Second Sunday of Advent, 2007 Dec. 09

Posted on December 11, 2007 Updated on December 11, 2007

Second Sunday of Advent

I enjoyed the liturgical passages for today, especially the Peaceable Kingdom verses in Isaiah. In case you haven’t seen them, those passages were as follows: Isaiah 11:1-10, Psalm 72:1-7 & 18-19; Romans 15:4-13, and Mathew 3:1-12. Next week’s passages are included in the church calendar on the website.

In the sermon time I spoke with a copy of one of Edward Hicks’ paintings behind me, a painting of the peaceable kingdom. He was a cool, Quaker sign-painter quite a while ago. Google him and you can learn all you ever wanted to know about his work. We had several of his paintings at the Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, and I enjoyed his style back then as now.

What a beautiful picture… the Peaceable Kingdom. It’s a haunting image of all the animals and serpents and infants wallowing in a seemingly blissful harmony. And as Hicks’ paintings all had social and political ideas strung through the with the scriptural imagery and meaning, so today the image of the peaceable kingdom laid out for us in Isaiah can be read and used in many different ways. I Googled it last week and found a website using it to promote a vegetarian lifestyle. Even though I have all kinds of respect for vegetarians, I doubt seriously that the leopards had turned to bean curd and the lion to mango smoothies. I appreciated so much the thoughts that Michael shared during communion of their appetites being so satisfied by God that they had no need any longer to kill and eat one another. What a great insight.

You see, as I dwelt on the passage throughout the week I came to realize that the image might be getting in my way. The image follows a description of the One who comes to make the kingdom possible. The kingdom is not the hope, but the One who comes is the hope, the point. The kingdom simply follows after, very naturally.

The kingdom is the daily manifestation of the One’s sovereignty. Go back and read that description of the One, Isaiah 11:1-5! How can I miss that the point is not found in lions and lambs and leopards and snakes, but in the coming of the One, and the reign of such a Sovereign that can change us into a community of peace, allowing us to take our place in that great mosaic of justice and truth?

So, we have our baby Jesus in a manger… another image that we get so caught up adoring and fighting to have on display. I love that image! I don’t want a single nativity scene going back in the closet! But, I also want to make sure that I don’t allow the images I pick and choose to be able to distract me from the realty of what is happening.

Here’s what I mean… I was thinking this past week about the whole birth scene of Christ. I started to have a few questions: What was Joseph thinking? He took Mary on a road trip when she was nearing the end of her term? What was Mary thinking? Why didn’t they use Expedia.com or call ahead and book a room? We won’t hardly let pregnant women fly these days, especially not in their third term! Why was there nothing for Joseph there in the “city of his family?” He’s the hometown boy, and he’s got no strings to pull?

But, then I remembered a little something… you know our sensitivities are probably a lot more delicate than Mary’s and Joseph’s. I mean, we are constantly building bigger and better hospitals, fine-tuning every aspect of the experience, incurring more and more debt. Why? Because our sensibilities say that no baby should be born into anything but a $2000 a day, psychologically soothing birthing suite with a flat-screen TV, movies and good drugs on demand.

Joseph and Mary don’t seem to put off by the manger. And neither does God. I mean, God can arrange for the star, but not a room at a Best Western? Of course, God could do anything needed in the situation, but a room at the inn didn’t make the cut. Even so, it was the orchestration of the whole scene that grabbed me. John is sent to “prepare the way.” There’s a census in the empire. Jesus’ family must go to the prophetic town of Bethlehem. (Every knows that the Messiah will be born there!) Angels are dispatched to alert the shepherds and a star is hung to announce to any and all with the ability to read it, “This is the place!”

There was a fair level of orchestration going on here, but not the theatrics that the manger can become for us. The momentous event is the arrival of the One, the arrival of Christ.

The images are great stuff and have stood the test of time. But they are there to convey the ultimate glory of the One who has come, is coming, is here. The Peaceable Kingdom is about the reign of One who can change our lives and bring us the peace. The manger could have been anything, and it would have made no difference to the coming of the One. I read a little further in the Romans passage, in fact into the next chapter, chapter 14… and in the context of our making sure of our mutual respect and acceptance of one another, Paul pens these words,..

“For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. If you serve Christ with this attitude, you will please God, and others will approve of you, too. So then, let us aim for harmony in the church and try to build each other up.”
Romans 14:17-19

The peaceable kingdom is not lions and lambs, but you and I. The Kingdom of God is not what we eat and drink, but how we meet and greet. If I could take the liberty to just pull the kingdoms together for a moment, we’re talking always about the reign of God in a people who claim to be beholden to such a King. The making of congregation is the manifest image of the kingdom as we submit to the reign and the sovereignty that calls us together. There is no other way to make the peaceable kingdom, to dream such dreams, than to give ourselves, our fealty, our will to God for the using. I love the idea of satisfaction that Michael shared, and I also believe that the lions are simply commanded not to kill the lambs. Isn’t that the point of the strong caring for the weak? We are beholden to One who calls us to peace, regardless of the many appetites that might also call to us.

We finished our sermon time with a prayer by St. Ignatius Loyola. I read it in the plural sense for our corporate worship, but I’ll render it here, faithfully, as it was written:

“Take, O Lord, and receive my entire liberty,
my memory, my understanding and my whole will.
All that I am and all that I possess
You have given me.
I surrender it all to You
to be disposed of according to Your will.
Give me only Your love and Your grace;
with these I will be rich enough,
and will desire nothing more.”

St. Ignatius Loyola

First Sunday of Advent, 2007 Dec. 02

Posted on December 4, 2007 Updated on December 4, 2007

Movie Disease

I suffer from an affliction, and I don’t know how many of you can empathize. So often in life I rent a movie, and it turns out to be really bad, really lame, but I must watch it all the way thru. It is monumentally difficult for me to stop a movie part way thru. This has lead me to see a lot of sorry movies, in their totality.

