White Gifts, Epiphany Door Blessings (Midweek Message)

Fr. Tony's Midweek Message 

White Gifts, Epiphany Door Blessing

The Feast of the Epiphany on January 6 (next Tuesday) commemorates the manifestation of Christ to the world. The word Epiphany comes from the Greek word for manifestation or to show forth.  Epiphany falls on the twelfth day of Christmas and thus ends Christmastide.  It begins a period before Lent where the Church focuses on who Jesus really is.  The theme of the readings and hymns in church start with light and then focus on the wondrous deeds of Jesus in his ministry.

The January 6^th celebration commemorates the arrival of the Magi told in Matthew 2:  strange Persian religious figures follow a star to find the baby Jesus and come to pay him homage and to bring him gifts.    This coming Sunday, January 4, we will be celebrating at Trinity the Second Sunday of Christmas, with the Gospel story of the 12 year-old boy Jesus in the Temple.  This is because we are going to be having a special Epiphany Service on Tuesday January 6 at 6 p.m. that uses the Magi reading. 

Though January 4 will not be a Three Kings Sunday this year, we will still be honoring some of the Epiphany traditions that day:  the children will move the Magi figures to the crèche, we will offer our “White Gifts” after the homily.  This will be the culmination of our holiday gift giving, gifts for the needy in the community wrapped in white to establish anonymity and as a symbol of the light that Epiphany celebrates.  We will also bless chalk for the annual Epiphany door blessing in our homes. 

For centuries, Western Christians (those stemming from the Latin-speaking Church) have had a special tradition of celebrating the end of the Christmas season and praying for blessings in the New Year.  It is a practice of simple January 6 door decoration.   Since the Middle Ages, some Christians have marked the doors to their homes with the year, the letters C, M and B, and four crosses.  They generally mark these in chalk above the main entrance to their homes.  This year’s marking is this:  20+C+M+B+15

The letters C, M, and B stand for the names ascribed to the wise men in medieval poetry (Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar).  They also stand for the Latin phrase of blessing:  Christus mansionem benedicat, translated as “May Christ bless this house.”

If you would like to bless your home for the New Year and mark it with chalk on January 6, please take some of the blessed chalk with you at the end of Mass on Sunday, and use the following words as you write the blessing on the space above one of your house’s doors:

“Lord Jesus, around two thousand (20) and fifteen years (15) ago, by the light of a great star you showed the way for the three Wise Men,
(C) Caspar,
(M) Melchior,
(B) and Balthasar to find you as a newborn baby.  Christ (++) fill our home with Your light, and bless us (++), and remain with us throughout this New Year.  You are the Son of God made flesh, and showed yourself to the whole world.  Help us now to show forth Your light to all through our acts of love incarnate.  Amen.”

–Fr. Tony+

Incarnate (Christmas 1 B TEC)

 

Incarnate
John 1:1-18
Homily delivered First Sunday of Christmas (Year B RCL TEC)
28th December 2014: 8:00am Said and 10:00am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Readings: (Isa 61:10-62:3; Ps 147, Gal 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18)

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Last year, we read the story that begins, “During the reign of Caesar Augustus, a decree went out that all the world should be taxed.”  Deacon Meredith told me that at this point, her granddaughter Lucy poked her brother Kekoa in the ribs with her elbow and said with glee, “I know this story, it’s a good one!”

Today’s Gospel is a different story about Jesus’ birth, and it too is “a good one.”  But it takes a very different approach than Luke or Matthew.  Rather than tell a story of Jesus’ earthly origins, John tells us of something quite a bit deeper and much, much more hidden. 

 The hymn to Jesus Christ as the Logos, the eternal word of God, in John chapter 1 begins: “In the beginning was the word.”

This translation misses the richness of the Greek en arche en ho logos. Another way of translating might be, “At the start, at the root of all, the logos existed.”

