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