How not to Ruin Christmas (Christmas Day C)

 

How to Not Ruin Christmas

Christmas Day (Year C)
Isaiah 9:2-7 ;Titus 2:11-14 ; Luke 2:1-14(15-20) ; Psalm 96

Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
24th December 2018: 6:00 p.m. Said, 11:00p.m. Sung Festal Mass

The Very 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.

The Right Reverend John Chane, the former Bishop of Washington DC, once told me the story of his most memorable liturgical disaster.  He was serving as the Dean of the Cathedral in San Diego, and for Christmas Eve, they had an early evening service for families, with full Nativity Pageant.  One particular year, the Blessed Virgin was played by a demur 12 year old girl who clearly was teacher’s pet at school: she organized all the other players, scolding when necessary and making admiring and praising comments as she deemed right.  Among the shepherds were two brothers who seemed to be the opposite of teacher’s pets.  During the main service, not the rehearsal mind you, one of the brothers elbowed the other, provoking a swift push back.  The first brother fell, right into the thurible stand, knocking the smoking censer filled with hot coals out onto the rug, which burst into flames.  Pandemonium ensued:  shrieks of terror, crying, and jostling to get to the exits.  The verger ran into the sacristy and returned with a fire extinguisher:  a loud SHHHHHHHUUUUUFFFFF and a cloud of white retardant put the fire out.  As the cries and moaning subsided and the children returned to their places, the 12 year old prissy Blessed Virgin was heard to say over all the rest, shooting daggers with her looks at the two brothers, “Look! Now you’ve gone and ruined Christmas!” 

“Ruined Christmas!”  How many of us have heard those words hurled at us, either as kids or as adults, usually from family members. 

“Ruined Christmas!”  Whether it was late gifts or decorations, some untoward scene at the dinner table, spurred on maybe by too much holiday cheer, or, if in church, misspoken lines or wrong turns in procession, a spectacularly wrong note in an anthem, or burning down the Nativity Pageant:  “Ruined Christmas.”  

There are many reasons to love the season, but there are also tensions.  The holidays bring with them a whole lot of expectations, what we need to do, who we need to be with, what we ought to do, how we ought to do it, to properly celebrate and not give offense.  The holidays can bring us face-to-face with our own failings, those places where we do not measure up, either to the expectations of others or ourselves.   They bring us face to face with our losses and our regrets.  That’s why it seems so easy to “Ruin Christmas.” 

I wonder, though. The Feast of the Nativity, or Christmas, is the Feast of the Incarnation, of God becoming truly human.  We honor the birth of a little child into poverty, knowing that in him God is taking on all that it means to be human, including suffering and death.  Yet we think we can ruin Christmas by not measuring up in one way or another.  If we think that the feast can so easily ruined by human failing, then we have misunderstood the feast.

By becoming truly human, God embraces human weakness and failing.  In incarnation, God tells us that it is O.K. to be not O.K., and shows us that acceptance of who we actually are rather than who we want to be is the starting point of spiritual progress.   

Jesus says it again and again in life:  Do not judge.  Accept with gratitude all the gifts and blessings God gives us.  Do not envy others or covet their station or possessions. Help others, don’t worry about doing it just right. Let go, and let God. 

Such a spirituality informed even Jesus’s attitudes toward partying.  Jesus liked a good party, but did not want party planning to control life.  Note that in the story of the wedding at Cana, he provides hundreds of gallons of the finest wine to the joy of the guests, but also questions his Mother’s trying to control every little detail. 

We often hear this time of year complaints that there is a war on Christmas when we try to wish more inclusive happiness on others by saying “happy holidays.”  But this is mere tribalism at its worse: my group’s holiday is bigger than yours.   I’ll tell you what the real war on Christmas is: when we mouth pious praise of the holy family of Palestinian refugees fleeing Herod and seeking asylum in Egypt yet at the same time support separating refugee children from their parents or teargassing families on our southern border who have fled turmoil in their homeland. 

We also hear 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, something easy to ruin.   

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—for both believer and unbeliever—stems from bad theology.  Incarnational theology demands that our prayer be common prayer, or prayer in community, and our holidays be shared events.   