I have also seen some movies that began pretty slow, but around the midway point starting heating up and got good. And I was glad for the inability to walk away at the rough start.

The story of Jesus isn’t like that. From the beginning, things are happening and people are popping up that demand our attention and warrant our sticking around to see where this thing goes.

Think for a moment with me of the way this the story begins to unfold…

⊕ Zechariah and Elizabeth, barren, visited by an angel, and conceiving a son. John is their son, who would be known as the Baptizer, the forerunner who would lay the finishing touches for the arrival of his cousin.
⊕ Of course, there’s Mary and Joseph, engaged, visited by angles, unexpectedly and seemingly miraculously pregnant, caught up in a sudden political necessity that sets them on the road for Bethlehem on the eve of her delivery… Bethlehem, the town of prophecy, a humble place, and yet a place where the prophets of old had pointed and said, “Watch.”
⊕ Jesus is born and more angles appear, gathering some shepherds from the fields to come and bear witness. I’m comforted folks, that these shepherds are called to witness… we aren’t told they’re in the line of kings, they aren’t priests, they’re humble shepherds. If they can be called to bear witness, then I know that I can be as well.
⊕ As an infant Jesus is taken to the Temple and there awaits Simeon the Prophet who raises Jesus and proclaims to God, “I have seen your salvation!” And then there’s Anna, the sweet widow Anna, who praises God at the sight of Jesus and picks up where the angels with the shepherds left off, telling everyone she sees, “Jesus is here.”
⊕ But, we’re not done yet, because some wise men of the East still have to drop in looking for this child, the new king of the Jews. They had seen his star in sky… the arrival of Jesus being what it was, an announcement seemed to be placed in the sky for those able to read it, and follow the directions, even from far away.
⊕ And the arrival of the wise men leads to a dramatic escape to Egypt for the family of Jesus, fleeing the murderous wrath of the petty King Herod who could not stomach the idea that prophecy and events were coming together to announce such an arrival.

No, this story starts off running and soon careens into the political and religious maelstrom of the day. And we find more and more characters along the way, who like the humble shepherds, invite us into the story with their authenticity and honesty. One of my favorites is the man in Mark 9, when a father brings a son to Jesus and his followers for healing… and ends up in a fascinating conversation with Jesus… Mark 9::14-29. When a story like this one starts rolling in such a fashion, it’s hard to not be a little overwhelmed. And I relate to a parent who believes that going to Jesus is the right move, but there’s still room for growing that belief! It’s an expression of humility and inadequacy when caught up in a compelling story that feels just too good to flip channels and look away.

“Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed,
‘I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!’”
Mark 9:24

I love the season of Advent. We need to start again each year, returning to the beginning of this story, the conflict, the miraculous, the hopes and machinations of both God and humanity. It becomes for us a needed anchor, a place to remember the belief of a previous year and the need for even more belief in the year that waits to begin.

My prayer for this Advent Season, for myself and for this church family, is to humbly join that father in Mark 9, “We do believe, help us in our unbelief!”

I have enjoyed the writings of a very smart lady named Marva Dawn, and in a book she co-wrote with Eugene Peterson she penned these simple but true words, “You cannot help but be disillusioned if only Santa Claus come to your house. But if the one you yearn for is the Christ Child, you will never be disappointed, for he always comes.”

So, welcome to Advent.

What the scriptures give us on Father’s Day…

Posted on June 17, 2007 Updated on June 17, 2007

You know I didn’t do this kind of a post for Mother’s Day… I hope you can forgive me. But I thought I would collect here some of my thoughts I am sharing with a class tomorrow morning, the Sunday which we celebrate as Father’s Day.

What does our Bible most often give us, as pertaining to God? My thoughts are running something like this:

The scriptures give us (not exclusively) images of God in a quest to help us know God and love God. I’m daring in my sense of over-simplification, but I think the idea rings true enough.

Not being divine oursleves, not divine in essence or personality, we’re not able to perceive God in a full, undiluted manner… so the images of scripture quite naturally flow from our own context and existence to be understandable and cogent.

And here’s a point of distinction… these images must be allowed to function in ways that help us know and love, but not allowed to funtion in ways that circumscribe God. It’s healthy to remember that scripures aid us in knowing God, not “figuring God out.”

So, let’s cruise some (just a few) images: father, mother, bridegroom, shepherd, potter… and later in a fuller way, son and spirit. To help enliven our images we have some amazing verbs that come along with the God of our scriptures… God loves, hates, marries, becomes jealous, divorces, forgives, molds and fashions, protects, calls, sends, speaks, listens, and remembers.

I was in an unexpected and interesting snatch of conversation this past week when a friend bemoaned the fact that some of the push towards inclusive language in church culture and vocabulary was actually excluding the masculine. So, in a rush to make God not exclusively masculine, we might try to make God not masculine. But God is masculine. And God is feminine.

And God is so far past those adjectives and realities that after they help us understand and love God a little more than we have previously, we have to remind ourselves that our being drawn to God is the point of this exercise, not divine sexuality. When the images wear a little thin or start to get too bossy, leave them aside for a few weeks and come back to them… let them breathe a little.

Fellas, there’s not a doubt that the father image, the masculine image, is the hands-down winner of which image pops up most through the scriptures. But I don’t think that really gives us much reason for self-congratulaion or high-fiving. If anything, we might uniquely have a bar set pretty high for the love of a bridegroom, the patience of a father, the sacrifice of a parent. *sigh*

So, let us do what honor to the Divine image that we may! Let us give someone something to celebrate in the way we love, are fathers, and are husbands.