As we transition into the advent season, I find myself full of gratitude and grief for the hidden things — the emotions, experiences, remembrances, and hopes that are invisibly working and growing inside myself.
I am grateful for the rhythms and rituals of the season. Many of my rituals are familiar across the country: a Thanksgiving meal with gathered friends, a trip outside the city to fuss over finding the perfect Christmas tree, crafting perfectly chosen (though less-than-perfectly made) gifts.
These weeks in anticipation of Christmas remind me of how embodied my life is, remind me that my most meaningful experiences are my most physical ones. The texture of a certain sweater; the scent of pine in the living room; the taste of white peppermint mochas in vibrant red cups. The concepts of the holiday season are hidden things — joy, charity, patience, faith. And these virtues only become invisibly manifest in my inner experience through their cultivation expressed in the tangible.
I forget that too quickly.
It’s been strung-together months of having forgotten to remember that my body needs to be inhabited in order for my heart to be warmed. Which underlies a lot of the grief I mentioned earlier; I have been in a season of depression. Depression is another hidden thing, an experience that is real and powerful despite being invisible.
It seems to me that, whereas the warming hidden things are cultivated by embodiment, my depression is cultivated by disembodiment. By overly-indwelling the intellect, by seeking an orienting goal for my vocational pursuits, by getting lost in explorations through possible futures.
I’ve been thinking a lot, this week, about Mary. I find it comforting that Mary must have also felt this tension between gratitude and grief. Even as she felt her fiancee withdraw from the promise of marriage, even as she wondered how she would provide for herself and her child if abandoned, even as she encountered the stigma of a pregnancy out of wedlock, even as her family (I imagine) shamed or shunned her — in the midst of these griefs, God was becoming flesh in her womb, God was becoming flesh from her own flesh.
My body follows the rituals and rhythms. My body is faithful to the actions I associate with advent, in hope that such faithfulness might cultivate some of the hidden virtues and lessen my hidden sorrow.
Though, if my past is any indication of my future, I will likely always have at least some measure of that sorrow with me. But if Mary felt this grief-gratitude tension as I do, then Mary is already with me, even as her womb works in the early stages of the process to bring God with us.
In the Middle East, it’s hot. Which means decomposition sets in quick, and the stench of that rotting process is heavy in the air. So if I had been four days in a tomb, in the heat — essentially the tomb becomes a warmed oven — I think I would have been too ashamed to come out.
And on top of that, there’s the problem of the bindings. The text describes how “his hands and feet were bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth.” In the burial customs of the time, strips of cloth were tightly wound around the body — they bound the jaw closed, the feet together, and the hands to the side of the body. Which means that even after the shock of finding himself alive in his tomb, Lazarus is faced with the problem of exiting the tomb. He cannot walk with his feet bound together. He cannot even crawl with his hands tied to his side. The text doesn’t describe what must have been Lazarus’s struggling exit from the tomb; we can only imagine the movements of rolling and shuffling and squirming that must have taken him from the darkness to the light.
I would have stayed in the tomb. It would be less painful to stay dead than to suffer the humiliation of exiting on my belly and the shame of exposing the community to the stench of my death.
And that’s not to mention life after the tomb. In a culture where the dead are considered unclean, untouchable — where does an undead person go? what does he do? who will be near him, eat with him, care for him?
In commanding “Lazarus, come out!” — rather than going in, gathering up Lazarus in his arms, and carrying him out like a fireman making a rescue — in commanding Lazarus to come out, Jesus is asking a lot of his beloved friend. Jesus asks for Lazarus’s struggle and his exposure. Jesus asks for him to risk living with social stigma. Jesus asks for his full participation.
I would have stayed in the tomb.
Unless, perhaps, it becomes too painful to stay in the tomb any longer. I think we all reach this point, in different ways, at various moments of our life.
Perhaps it’s physical — our body is in pain or we suffer an addiction, and we know we can no longer keep living the way we have been, that our lifestyle habits have become a kind of tomb that we must leave in order to have real life.
Perhaps it’s relational — something about the person I become when I’m with this other person has turned my home into a kind of tomb, has bound me up in some way that I no longer feel like I have agency, and I need to crawl to someone who can unbind me.
Perhaps it’s societal, living in a system that bends toward injustice and it even though it will be really difficult to get out, staying in the tomb, staying with the way things are, is just no longer an option.
Jesus did not prevent his friend from dying. Mary and the Jews have a point: If Jesus had been there, Lazarus would not have died. So it seems that Jesus did not come to rescue us from going through difficulties.
