Redemption is Near (Advent 1C)

 

     

The Prophet Jeremiah, from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling Frescoes

Redemption is Near

28 November 2021; 8 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland, Oregon

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

Advent 1 C

Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

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

 

I once had a friend, who, when faced with a horrible disaster and nightmarish death in the family, told me, “How can I have faith in God?  God did not deliver on any of those promises of protecting us and caring for us.  We tried to follow God’s will, and all we got was this.  No more faith, no more hope.  Please, don’t talk to me about God.” 

 

It is hard when you face the unimaginable, when the God you trust seems to abandon you.   Loss of faith can come suddenly, like for my friend, or gradually, over years of being worn down by seeing one’s hopes wither and one’s heart broken.  

 

Sometimes, hope and faith gradually return. They did for my friend.  Sometimes, we remain emotionally dead.  This is the way God made us:  flight or fight in danger and trauma, hunkering down to duck from further missiles of fate. 

 

Yet in all this, God entices us, and invites us into a loving, trusting relationship.   

 

How do we respond to disappointment, to a sense of being betrayed by God?

 

In 587 BCE, a great catastrophe befell the people of the tiny kingdom of Judah.  The great empire Babylon, after a decade of dealing patiently, in their lights, with the fanatic and ultra-nationalistic people of Judah, came down hard. After killing all insurgent combatants and activists, they deported the entire ruling  class of the nation to secure and safe provinces in Mesopotamia far from where they could stir up opposition, and where they were expected to blend in, accommodate, intermarry, and disappear. The Babylonians deposed and blinded the puppet king they had put on the throne of Judah only ten years before, a minor prince of the House of David whose name, Zedekiah, meant “Yahweh is Zedek,” that is, “righteous, upright, the one who makes things as they ought to be, especially by giving alms.”  They burned Jerusalem, and leveled to its foundation the Temple of the Jews’ God.  The House of David no longer ruled.  The nation no longer existed. It had gone the way of the Northern Kingdom, Israel, destroyed by the Assyrians a century and a half before. 

 

This was a disaster of overwhelming and unfathomable proportions.  The people had believed that Yahweh had promised to protect and keep them from harm.  He had promised, they thought, to preserve the line of the kings descended from David.  Now all that was gone. 

 

The prophet Jeremiah had warned of catastrophe for years.  But as it broke over his people’s heads, he reassured them that hope remained.  Playing on the various meanings of the word Zedek in the name of the last Davidic king, in chapter 23 Jeremiah prophesies, “The days are surely coming, says Yahweh, when I shall raise up a true (ZDK) Branch for David, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness (ZDK) in the land.  In his days Judah shall be delivered and Israel shall dwell secure.  And this is the name by which he shall be called, Yawheh-zedekenu, ‘Yahweh is our Vindicator (ZDK).’”   This king won’t be overthrown like Zedekiah, “Yahweh is Upright.”  When Yahweh’s trustworthiness is our own, he says, righteousness and vindication will come to us. Dour Jeremiah says here that Yahweh’s promise to the House of David will someday come true, and even long-lost Israel will be restored along with Judah.  Yahweh may be upright, as the name Zedekiah declared, but as the fate of this king showed, in crisis this may not seem to matter.  But Yahweh will, at long last, vindicate us, as the name of the ideal king of the future declares:  Yahweh-Zedekenu. 

 

Many of the prophecies we read during Advent about a coming ideal king of the future are reactions to this catastrophe: the hope was that the Jews would return to Palestine and bring with them a new Davidic hero to restore their former glories.  But even as the mass of exiles did return some fifty years later, it was clear that the Davidic crown was gone:  No kings in the offing, just scribes and priests like Ezra and Nehemiah.  This was yet another defeat of hope and trust.  It was at this time that a later prophet, writing under Jeremiah’s name and in his tradition, repeated the earlier oracle about the future Righteous Branch, thus affirming hope against hope once more.  It is today’s Hebrew Scripture lesson. 

