the relationship between these. 

The Essenes or the Dead Sea Scrolls community hated the messiness of life and saw it as something to be defeated.  They believed in a form of the immortality of the soul and thought that those purified through strict obedience to the Torah, the Community Rule, and its ascetic practices (including celibacy),  would after death continue to live apart from their bodies and join with the purified living in the great army of the Sons of Light that would defeat the evil world and its Sons of Darkness.  They were this-life denying but future-life affirming. 

The Saduccees, the ones in today’s reading, believed that the Law controlled the messiness associated with life.  But they rejected both immortality of the soul and a resurrection of the body.   Thoreau, when asked about the afterlife, famously said, “Please, one life at a time!”   The Sadducees would have agreed.  They were this-life affirming but future-life denying.  Believing as they did that life’s messiness was incompatible with an ideal perfect future life, they denied the existence of any such ideal. 

The Pharisees also believed that the Law brought order to the messiness of life, but were generally more optimistic about life in general and rejected the asceticism of the Essenes.  They accepted both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body.  They were this-life affirming and future-life affirming. 

Jesus is closer to the Pharisees than to the Essenes and the Sadducees:  he affirms this world as well as the world to come.  You might think his language about “being as the angels in heaven, neither marrying or being given in marriage” is some kind of Essene contempt for the body and marriage per se.  But this is a misunderstanding.  

Remember that in John 2, Jesus shows up at the wedding at Cana and plays his appropriate role as a wedding guest, even to the point of helping all his fellow guests enjoy the party by miraculously creating copious amounts of wine from water.    In the words of the Prayer Book, he thus “adorned this manner of life,” marriage.   He also showed he was no alcohol-eschewing ascetic.   He loves this world, this life, particularly the bits that give us joy, including love, marriage, family, work, and simple pleasures like wine and food. 

His response to the Sadducees here stems from a key element of how Jesus saw the world, one where he differed from the Pharisees on a crucial point: how to distinguish between the good and the bad that is mixed together in this life, and what in this life would remain in the life to come and what would be burned away in the great Day of the Lord. 

Jesus refused to use the distinction between clean and unclean, or between conventional and abnormal, as the dividing line.  Rather, he used almost exclusively how we treat one another, the distinction between just and unjust, between acting fairly and unfairly. “First seek God’s reign and the justice it requires, and everything else will take care of itself” he says in one place (Matt 6:33).  “Unless your justice exceeds that of the Pharisees and the scribes, you are not fit for God’s reign” he says in another (Matt 5:20). 

His opponents criticized his noticeable laxity in respecting differences in the Torah between clean and unclean.  His desire to help those most in need of his message led to accusations that he spent all his time in unclean settings, with prostitutes, drunks, and tax collectors (disloyal traitors working for foreign invaders). 

Within this larger context of affirmation of this life, liberalism on matters of ritual purity, and strong criticism of social injustice, we see the logic behind his answer to the Sadducees’ question on the resurrection. 

The Sadducees assume that marriage and family are key constituents of what it means to be human and alive and that marriage as they knew it was the only kind of marriage there can ever be.  They see that the religious framework of marriage—the Leviticus clause about marrying your dead brother’s childless widow—as unchanging.  So marriage’s messiness, religion’s messiness, indeed life’s messiness is for them  incompatible with any perfect realm.  That is a major reason behind their denial of the resurrection of the body and immortality of the soul. 

But Jesus corrects the error head-on.  Where the messiness and contingency of life in this world make it hard for the Sadducees to imagine any of it lasting beyond death, Jesus focuses on the differences between this life and life in the age to come.  This age is messed up, but the age to come is ordered in accordance with the creator’s will.  This age is riddled with injustice and wrong; the age to come has justice flowing like a river.   

In specific reply to their question on marriage, he says that in this age we make exploitative contracts and establish unfair relationships of subordination.  Men take wives as chattel (that’s what the word “marry” means in this context) and women are taken as chattel (“are given in marriage”).  But in the age to come, in the resurrection, there will be a radical equality.  There will be no exploitative contracts or relationships.  Only one subordination will exist, the one that binds each person to God: “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.” 

“In the resurrection all will have God as father,” he says, and this implies that in the resurrection, unjust parent-child relationships will cease along with unjust marriage.   Elsewhere,  Jesus says, “call no one your father on earth since you have one father, your one in heaven” (Matt 23:9).  Contrary to later radical Protestant readings, this is not a prohibition about calling a priest “father.”  It is about real life fathers.   Jesus is saying even families aren’t absolute, even fathers are in some ways defective when contrasted with the True Father. 