The Greek word logos is where we get out word logo, our word logic, and our words analogue and dialogue. It means much more than just “word.”   Its basic meaning is whatever it is that makes or conveys meaning or sense, whether in our minds or on our lips Something is logical, or has logos, because it coheres and is patterned.  Geo-logy is the patterns we see in the physical world, Gaia.  Theology is a patterned and coherent way of talking about God, Theos.   Logos is a deep pattern, a coherence, that lies behind and beneath disparate and apparently random facts. 

Thus, a good way to translate the first verse is, “At the root of all things, there existed Meaning.”

Episcopal priest Jim Stamper gives us the following paraphrase of John 1:1-18, pointing to the meaning that John’s Gospel gives such words as “word,” “light,” and “darkness”: 

Initially there was a pattern for everything.
The pattern was God’s; God was the pattern.
The pattern was always God.
Everything came from that pattern.
There isn't anything else.
The pattern is both the source of life and the meaning of life.
It is a way of being alive in opposition to death, and death cannot overcome it.

God sent a man named John to tell people about the possibilities of this way of being alive in opposition to death so everybody would trust the source of life. John wasn't the source of life; he taught how to recognize the pattern.

The true pattern, the source and meaning of everybody's life, was coming to people.

To some people, however, life, and what life is all about, is unrecognizable. Some who could be expected to see the possibilities of this way of being alive select death instead. Others embrace life. They trust what life offers.

Life offers something more intense than the strongest family ties:  obtaining a new parent, God, the source, the meaning of life itself.

The initial pattern for everything that is, became a human being and lived among us.

We experienced how awesome [he] is: as awesome as a newborn baby is to its [dear father], the gift of life and all its possibilities.

The hymn says that the Word/Meaning/Pattern of God took on flesh. The choice of the word “flesh” is deliberate. In Semitic culture, basar “flesh” was the physical, earthy part of a person that you could see, touch, and smell. It was a key part of you, and not wholly separable from your mind or spirit. The symbol for a man to be part of God’s covenant with Abraham was that he be circumcised in his flesh. For Greeks, sarx “flesh” was the changeable, impermanent part of a human being. For some Greek philosophers, it was the part that resisted reason and had a mind of its own, the part that I think we would identify by talking about addictive, obsessive, or compulsive behaviors. It was in this sense that Saint Paul had occasionally used the word—sarx for him sometimes is shorthand for that part of a human being that resists God’s intentions for us.

When the prologue of John says the logos became sarx, it means that Reason, Pattern, Meaning itself, took on all it means to be a human being: all the limitations, all the doubts and fears, and the ignorances, all the handicaps.

The hymn adds “he dwelt among us.” The word used for “dwelt” is eskenasen: he “pitched his tent” among us. The image is of a temporary habitation, like the Tent of the Meeting or the Tabernacle of the ancient Israelites, where God Himself was made manifest to Moses.

The hymn adds, “and we saw his glory, as of a father’s only Son, full of Grace and Truth.”

Grace—one directional love, without condition, of its nature giving.  True—genuineness, authenticity, transparency.   It is here that the conflict between divine and human, the perfect and imperfect, the boundless and the bounded is resolved: Grace and Truth. For despite all our limitations, we human beings can on occasion transcend ourselves and open ourselves to Grace and Truth. On even fewer occasions, we can even become the channels or instruments by which Grace and Truth can be given to others.

“We saw the glory of God made flesh, we saw the beauty of the pattern behind the worlds placed within this apparently meaningless world—and we recognized that glory as Grace and Truth.”

It is in Jesus’ gracious love and authenticity that the Gospel of John says we can recognize the pattern of the universe, see Jesus is the Logos from all eternity.   But he adds-- Jesus is monogenes—one-of-a-kind. We on occasion can transcend ourselves. Despite all the limitations his humanity imposed, Jesus is Transcendence Itself.

