November 2011


First Sunday of Advent (Year B / RCL) - November 27, 2011

Isaiah 64:1-9      Psalm 80:1-7, 16-181      Corinthians 1:3-9     Mark 13:24-37

Some days I feel like my shadow’s casting me.
    —Warren Zevon, “My Dirty Life and Times,” The Wind

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

            —the Collect for Advent 1

† “Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light . . . .” Amen.

*   *   *

The other night after giving a final exam I was walking across campus in the dark. All of a sudden, a shadow—a very long shadow—crossed my path.

It freaked me out. Was I being followed? I walked a few more paces. The shadow—the very long shadow—was still pursuing me.

Not wanting to look like an idiot, all freaked out, I discretely glanced over my left shoulder.

The shadow—the very long shadow—was a five-foot tall elderly woman.

Other works of darkness, however, do not so easily vanish.

One term my class learned this past quarter was Zeitgeist. “Zeitgeist” means “the spirit of the times” or the general climate within a nation . . . . the mood associated with an era.

Some 70 or 80% of Americans say America’s best days are over; we’re heading in the wrong direction. That’s not a very happy Zeitgeist.

Congress’ approval rating is 12%. I can’t resist quoting Mark Twain here: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself” (1).

If they took a poll, I wonder what God’s approval rating would be?

When we reflect on our readings today, though, it’s clear that darkness is not merely a modern manifestation.

Isaiah today has this lamentation:

We have all become like one who is unclean,

and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.

And Jesus warns his disciples:

the sun will be darkened,

and the moon will not give its light

I don’t believe in Original Sin. I do believe in Original Sinfulness.

When I say I don’t believe in Original Sin, I mean I don’t believe that Adam and Eve were literal people molested by a talking snake; nor do I accept St. Augustine’s awful understanding that Adam and Eve’s “original” sin passes on to everyone from their parents.

When I say I do believe in Original Sinfulness, I mean that each of us has within us vast landscapes of darkness. Each of us, when lost in that land of unlikeness (2), is capable of committing “works of darkness.”

“Works of darkness.” Our works of darkness. Not Hitler’s, not the terrorists’. Not Bush’s, not Obama’s. Ours. Mine.

As I reflected this past week on darkness and disquietude, it seemed like everything I read pointed to this theme.

A couple of weeks ago my Christianity class discussed a sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr. called “Loving Your Enemies" (3).

In this sermon King tells his audience that he and his brother were driving one evening to Chattanooga from Atlanta. His brother was driving the car. For some reason, King says, “the drivers were very discourteous that night. They didn’t dim their lights; hardly any driver that passed by dimmed his lights.”

King says that he remembers “very vividly” that his brother looked over and in anger said: "I know what I’m going to do. The next car that comes along here and refuses to dim the lights, I’m going to fail to dim mine and pour them on in all of their power."

King continues, “I looked at him right quick and said: ‘Oh no, don’t do that. There’d be too much light on this highway, and it will end up in mutual destruction for all. Somebody got to have some sense on this highway.’”

The darkness of night. Light. Too much light.

In a reversal worthy of Jesus, King realizes “There’d be too much light on this highway, and it will end up in mutual destruction for all.”

How can you have too much light?

You can have too much light if you’re black, the other drivers are white, and you’re in the South in the ‘50s or ‘60s.

Layered within King’s sermon is the realization that it is the whites, with their almost inbred racism, who dwell in a land of darkness.

But—and this is important—King doesn’t let his brother, or himself—or any of us—off the dark hook: metaphorically, his brother—which means all of us—is quite capable of meeting darkness with darkness, violence with violence.

We’re all even capable of misusing light to combat darkness. In other words, each of us is capable of harboring in ours soul Jim Crow laws, segregationist beliefs, and murderous lynchings.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The time when we await the birth of Christ.