 

Note how this version changes and adapts the earlier one.  The prophet starts by adding the words, “The days are surely coming, says Yahweh, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the House of Israel and the House of Judah.” Then, “In those days and at that time, I will cause a Righteous Branch to spring up for David: and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”  He thus puts hope again into the future, and says we mustn’t lose faith because our hopes for the moment are disappointed.  He adds, “In those days, Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.” And then rather than giving the name of the upcoming king as Jeremiah had done, this later prophet says, “and this is the name by which it [Jerusalem] shall be called, ‘Yahweh is our Righteousness.’” (33:114-16).  Maybe hope can be fulfilled even without the Davidic King.      

 

Today is the First Sunday of the Christian Year, First Advent.  Today’s Collect from the Prayer Book is a summing prayer for all of Advent, to be said each day in daily prayers throughout the season.  It is based on the closing section of Romans.  Paul counsels us to be good, to amend our lives: “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. The night is nearly over; day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Romans 13:8-9). 

 

This idea—that salvation is nearer today than it was yesterday, and the we need to wake up and put on God in preparation—is present in all of today’s readings. 

 

The Gospel is part of Luke’s version of the little Apocalypse found in Mark 14 and Matthew 25.  Jesus here says that scary things will precede the final salvation: “People will faint from fear and foreboding.” Hopes will be dashed and hearts broken.  But, he says, “when these things begin to happen, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  He adds, in the words of Eugene Petersen’s The Message that seem particularly a propos for us in Advent preparing for Christmas: “But be on your guard. Don’t let the sharp edge of your expectation get dulled by parties and drinking and shopping. Otherwise, that Day is going to take you by complete surprise….”  

 

Human beings have been dealing with horror and dashed hopes from the beginning.  The prophets teach us to hope on, regardless.  The promises to David fail; Jeremiah says they will still be fulfilled.  This hope fails, and Jeremiah’s student says it still will be fulfilled.  Prophecy inspires hope, and hope inspires further prophecy.  Help is on its way.  All will be well in the end, and if they are not well, it is not yet the end. 

 

Christians, after the death and resurrection of Jesus, realized that this promised ideal king of the future, this Messiah, was in fact the Galilean rabbi they had followed.  They saw in Jesus the embodiment of all hope, the fulfillment of all the promises.  So when Paul says we should put on Christ as an armor of light, he means the best preparation for the suffering in store, as well as the joy at the end, is thinking about Jesus, following Jesus, trying to show the love of Jesus, praying to Jesus and in Jesus’ name.  All this puts us in a place where God can give us what we need, can protect us like armor, can light for us the darkness all about.  He does not mean that Jesus is some kind of talisman or amulet that magically turns aside tribulation or sorrow.  God is not a magician or some kind of wacky great uncle to grant us our wishes.  Rather, opening our hearts and our minds to Jesus makes sense of what appears to be our meaningless suffering.  And there is no suffering where God cannot help us in some way.   Jesus suffered injustice, abuse, and terrible, painful death.  But God raised him from the dead in glory.  If we share in human suffering with Jesus on our lips and in our hearts, we share in Jesus’ pains, and this means we will share in his joyful glory.  

 

Prayer, reading scripture, thinking on Jesus, and loving service are what we can do to prepare for the trials and pain of life, as well as for life’s joyful culmination.  It is putting on the armor of light that the Advent Collect talks about.   And what gives it all sense is this: our redemption is near, and help is on the way. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Good and Bad Thanks (US Thanksgiving Day)

 

“Good and Bad Thanks”

25 November 2021

U.S. Thanksgiving Day Year B

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

5 p.m Anticipatory Mass

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

Joel 2:21-27; Psalm 126; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Matthew 6:25-33

 

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

 

How in the world did we, good Anglicans that we are, end up celebrating a secular holiday whose core mythos is about God’s blessings to the pilgrims, come to North America seeking religious freedom?  They were not at all for religious freedom, and that was the problem.  Radical puritans seeking separation from the Church of England, they were fleeing from what they saw as wicked persecution by King James I of England, but only so they could enforce their religion on others.   