The hymn to the Logos ends by saying, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”

The Ultimate Meaning of the universe found a place in human flesh, in the person of this helpless baby, who was only beginning to enjoy the good things life offers. But he was also just beginning to suffer everything that life can throw at any of us. Despite it all, he remained ever steadfast.

This only Son of God offers us Grace and Truth.  He gives us the chance to be adopted as Children of God.  Joy, joy, and thankfulness on our part. 

As helpless, pathetic fellow human beings, let us accept what he offers, and in Love offer the same Grace and Truth to those around us.

In the name of God, Amen.

Grace Appearing (Christmas Day II)

Grace Appearing
Isaiah 62:6-12 ; Titus 3:4-7 ; Luke 2:(1-7)8-20 ; Psalm 97

Christmas Day (II)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
24th December 2014: 6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Sung Eucharist

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Our lives are messy.  We have marriages and family relationships that require a lot of work, and that sometimes break up.    We have noble ideals, goals, and values, but find it hard to live them.  Sometimes they conflict with each other.

We tell stories to each other, especially to our children, to try to make sense and bring order to our lives.    The good are rewarded; the wicked, punished.  Courage and honor and love triumph and we live happily ever after.  At least that’s how the story runs. 

Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment tells us that fairy tales are ways of processing the messiness of life.  That is why they are so popular, so lasting, and so troubling.

Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, featured by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year, to be released tomorrow in film version by Disney Studios, plumbs Bettelheim’s themes.   Happily ever after?  No.  Act II tells the more complex tale.  What we thought were triumph and resolution only entail newer, and deeper woes.  In the end, it is all about telling the story, sharing our hope, and our fear.  “Careful the things you say, Children will listen.  Careful the things you do, Children will see.  And learn.”

We try to teach our children and grandchildren to have faith and hope.  We try to have faith and hope ourselves.  But life really is gritty.  Life is complicated. 

We tell each other it will be OK.  We continue in all seriousness to tell little ones this time of year about a jolly old elf who knows who’s naughty or nice, and gives us, if not our heart’s desire, a commercial simulacrum of this.   And we wonder when they lose faith in the deeper stories. “Careful the things you say, the things you do.  Children will listen and see.”    

Messiness!  Not just fairy tales try to manage it.  Political ideologies give us an action plan.  But we find that if we are honest, political programs and utopian schemes can bring the bitterest disappointments of all.  I have a dear friend who is a long-time member of the Chinese Communist Party.  I remember well the night she told me, with tears in her eyes, her loss of faith in Chairman Mao, in the Party, and all its “clever management of the truth.”  Her pain was acute because she still yearned for in her heart of hearts the values of equality, fairness, and truthfulness that are at the basis of the Marxian enterprise.   I see the same jaded pain in Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. when their political programs falter, and once hopeful leaders fail and disappoint. 

There are different ways of handling life’s messiness.   One is simply to try to control, contain, and make it right through force of will.  Not a good recipe, given that we ourselves are messes.  Another is to “man up” and just accept the messiness, pretend it’s OK.  Whether as a simple “suck it up,” or a more philosophical Buddhist rejection of desire and attachment that causes our pain in the world, the basic tack is the same.  “Give up on desiring anything better.  This is as good as it gets.”  Peace of heart lies in acceptance, sometimes of the unacceptable.   Attachment is the problem, so detach.   But detachment not only relieves us of pain, but also robs us of engagement and relationship, of hope for something better.

Another way is simply pretend that the world isn’t messy, and that it makes perfect sense.   Denial.   This is like an eight year old who plugs his ears and sings “Na-na-na-na-na-NA I can’t hear you!” Look at religious fundamentalism’s denial of facts, whether experiential or scientific.  Look at its foolish Gospel of Wealth, its claim that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked, despite plenty of evidence that in this life the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer: denial, pure and simple.

 

Christmas is hard on us, I think, because it rubs our noses in the difference between the ideal of how things ought to be and the reality of how things are.  We regret failings in relationships all the more; we yearn for those we love but who have died.   