I kind of feel like the old Irish priest who, on Christmas Eve, preaches a sermon of fire and brimstone. When he’s through berating his holiday congregation with hell and damnation, he turns on his Irish twinkle and concludes, “And all of ye have a merry Christmas!” (4)

But the Christmas Gospel, we need to remember, is not all fun and sunshine. As the opening of John’s Gospel reminds us, the coming of the Word involves both darkness and light.

Our Christmas Gospel this year is Luke. Luke doesn’t do anything with King Herod. But Matthew does.

In Matthew’s birth narrative, Herod is afraid that Jesus will be a king who will take away Herod’s throne. So he kills all the children in and around Bethlehem two years and younger (5).

For Matthew, Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” fulfills “what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah”:

     A cry is heard in Ramah,
     Wailing, bitter weeping--
     Rachel weeping for her children.
     She refuses to be comforted

     For her children, who are gone (6).

Matthew’s Jewish-Christian audience would have got his point. Rachel is symbolically the mother of the Jewish people, weeping for her children who have been deported into exile to Babylon.

Rachel‘s tomb is on the road to Ramah. In the sixth century B.C., when the conquering Babylonians assembled Judeans destined for exile, they did so at Ramah (7).

As Jack Miles observes, “[Matthew’s ] adding this quote does nothing, immediately to clarify the identity of Jesus, but it does much to darken the mood. At this early

moment [in Jesus’ life, he] is already being hunted” (8).

At this early moment [in Jesus’ life, he] is already being hunted.

You know I’m not here to wreck your Advent and Christmas. I guess I’m reminding us that there is darkness as well as light, and both darkness and light dwell within.

If you’ve been in darkness, you know you’re not alone; if you dwell now in darkness, you may feel like you’re alone.

You’re not.

You have us. And you have Christ.

For Christians, Christ’s advent signals the immeasurable depths of both light and darkness.

But John’s Gospel testifies to a very important truth—perhaps the most important truth, the greatest truth ever told:

What has come into being 4in [Christ] was life,* and the life was light for all people (9). 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (10).

Christ’s life signifies the innumerable possibilities of light.

Christ’s death signals the drunken triumph of violence and darkness. But—it’s a triumph mocked by its transience, its futile momentariness.

Christ died a physical death. But the spiritual death surrounding us, and within us, is far worse than physical death.

But Christ’s resurrection assures each and every one of us of resurrection over the forces of darkness—not just in the future but right now.

In Christ, through Christ, and with Christ, we become the light that shines in the darkness. And darkness, no matter what, will never overcome us.

Amen.

NOTES

1.  Mark Twain, A Biography

2.  Bernard of Clairvaux. “This traditional medieval theology taught that men and women were created in the image and likeness of God, but that this image has been corrupted, tarnished, and distorted—but not destroyed—by sin. Because God shared our human nature in Jesus Christ, we can begin the journey from the ‘land of unlikeness’ toward the ‘land of likeness,’ toward the complete integration and reformation of the divine image from which we have fallen.” http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/1989/issue24/2413.html.

3.  http://mlkonline.com/. I’d like to thank my student Christeen Abee for reminding me of this story.

4.  A true story told to me by Jeffrey Russell, my History professor at UCSB.

5.  Mt 2:16.

6.  Jeremiah 31:15. Jewish Study Bible translation.

7.  Jewish Study Bible 989.

8.  Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York, 2001) 90.

9.  The NRSV has “the light of all people,” a subjective genitive, but the genitive can also be an objective genitive: “the light for all people,” or “light for all people.”

10.  John 1:1-5. The NRSV has “did not overcome it,” which accurately reflects the Greek aorist past tense, but the NIV has “has not overcome it,” which, I think, has greater significance for us.


