On the Way: December 2012

30 December 2012

God With Us

Matthew 1: 18-25 & Colossians 3: 12-17

First Sunday After Christmas Day/ 30^th December 2012

Emmanuel. God is with us. The heart of the Christmas message. This is what theologians since the early church have referred to as the doctrine of the incarnation. John’s Gospel is most explicit, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…full of grace and truth.” And the Word – the eternal divine Logos or Word, the creative language of the universe that is God – became flesh and lived among us, literally, “tabernacled” among us; or, to put it another way, with the birth of Jesus, “God pitched a tent” with us and invited us to live under it with God (John 1:1-5, 14).

Matthew’s Gospel makes a similar claim using different language. Instead of appealing to Greek Logos philosophy as a way to make sense of Jesus’ birth, Matthew, writing primarily for a Jewish audience, drew upon Israel’s past, delved into the Hebrew scriptures and lifted up Isaiah’s promise that a young maiden shall conceive and bear a son and they shall name him Emmanuel,” meaning “God is with us.” This is the staggering, mind-blowing claim we celebrate and affirm this time of the year. God with us.

On Christmas Eve last week, at the Candlelight Service, I built the meditation around a quote from E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End (1910), to express the core theme of the Gospel. “Only connect.” Forster (1879-1970) writes of the character, Margaret, “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect…”

He, she, is talking about writing here, connecting prose and passion, but this wisdom speaks beyond the world of writing. Words and emotions, bring them together and both will be exalted. Bring them together and love will be seen at its height. Enflesh the words with passion, with emotions, thought, purpose, and love will be embodied. In many ways, this is what Christmas, the incarnation are all about, connecting prose and passion.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Word embodied in human action, in a human life. Bring them together and love will be seen at its height. The birth of Jesus the Messiah, Emmanuel, God with us, is the fullest expression of this truth – that God wants to connect with us and we really want to connect with God because we were created this way. It’s all about connection. This is the root and true meaning of the word religion. It doesn’t mean being holy or following religious practices, it has little to do with belief. Religion, from the Latin religare means, to make a connection. Our words ligament and ligature come from the same root. Religare. It’s all about connection – God connecting with humanity, humanity connecting with God, human to human, person to person, connecting with the depths of the self, connecting with creation, with the cosmos itself. As Einstein (1879-1955) showed us, this entire universe – at every level, from the micro to the macro, including the properties of light – is all based on connections, relationships, making those links and realizing how we’re all connected.

And God is tireless in making these connections with us and to us and for us. Incarnation. God taking on flesh in Jesus reveals to us something of what matters to God – God comes down and God comes in, God comes down and God gets close to us, takes up time and space, shares time and space with us, coming not as an idea or philosophy or a disembodied spirit, but as a person and a person has and is a body, with a face. We have to dispel the notion that Christian experience is something essentially “spiritual.” It’s more than that; it’s an embodied experience.

This is really an extraordinary claim if you think about it. If you take this image of God born in a manger and let it dwell in you, let it sink down into your body, allow it to become enfleshed in your life, it will shape how you see yourself and your neighbor and the world around you. The doctrine of the incarnation is almost too much for our minds to take in, but if we had embraced it, if we had allowed its images to shape us, the history of the Church would have been very different. I believe that if we embrace this image, allow its images to shape us, the future of the Church will be very different.

The theologies we hold – or that hold us – always have consequences. Here are several implications of an incarnational theology.

· That God would act in this way, affirms that God loves time and space, the birth of Christ means that God makes times and space for us.

· It affirms the gift that is our humanity. Yes, we are fallen and broken by sin, but the birth of Jesus means that he has shared our humanity with us. Yes, to redeem it, by showing us what a human being really looks like, what it means to be human, how to love as a human, how to suffer and die as a human, how to be relationship with God.