Christmas stories affect us so much because they touch us deep, in places we don’t like to think about.  As Longfellow wrote during the Civil War, “I heard the bells on Christmas Day, their old familiar carols play. … But hate is strong, and mocks the song of Peace on Earth, goodwill to Man…” 

Unfortunately, we take these great stories about Jesus sometimes as if they were fairy stories.  We use them in our denial.  We try to make them all very nice and neat: prophecies and fulfillment, evidence of order, and the love and power of God. 

But the fact is: these scriptures themselves are very messy!  What we later see as prophecies of Jesus’ birth started out as religious political propaganda for a failed Davidic royal line. “A virgin shall conceive” originally was “a young woman shall bear a royal child, Hezekiah, who will restore good times and right religion to Ahab’s corrupt nation.  Even the stories Luke and Matthew tell of Jesus’ birth are so at odds with each other in their details, the best we can say is that they each express faith in Christ, rather than biographic details.

Despite this, some Christians simply can’t give up on these stories as a cure of messiness.   They plug their ears, sing “I can’t hear you!” when the messiness is pointed out. Jewish friend tell us, “Isaiah says young woman, not virgin.”  They say, “but Isaiah had to have said ‘a virgin shall conceive!’” 

The thing is this—the point of the stories is that within the messiness of human life, God is found.  Hope for true fulfillment of true desire is grounded in true confidence of God’s love. We need not turn to fairy stories, wish fulfillment, apathetic detachment, denial or truth management.  God is love, made manifest in this little baby, who later in his very human, mortal life, would conquer death itself.    

Titus says, “the goodness and loving kindness of our God and Savior has appeared, and has rescued us.”   This means salvation from messiness was found in Jesus of Nazareth, salvation from the very messiness we dread.  That’s why we affirm in the Creed that he was truly God, but also truly human. 

Belief in the incarnation, the enfleshment, of God in the baby Jesus is belief in hope, in embracing messiness without rejecting it or pretending it doesn’t exist.  It enables us to keep attached, to keep feeling the longing God has placed in our hearts for something better.  Belief in the wholly unexpected birth of a holy baby to a young woman who doesn’t need a man to make her whole, is belief in Love redeeming the world it created. 

The Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart helps us to understand this:
“We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity... But if this does not take place in me, what use is it?  It all comes down to this: the eternal birth should take place in me.” 

“God with us” includes the idea of “God in us.”  When we, like Mary, say yes to God and in saying yes, carry Jesus out into the world, we give birth to the Christ:  not as myth, or fairy tale, or political program, or even as history.  We give birth to Christ as reality itself, we, the ones transformed by his love.  We take that love into the messy world we find around us, and share our hope and experience of grace and rescue. 

In the name of God, Amen.

2014 Christmas Letter

Ashland, Oregon

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

December 12, 2014

Dear Members and friends of Trinity,

Christmas will soon be upon us, when the “Word took flesh, and pitched his tent among us” (John 1:14).   God made flesh as a helpless baby implies potential holiness in simply being a human being, a sacredness to all of life and all it means to be human.  You don’t have to be “churchy” to be holy, nor “religious” to be “spiritual.”  You don’t even have to be “spiritual” to be spiritual!

2 Peter 1:4 says that Christ’s divine power was manifested to us so that we might become “…partakers of the divine nature.”  Saint Athanasius of Alexandria said, “God became man, that we might become god, … becoming by grace what God is by nature.”

God made flesh makes the common holy, eventually turning death on the cross into life, alienation into reconciliation.  When we offer the Bread and the Wine at Eucharist as “God’s Holy Gifts for God’s Holy People,” we are saying that God is making us holy, making us saints, is making us god—despite ourselves, despite appearances, and despite how harshly we may judge ourselves.  Christ’s incarnation makes the common holy: ordinary bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ; we ordinary people, Christ’s body in the world. 