Sermon,  November 20, 2011 - Proper  28, Christ the King
Grace Episcopal Church - The Rev’d Vern Hill

When I first worked in the Episcopal Church as an Organist/Choirmaster about 2000 years ago, the name given to this final Sunday of the church year was “The Sunday next before Advent.”  Very English and quaint to say the least.  More recently, today is known as  “Christ the King” Sunday. 
Now, I have never been cheered by the title “Christ the King”.  I tend to run away from the title because I associate it with antiquated language of monarchy and privilege.  It was designed to put Jesus on a similar power footing with the rulers of the world.  Kingly language seems to be a coup for early Church advertising.  Moreover “Christ the King” seems to say that Jesus didn’t really get it right the first time and needs to return from out there wherever he has been to seriously take care of the bad guys and to welcome the good to their heavenly reward. 
I have recently, however, been having second thoughts about Christ as King.  I have begun to appreciate the biting satire and irony wrapped up in this title when you get into the reality of Jesus and the world of Jesus.  Today’s Gospel reading thrusts us clearly into that world.  We have here, completely unmasked, the raw, unfiltered Jesus.

Before we enter this world of Jesus, I need to confess that I and I suspect maybe some others here, experience Jesus through the filter of our own world view, our values which we prize and our history.  A simple example – years ago the church I was raised in had behind the choir and pulpit a large oil painting of Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ.  I’m sure you would recognize it.  I have no doubt that few people gathered each Sunday at that church had noticed that this Jesus had few Semitic characteristics with his long flowing hair and Nordic bone structure, far from the world of Palestine, but comfortably familiar to those in the pews.

When we go to the well-known Jewish historian, Josephus, he returns us to reality.  He describes those living in Palestine as existing amid an undercurrent of peasant unrest in a land where revolution was just waiting for a trigger.  Into this Jesus was probably born a few years before the first century at the end of Herod the Great’s rule.  He was born to Joseph and Mary of Nazareth which was a tiny hamlet with a population of no more than a few hundred.  From Mark 6:3, we are told that Jesus had four brothers (James, Joses, Judas and Simon) and perhaps two sisters who are unnamed.  What we know of Jesus’ social class also comes from Mark 6 when we read, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?”  Lose the temptation to think of a first century carpenter as a skilled, well-paid, respected member of the building trades.  The Greek word for “carpenter” was used by the upper class to show their complete contempt for those beneath them.

In the world of Jesus there was a sharp boundary drawn between those who worked with their hands and those who did not.  A Governing Class made up about 1% of the population and owned 50% of the land.  Supporting classes – the priests, merchants and military controlled another 15% of the land.  The vast majority of the population were peasant farmers.  2/3s of what they produced went to support the upper classes.  Peasants not farming, meaning they were without land, making them poorer, were known as Artisans.  Just below Artisans were the Degraded and Expendable Classes.   The Degraded had occupations like tanning which made them outcast.  The Expendable who were without value, by circumstance were reduced to begging, day labor or slavery.

What does this mean for Jesus?  If Mark has it correct and Jesus was an artisan, a carpenter from a carpenter’s family, that meant he was lower than peasant farmers (meaning that the stable in Bethlehem was probably more than what Mary and Joseph would have expected).  Also, since about 97% of Palestine was illiterate, unable to read, then we can assume that Jesus was also illiterate.  What?  BUT, and this is important, Palestine was an oral culture – a story telling culture.  There was little need for reading and writing.  Effective teaching was telling stories and Jesus, we know, was an incredible teller of stories, the Parables.

What about the parables?  You may have noticed that the parables are for the most part quite brief.  That’s because we have only a remnant of the parables in our Gospel accounts.  It is like having only the punch lines to a series of jokes (my dad could not remember punch lines and collected them on  3x5 cards.  But then, he couldn’t remember the joke either.  I take after him.)  With Jesus, the actual telling or better, the acting of a parable might have taken him over an hour to tell.  It would have involved frequent audience interaction, a kind of Q&A with debate.  The topics included religion, but also politics and economics, edgy and dangerous stuff.  Issues of justice would be raised about that terrible line between poverty and destitution, and between those with much, those with little and those with nothing.  By parables Jesus shepherded his listeners to a new grasp on their condition, on their humanity and a radical new kingdom vision – a Kingdom of God.   