And on the other side of death, at the tomb, at this scene: Jesus does does not rush into the tomb to deliver Lazarus out like a fireman rushing into a building burning. Rather, Jesus invites Lazarus to participate in his own salvation. Having done what he could do in raising Lazarus to life, Jesus expects Lazarus to do what he could do by making his way out of the tomb.
It’s when each of us is in a place of death — of pain and suffering and stench and shame — it’s when we feel trapped and bound and unable to act — it’s in death that Jesus offers the possibility of new life. Jesus calls to us. He calls to us: Come out! He invites us: Come out! He offers us hope that there is new life waiting to be had. Come out!
Jesus looks at something dead and see it as full of potential for life. Jesus looks at a corpse in a dark tomb and invites a living body into the light. Jesus looks at his beloved one and shows that death does not have to be the end of the story.
Having done what he can do in inviting us to new life, Jesus expects us to do what we can do to in our own movement and struggle out of our tombs.
In case you missed it, last week The Seattle School posted this piece I wrote on story and theology. Head over there to read it in honor of Theological Libraries Month!
A young girl rolls in the cool fountain water some distance from where our feet dabble. She calls over to us: “What does God look like?”
Her mom smiles and whispers to me, “She likes the light and easy questions lately.”
“Mom! What does God look like?” the daughter insists.
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Do you know?” her sincere eyes turn to me.
Well… God looks a little bit like your mom. And God looks a little bit like those ballerinas practicing in the grass. And a little bit like that man playing the saxophone. And a little bit like each person walking by and driving by. God looks a little bit like me. God looks a little bit like you.
I want to say that, but I hesitate, attempting to gauge what the mother’s reaction might be, and before I can resolve to risk it, the mother answers her again: “No one knows. God can’t be seen.”
The mother and I look to the girl, the girl looks down into the rippling water, and the moment is gone — but for the whisper in my head: Everyone who has eyes to see knows just what God looks like.
This sermon was written for St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, Washington. The lectionary texts included Ezekiel 17:22-24 and Mark 4:26-34.
Perhaps you’ve seen photos of people standing beneath mustard shrubs that are twenty, sometimes thirty, feet high. The shrubs are larger than some trees, looming over the people standing beneath, who smile in its shade. Sometimes the people beneath hold a single mustard seed between two fingers as they stand in the shade, grin at the camera, their smile saying: This tree started with a tiny seed like this one! The contrast is remarkable — the seed so small, and the plant it produces so exceptionally large! Offering rest and respite for the birds is nothing — these trees offer shelter to entire families of picnicking people.
The kingdom of God can perhaps be said to be like that type of growth. Perhaps the kingdom of God is like the movement from something small to something towering, a movement that is ever-upward into strength.
The photographed mustard trees, the way their power and might is glorified — we can liken the way we see them to the way the prophets of Israel viewed the cedars. Cedars are massive trees; they can easily grow up to 120 feet tall, some as high as 180 feet. They are symbols of nobility, power, and strength.
The prophet Ezekiel, whose words we heard this morning, whose words Jesus likely memorized as a boy, Ezekiel spoke of cedars as a metaphor for the kingdom of God; the people of Israel are birds who rest among its branches. From Ezekiel we heard:
Thus says the Lord God: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain, in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind. All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord.
The kingdom, in this text, is a cedar that God’s own self has planted, and under it the birds of the air will make their nests, the people of Israel will live comfortably.
+ + +
A few weeks ago, I went to the West Seattle nursery to pick out bushes for my front yard. While pawing and searching through the various adolescent fruit shrubs available for purchase, I came upon, for sale, a young blackberry bush.
I was bewildered. Blackberries are an invasive species in Seattle — a delectable invasive species, don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining, I love a good blackberry pie or blackberry crumble or blackberries in my morning yogurt, or blackberry jam…. I mean, I love them, but they’re essentially a very delicious weed.
They’re everywhere in this city. Right now, they’re in bloom — you’ve seen them, those thorny branches with the little white flowers. You see them in parks and by the highway and around parking lots and pretty much anywhere that has some spare soil. You probably passed some this morning on your way here, they’re that pervasive.
To use my own home as an example, if I’m looking to grab a fresh snack, I can walk ten feet west or twenty feet east and have a heaping bowl of blackberries. Not even like a personal size soup bowl, but like a mixing bowl, the biggest one I have. They’re abundant.
And those are just the ones I can reach without personal harm to my skin — there are even more on the inner parts of the shrub, places that only birds of the air can reach.
And yet there I was, in the confines of a nursery, I round the corner and here’s a potted, adolescent blackberry bush. Yours to own for $19.99 + tax. Who in their right mind would pay for a blackberry bush when they’re so abundant? And what’s more — who would plant something that’s essentially a delicious weed that will take over every corner of your yard?