Let me wish you and your loved ones every grace and peace during this season, with prayers for reconciliation for all.  Together with the angels at Christ’s birth, I pray that there be fullness of life on earth, because we human beings enjoy God’s grace.

With love and blessing,

Fr. Tony+

Not Meek, Not Mild (Advent 4B)

Not Meek, Not Mild
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Canticle 15; Romans 16: 25-27; Luke 1: 26-38

Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year B)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
21th December 2014: 8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

It is fourth Advent, Mary Sunday.  We are close enough to the holidays that some of us begin to feel overwhelmed, or down because we miss those we love who are no longer with us.  Or we are just lonely. 

It is important to see in today’s stories about Mary this:  she did not get what she expected.  She did not get the best deal at all.  But because of the hope in God she has, she accepts God’s wild and unexpected plan.  At least she says she’s hoping that it turns out the way the angel says it will. 

There is a wonderful poem about Mary:   

First Miracle

Her body like a pomegranate torn
Wide open, somehow bears what must be born,

The irony where a stranger small enough
To bed down in the ox-tongue-polished trough

Erupts into the world and breaks the spell
Of the ancient, numbered hours with his yell.

Now her breasts ache and weep and soak her shirt
Whenever she hears his hunger or his hurt;

She can't change water into wine; instead
She fashions sweet milk out of her own blood.

[A. E. Stallings in Poetry January 2012 p.298]

God is crazy about you and me.  He made us, redeems us, and sustains us.   The faith we have in God taking on everything it means to be human in the conception and birth of Jesus is at heart a message of “gladness, of great joy.”  It seems at times to be too good to be true, yet even so, the angels simply had to break into song that night.  Joyous song. 

Today’s Gospel reading hints at the underlying message of joy at the coming of the Lord: an angel from the presence of God, comes to a thirteen year old Jewish girl art her prayers and says God is going to act in a definitive, unalterable way, a surprising way, one that will bring all happiness and joy.

We sang a joyful Canticle today instead of a Psalm.  It is the Song of Praise on the lips of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Luke’s Gospel, the Magnificat, in response to this annunciation. This is why we call today Mary Sunday. 

Mary is a model for the joy and acceptance that connects us with God, Jesus, and all good. 

The Angel Gabriel greets her with the words, “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with you.”  He declares to her she will become pregnant with a holy child who will bring about the great setting of things straight hoped for by Israel’s prophets.  She asks how this can possibly be, since she has never been with a man.  She obviously knows as well as we do about the birds and bees.  The angel replies that it will be a pregnancy without any man involved—God’s power alone will do.  Despite the dubious credibility of such an announcement and all the trouble such a pregnancy obviously will entail, Mary focuses on what the angel says this baby will be and do.  So she accepts the angel’s saying, replying “Behold the Lord’s handmaid, may it happen to me just as you have said.” 

In the story, she conceives by the action of the Holy Spirit alone, and then hurries off to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who the angel had told her was also pregnant, similarly in decidedly odd circumstances, given her previous sterility and advanced age.  After the baby leaps in Elizabeth’s womb for joy at the sight of Mary, Elizabeth says to her, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the child in your womb,” Mary then replies with the Canticle.  Note here that she trusts the angel’s word enough now to speak about the salvation of Israel’s poor as if it has already happened. 

It is important to see what this story is not saying.  One—it is not saying that human sexuality is corrupt and that thus only a virgin could bear the One from God.  That would be a form of saying that Jesus was not fully human.  Mary here is seen as humanly self-sufficient: she does not need a man to fill her calling as mother.  Two—it is not saying that Mary is a model of subjected women who need to know their place.  The idea of gentle virgin, meek and mild is not in this story.  Mary here is fierce, joyous, and submits to God in thankful relief and wonder, not in timorous and abject humiliation.

This young Jewish girl is unafraid to say yes to the new, the strange, not that she is submissive, meek and mild, but because she is open to the wildness of a God who does surprising acts. She is willing to offer herself, her body, her reputation, her life, to see through the wonderful things God has in store, whatever they may be. 