What exactly was he asking them to grasp?   In the Mediterranean world, the world of Roman occupation, Kings and the governing class had all the power.  The King was entrusted to maintain order and justice – yes, justice.  Now justice can be a slimy word, for in this context justice meant protecting the class system as it was and benefiting those with wealth to the exclusion of others.  Justice was protecting unequal distribution based on a rank of importance – of class, taking from the least to support the well-being of the 1% and those who clung to them.  A similar line of reasoning regarding justice was made at the time of our Civil War in defense of the South’s “peculiar institution” of slavery and way of life it supported. 

Up against this “justice” Jesus’ “Kingdom of God”  asked the question – what would the world look like if God, not the emperor, sat on the ruling throne and acted with Godly rather than imperial justice?   What does Godly justice look like?  Jews have the Exodus experience to explain justice.  Exodus is all about Godly Justice.  The point to Exodus is not God’s preference of Jews to Egyptians nor does God even prefer slaves to masters.  Godly justice says that you not only do not brutalize your slave, but that slavery is against divine justice because it is contrary to absolute equality in value and respect which is the will of God for human creation.

The world of Jesus was a world of institutionalized imperial oppression, a system where many had been squeezed out deliberately as human junk.  The Kingdom of God cuts through this exclusion with grace and compassion and without compromise.  All are welcome at Jesus’ Table, complained his critics!  They accused him of being a glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.  Since an unmarried woman not under the control of a man was assumed to be a prostitute, single women at the Table were an outrage.  What drives this Kingdom is a common humanity created in the image of God.  Jesus made no distinction between persons.  It was not a question of being rich or poor, old or young, Palestinian or Roman.  All were welcome to this new meal arrangement built upon equality of worth.

As I said last week, this made Jesus dangerous.  Dangerous because he challenged all participation in imperial justice and its many forms of segregation and apartheid by race, culture, age, gender, wealth or any other category of separation.  This is a radical vision of God within us, every us.  And it is the source of irony – “Peasant King Jesus” today eating among tax collectors still, but also the homeless, bank executives, the abused, stock brokers, the unemployed, the police, the prisoner, the protestor, Senators and the sick and troubled, all at a Table with no seating order.  How different is this Table from the “Imperial King’s”?

The parable today is less about judgment, though imperial values bring with them tragic, horrific consequences to human living; it is about the justice of righteous behavior.  It’s a new wisdom and thinking for living.  And it is a wisdom which is neither comfortable nor easily swallowed by us. 

It is a most difficult struggle to embrace the equality of this Table arrangement, to accept the equality of grace with the least people, the different others.  “We don’t need healing” gets in our way.  We don’t understand our equal place at the Table.  To get there we have to honestly admit to the difficulty to make God’s purposes for creation and our work as humans at this Table our own . 

The parable today is about this struggle.  Within the sheep and goats metaphor – I always feel sorry for goats in this.  I like goats and I’m not crazy about sheep – But in this metaphor resides the recognizable Hebrew covenantal choosing – “Choose this day [better – “daily”] who you will serve.”  Choose over and over and over between Godly and Imperial justice.  It is not a choosing to be made alone.  Our community of faith is so important for it gives support in prayer, in praise, in confession,  in thought and in forgiveness; it gives what we need, to do our best in our choices.

The King in this story says you serve him when you meet him in those at this Table.  “As you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family  - you did it to me.”    Christ the Peasant King is present in the ones in need and all are needy in their own unique ways.  This final parable for this 2011 church year is not one of ending times or final judgments.  It is a learning, a wisdom story, a parable Jesus tells to shepherd us into what finally matters.  Amen.

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1.     Much of the description of the “world of Jesus” comes from Who is Jesus?  by John Crossan.  Crossan’s book is in a very readable Q&A format.  While I don’t embrace all his conclusions about Jesus, I certainly appreciate his development of a Jesus reality and his insight into the meaning of several familiar parables.