+ + +
With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what metaphor can we use for it? The kingdom of God is like a blackberry seed that becomes the greatest of all shrubs and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.
+ + +
We don’t hear this as a majestic image, not compared to the 30-foot mustard plant. And yet… I’ve also seen photos of blackberry bushes that loom over people; like their mustard counterparts, these blackberry trees are exceptional. But hear that I mean that literally — the giant mustard plants and blackberry plants are exceptional; they are the exception. They are the tenacious seeds met with the perfect conditions of the proper amount of sun, the proper amount of shade, the proper amount of water, good growing temperatures and seasonal conditions, the appropriate type of soil. A lack of natural disasters. The vast, vast majority of mustard plants grow about 3 to 6 feet high.
Jesus used the same image as Ezekiel of nesting birds, the image of birds nesting in the shade of a plant that represents God’s kingdom. I suspect he knew what he was doing. I doubt it was a slip of the tongue that made him say “mustard seed” instead of “cedar sprig.”
So I don’t think he was going for an image of greatness. I don’t know that Jesus understands the kingdom of God to be about imposing displays of power or appearing impressive. I don’t know that he’s interested in the most powerful systems — the skyscrapers of big banking, the multi-billion dollar cosmetics industries, the most impressive job titles, the biggest weapons, the best stuff.
I’m not at all sure that Jesus is interested in a kingdom like a cedar. I’m not sure he’s interested in securing a nest for himself in a high-up bough. I’m not sure Jesus is interested in simply appearing impressive.
No, Jesus doesn’t use the image of the cedar tree. He uses the image of a mustard seed the unexceptional mustard seed. If Jesus were a Seattleite, I imagine he might use the image of the unexceptional blackberry seed. A common seed that will grow into a common plant, the type that grows waist-high and itself produces more seeds that produce other plants that grow waist-high and produce seeds that eventually take over a garden, and some time later they take over the city, and surrounding fields, and a generation after that, they’ve filled every bit of available soil from the Olympics to the Cascades. Without our having to do anything, these plants grow and spread and can’t be stopped.
The greatness of a cedar is in its height; yet a cedar can easily be cut down. The greatness of blackberry bushes is in their explosive, horizontal growth. As anyone who has ever tried to keep blackberries from their yard can tell you, they aren’t easily defeated. Blackberry bushes only appear less powerful than a cedar; precisely because they are low to the ground and their power is decentralized, they’re just about unbeatable.
+ + +
The Kingdom of God is among you. Will you fight back the invasive vines, cutting yourself on thorns in a losing battle? Or will you taste the delectable berries, taste the goodness being offered to you freely, feast on the fruit that came about by no work of your own doing — and build your nest in its shade?
In the opening scenes of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), we see Max (Tom Hardy) captured by War Boys of the Citadel. A prisoner of this empire, his body is under their control. The empire enlists him into service, finding use in him as an unwilling blood donor. An IV runs directly from his vein into the arm of Nux (Nicholas Hoult), one of the many ailing War Boys. When the call comes for the boys to fight, Nux orders that his “blood bag,” Max, be chained to him so that he can drive into the battle.
And so it is that we find Max, our title hero, chained to the front of a speeding car as though he were a wooden figurehead on the prow of a Roman ship.
For most military ornamentation, the purpose is to demonstrate the wealth and power of the empire. An empire that has resources to put into unnecessary embellishment and decoration is certainly an empire with abundance, with surplus — an empire that rules enough land and manpower to produce such extravagance.
But here, in a land with few natural resources (Immortan Joe controls the people through controlling the water supply), there is no gold to be mined nor trees to be cut down for a figurehead. But what they do have is this prisoner; the Citadel shows its power through controlling Max’s body. It is impractical to do so; he’d be a much safer resource tucked behind the driver’s seat. But he’s up front, sand in his eyes, his weight a nuisance to the movement of the vehicle, so that this empire can show their might.
The empire controls the level of danger into which his body is placed. The empire controls his level of discomfort. The empire controls the pace at which his life-blood is drained from him.
In this sense, Max the Figurehead may be one of the best images our contemporary culture has of Jesus the Crucified One.
Jesus, like Max, was a prisoner of the empire. His body was used to demonstrate the empire’s control. The Roman empire used crosses the way naval ships and Nux use figureheads, as a symbol to say: We are strong enough to not only kill, but to control. We are strong enough to kill slowly, strong enough to control the blood’s slow draining.
As a culture, we have lost our disgust in response to the cross. The cross, today, is an decoration on the wall of our home, an ornamental tattoo on our shoulder, a bejeweled trinket that hangs on our necklace. We talk about finding comfort in the cross. We don’t feel any of the guttural responses the cross evoked in first century peoples living in fear of the empire. We don’t feel, in our guts, the repulsion, the deprivation, the dehumanizing cruelty that must occur in order to hang a body on a plank in the desert.