The incarnation marks a radical continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies sacredness in all it means to be human, even things that we find embarrassing, demeaning, or silly. We often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us. This “God incognito” 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.

William Stringfellow wrote,

“Jesus Christ means that God cares extremely, decisively, inclusively, immediately, for the ordinary, transient, proud, wonderful, besetting, frivolous, hectic, lusty things of human life. The reconciliation of God and the world in Jesus Christ means that in Christ there is a radical and integral relationship of all human beings and of all things. In Christ all things are held together (Col. 1:17b)”  (A Public and Private Faith, 1962, 40-44).

Incarnation tells us to accept who we are—gifts and strengths, disabilities and ugly deficiencies, and all. We must accept who others are as well. We must be gentle both on them and ourselves.  I think that is the most important thing if we do not want to “Ruin Christmas.” 

Starting where we are, we must respond to the glimpses of glory, to the places in our lives where the veil between this world and the next is thin.  Seeking to let God finish creation in us, trying to amend our lives, both personally and communally, requires an open-ended listening, a total trust in God’s good intentions.  It means joyfully serving and helping others, welcoming, feeding, and housing the stranger, foreigner, and oppressed.  It means not beating up on ourselves, and being kinder to others. 

Ambrose of Milan, who taught and converted Augustine of Hippo in the mid fourth century, wrote dozens of hymns popularizing the basic teachings of Christianity. Both Ambrose and Augustine were very flawed people—Ambrose an anti-Jewish bigot and Augustine a lecher who never seems to have escaped his conflicted views of his own bodily urges.  But they both persevered in open-ended listening to God. That’s why we call them saints—not because they lacked flaws, but because they persevered despite them. One of Ambrose’s hymns praises the enfleshment of Christ in these words:

O equal to Thy Father, Thou!
Gird on thy fleshly mantle now;
the weakness of our mortal state
with deathless might invigorate.

As God became truly human in Jesus, let us accept our own humanity, with all its limitations and failings. Let us follow Jesus, and try to live in his light. Though we might make every effort not to ruin Christmas, let us as a first step not worry at all about getting everything just right. 

Peace and grace.

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Our Lady (Advent 4C)

Our Lady
Micah 5:2-5a; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45; Canticle 15

Fourth of Advent (Year C)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
23rd December 2018: 8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 Sung Mass

The Very 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.

Today, the fourth Sunday of Advent and the Last Sunday before Christmas, is Mary Sunday.  The Lectionary Readings are about the Incarnation of our Lord, and in these stories, Mary plays a leading role. 

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.” 

So 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.   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: 

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
    for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
    the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him
    in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
    he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
    and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
    and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel,
    for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers,
    to Abraham and his children for ever.

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. 

Sara Miles has written the following about the Blessed Virgin,

“Mary, Mary, Mary. Gentle virgin, meek and mild. For centuries, the church has tried to portray Mary as submissive, and thus paradigmatic for female lives on earth. The church has suggested, not subtly, that just as Mary turned over her will to God, so should women turn over their wills to God’s representatives on Earth: that is, to serving the church and its officials.

“This archetype of Mary glosses motherhood––the fiercest, most powerful and passionate occupation known to humans––with sentimentality. It bathes a revolutionary risk-taker with the glow of goodness and docility. It twists Mary’s obedience to God into the suggestion that the weak owe obedience to powerful humans: priests, husbands, masters, rulers.

“But … Mary sings a new song[, t]he Magnificat … she prophesies the overturning of the whole social order, proclaiming that the lowly will be lifted up, the rich turned away empty. She doesn’t ask permission of kings or family to step off the precipice into unprecedented experience. Her proclamation that God is at work in her body shows us, even before Jesus does, what it means to truly submit––not to the world but to God.”

This young Jewish girl, probably 13 or 14 at most, 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. 

We don’t like the word submission in our culture.  We want independence, autonomy, and freedom.  Do your own thing; follow your bliss; to your own self be true.  Submission in our culture has bad, bad overtones: victim, doormat, tool.  Mary’s submission is not that.  It is not to the system, but to the Unseen Love that drives the world.  It is joyous, and it is fierce.