· The incarnation affirms the value of embodiment; that bodies matter, it matters how we use them and care for them. Embodiment includes the affirmation of emotions and feelings, as well as thought. The Church’s centuries old, anguished frustration with sexuality would have been very different if we did a better job affirming the Incarnation. We can embrace all aspects of our humanity. I also think we would have been healthier as a people, emotionally, psychologically, if we welcomed and embraced emotions and feelings, along with beliefs and ideas and thoughts about God.

· The incarnation also affirms the goodness of this creation; that God would become part of creation. The Creator takes up creation and incorporates it into Godself. If we really embraced this aspect of the incarnation, we would honor and care for this earthly body. If we had, I wonder if we would be facing climate change and the destruction of the environment today.

· The incarnation affirms the gift of history, that God wants to enters time and space embodied, which means that God cares deeply, passionate about how we live in time and space, about justice, about reform. We’re more than just a passin’ through this weary world on the way to heaven, this world matters to God. Heaven and earth need to connect.

· Theologian Wendy Farley puts it this way: “The incarnation is the sign for Christians of the joining of heaven and earth, of Divinity and humanity. We are all embraced by that glorious ‘oneing’ as Julian of Norwich [1342-c.1416) put it. …The incarnation is the unspeakable joyousness that we dwell in at the intersection of Divinity and humanity.”[1]

God with us, enfleshed in Jesus Christ. These are the staggering claims we affirm as Christians. And yet, as Christians and as the Church have yet to fully embody what this means for us over these 2000 years. This is the ongoing work of the Spirit; the Spirit’s task is to embody the truth in us. The enfleshment, the dwelling of God with us continues in us through the power of the Holy Spirit, when we let, as Colossians puts it, “the peace of Christ rule in [our] hearts” (Col. 3:15). The writer of Colossians, heavily influenced by Paul, affirmed the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, who is at work in our hearts and the world, continually engaging, connecting, embodying, enfleshing God’s redemptive love in our lives, in our souls. This is the Gospel: God is with us – not was with us or will be with us – in Christ, Emmanuel, God is with us – now and now and now, in this moment and the next and the next. Forever and ever; Amen!

[1] Wendy Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away: A Theology of Incarnation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 17, 14. Theologian Mark Jordan argues, “the history of Christian theology can be seen as a long flight from the full consequences of its central profession. The big business of theology has been to construct alternate bodies for Jesus the Christ – tidier bodies, bodies better conformed to institutional needs. I think of these artificial bodies as Jesus’ corpses, and I consider large parts of official Christology as their mortuary” (cited in Farley, 35).

26 December 2012

Only Connect

A Meditation for Christmas Eve 2012

“Only connect.” The final thought of E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910). “Only connect.” Forster (1879-1970) writes of the character, Margaret, “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect…”

Forster’s words have been swimming around in my head leading up to tonight. They’re never far away from me. He, she, is talking about writing here, connecting prose and passion, but this wisdom speaks beyond the world of writing. Words and emotions, bring them together and both will be exalted. Bring them together and love will be seen at its height. Enflesh the words with passion, with emotions, thought, purpose, and love will be embodied. In many ways, this is what tonight is all about, connecting prose and passion.

In a few minutes we will hear the majestic opening of John’s Gospel, one of the most profound expressions of the Incarnation in scripture; it’s why we’re here this evening. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God. All things came into being through him…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-3, 14). Word embodied in human action, in a human life. Bring them together and love will be seen at its height.

The birth of Jesus the Messiah, Emmanuel, God with us, is the fullest expression of this truth – that God wants to connect with us and we really want to connect with God. It’s all about connection. This is the root and true meaning of the word religion. It doesn’t mean being holy or following religious practices, it has little to do with belief. Religion, from the Latin religare means, to make a connection. Our words ligament and ligature come from the same root. Religare. It’s all about connection – God connecting with humanity, humanity connecting with God, human to human, person to person, connecting with the depths of the self, connecting with creation, with the cosmos itself. As Einstein (1879-1955) showed us, this entire universe – at every level, from the micro to the macro, including the properties of light – is all based on connections, relationships, making those links and realizing how we’re all connected.