Max, the Mad One, the Holy One is here to show us: there is no comfort in the cross. This image of a man cruelly and unnecessarily hanging from the front of a speeding car, this man whose lifeblood is dripping from him, helps shape our understanding of what we are no longer able to see in the cross. This image in culture helps inform the image in religion. This image helps us to re-find–in our guts, in our disgust–the scandal of the crucifixion.
For just imagine, for a moment, that that man being used as a hood ornament is the Child of God, the Word made flesh, the hope and salvation of the world, the promised Holy One.
This sermon was written for St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, Washington for the Seventh Sunday in Easter. The gospel text was John 17:6-19.
There are glasses available now that correct color blindness. People with green-red color deficiency– the most common form of colorblindness– experience the world in relatively muted tones because of what is called spectral overlap. For these people, the light spectrum that gives us green and the light spectrum that gives us red overlap, and as a result green and red overlap — have you ever blended red and green watercolors? It turns into a kind of dull, dusty gray-brown. For color blind people, to varying extents…that’s their world.
So the problem here, for the person with color deficiency, is not with the eye — the eye and optic neuron is essentially healthy, the systems function normally. The problem is the way the light is received.
So these glasses — these entirely normal-looking sunglasses — the lenses essentially put a space between the spectrums, they pull apart the overlapping spectrums, helping the eye to see that green and red are distinct colors. And by sorting out red and green as distinct colors, that dusty grayness is removed; reds are more red, greens are more green, blues are more blue — the entire color spectrum opens up once these two spectrums are seen as distinct. All by putting on a pair of glasses.
A close friend of mine, a woman who was like a mother to me, had a gift of turning a gray world into a colorful world. She was able to pull apart the aspects of a given situation that were the result of the world’s powers being at work–a result of hateful beliefs and attitudes, the ways systems privilege certain people, the ways despair and depression take hold, creepingly. She had the insight to be able to sort out those powers of the world’s system in my life from what God was doing in my life.
Through our conversations, it is as though she gifted me with color-correcting glasses. When the world feels too gray, I hear her voice and I can adopt her frames to sort out the world’s narratives and God’s narrative, both at play in my life.
I imagine the disciples felt as I feel when I heard that this friend was dying, when Jesus started speaking openly, bluntly, about his impending death. I imagine their fear of having to navigate the world’s ways and see God’s action in the midst of their situations. Their disorientation, like we’re losing a navigational point that told us who we are. I imagine them wondering: Who will name the world’s powers for what they are? Who will help us see God’s movements? Does the death of Jesus mean that the world’s powers will win out in the end? And under all of this, tied to all of these questions, is the Big Question: how can the world continue on without his love to hold it all together?
It is into this situation, this fear, that Jesus prays. “Father, the world’s systems and powers, the dominant culture of the world has hated my followers because they do not fit in the ways of the world, just as I do not fit in the ways of the world.” He reminds us that he has given us God’s care and protection as he pursue God’s truth.
He continues, “Sanctify them in your truth.” Sanctify means “to separate for purposes of God,” separate the purposes of God from the powers of the world, of the dominant culture. Our sight has the tendency to conflate the two spectrums, the world’s ways and God’s ways, Jesus reminds us that we are to be sanctified, to be able to see the two ways at work, as separate things. Jesus reminds us that he has given us new eyes to see. He reminds us that he has been the space that separates the spectrum of the world’s ways and the spectrum of God’s ways, he has pulled apart the world’s images of success/the world’s systems and ways —- from God’s movements and workings. Jesus prays that we remain able to see them, that we be sanctified.
And he continues: “Sanctify them … as you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”
Jesus sends us, as he was sent. He sends us in the same manner and for the same purposes that he was sent. Our work in the world must look to Christ as the model. We read, earlier in this same gospel, about God’s sending Jesus in the oft-quoted John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” And the next verse continues the thought: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved.”
Jesus was sent into the world because of love, for the purpose of loving. In this prayer, Jesus sends his followers as he was sent — because of love, for the purpose of love. Love alone is the church’s reason for being in the world. When Jesus dies and the disciples feel so uprooted that they wonder, how can the world continue to exist without his love?, the answer is: we put on Jesus’s sight to correct our sight toward love. We adopt the way of seeing the world’s ways and God’s ways compassionately in a way that leads us to love.
He sends us as he was sent — not to condemn the world, but to lovingly interact with it, in order that the world’s ways might be saved.