Walter Wink describes what is at issue here, when he discusses how Jesus teaches and shows us to fight the Powers of Evil without violence. This is far from resignation to oppression, “passive aggressive” attitude, or even “passive resistance.”  It is an active engagement to undermine and subvert the institutions and culture of wrong and their manifestations in daily life.  Jesus’ “Third Way” is not simply giving up and allowing evil to have the ground, or stooping to the enemy’s level and fighting back with all the violent and coercive weapons in Evil’s quiver.  Rather, Jesus tells us to let our hearts be untroubled, confront the Powers, and don’t give in or give up.   Turn the other cheek so that an arrogant abuser must slap with his palm rather than the back of his hand.  Go the second mile and force the Roman occupiers to violate their own regulations about limits on abusing the local populations.  Puncture the propaganda of the religious authorities with images like whitened sepulchers, spawn of vipers.  Stand silent before Herod; question Pilate’s authority.  Accept death on a cross with prayers for your torturers. 

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 even 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. 

 

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: not a hierarchical obedience but a total surrender, one coming from the deepest heart’s passion.  Jesus learned such passion, such fierce joy, from his Mother. And as she stood at his cross, he put her under the care of the Beloved Disciple, and the Beloved Disciple under her care: “Behold your child! Behold your Mother!”   This is why many of us call her our Lady, just as we call him our Lord. 

Sisters and brothers, this week let us pray, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, the God-bearer, Mother of God and of all beloved disciples, 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 share in this fierce joy, and let our souls, along with our Lady, magnify the Lord with joy.

In the name of God, Amen.

Kidnapped Baby Jesus (midweek Message)

Tai Shui Hang, Lantau Island, Our Lady of Joy Abbey (Cistercians of the Strict Observance) 

Kidnapped Baby Jesus (A Christmas Memory)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

December 19, 2018

When my family and I were living in Hong Kong for the first time, in 1987, we had a challenge in making our holiday traditions fit into our new and very strange surroundings for our children, aged at the time 5, 8, 10, and 12.  Every year, we had done a careful series of Advent activities, and we studiously kept the figure of the Baby Jesus stored away, to be placed in his manger in the crèche on the coffee table only on the morning of Christmas Eve. 

This year, we could not repeat many of our annual traditions, because they were local and not available in China.  Here one of our holiday meals was to be dim sum luncheon at a giant restaurant with dozens of steaming, mobile carts moving between the chattering, jasmine-tea fragrant tables: we had to be imaginative.

The morning of Christmas Eve, the children all crowded around the small box that usually held the Baby Jesus.   They opened it, and found it empty,  In the place of Jesus, a note, of letters cut from a magazine and pasted onto white bond, read “Jesus has been KIDNAPPED.  If you want him safe, follow all instructions, find the notes with next instructions, and get ready for a great treasure hunt.  First instruction, go and bathe, brush teeth, and dress for a busy day. When done, find next instruction in the refrigerator door.”

The next instruction was to eat breakfast, the next (found in the front hallway) to clean bedrooms, finish Christmas presents.  Finally, they were told to pack an overnight bag with one change of socks and underwear, toothbrushes and a jacket.  They were told to walk down the hill to Bowen Road, and find the next instruction taped under the first park bench there: catch a cab and go to the outlying islands ferry, where they’d be given the next instruction.

When they realized they were leaving the apartment for overnight, on CHRISTMAS EVE, the children got a little worried.  Would Santa visit them where they were mysteriously going?  Did he visit empty apartments?  How in the world were we going to have a proper Christmas Eve and Christmas day with an unexpected journey to GOD KNOWS WHERE thrown in? 

As they walked with Elena along Bowen Road, and took the cab, I went to the apartment and finished Santa things.  I hurried and got to the ferry pier before them.  The instructions were to take the tickets I gave them and go with Elena and me to Lantau Island, to a small harbor called Tai Shui Hang, there they would find the Baby Jesus.  

We had to change ferries on Peng Chau, the small island we went to in the hot weather to go to the beach and eat at waterside seafood restaurants.  When we finally arrived at Tai Shui Hang, the children realized our destination:  the Trappist Monastery.  I finally told them that we had reservations to spend Christmas Eve night there.  After a simple cabbage soup and bread dinner, we took a nap so we would be ready for Midnight Mass.  