It’s really this simple and profound at the same time. This is the message. This is the story; the story in its simplest form. And the One who connects with us is Love itself, Love with a face. And because it is Love it’s untiring, it never gives up on us, never gives up in searching for us, reaching for us, desiring us.

And we never tire in needing to hear it again and again, to know it, to feel it, to encounter this Love – because at some level we don’t really believe it or trust it. It’s too simple. It’s too good to be true. For the truth is that there’s so much at work in our hearts and in the world, in the brokenness of the world that works against this, that disconnects. The plight of the human condition is rooted in the fact that we’re often disconnected from God, from others, from ourselves, from creation.

But sometimes there are truths so good not to be true, so good they have to be true – like snow falling on Christmas Eve.

I intentionally placed the anthem – Carol to Joy – before the sermon tonight and before we sing the carol Joy to the World after the sermon. For the upbeat message that Joy to the World proclaims, what we celebrate this night, must speak directly to the world as it is, especially the events of this dark December; Joy to the World cannot be detached from the world, the world reflected in the pathos and poignancy of that haunting anthem. Joy to the World must connect to a fallen world, to a fearful world, to a friendless world, to a world burdened and bound, to deep, dark valleys absent of light, for the lonely, the laden, the forlorn. To such a world a Savior has come. “For to you is the song” – to you and me. To you and you and you. For you is pardon. For you, healing and reconciliation. Look up sad hearted.[1] To you is the song of songs, sung by angels, sung by the cosmic hum of the universe that God is with us and we are with God, God is in us and we are in God – and nothing, nothing, nothing! – in all of creation can separate us from the bond of that love. Humanity absorbed by divinity, divinity dwelling with humanity, enfleshing our lives with grace.

The world needs us this night. God needs us to live in fragments no more. Only connect. And the Word became flesh and lived among us. Always and forever. That is our joy. To you is the song!

[1]I’m intentionally building here off of Eileen Berry’s lyrics in Dan Forrest’s Carol of Joy (2007, Beckenhost Press). The full text maybe be found here.

23 December 2012

Awake & Astonished: IV. Astounded - An Advent Series

Annunciation, attr. Melozzo da Forli
(c.1438-1494), Pantheon, Rome
(Photo: K. E. Kovacs.)

Micah 5: 2-5 & Luke 1:39-55

Fourth Sunday of Advent/ December 23, 2012

The word “astounded” has it roots in the Latin extonare, meaning to “strike with thunder.” Early forms of the word appeared in fifteenth century English, meaning “stunned” or “astonished.” Struck. Stunned. Astounded. That’s how Mary must have felt when she learned that she would bear the Savior of the world. The inbreaking of God’s saving presence is often an experience of being stunned by grace; these experiences come upon us. They surprise and maybe startle us, but they also have the capacity to offer hope and liberation and the promise of a new day. That’s what Christ’s birth can mean for us when we, like Mary, are open to being struck by God’s Spirit and risk being astounded. But are we open? Are we awake?

The parents, teachers, and citizens of Newtown, Connecticut – indeed the nation – know something of the meaning of this word, astounded. They, we, have been struck, stunned, even traumatized by this horrific event. It is too much for us to bear, too much to take in. To be struck, stunned, astounded in this way, with the inbreaking of this news, to undergo that kind of experience, that kind of suffering and loss, has a way of causing us, almost inevitably, to shut down and close ourselves off, maybe drift off to sleep or enter a kind of catatonic state in which we walk around with our eyes wide open, but really asleep inside.