A thai poet wrote that “paradise is not another world. Paradise is the ruins of this world gazed upon compassionately.” St Teresa of Avila wrote that “Christ has no body now on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the world; yours are the hands with which God is to bless people now.” Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion looks out to the ruins of this world and sees it as paradise.
I saw a video of a man putting on these glasses for the first time. It’s his birthday; the glasses are his birthday gift, wrapped in bright red tissue paper. His wife has put out a container holding variety of colorful flowers in the front yard; she’s narrating from behind the camera. Their kids are in bright winter coats. Other than that, it’s really quite a bleak day. The sky is entirely overcast; they live in an apartment park filled with gray-brown townhomes. There is no grass; they’re stand on light gray sidewalk between dark gray pavement and their own gray-brown home.
The man, head-to-toe black denim, hair slicked back — he’s remarkably nonchalant, like he doesn’t want to appear uncool for a minute. Or maybe like he doesn’t want to hope too much. He unwraps the gift, pushing the tissue paper into the hands of his school-age daughter. Opens the box. Coolly, skeptically, he examines the seemingly ordinary shades.
When he finally puts them on, the moment that follows is …. Well, the kids are kind of oblivious that anything significant is happening. They’re playing with the tissue paper, running around.
But their father, the man in the glasses — the moment he puts them on, he stops talking. He stops smiling. He doesn’t know which direction to look. His wife says to him: look at your kids eyes. He glances down at his daughter in front of him, stares for just a second, and turns away, needs to go sit down.
And a minute later, composed, he gets up, smooths out his hair, paces, and then he comes to the flowers his wife set out, and this man just crumples in the parking lot. His new sight fills him with such love for the world — the same world that he had nonchalantly moved through before, but now rightly perceived — he’s filled with such love that he is overwhelmed and seems to become, at least for a few moments, an entirely different man. His tough exterior is undone as he weeps at the beauty of a gray day in a gray parking lot surrounded by gray homes.
The world hasn’t changed, but his perception of it has been corrected; the spectrums with which he sees have been pulled apart, and he can see the world as it is, and he is changed.
Jesus sends us into the world — not to condemn it, but to lovingly interact with it in order to save it. He sends us to see it with eyes so new and grateful that the color of another’s eyes brings tears to our own, that the brightness of a flower against gray sky brings us to our knees.
This sermon was written for St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, Washington for Transfiguration Sunday. The gospel text was Mark 9:2-9.
There’s a game my husband and I play on our commute — maybe you play as well. The game is called: Is Rainier out? It’s initiated each time we near the West Seattle Bridge; either he or I will say, “Well? Is she out?” And we’ll examine the conditions, gaze into the sky, debate about the level of visibility. Whether we estimate correctly or not, when she’s out, we both feel like we won.
Perhaps this game is part of the reason it makes sense to me that the word “cloud” shares the same root as the word “clot,” as in a blood clot. They both come from clod: a clump of earth. Clouds are clumps of sky; clots are clumps of cells. It makes sense to me that these two words, cloud and clot, share their parent: both, material, stuck together; both capable of blockage and obstruction.
In this city, we know clouds intimately. We are familiar with their presence, familiar with their comings and goings, familiar with the way they seem to shift our landscape, shift what is visible and what is hidden.
My parents recently visited from Michigan, where they know clouds well but know very little of giant clods of earth. During their visit, as we drove about, they would comment on the landscape: the water, the green, the flower buds. The rain. But it’s winter; the view of the mountains, and of course the views of Mt Rainier as well, were continuously limited by clotty clouds, blocking our sight.
I tried to explain to my parents what they were missing. “There’s a glorious mountain rightoverthere.” I showed them photos that didn’t do it justice. I pulled up a map. They said, Yes, sure, we know, we understand. But I knew they didn’t fully understand. They had the right concept — a hill but bigger, with snow on top — but they didn’t fully understand the right meaning. The clouds blocked their experience, and thus blocked their sight.
Peter, too, has the right concept but not a firm grasp on the right meaning behind it. The week before Peter sees Jesus transfigured on the mountaintop, Jesus asked him, “Who do you say I am?” Now, Jesus had triumphed over every foe: he had cured illnesses, debated critics, soothed nature, controlled spirits. And so Peter responds, “You are the Messiah.”
Peter was able to sincerely confess Jesus as the Messiah. But, like my parents relying on photos to understand the experience of a mountain, Peter was relying on insufficient images to understand who the Messiah is. He believed the Messiah to be the one who will triumph over every enemy, natural and spiritual. The one who ends all suffering and death. The Messiah has come, and Peter believes that as a result he will see an immediate end to despair, betrayal, grief, suffering, death.