Mary’s submission is not to the system, to the hierarchs, the powers.  It is, rather, to the Unseen Love that drives the world.  It is joyous, and it is fierce.  She is joyous and she is fierce.  Not meek and mild. 

It all comes down to heart.  If we are picky and choosy, and peevish, if we insist that God do things the way we want or that we find comfortable, we do not, with Mary, sing “my soul proclaims the Greatness of God!”  We sing bitterly, “I did it my way.” We take offense at this or that, let Jesus or Mary become a stumbling block or scandal for us.   Farewell to the fierce joy of following a living God, a God of surprise, of wildness.

 

The prophet Mary stands before us, with her fierce and joyful song, her example of putting everything on the line for the love of God and Good. Blessed among women, she says “yes,”  “yes,” “yes,” to God, before even knowing what God has in mind.

“All generations will call me blessed,” Mary sings, but what a harsh blessedness!  Joyous moments, to be sure, but also a life involving fierce pain, humiliation, terror, and the bitter loss of her child. 

But the joyous truth behind “all generations will call me blessed” is even greater than she suspects:  resurrection on the third day, a recognition that Christ was fully God in fully human form, and that this young Jewish girl was in fact the means of God’s incarnation, the Theotokos, the God-bearer, the Mother of God. 

The Magnificat is a song of fierce joy, of shared blessing and our common lot.  Yet its words hint at the passion of Jesus, in both senses, foreshadowing Jesus’s commitment and his sufferings.   Mary empties herself as Christ empties himself when he says,  “Now my soul is in turmoil, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.  Father, glorify your name!  (John 12:27-28).    Jesus’ emptying himself is not a hierarchical obedience but a total surrender, one coming from his deepest heart’s passion.  It expresses who he his, both God and human being.  And he learned such passion, such fierce joy, from his Mother.

Sisters and brothers, this week let us pray, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, God-bearer, to accept the wild and surprising spirit of God in our hearts and very bodies.  Let us accept God’s blessings, whatever they may be, and have God lead us to the deeds needed for his reign to come.  May we not let surprises or the unexpected trip us up.  Let us share, in our actions and in our words, the glories and beauty of a God who turns the world on its head, who has done wonderful things for us, and never forgets his promise of mercy. Let us be joyous and fierce. 

In the name of God, Amen.

Embracing God (Mid-week Message)

O Eastern Dawn, by Sr. Ansgar Holmberg, CSJ

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

December 17, 2014

Embracing God

Today is the start of the recitation of the Great “O” Antiphons, the liturgical counterpoints in the monastic daily office to the Virgin’s Hymn of Acceptance, the Magnificat, for the final seven days of Advent to welcome the Christmas feast: “O Wisdom, O Lord, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David, O Eastern Dawn, O King of the Nations, O Emmanuel.”    This marks the winding down of Advent in preparation for Christmas. 

As we begin to turn our devotions to the wonder of the incarnation, it is important that we see that God taking on our flesh in Jesus is an intimate act by God, where God embraces us and holds us, and all that we are.  

This faith should leave little room for self-loathing, disappointment, or terminal discouragement. God embraces us and holds us:  love touches what at times is unlovely and remakes it in its own image.      What makes us unlovely—alienation, dispute, criticism, and resentment—flee from the embrace of God.    In meditating on the Incarnation, of God embracing humanity, we must embrace God, and recognize the holiness that is in the core of each of us, the image of God placed in us in our creation. 

Hoping your holidays are gentle and sweet, 

Fr. Tony+

Take Joy (Advent 3)

Take Joy 


Homily delivered the Third Sunday of Advent (Advent 3B RCL)
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 


14 December  2014; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist 


Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon) 


Readings: 
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126 ; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

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

It is good to be back in Ashland.  Our adventure in Australia, Indonesia, and China--as exciting and resting as it was--wore both me and Elena out and it is good to be home, with you, with those we love. 