A lot of pastors and theologians this past week have responded to the massacre in Newtown, online, on the television, in sermons around the world. An event like this raises all kinds of questions for everyone about faith, providence, and evil. Some are grateful for their faith in such a time, for others that faith is being sorely tested, for others still it only confirms their atheistic stance in the world. Coming during this season of peace, goodwill, and joy, it’s especially difficult for many. Some in Newtown, CT, I’m told have taken down their Christmas decorations because they feel it’s inappropriate. We can certainly understand such a response for those who have and are experiencing loss at Christmas. Tragedy at this time of year has a way of putting the meaning of Christmas and the nature of one’s faith into sharp relief.

I must say, there have been a lot of thoughtless responses coming from pastors and religious leaders with high visibility, who embarrass me as a fellow-Christian, expounding really questionable, even destructive theologies. And we wonder why people are leaving the Church. Some are reacting too quickly with reasons and answers and lessons learned. Feelings are still too raw to speak intelligently. One of the more thoughtful, pastoral, responses I read this week came from the Franciscan Father Richard Rohr. I have a lot of respect for Rohr. He’s very wise. He said, “…the very point of faith must be: ‘How do you keep your heart open in hell?’ How do you keep trusting? How do you keep any kind of happy, rejoicing faith when so much of life is, frankly, disappointing, tragic, absurd, evil, wrong?” This is the immediate issue before us. “The heart just keeps being assaulted. And as many people get older the heart closes down.”

The composer of the hymn we just sang, “Sleepers, Wake! A Voice Astounds Us,” had every reason to stay sleeping. He had every reason to give up on hope. He had every reason to shut down his emotions and close off his heart. He had every reason to not trust in the future. Philipp Nicolai (1556-1608) was a Protestant pastor in Unna, Westphalia (Germany). In the sweltering July of 1597, plague arrived in Unna. An initial 300 people died. Over the next six months 1000 inhabitants perished. Pastor Nicolai’s home “overlooked the graveyard where some two dozen burials took place on a single day. During one particularly virulent week approaching the Advent season of 1597, Nicolai conducted funerals for 170 of his parishioners.” As a pastor, the mind boggles trying to comprehend that, how the human spirit can endure that, stay open, and not shut down. And yet, as a testimony to his faith during this time, he wrote a book of meditations to be published after his death. He entitled the book, Freudenspiegel – Mirror of Joy. The hymn text, “Sleepers, Wake,” was one of two poems included in the work.[1]

We studied the hymn text this morning during adult ed, but one thing to lift up here for us is that Nicolai had this deep trust and confidence in God’s presence in and through the trials of his life. He looked with confidence toward the life to come with God where they would “need no light, no lamp, nor sun,For Christ will be their All!” (Rev. 224). He also looked toward the future when Christ would return, his second Advent.

The Christian’s orientation is always toward the future. We lean into the future. For the person of faith, history is never destiny. God’s future breaks the chains of the past, loosing its hold on us. The present is never definitive of what can be and cannot predict the future, because we don’t know what will be. But what we do know is that God will be there before us and we wait for that new day to come. This is the reason for our joyful hope, this is the reason for joy.

This forward-leaning orientation is there all over the prophets. It’s there in Micah: “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,…from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel.” He points to the time when Israel in exile in Babylon when a young child will lead them home, back to Jerusalem – so watchmen on the walls of the city, look, wake up, be prepared for the people of God on the way home. “And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.” That day is coming – a forward-leaning orientation.

Mary had it too. It was the song of her heart. Magnificat! “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” In the midst of her suffering, a poor women in an occupied country, she was confident that God was about to birth something new, she would bear the presence of God in the world. She saw in him a future promised to Israel. His birth is a foretaste of that future when prideful hearts will be scattered and the mighty brought down and the lowly lifted up; when the hungry will be fed not with scraps and leftovers but filled with good things, and the rich sulking away with their wealth feeling empty, and he will be a child of mercy. She is laboring toward that new world about to be born through her.

That’s what Christ’s birth can mean for us when we, like Mary, are open to being struck by God’s Spirit and risk being astounded by the new world Christ is trying to birth through you and me. But are we open? Are we awake? Are we leaning into that future with joyful hope?