 

 

In fact, it was their extremism in foisting their religion on others that caused the problems with James.  After the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, he had rejected all but one of the demands of the puritans’ “Millennial Petition” to reform the Church and bring everyone in line with their views—he had learned in Scotland that “no bishops” meant “no kings,” and seen the need for a uniform Prayer Book to guard the comprehensive unity of the Church. The puritans’ extremism and sectarian tribalism was to him a great threat to the peace of the realm, and to the practice of true Christian faith.  

 

 

James and the Stuart Kings who followed him saw the puritans and their more radical separatist comrades “the pilgrims” in the same way that modern moderate Muslims see the Taliban, ISIS, or al-Qaeda:  fanatics bound to do wicked deeds because of their profound lack of compassion for anyone not sharing their exact beliefs.  James did grant them one concession after Hampton Court: a new Bible translation, but he assigned scholars to the project who were averse to Calvinist fanaticism, and he forbade any marginal commentary to avoid the very Calvinist understanding of the Bible they wanted when they asked for a new translation.  Initially, the “King James Bible” was seen as an abomination by the radical protestants, who within two generations, once marginalia were allowed, granted to it the sanctity of the words of God in their original language. 

 

James’ threat to nonconformists rejecting the bishops and prayer book that he would “harry them out of the land, or worse,” was what lead the non-conforming separatists first to Calvinist Holland, which they found far too earthy and pleasure-driven for their tastes, and finally to the wilds of what they were soon calling “New England” on the other side of the world.  This root of radical rejection of moderate traditional Christianity, and bitterness toward any head that wore a miter or a crown, would lead in 50 years to the English Civil wars in which the puritans beheaded Blessed Charles I, and then in 150 years to the New England terrorism of tarring and feathering, torturing and maiming, and sometimes outright murdering, agents of the British crown that provoked such a ham-fisted response by George III that the 3% fire-eating supporters of Sam Adams and the “sons of Liberty” turned into 40% of the colonial population, enough to start a revolution that eventually severed the colonies from the crown.  And those new states, seeking a national mythos, found it in the tale of poor persecuted pilgrims, chosen and blessed by God, coming to an almost uninhabited wilderness and reclaiming it for God and Jesus, and in the process finding prosperity and liberty too.   And, like the Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa 200 years later, they even fulfilled God’s plan, as they saw it, by subjugating people predestined, as they thought, to a subservient status where they could find God and Jesus in their servitude.     

 

The myth was a lie from the first, as most first nations people and enslaved persons and their descendants saw all along.

 

Is it a sin to give thanks for the privilege you enjoy, even when that privilege was obtained through the oppression or extermination of others? 

 

It most definitely is if your thanksgiving is specifically because you are on the winning side and not the losing one.  Like a Jewish male in the 1^st century CE who prayed every morning “Thank God I was not born a woman! Thank God I was not born a goy!” this kind of thanks is actually an act of oppression in itself, and alienates us from God and from our fellow beings. 

 

But if it is an honest expression of gratitude even while acknowledging the sins we have done or that have been done on our behalf, it is a holy act that brings us closer to God and to those we have hurt, intentionally of otherwise.  It is a prophetic and saintly act if the gratitude thus expressed leads us to make amends for our misdoings, make reparations for wrongs of the past, and gives us courage to stand beside those upon whose backs our privilege is based.

 

Thanksgiving as a partisan or tribal shibboleth is poison, and kills the soul. 

 

But Thanksgiving when felt and expressed in solidarity with all our fellow creatures is a great healing medicine.  It drives out fear, resentment, and a sense of shortage and zero-sums.  

 

I am so thankful for all the blessings I enjoy. I hope you are too.  But in the words of Jesus, we must treat others as we would ourselves be treated. 

 

Thanks be to God. 

 

 

 

Our Hope and Our Fear (Christ the King Sunday)

 

Our Hope and Our Fear

Sunday Last before Advent, the Solemnity of Christ the King (Year C)
21 November 2021—8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Said Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

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

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

 Our Hope and Our Fear (16:00-30:00)

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial and verdict has troubled most of us, if for different reasons.  Those who welcomed the verdict thought that the case never should have been brought to trial; those who found the verdict appalling saw it as one more nail in the coffin of any belief that the U.S. is a just society.  