It's been a challenging week:  news in the parish of fresh falls of those we love, terrible diagnoses of illness, our annual liturgy for the bereaved before the holidays with its bittersweet mixed emotions. 

And on the broader scale, we saw continuing turmoil in our nation on race and violence by and against police, and the long awaited release of the horrific details of systematic and intentional torture and abuse committed by officials of our government. 

I have been shocked that this release has not provoked a wide public discussion on how we might make amends, and bring to justice those few policy makers who so profoundly violated our nation's values, its laws, and those of the entire international community.  Instead, there has been partisan bickering on whether the report should have been released, whether amnesty should be granted to those involved, or, believe it or not, on whether torture is ever justified.  Let there be no mistake:  torture and abuse are deep evils, and are wrong.  They violate the norms of all civilized society, and offend the divine principle that we should treat others as we would ourselves be treated.  Anyone who would argue for cases where they might be excused, or make legal cases for them, or outline policy arguments for them as instruments of state security have lost their way in a profound sense.  Such people need our prayer. 

I was saddened to hear from one friend the bitter observation, "Of course, how can you not expect lies and moral confusion in a nation with a myth of divinely ordained exceptional destiny but which found its space through the genocide of the First Nations living here before and built its economy for 2 centuries on the blood and sweat of chattel slaves?"  I love our country, and believe our values and hopes should indeed make us a sign of hope for the world.  So when we fail so miserably, it hurts. 

Overcoming oppression, comforting grief, righting wrongs, setting captives free, forgiving debts--these are all what today's readings from Isaiah and the Psalms is about: Hope amid the things that make us want to lose hope. 

Some think it is a question of having a positive mental attitude.  When I was in the foreign service, I saw many people who would have been happy as clams no matter where they were stationed--they took their happiness with them, and remained so whether they were posted in Paris, or Ouagadougou.  And there were those who took their unhappiness with them, no matter where they landed. 

But it isn't that simple.  There are truly horrible things that deserve our sorrow, our grief, and our anger.  And there are some things that happen that are so magical and unexpected that they just demand joy.    The point of the scriptures today is that joy comes from God. 

Today is the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete or "Rejoice" Sunday.  That's why the chasuble I'm wearing and the candle of the Advent Wreath today are pink. 

Why talk of joy in the middle of a season about coming judgment? 

It is easy to confuse the issue and turn it into a question of us and them, of party, or race or class:  judgment is coming and it'll be bad for the wicked but great for us! 

But that isn't right.  How should we understand "judgment" in the first place?  Hasn't it ever struck you that the book of "Judges" in the Hebrew Scriptures isn't about courts of law, but rather about popular heroes and heroines who set things right for the oppressed?  That's the essential idea of judgment in the Bible:  judgment day is a day of setting things right.  It is only if you have a vindictive streak, a fixation on the idea that things can only be set right through punishment, through vengeance, through retaliation, that the Day of Judgment becomes synonymous with the Day of Doom or the Day of Wrath. 

Note the images used here to describe the day of Joy:  good news to the oppressed, binding up broken hearts, liberty to captives, release to prisoners, the year of Jubilee, when all debt is forgiven, and if a day of vengeance, only so that all those who mourn can be comforted.  God will recompense wrongdoing, but it will be like the natural world:  the earth brings forth its shoot, a garden sprouts its sown seeds--that's how God will do it!  Those who have sown in tears will reap with joy.  The psalmist says, "Restore our fortunes, Lord."  Make them like the dry gulley beds throughout the desert south of Judah, the Negev.  A wadi is bone dry and lifeless most of the year, and then for a few short weeks in the spring, is alive with way too much water after the rains. 