 Trappist monks fleeing Mainland China, 1948.

The Mass itself was luminous.  Half in Latin, with the rest split up between English, Cantonese,  Mandarin, French, Spanish, and German, most of it was sung. Lit with hundreds of candles, and scented with clouds of sweet frankincense, the divine was clearly present.  Most of these old monks had fled monasteries in Mainland China after the Communist takeover and the start of systematized murder of all class enemies, including priests, nuns, and monks.  Most had lost brother monks in the red terror and fled to the British colony in desperation.  It was there they had founded their new home, the Trappist Haven Monastery dedicated to Our Lady of China.    A few young novices were in their midst, but most of the monks were obviously so very old that the children wondered if maybe in their youths they had been with the shepherds with Jesus in the stable. 

After a final singing of Silent Night in German, we retired to our beds, bunks all together in a common room with thick quilted ticking to keep us warm in the chilly small hours.  In the morning, we had coffee and milk with bread and cheese, and then prepared to catch the ferry back.  We arrived back at our apartment on Hong Kong Island at 11:00 a.m.  Santa had been there, all right, and the children were very relieved. 

We never again went to a monastery for Midnight Mass together.  But the memories of that special day stayed with us.  The children reminisce about it to this day.  

Christmas is a celebration of the Incarnation: God taking on flesh, becoming truly human.  It is not a mere commemoration of a one-time-and-one-time alone event that took place in Palestine 2,000 years ago.  It rejoices at the cosmic Christ embracing this material world, his own creation, and thus revealing God in and behind all the material world.  It sees the hand of God at work in the world about us, and in our own lives, despite the suffering and brokenness we also see about us and in us. In Christmas, we express our faith and trust in God present in all flesh, and all life, and see God at work even in things we may want to turn aside.  Those monks’ faith in that Midnight Mass was all the stronger, their joy all the more fervent, because of the sufferings they had borne.   Never did we have a Christmas eve dinner quite so satisfying at that cabbage soup and plain freshly-baked bread. 

Grace and peace,  and a joyful Christmas to all,

Fr. Tony+

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St. Lucy (Midweek Message)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

December 12, 2018

St. Lucy’s Day

Tomorrow, December 13, is the Feast Day of Saint Lucy, a martyr during the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian (304 C.E.).    She is associated with light in darkness, since her Latin name Lucia is very close to the Latin word for light, lucis. 

Twelve days before Christmas Day, St. Lucy’s Day is a mirror and foretaste of January 6’s great festival of light, Epiphany, twelve days after it.    In the Julian Calendar used before the Gregorian Calendar was introduced in 1582, December 13 was the day of the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.   St. Lucy is one of the few saints celebrated in reformation Scandinavia, and her day is marked by a procession of a young woman representing the saint.  She wears a crown of lit candles and is followed by young women (and now also young men) bearing candles.

Lucy refused a pagan marriage and gave her dowry to the poor.  Her jilted pagan bridegroom reported her to the authorities, who demanded that she sacrifice to the image of the Emperor.  When she declined, she was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in a brothel.   She replied by saying that God judges the intentions of our heart and not our actions when forced against our will.  When the soldiers came to take her away, they found that they could not move her from her house despite increasing heroic efforts on their part, and her death resulted.  In some retellings, St. Lucy dies by having her eyes gouged out before being beheaded, though the late medieval iconic image of St. Lucy bearing a pair of eyeballs in her hand probably results from her being the patron saint of those suffering from blindness and eye diseases, rather than the manner of her death. 

Here is John Donne's poem for St. Lucy's Day when it was still the Winter Solstice, with my bracketed notes trying to bring his sense into modern English:  

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY,
BEING THE SHORTEST DAY.
by John Donne

'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
            The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

[It is the end of the year, St. Lucy’s day, with scarcely any light. The sun is exhausted and its rays are like mere firecrackers that fizzle briefly and go out.   The world’s life force seems to have drained into the ground; the thirsty earth has drunk it and is now waterlogged like a person with edema-swollen feet.   Life itself seems shrunken, dead and buried. Still, all these things seem positively cheerful in comparison to me, reduced to feeling like the words engraved on a tombstone.]