 

 

 

Fr. Robert Hendrickson, a friend and sibling member of the Society of Catholic Priests, expressed well how I personally feel about the matter:  “Sadly, it is possible for something to be correct on the letter of the law and still morally and ethically repugnant. We see things that are legal every day that are abhorrent. From Pontius Pilate to our justice system today we know that a verdict, action, or case can be within the letter of the law and utterly outside the bounds of decency and ethics. This is one reason why Saint Thomas Aquinas still speaks to us today with his famous"Lex malla, lex nulla" (an evil law is no law). This is why Christians have never rested their hope in human laws, systems, or politics. Slavery and so many other institutions of human depravity have been completely legal — and absolutely outside God’s law.  Claims that this is a Christian nation are put to the lie every day. Today is no different. We will find our Christian nation in the Kingdom alone. Our task is to find ways to bring some portion of that great peace, justice, and mercy to our own day and time as we await the judgment to come. May the souls of those who were killed find rest and may justice roll down.”  These as appropriate thoughts on this, Christ the King Sunday, called by some by the inclusive/expansive “Reign of Christ Sunday.” 

 

 

 

Another colleague, the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, wrote that Pius XI established the feast in 1925 in an effort to turn back the growing power of the Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy, and totalitarians world-wide.  She wishes us, therefore, “Happy Antifa Sunday.” 

 

The image of Christ as King does not really speak to us Americans. We live in a republic that gave up on kings 250 years ago. We tend to belittle the very idea, except perhaps for vicarious royal-watching titillation in viewing such programs as The Crown.  So it is hard perhaps to see how connected this theological concept is to the Christian desire to have justice and compassion expressed in our political and legal institutions. 

 

 

 

I once met a king.  When I was living in Africa, I was honored for my work with villages and traditional leaders.  Together with Roman Catholic priest and sustainable farming advocate Father Godfrey Nzamujo, I was named an honorary prince of the Yoruba Kingdom of Kétou.  Within the larger context of the Beninese and Nigerian states, the kingdom is ruled by a hereditary ruler, a King called the Oba.  I have to confess—I was nervous, since the ceremony was partly religious and the closest thing to a state church there is what we in the West dismissively and ignorantly call “Voodoo.”  My staff at the American Cultural Center was excited to have their boss thus honored, and told me to obey exactly any instructions from the King or his ministers.  They assured me that we would not be asked to do anything dangerous, immoral, or compromising our Christian faith.  

 

Fr. Nzamujo and I were received at the palace of the Oba unceremoniously ushered into the basement while dancers and singers performed for the assembled crowds in the palace courtyard.  Three elderly women looked us carefully up and down, and left.  Then the King’s chamberlain evenly commanded, “Mettez-vous à poil (strip naked).”  We proceeded to do so under the watchful eyes of the king’s security guards.

 

We then waited together in the dark naked for a few minutes, feeling vulnerable and a little silly, until the chamberlain returned.   He looked harshly at us, and had his assistants produce three items in sequence. “This is water from the Oba’s well.  Let him quench your thirst if you are to become his sons.”  We drank deeply from the gourd.  “This is manioc from the Oba’s table.  Let him satisfy your hunger if you are to become his sons.”  We ate the gray paste.  And finally, “These are ashes from the King’s pipe.  Enjoy his leftovers and taste bitterness with him if you are to be his sons.”    We tasted the ashes.  Then, producing a small bowl of palm oil, he had a vodun priest anoint us as he translated the Yoruba chanting into French for us: “I anoint your brow that you may think as the King thinks, your eyes that you may see with his eyes, your arms that you may defend him and his people, your legs that you may always hurry to heed his call.”  Then he clothed us with exquisite royal robes and hats, hemmed to our exact bodily dimensions in the minutes while we waited in the darkness.  The elderly women who had scanned us were expert tailors.  We then were ushered up a stairway into the bright light of the tropical courtyard.  We were told to approach the Oba, who then took a full mouthful of gin and sprayed it over us as the priest said, “You are my sons, princes of Kétou.” 