Again, it's way too easy to reduce this to partisanship, to us and them:  we are the victims, the oppressed, so the Day of Judgment will free us and punish our enemies!  But in other peoples' minds, we are the oppressors.  I wonder if there is  anyone on earth who hasn't done things that merit a grudge of some sort or another from someone else.  Things are just too complicated, and justifications and rationalizations too convenient! 

It might be as simple as whether we show compassion and service to others: that is the point of the parable of the sheep and the goats we read just a few weeks ago. 

Perhaps also it is whether our hearts are in the right place, where our hopes lie, where we find our joy. 

Oscar Wilde once wrote, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us have our eyes fixed on the stars." 

If our eyes are fixed on the stars, we cannot lose our bearing in the shadows about us.    Having a clear hope and vision of joy, grounds us and keeps us oriented.  In her wonderful novel Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver writes, "The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof." 

It is not a question of understanding how everything fits in, or where things are going.  It is simply a question of having that hope and vision give us the wherewithal to be present in our lives, our real lives, with all their ambiguities and fears.  Thomas Merton, the great contemplative who died 42 years ago this week, writes, "You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope."

This is the openness of heart and clarity of vision discussed by the 2 Thessalonians passage:  giving thanks always and remaining open to the critical vision of prophets in our midst who tell us uncomfortable truth. 

Hope comes, like the Muse, unbidden.  Joy comes in the morning.  God acts.  We recognize it and feel it when we are thus thankful and open. For this we must be present, alive, and honest. 

On Christmas Eve in 1513, at the height of the Italian Renaissance and just before the contradictions of that society produced the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation, an Italian Humanist (possibly the Franciscan friar, architect, and classical scholar Fra Giovanni Giocondo) wrote the following letter to a colleague: 

"I salute you. I am your friend and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got. But there is much, very much, that while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instance. Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy! Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty . . . that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it, that is all! . . . And so I greet you, with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away."

Advent is a time of awakening.  It should be for us like a hot cup of coffee in the sleepy morning, a brisk shower as we try to shake of the stupor of the night.  Part of that awakening must be an honest discomfort with what just isn't right in the world, in us.  Part of it is feeling the grief, sorrow, regret, and fear that comes with being a spirit living in the material world.  But the awakening cannot come without a recognition that all things will be well with the world, and all manner of thing well.  Because God is love, and judgment is setting things right, not evening scores. 

The day breaks, and the shadows flee away. 
Thanks be to God.

Thomas Merton (Mid-week Message)

 Thomas Merton, O.S.C.O. and HH the XIV Dalai Lama 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Thomas Merton

Dec. 10, 2014

Forty-two years ago today, Cistercian monk and author Thomas Merton died in Bangkok by accidental electrocution. 

I think many of you may know his story, told in The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). 

He is somewhat of a hero for me, since his works on contemplation (The Seeds of Contemplation, 1969), and the bridging of eastern and Western mysticism (Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 1968; The Way of Chuang Tzu, 1965) played a profound role in my own spiritual journey. 

He was the one who wrote the words that encouraged me to change from the church of my youth to more traditional Christianity:  “God does not want us to be an army of robot, victim souls” and “any god that must be sustained by a constant effort is an idol.” 

His writings on the Eucharist and liturgy (Seeds of Celebration, 1966) also had a profound influence on me:  the timelessness of the liturgy bound in the timeliness of the liturgical calendar and lectionary. In No Man is an Island (1955), he wrote, "Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the Universe."

Merton near the end of his life was a pacifist, strongly criticizing the U.S. war in Indochina.  He believed that the Gospel of Christ required him to take this position:   "War represents a vice that mankind would like to get rid of but which it cannot do without. Man is like an alcoholic who knows that drink will destroy him but who always has a reason for drinking. So with war” (Love and Living, a posthumous collection of his letters and lectures, 1980).

Let us pray,

Gracious God, you called your monk Thomas Merton to proclaim your justice out of silence, and moved him in his contemplative writings to perceive and value Christ at work in the faiths of others: Keep us, like him, steadfast in the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.