Jesus acted this out as well.  In Mark 3 we read a story about Jesus’ family trying to get Jesus to come home and start acting like a normal, obedient son after he began his public ministry.  They think he has gone insane by abandoning his family. In reply, Jesus publicly breaks with his family and says “Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother.”

For Jesus, what separates this world from the way it is supposed to be is injustice and alienation from God and each other.  The true pattern, sometimes imperfectly but joyously reflected here, lies in the Age to Come.  We should not mistake the distortions, the twisting, the messiness of that pattern we see in this life for the true pattern.  We should not, like the Sadducees, deny that a true pattern exists.  

C.S. Lewis makes a great point about the contrast between “the real thing” and poor substitutes:  if the only thing we know is a poor substitute, or a distorted shadow, when we actually run into the real thing we may think it strange, and perhaps mark it as the poor substitute.  He tells a story from his youth—stealing cigarettes from his father’s stash.  Occasionally when the cigarettes were so few that even one might be missed, he dipped into his father’s plentiful cigar stash, which he kept only for honored guests.  He says that he and a friend thought “poor us, today we’ll have to put up with cigars when we might have had cigarettes!”   

In saying “call no one father,” Jesus suggests that earthly fathers—no matter how good, how loving, and how wise—are poor substitutes for our Father in Heaven.  In contrasting chattel marriage here and its absence in the resurrection, he is suggesting that our earthly families—no matter who good and sweet—are dim reflections of the true human relationships God created us for, and has in store for us.   Even our gender is perhaps a dim, distorted echo of the brilliantly sharp distinctions of personality of those who enjoy the beatific vision of God. 

Thus, Jesus here does not teach that the resurrection is celibate, or that people there are neutered.  He does not say that human relationships are excluded from the next life.  His point is not that human relationships are all bad, something to be gotten rid of.  His point is that all of life that we know will be changed for the better as God’s kingdom comes, when His will is done on earth as in heaven.   Life will then match what it was created for, and not be mixed with the painful distortions we see here. 

His point is that the most important relationship is the one we have with God.  If that is right, all the other ones will take care of themselves.  If it is wrong, the other relationships are doomed.

Jesus in this story says clearly that exploitation, injustice, and unfairness are totally excluded from the age to come.   This means that we must reexamine our assumptions about society, including marriage and family.  In opening our hearts to God, in emptying ourselves to God’s fullness, we need God to lead us to more just relationships.   Jesus here is not saying that the world is wholly evil and corrupt, and that marriage, and love, and families are mere passing ills, destined to be jettisoned along with our evil bodies as we leave in death this world of sin.  He is saying that in this world, all things are admixtures of good and ill, and if they are to endure in the age to come, must be transformed, starting now.

Jesus affirms both this life and the life to come because he believes that life—this messy, boisterous, and glorious life—is redeemable and transformable. This is part and parcel of his faith in a God who acts to save his creatures.  And it’s not just his teaching  It is what his life, death, and resurrection are about. 

So what part of family life and relationships will endure?  I personally think that hope for such on our part is demanded by Jesus’ affirmation of this life.   But I also think we will be very, very surprised by what God actually has in store for us.  Whatever it is exactly, we can be sure it will make our sweetest joys here pale by comparison. 

The fact is, there is no family that is “normal,” no family that is ideal, just as there is no such thing as a perfect human being, or a “saint” who has no failings or disabilities.  Last Monday was All Saints’ Day, the day where we celebrate the link between us and the society of the age to come, the community shared between the faithful living and the faithful dead, the communion of saints.  A saint is not a person without failings and disappointments.  A saint is a person burdened with such disabilities who nevertheless in faith and hope perseveres despite them. 

This week in our prayers, I hope that we can all reflect in silence about eternity and the life to come, about the true image of humanity and human relations yet to be revealed.  May this image be a balm to the images of the sick humanity we see in the mirror and lock away in unseen photo albums.  I pray that the hope generated by such a vision enlivens our faith, makes us strive harder for justice now in how we treat others, especially those most dear to us, and keeps our eyes fixed on the real family that Jesus invites us to focus on.   

In the name of Christ, Amen.  

 

Morrison Chapel, Macau