 

After a lengthy public ceremony, we were handed plastic bags containing our original clothes and escorted back to our car.   I didn’t really realize how much all of this meant to the Yoruba until what happened next:  On the long drive back to the city, we stopped to have a late lunch at a roadside restaurant.  Not having the chance to change back into our western clothes, we were both in the royal robes as we walked from our car. A group of 20 or so market women came around a corner and, when the saw us in our robes marking us as royalty, they all, in a second, fell prostrate before us, faces in the dirt.  They remained motionless until we had passed and entered the restaurant. 

 

This experience taught me that a king is the object of love, awe and fear.  He embodies the well-being or woes of his people, and is responsible for them.  The “divine right of Kings” is not simply an effective propaganda tool to enforce hierarchy on possibly restive subjects.  It expresses a faith of an earlier age: a king reflects in some way—however dim—God’s relationship to us, just as a parent, a shepherd, or a trusted teacher.

 

God in the Bible is often described as a King, and even the “King of Kings.”  The Royal Psalms describe the King of Israel “Son of God.”

 

The core idea here is not hierarchy, authority from top down, or rule for the sake of the ruler.  Rather, it is the responsibility that comes from being chosen: the Monarch is first in battle to defend the people, and last in retreat from an attack on them.

 

The fact that royals so often fall far from this ideal is the reason that the Deuteronomistic History in the Hebrew Bible also includes an anti-royal tradition.  In it, God, the only true king of Israel, reluctantly allows the people to set up kings like Saul, David, and Solomon.  This is a defection from God’s true plan, a concession to God’s people, who want to “be like the nations round about us.”   These very passages were used by the Puritans—including one of my ancestors—during the English Civil War to justify their murder of the Blessed Royal Martyr, King Charles I, and later, by the Revolutionaries in the North American colonies to justify rebellion and sedition against King George III. 

 

So why should we, good citizens of a Republic, celebrate Christ as King?

 

If we change the question slightly, the reason becomes clear. Why we do not celebrate Christ the President, Christ the CEO, or Christ the Celebrity?  Leaders chosen because of popularity or achievement may make sense, but most certainly might not be leaders who give us what we need rather than what we want or merely find attractive. 

 

The heart of the matter is found in the very story in John’s Gospel where Jesus empowers his followers, and calls them friends rather than slaves.  In that most anti-hierarchical of passages, Jesus puts it plainly: “It was I who chose you, not you who chose me.” 

 

In our marketplace of goods and ideas, we tend to have a consumer’s approach to things. But being attracted to an idea does not make it true.  Choosing leaders because they or their program strike our fancy is no guarantee that they will lead us where we need to go.  In fact, the very individualistic egotism and partisanship of such an approach almost guarantee the opposite.

 

Again, in John’s Gospel, Jesus meets initial success.  Large crowds follow him, intrigued by his signs of power and his teaching.  But when he gives the bread of life discourse. Immediately, large numbers desert him.  Not liking his message, they vote with their feet, withhold their pledges, and find another teacher more to their liking.  Jesus asks the Twelve if they are going to leave too, and Peter replies, “Lord, and just where would we go?  You are the one who has the words of eternal life.   We have come to trust and know that you are God’s Holy One.” (John 6:60-69) 

The Roman Catholic catechism defines faith as “trusting and believing in what God reveals because of the authority of the revealing God.”   Submission to a higher power, to an authority, is a key part of faith.  Simply agreeing with God’s word because it pleases us is not faith.  It is consumer choice.  It cannot transform us because it can take us only as far as we already have gone.  It may at times demand support, but this is simply an appeal for funds based on the logic that you may want to continue to have your ears pleased and your fancy tickled.   In such an approach, it is we who choose Jesus, not Jesus who chooses us.   This is boutique religion, not a living Christian faith able to save us from ourselves. 

 

Christ as king means we have a personal loyalty and devotion to him.  As the personal embodiment of God’s love, responsibility, awe- or fear-inspiring power, we admit he has chosen us, and not we him.  On this last Sunday of the Church year when we will be gathering in our offerings and pledges to Christ and the Kingdom for the next year, let us remember that Christ is King. 

 

In the name of that King, Our Christ, Amen.