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
            For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

[So look carefully at me, all of you who will be lovers next spring — as far away as another world — because I have become like death itself, though love with its magic once distilled out of my nothingness the concentrated essence of myself.  But Love also ruined me. He has now re-made me out of absence, darkness and death, almost as if I had been born out of nonexistent things.]

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
    I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
    Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
            Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

[Everyone around me seems to have the best of all good things. They are made of life, soul, form, body, spirit — they are real.  But I, through the distillation process that is love, have been reduced to a mere grave where emptiness is buried.  Many times in the past we two wept a flood of tears that drowned everything. Many times we became chaotic messes when we had to pay attention to anything besides each other.  Many times when we were apart, we became lifeless as corpses.]

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know ; I should prefer,
            If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am none; nor will my Sun renew.

[But she  (the loved one)  died, if that word can be used in talking about her, and that turned me into something like a potion distilled from the primordial chaos before creation.  If I were a real human being (and I should know what that is like because I used to be one) I would think myself better off if I were an animal.  Even plants and stones have feelings, and they are more real and alive than I am.  They are capable of loving and hating. Even if I were a nothing, a mere object, I would have the capacity to cast a shadow when light shone on me. But I am truly nothing, and the sun will never shine for me again.]

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
    At this time to the Goat is run
    To fetch new lust, and give it you,
            Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

[All you lovers—on account of whom the sun in the sky (not the true sun) now arrives in the constellation Capricorn (the goat), to borrow for the new summer new life-drive (like a goat’s lust)—all of you go and enjoy your summer.  Since she (St. Lucy) is enjoying and celebrating this long night, let me get ready for her, and let me call this hour her (the dead loved one's) vigil, and her evening (or Eve), since it is the midnight of both the year and this day.]

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+ 

A Change of Heart, A Change of Minds (Advent 2C)

John the Baptist, El Greco.  M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco 

“A Change of Heart, A Change of Mind”

9 December  2018

Advent 2C

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Baruch 5:1-9; Canticle 16; Phil. 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

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

I saw a comment earlier in the week that struck me: “If you want to praise a young missionary who crosses a border illegally and is killed, but criticize a mother who tries to cross a border illegally to save her children, and yet support officials who lob tear gas at them, then maybe your gospel is too small.” 

“Your gospel is too small.”  Or, alternately in the words of the old devotional chestnut by J.B. Phillips, Your God is too Small. 

This is at the heart of what John the Baptist is all about.  He is not preaching a sectarian rule of life, a set of doctrines and practices you must accept or be damned.  I saw another meme this week parodying a beloved Advent hymn: “On Jordan’s Bank, the baptists cry, were I a baptist, so would I.”  No.  John the Baptizer was not, after all, a baptist.  John is saying to all the groups around him:  you have all sorts of ways of figuring God and this life out.  But they’re not working.  Something’s wrong:  your God is too small. 

To the Saduccees, or Temple party, he says:  You stress strict adherence to Temple ritual and respect for the Temple authorities.  Conservatives that you are, you recognize only the Torah as scripture and thus reject any afterlife.  But you are in bed with the Romans.  Your royal supporters, the Herods and the Maccabees before them, have put the High Priesthood for sale to the highest bidder.  You think that you are the sole franchise holders on God’s forgiveness and purification.  Few can afford your prices, or stomach your corruption.  Your God is too small. 

To the Pharisees:  You think yourself liberal, accepting the prophets and the writings as part of scripture.  You think yourselves pure, rejecting the corruption and accommodation of the Herodians and Sadduccees.  You stress careful observance of the Law, but also add extra rules aimed at putting a fence around God’s law.   But few can follow your rules, or stomach your own profiteering from religion.  And you remain in the thrall of the Temple authorities.  Your God is too small. 