In Mark’s account, the line of text after Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus starts speaking of what is to come: his suffering, his rejection by all respected authority figures. Jesus tells his disciples that he will be killed. Peter is appalled and rebukes Jesus — death is a sign of defeat, failure of mission. Certainly the Messiah will not, can not be defeated. God will not abandon the Messiah in this way.
It is in the midst of this confusion that Jesus takes Peter, along with James and John, and they hike to the top of a mountain. On the mountaintop, close to heaven, Jesus appears as a brilliant, dazzling figure, and alongside him are Moses, the bearer of the Law, and Elijah, the great prophet. There can be no doubt that Peter was right in naming Jesus the Messiah. This is certainly God’s Holy, Chosen One.
And I imagine that Peter must have thought: this is it, this is the arrival of the Kingdom of God, from this moment there will be no more misery, no despair, no betrayal, no grief, no suffering, and certainly no death. He offers to make dwellings. He wants the Holy Ones to settle, to set up camp, to move into the neighborhood and build a permanent home. He wants this moment of glory to be where they stay.
A cloud comes over them all, and the voice of God speaks: “this is my Son; listen to him.”
Jesus is silent. The words we are to listen to are the ones that have already been spoken, the ones that Peter did not want to hear — Jesus telling of his upcoming shame, suffering, and death.
To Peter, who had been hopeful, even certain, that the world was done with suffering and death, this cloud might have felt clot-like. This cloud might seem to obstruct the settling of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. This cloud might be felt to obscure the immediate presence of the Kingdom of God by affirming that Jesus will, indeed, suffer and die.
I, too, was frustrated with clouds, during my parents visit. They had never been to Seattle before and I wanted them to have this image of dazzling beauty to take back home with them. I wanted the clouds to part and the sun to shine on the mountain and them to have the experience of seeing Rainier in all her glory.
But precisely because I was so focused on them seeing Rainier, I often missed the beautiful things we were able to see, the things my parents, in their enthusiasm, kept drawing my attention to: The moss growing thickly on banisters, turning a safety device into an enchanted thing. The incessant waves of water, their rhythm conveying something of the infinite. The way the clouds moved among the buildings. The clouds in all their beautiful grays. The very clouds I had been cursing have a beauty all their own.
Peter, too, wanted glory, and was slow to realize that there is beauty and glory in the grey, cloudy, clotty places; indeed, the voice of God, the blessing of God might be found precisely in the cloud that comes over us like a shadow.
In her poem Early February, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre writes:
Grace doesn’t always come as a rainbow.
Sometimes it hovers like a pewter sky
tucked in around the treetops,
bringing the landscape close to the eye.
Still, grace comes on a day like this
in odd disguises…
For the gifts of greyness let us give thanks:
cobblestones and flagstones and boulders of granite,
clapboard houses, dark-shuttered and lamplit in the afternoon,
snow on asphalt, pencil and charcoal,
the naked stretch of steel that protects us
at the bridge’s edge,
old movies from a kinder time,
the wolf and the owl — hungry and hidden —
the rabbit’s fur,
the hawk’s eye,
the dolphin’s back,
the cocoon where a caterpillar
quietly works out
its salvation.
Moses, Elijah, and Jesus, and Peter, John, and James — they do not get to stay on top of the mountain in the moment of dazzling and obvious glory. The Messiah will not avoid the hardships of human life. Jesus will not settle where it’s comfortable. Neither do we get to stay in shining moments for long, near heaven, on top of mountains.
The voice from the cloud comes to affirm what Jesus has told the disciples about his death, and to bless it. God comes in a cloud in a dramatic affirmation that Jesus will indeed continue to be God’s agent of redemption. Suffering is not the result of a withdrawal of heavenly favor. Death is not the result of a withdrawal of heavenly favor.
This God does not shy away from suffering. This God is not afraid of death. This God does not bypass the difficult things.
Jesus will not take the easy way, for he knows there is no shortcut to new life. And though we may look for shortcuts — the Seven Easy Steps to a Better, Fitter, Healthier, Happier, Richer, Kinder You — it should, perhaps, be unsurprising that we find ourselves with Jesus on the long, slow journey to salvation. So we go to the doctors appointments and treatments. We spend the hours in counseling. We show up again and again for the 12-step meetings. We apply for this job, and the next one, and the next. We grieve one day at a time. We come to prayer in rhythms, regular or irregular. These are our own slow, gray cocoons, in which we quietly work out our salvation.
God does not bypass the difficult things on the way to salvation, but joins us in them. The savior we know is named Emmanuel, the God who is with us. Just as God was with Jesus in his baptism, God is just as much with Jesus in his suffering and death. And God will be just as much with us through our times of suffering and, yes, death, as God was with us in our baptism.
And God is with us through our despair, and is loyal to us when we are betrayed. And God intimately knows our abandonment. And God weeps with us in grief. And God suffers alongside us.