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), the playwright, poet, dissident under Communist rule and later president of the Czech Republic, said, “Hope is a condition of the soul, not a response to circumstances.” Hope is not he same as optimism.

I think Havel is right. Hope is a condition of the soul. It comes from a place deep within us that has been shaped and formed by the tragic forces of the world, nevertheless tempered by a confidence in the power of God to act in a liberating, loving, transforming way. Hope is God's Nevertheless! Hope has little to do with what “makes sense.” For what really makes sense in this world? For Israel’s prophets, hope was a condition of the soul. For Mary, hope was the song of her soul. For people like Philipp Nicolai, only a certain condition of the soul can withstand such suffering. For us, our hope, too, is a condition of the soul, which allows us to stay open to possibilities beyond what the present moment might suggest. There’s so much in this world that wants to shut us down, close us off, lull us to sleep.

The world needs us; indeed, God needs us – and all people of faith – to be awake and open, with open hearts, even open in hell. When hearts are open, like Mary, we can be receptive to the new thing God is doing in the world; open to the new thing God is birthing in us and through us. And then we, too, will be struck, and stunned, and astounded by the grace of God that is still at work in the world, whose message to the shepherds is given to all of us who are far afield, “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Luke 2: 10). That is always our hope.

[1] Mary Louise Bringle, “People, Look East: A Study of Advent Hymns,” (Session 4), www.TheThoughtfulChristian.com.

17 December 2012

Awake & Astonished: III. The Birth of Dawn - An Advent Series

Isaiah 60:1-5; Revelation 22:16-17, 20; John 1: 1-5

Third Sunday of Advent/ 16^th December 2012

Last week we looked at texts that spoke of darkness and shadow, of God’s light shining in the darkness. Last week I asked us to sit with the darkness, embrace it; see what it can teach us. A tall order, I know; tougher today after this past week with the shooting at a mall outside Portland, Oregon, and the horrific shooting on Friday morning in Newtown, Connecticut. Isaiah’s text speaks to such a moment, moments when darkness covers the people. That’s how it felt on Friday and maybe today, overcome by a pall of darkness and grief in this season of light, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking pain, anger, sorrow for those innocents, their parents, for the teachers, the people of that community, for the family of the gunman, for the first responders, counselors, rabbis, priests, ministers.

What does one say? Where is God? What right to we have to talk about light and hope? For some, but not for everyone, not for all.

It’s not all darkness, to be sure. But sometimes when we’re in dark places it’s exceptionally difficult to find the light and so we must wait and hope. We have to take the darkness seriously or else we become its victims. For the light to shine in the darkness, maybe especially there, we have to hope and wait and earnestly look for it. Our waiting is not in vain. Scripture has shown us time and again, in the darkness a new light will dawn. That’s what Isaiah held out for Israel. Last week, we heard Zechariah say, “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:78-79). At the end of Revelation we find Jesus saying, “I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star” (Rev. 22:16). And in John’s Gospel we have some of the most profound verses in the Bible, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (Jn. 1:4-5). He is “the true light, which enlightens everyone,” who has come into the world (Jn. 1:9).

In this sense, Jesus is like the sun that rises in the East, who grants us a new day. The Latin word for “dawn,” for the rising, or morning, sun, is oriens; the name given to the direction from which it rises: the East, or the Orient. We are "oriented" when we face or point toward the East. The noun oriens is formed on the verb orior: meaning rise or become visible. By extension, the verb means "growing" or "springing forth," "origination,” coming into being and birth.[1]

When Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965) wrote the carol “People, Look East” (which we studied this morning in adult education and sang in worship), she drew upon these texts that refer to Jesus as the birth of dawn, a new day springs forth and grows in him and us.[2] In her hymn, “Morning Has Broken,” she’s saying something similar.

People, look east. The time is near

Of the crowning of the year.

Make your house fair as you are able,

Trim the hearth and set the table.