To his close coreligionists the Essenes:  You accept the entire canon of scripture plus your own sectarian writings.  You have fled the corruption of Jerusalem and the Temple, and seek, here near where I baptize, to prepare in the desert the way of the Lord.  You reject the authority of the purchased High Priesthood, and try to live the Law more strictly than all the others, recreating in your life the wandering of the Children of Israel under Moses.  But you are a small sect, highly insular and exclusive, and your leaders abuse power just like those of the other sects.  Your God is too small.

  

John’s preaching and baptism is a reaction to bad religion all around.  It tries to make God’s rescue and hope accessible to all: something real, something tangible, something available. 

John offers all and sundry the grace of God.  “Repent and be baptized for the remission of sin” is better translated, I think, “Change the way you think, act accordingly, and receive this washing as a sign your failings no longer separate you from God.” 

John’s baptism fed a great hunger:  in his community, most people felt they were perpetually unclean and unworthy of God’s fellowship.  The ways offered them out of this did not work.   The Temple was too far away and expensive for most.  The Rabbis’ fence round the Law too constraining and its practices too costly.  The monastic life in the desert was too exclusive and inaccessible.   And many were unwilling to follow these paths precisely because their corruption had become part and parcel of the oppression of the Romans and their Jewish quislings. 

John answers this problem with the great message of the prophets: Turn around, turn around.  “Focus on your wrong thinking and your wrong acting, and then turn around.”   That’s what “Repent” means.  John says “Do that, come and let me wash you, not in the Temple after a sacrifice, not in a ritual mikveh built and owned by those who have their lives together and can afford it, or in a closed monastic community, but in the open water of the river.  Then show in your lives fruit of that turning around.” 

It's all a question of perspective.  Too narrow a perspective, and you have narrow exclusive religion.  Too broad, and you have vague gas without specific demands on you.  John says: Change your minds.  Change perspectives.  To the narrow, he says, broaden.  To those who see religion flexibly enough to allow unjust and abusive behavior, he says, tighten up the focus, eschew injustice.  He preaches a demanding set of ethical rules.  

I was raised in a Church that taught that incorrect thinking was the result of sin.  But I found in my own experience that the opposite was more often the case:  it was only after I changed the way I thought about things that I felt free to ignore some of the rules put forward by the hierarchs.    How we think sets boundaries on what we believe is possible and good.  A change of thinking usually precedes a change in behavior. 

Sometimes, how we think is constrained by our habits and vices.  In this case, we may indeed have to change the way we behave in order to change the way we think: the Twelve Step programs’ principle of “Fake it ‘till you make it.”   In this case, we act better than we think we are so that we can become better.  This is the opposite of hypocrisy, where we act better than we are so that we can remain the same or even become worse. 

But in general, the Baptist’s cry to “Change your Mind” as the stepping off point for hope and accepting rescue is what holds true.  As the early 1990s disco/ hip hop cross over song put it: “Before you can read me you gotta learn how to see me.  Free your mind, the rest will follow.  Be color blind, don’t be so shallow.” 

What are some of the ways we have of making God too small, of having too narrow a perspective? 

If your God is first of all a judge or policeman, a killjoy in the sky, then your God is too small. 

If God condemns the faults of others but not of you, your God is too small. 

If God loves and supports only those whom you love and want to support, your God is too small. 

If God prospers the righteous and starves the wicked, your God is too shallow. 

If God hates the things you hate, your God is too small.

If God is a patriarchal cis-hetero white male, your God is too small. 

If salvation is merely a personal thing taking away sins, your God is too small.

If God is manifest only in Church or ritual, your God is too small. 

If God is manifest only in your heart and feelings, your God is too small. 

If God is manifest only in nature, your God is too small. 

If God is manifest only in thinking and doctrine, your God is too small. 

If God is Episcopalian, or Christian, Buddhist, or Jewish, your God is too small.  

If the struggle between Good and Evil is between groups of people, divided by class, wealth, nationality, politics, race, or religion, your God is too small. 

“Change your minds.  Change your hearts.”  John the Baptist teaches us that hope for salvation comes from broadened perspectives and focused vision that allows honest recognition of failings.  In the coming week, as we continue our advent preparations and spiritual practices,  I invite us to ask “in what ways is my God too small?”  Let’s open our minds and hearts, broaden our perspectives, and then let this change express itself in our actions. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.