2.     I was taken by a sermon on Matthew 25 developed by Rex Hunt, retired minister in the Uniting Church of Australia.  I borrowed a few phrases from him, but in the end went off in a different direction.

Sermon,  November 13, 2011 - Proper  28
Grace Episcopal Church - The Rev’d Vern Hill

I learned a new word on Friday –  apo-phenia.  It is “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns in random or meaningless data.”   One true champion of apo-phenia is Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster who earlier this year found himself the center of national if not world-wide attention.  Last May, Camping, known for applying numerology to his interpretation of the Bible, predicted the date for the End Time – the End of all things.  According to his figures based on scripture, the End would begin on May 21.  On that date Jesus would return to Earth, gather the righteous who would fly up to heaven in an Event called the Rapture and then there would follow on earth for those left, five months of fire, brimstone and plagues with millions dying daily.  This hellish storm would culminate on October 21 with the end of the world.  By late in the day of May 21, there still was no report of large numbers of persons missing.  I can see that you were all disappointed. 

As had happened with previous End Time predictions made by Mr. Camping, the absence of anything cataclysmic called for a recount of the numbers.  Spinning a revised prophecy, Camping claimed that on May 21, there was really a Judgment Day, but rather than being visible, it was spiritual.  He then claimed that this could be better discerned by October 21.  Sorry to disappoint.  There have been enough awful things going on this year, but not of Judgment Day proportions.

This past week was a week for spooky stuff.  We had at least two events that would have been good material for those who are into prophecy and End Times predictions.  On Friday there was the conjunction of 11s - 11-11-11 at 11:11:11.  Rather than doom and judgment, however, a bunch of couples headed off to Las Vegas to be married (no marriage jokes).  In terms of doom genre, last Tuesday offered something more enticing.  On Tuesday an asteroid dubbed YU55 passed within 200,000 miles of the earth, closer to the earth than our moon, an event that sort of had a Hollywoodesque quality of a disaster movie.

Since the notion of an Ending Time is very much a part of Christian and Jewish thinking, and center stage in the readings for today and next week, let’s spend a few minutes with End Times.

There is one common-held assumption about early Christianity that is false and we need to get over it.   That assumption is that there is a point early on, in that space between the execution of Jesus and the end of the first century when there is a singular belief, a single answer to who Jesus was and what should follow next in time.  This is an appealing idea.  Whole Protestant denominations have been invented on the hope of returning to the “pure origins.”  What scholars have shown is that from the very beginning, in Galilee and Jerusalem and in Paul’s letters, there were multiple answers to the Jesus question and what would follow.  These answers were in various degrees of conflict with each other.  This was not exactly friendly conflict either and led to the marginalizing of several alternate views.  We know of these views in part because they lay in the background within our present New Testament and other early Church writings.

The puzzle for Christians (and Jews) was not about what Jesus did, but what he didn’t do and what hadn’t happened.  Jesus did not bring an Ending to the present evil age.   From Paul’s letters, which pre-date our Gospels, it is clear that many first Christians believed that Jesus would return in their lifetimes to bring in the final End Time of evil.  As these first Christians began to realize that Jesus would not return, an emerging belief appeared – a belief that we remain in the midst of “Ending Time”; it’s unfinished and on-going.  So Mark writing in AD 70 has Jesus teach the crowd about End Time - “About that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Mark 13:32)  

Still, there remained and continues to remain the belief that God would at some point act, with violence and with judgment, to bring about the close of the present evil-ladened history.  Christians are called to wait in faith for God’s decisive act, and the separation of the “sheep and goats”.