For this God, in Christ, goes through death, and blesses it, on the way to new life.
Normally I would record my sermon before posting it, but it is the end of the term and I still have twenty pages to write. So, here is my sermon from Advent 1, preached at St Paul’s Seattle, on the texts of Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:24-37.
We were lying in the middle of the road, soaking wet, unwilling to blink.
It had been a long day of hiking and was sometime after midnight, and my two companions and I had just been for a night swim in the Puget Sound. Once we had the courage to jump in the water, we had been surprised that each splash resulted in outbursts of tiny blue lights — bioluminescent creatures filled the Sound. I had never seen it before — each motion through the water resulted in unanticipated beauty. It was like swimming in fairy dust. It was like swimming in stars. If I had formed a prayer that night it would have echoed Isaiah, who says to the Lord, “you did awesome deeds that we did not expect.”
Afterward, the three of us walk back to camp, still full of joy and laughter. One companion remarks that on a night full of such unexpected, unearned goodness, he bets we could see a shooting star.
So, with the fresh memory of the goodness of our swim, we stopped and lied down right where we were, right in the middle of the road, and we watched the sky. And we waited. Eyes straining intently into the night, fighting against exhaustion. And we watched. And we waited.
Isaiah, again, says, “From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait.”
And we watched. And we waited.
Isaiah speaks of a God who does awesome, unexpected deeds for those who wait.
Jesus, too, speaks of waiting in our gospel text this morning. “Be on guard!” he warns. “Watch! Stay awake!”
Jesus’s tone seems perhaps anxious, and maybe rightly so, if the predictions of end times are as we have been told. His description of the End of the Age is filled with signs that are conventionally used throughout the teachings of the prophets of Israel: war, earthquake, famine, betrayal, death. These are images typically associated with God’s judgment. The end of the age is coming, and it a dark portrait of judgment to come.
I can understand how some believe that we are in the end times. Famine is present — in this country alone, one in six families suffers from food insecurity. Drought, too — globally, 1 in 9 individuals do not have access to clean water. War, it seems, is always either present or near. Many of us have perhaps intimately known betrayal, whether from an individual we trusted, or betrayal of systems that are meant to uphold justice and instead move in ways that perpetuate injustice.
Perhaps you feel as I do: compelled toward despair. In the face of problems so large, what can possibly be done? I imagine Jesus’s audience– They lived under an imperial system geared for maximum exploitation. Their leaders were corrupt. The people were possessed by fear. Perhaps this sounds not so very far away. In the face of such problems, what can possibly be done?
Jesus’s encouragement to “stay awake” and “watch” do not seem to match with the despair I associate with end times. On the one hand, watchful wakefulness isn’t active enough, doesn’t do enough, doesn’t accomplish anything. At the same time, asking me to stay awake and watch– what purpose can this possibly achieve?
As I sit with Jesus’ words, I realize that his images of God’s judgment are not the whole story, for Jesus pairs them with images of hope. He speaks of birth, of ingathering, of mercy in the midst of suffering, of a new season. Jesus says: where the world sees death, there is the possibility of new life. Where the world sees despair, there is also hope.
When we despair, it is, perhaps, tempting to give in to exhaustion, to give up hope for seeing new life, for seeing peace and justice — or even just for seeing a shooting star alight the night sky. It might be tempting to close our eyes to the wicked problems of the world and slumber in relative peace.
Remembering that night my companions and I were lying in the road, covered in saltwater– I was exhausted then, too. I thought: I don’t really need to see a shooting star. And yet…the goodness that had just happened was so entirely unexpected and so full of new life that I was certain, absurdly certain, that goodness would come again if I could stay awake. Because of course I would miss the shooting star if I fell asleep — even if my companions awoke me immediately, I’d have missed it. So I stayed awake. And watched, and waited.
So I hope you see that watching and waiting doesn’t necessarily mean being passive. Staying awake is quite an active process, fueled, I believe, by longing. By desire. By anticipation. Longing for the goodness that is to come even as we remember the goodness that has past. Or perhaps the goodness that has already happened enables us to stay awake, perhaps past memories of goodness fuel our ability to watch, to wait, to stay awake. Goodness has surprised us before, the Lord has done awesome deeds that we did not expect. And so we stay awake. And we watch. And we wait.