It did occur to me at this point in my sermon writing that I may have slipped over the edge.  All of this could be a lot to digest in sermon form even for Episcopalians who openly admit to not leaving their brain at the church door.  But the problem is that even as Episcopalians, this End Time thinking is embedded in us and our story of Christianity.  It’s in our liturgy, our hymns and our art.  And while our instincts for structural justice, grace, and inclusion often take us in different directions from our evangelical and Catholic brothers and sisters, it is important to understand that we move in those directions because we have a different and very old understanding of Jesus and what comes next in Time.  The Jesus behind what we believe and act on is formed in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the margins of the New Testament writers, but it jumps out at us in the sayings, storytelling and teachings of Jesus.  Our Jesus story is about Time, not End Time.

This Jesus understanding is about an on-going struggle between God’s purposes for creation and our work as humans, versus the Kingdoms of earthly rule, of greed, and injustice and violence and exclusion.    Listen to the end of this parable in Matthew 25.  The parable appears to be just another judgment day parable, but in fact it is about righteous behavior  - “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . , you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40).  This parable is similar to last month’s parable of the coin and taxes.  The coin parable really was not about paying taxes but faithfulness to our created purposes.  This parable in Matthew is not about God’s violent judgment.  It is a call to compassionate living and faithfulness to our created purposes.

“Kingdom of God” is Jesus language about ethics and behavior, about non-violent resistance to evil and power and living in shared community.  In Jesus’ storytelling there are two worlds co-habitating -  a world of power and greed and of the very poor and marginalized; a world of great violence used to maintain the order and the privileges of the few who benefit from the work of the many poor.  This was first century Palestine and the world of the Roman occupiers, a world that continues to morph itself into our present time.  Jesus begins a kind of first century Occupy Movement, a second world.  He gathers about him a new community, a community of resistance to the powerful, a community who despite their social and economic weakness demand with their lives justice and respect, peace, sharing among the least people, and living out the covenant made with humans at Genesis.

This made the followers of Jesus dangerous.  When Jesus stands before Pilate, Pilate gets it right.  Jesus was subversive of the Roman order and dangerous; he was an open assault on the authority of Rome; he offered a radical challenge to Roman “business as usual.”    

What Jesus offers in his story-telling flows directly from the Story of Creation itself.  Unlike the common religious picture of human life as disaster burdened with an “original sin” of disobedience, this understanding of Jesus is linked to the notion that humans are created to engage in planting, nurturing, and in the harvest shared among those who have less.  Sin in this Eden world is akinos – not caring; it is forgetting or setting aside or turning from what we have been created to be in God’s image.  The story that Jesus tells is one of God’s nurture and compassion.  All of the words in Torah, the words of the prophets are reminders of who we are to be.  Zephaniah today speaks in the style of threatening language about a Day of the Lord.  But listen carefully - the descriptive language of this Day of Judgment represents the consequences of squandering the gift of our humanity – “the people who rest complacently on their dregs, . . .their wealth will be plundered.”   This describes the reality aftermath of greed, jealousy, hatred and violence.

Jesus gathers a community living the Kingdom of God. He gathers them at a common table where all are welcome, where in sharing a common loaf and common cup the community affirms and commits to something different from the ways of power and greed and hatred.  This is what we seek to be here at Grace.  This is what we seek to build up in each other.  What we find in Jesus helps us to see more clearly our God-created selves.

There is no End Time.  There is Time.  There is nothing to wait for; the God of Jesus expects and created us to act.  That’s the clear meaning of today’s Gospel parable – Property is given as a trust.  Two who receive the gift, nurture and cultivate what they are given, and at the harvest they can share much more.  A third chooses akinos – digs a hole and buries what he is given and waits out the time.  Nothing comes from it. 

Life is gifted to us for something to come of it – that we do justice, be compassionate and walk in God.  To faithfully follow Jesus, this must be our witness to the other world around us. Amen.

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1.       Material about Harold Camping came in part from an article written by The Rev. Luis Rodriguez, Rector of Church of the Saviour, Hanford CA.

2.       General background information on early Christianity came from The Birth of Christianity by John Dominic Crossan.