The cries of protesters in our city and around our nation have demonstrated that lament is the natural outpouring of longing. Despair recognizes the world as it is and turns cynical, but hope recognizes the world as it could be and turns to lament. Lament is longing, while holding on to hope that the desire will be satisfied. Lament is the outcry of those who have eyes to see the world as it could be. Lament names the ways in which we have not yet arrived and helps us get on our way. Lament calls us toward new life. This is not a passive hope, this is standing in what looks like death and searching for new life. This is not a passive stare, but eyes searching for light that seems like it might not ever come, and yet — and yet — we are certain new life will come. Christ promises it will be so, and God has surprised us before, not least of all, God has surprised us by tearing open the heavens and coming down. God has surprised us further by tearing open the heavens through the womb of a powerless, unwed woman.
We think quite a bit about that unwed woman during Advent, this woman who was praised for her faith and sang (what we know as) the Magnificat in response. The Magnificat has often been explained to me as a prayer of glory to God, a sort of praise song. But it is also a prayer both longing for and invoking a God who can bring justice and peace. It is the outpouring of hope into a lament. This Advent, I hear the protesters sing with Mary:
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
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.
As we enter into this season of Advent, this season of longing for God to be more fully with us, longing for God to be birthed into new life, my prayer is that we be stay awake, that we watch. That the memory of goodness lends us a certainty that enables us to hear and join in hopeful, longing lament.
And so we watch. And we wait. We wait with active hope, hope foolish enough to lament to the God of the Universe; hope foolish enough to confront systems of injustice; hope foolish enough to cause God to become human. We watch, and we wait, our eyes staring intently into the darkness, straining toward the light, seeking a star to appear over Bethlehem, unwilling to blink. And we watch. And we wait.
Photo from http://www.artinnaturephotography.com/wordpress/
When my sister got to ride in the front seat twice in a row, or swiped my Halloween candy, or stayed out later than I without punishment, I would go to the Powers that Be — that is, a parent– and lament: “It’s not fair!”
And the response, predictably, repeatedly: Life isn’t fair.
In the face of this “Life isn’t fair” mantra, we often speak of the God of justice. The God who will set all things right. The God who punishes the wicked and restores — even rewards — the righteous.
In the lectionary, we read the end of the Jonah story and the parable of the workers in the vineyard together. What these readings share is this question of justice: reward and punishment; good and evil. The Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard is to answer Peter’s question of how good deeds will be rewarded — specifically, of how his good deed of having “left everything” to become a disciple of Jesus, will be rewarded.
Perhaps a bit of context is helpful here. Peter is a Jew living in the Roman empire, where shrines to Roman gods could often be found with three words inscribed above them: Do ut des, which translates to something like, “I give in order that you will give.” The concept of an exchange was inherent in the act of a Roman sacrifice. People were accustomed to bargaining with God. Their prayers might begin, “O God, I’ll offer you this sacrifice if you please make me rich and powerful” or “Lord, save me from this situation and I’ll dedicate my life to you,” or perhaps, “I will worship You, God, and in exchange you take all my problems away.”
So when Peter asks how his sacrifices will be rewarded, he is entering into a bargain, rooted in a familiar mindset. Jesus gives Peter a very satisfying answer, a promise of eternal life and image of glory. To which you can see Peter nodding, yes, of course, this is the answer he expects. … But then Jesus says that the same promise stands for all who follow him. I imagine a sour moment for one who had left everything. Surely his sacrifice of family and home, surely his intimate closeness to Jesus must mean something extra is in store for him?
The teacher chooses this moment to tell the parable of the workers in the vineyard, of the landowner who hires more workers throughout the day but pays them equally at the end of the day. The parable ends with provocative questions: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
The questions offend us. The parable offends us. It offends our sense of justice, order, and fairness. This is not the way a just God should operate.
There is no good answer to the question, of course. Is the landowner allowed to do what he chooses with what belongs to him, or are we envious because he is generous? Peter’s options are either to admit his envious heart and lack of compassion, or he says no, the landowner does not get to choose what to do with his belongings — which, of course, means that Peter then forfeits his own right to do what he chooses with his belongings; and such a confession would mean that Peter forfeits his right to feel “better than” for having left everything.
The vineyard owner is allowed to do what he chooses with his wealth, and he claims the right to pay his workers not on the basis of their merits but on the basis of his own compassion. Compassion overrules justice. Compassion, indeed, looks unjust. It is not fair.
Because justice has never been the thing. Even Jonah — after Nineveh repents and turns to God — Jonah laments that God is not a God of justice. The Ninevites do not get what they deserve, but compassion overrules justice. And Jonah laments: I knew you would do this, I knew you were a God of mercy and compassion and that you wouldn’t smite them, and that’s why I ran away from prophesying to them.
The texts confront me. Who are the ones I begrudge, who are the people from whom I withhold generosity?
What would it take for me to stop being like Jonah–a person who would die for his own righteous anger–and become a person who would die to imitate a God of compassion, generosity, and mercy?
Where have I allowed justice to overrule compassion?
