Tag Archives: Advent

Be Patient? Third Sunday of Advent, 12/14/2025

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Readings

A child of my age, I resonate with Ambrose Bierce’s definition of patience, “A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” So, James’ “Be patient” is not what I want to hear.

Actually, James’ “Be patient” and Jesus’ “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” are acknowledgements of problems, and set the agenda for the sermon.

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” It’s not an unreasonable question, and not simply because John’s been in prison for some time. Recall what we heard last Sunday from John’s description of the coming one: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Jesus doesn’t seem to be doing that.

Jesus responds by describing what he has been doing, the description drawing heavily from multiple texts from Isaiah, including our first reading: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” The citations from Isaiah aren’t a rhetorical flourish; they’re the argument: Jesus is doing what God promised. Implicit in the response: there is a difference between gathering the wheat and burning the chaff on the one hand and what Jesus has been doing on the other.

Notice that Jesus in his response is doing what he did in the synagogue in Nazareth as recorded by Luke. Reading from Isaiah, he reads up to “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” but omits the following “and the day of vengeance of our God” (Isa 61:1-2; Lk 4:18-19).

Jesus knows that this is both what John does and doesn’t want to hear. Hence “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” Of course, it’s not a problem only with John. Luke recalls James and John’s response when a Samaritan village refuses to receive them: “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luk 9:54). And it’s been a problem ever since: Jesus and his followers: enacting  God’s vengeance or God’s compassion and mercy (recalling the ending of James’ argument, cut short by the lectionary)?

So that’s one problem, what “the one who is to come” is doing, is commissioning us to do. It affects even our reading of the Magnificat. 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.” That should give the mighty and rich pause.[1] But following Jesus’ lead we focus our efforts on the lowly and the hungry, a focus that often demands not a little patience.

“Be patient—James writes—until the coming of the Lord.” James is also dealing with a second problem, the delay in that coming. His contribution to our reflection lies in his choice of wording. As Luke Timothy Johnson observes of the verb makrothymein, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that verb and its corresponding noun are mostly “used of the attitudes of a superiority to an inferior.” “[B]efore the time of judgment, God shows makrothymia; so should the community also share that outlook” (The Letter of James, 313). Contra Ambrose Bierce, we exercise patience from a position of strength, not weakness.

Now, if the delay in Jesus’ coming was a problem for James in the first century, it’s a problem for us in the twenty-first! In the Great Thanksgiving: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” How do I make sense of that delay? Well, in three different ways.

First, were I to push the question, I’d open myself to the same divine response Job got (Job 38-41):

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements– surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7)

And those would be legitimate questions.

The second way is a spin-off from God’s response to Job. We tend to assume that we’re God’s only concern. God spends the last two chapters of the reply to Job celebrating Behemoth (“which I made just as I made you”) and Leviathan (“When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; / at the crashing they are beside themselves.”). We humans are often making a mess of it; the rest of creation, from the hummingbirds to the great whales, are giving exquisite full-throated glory to God.

The third way is more tentative, and takes off from James’ example of the farmer. Some things take time. Crops take months; some things take much longer stretches. Take Yosemite Valley: the time to form those massive blocks of granite, the time for the glaciers to do their thing. So we get the majesty of Half Dome. Or take the Grand Canyon: God introduces what will become the Colorado River: let’s see what that looks like in five or six million years. God is happy to work with long stretches of time.

What if the Creator wishes to explore the potential of this creature made “a little lower than God” (Ps 8:5)? David and his harp: it took time for that technology to develop, and it will take centuries more before a Mozart, a Beethoven, or a Copeland can appear. Or to take a different sort of technology, the centuries to develop the scientific traditions that make possible the achievements displayed in the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Literally breath-taking what we can do together in our best moments.

There is, as Scripture and the daily headlines remind us, more than enough cruelty and suffering to have us crying “Come, Lord Jesus.” Job and these other reflections don’t lessen that impulse, but do make me grateful that I’m not the one making the decision on timing.

To sum up this perhaps strange reflection on our readings, Scripture is clear that the mind is important. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mat 22:37). And sometimes its importance lies in its capacity to recognize its limits. So I am profoundly grateful that Jesus’ blessing in today’s Gospel is not “Blessed is anyone who understands what I’m doing” but “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

[1] Recall the British ban during their rule in India as well as the more recent bans by dictatorships in Argentina and Guatemala. (Source)

“Good, I’m not crazy.” Mary & Elizabeth compare notes (4th Sunday of Advent, 12/22/2024)

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Readings

There’s a double dose of good news in today’s readings: God is indeed coming to set things right, and God generously invites us to be part of this. We’ll start with the invitation, then move to the setting things right.

The Gospel reading starts out “In those days…” If we ask “which days?” we need to go back a few verses and hear the angel Gabriel saying to Mary: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

“Do not be afraid…” first, probably, because angels are powerful creatures. Gabriel’s one of the more powerful and he’s standing right there in the living room. But “Do not be afraid…” also because Mary’s a Jew, whose people have been colonized by a series of pagan empires for over five hundred years, Rome simply being the latest. Mary has to think back over 500 years to remember a time when the Jews were free—if only in theory. If we had to think that far back it’d put us before Columbus. After all that time, can the God of King David, who many think has been conspicuously absent for the last 500 years, be trusted?

Mary trusts, and at the end of the conversation responds “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” God gives Mary—gives us—the quite amazing dignity of being agents in this story. Recalling our reading from Hebrews, Jesus is able to say “See, I have come to do your will” because Mary has given her “Here am I.” Jesus offers up his body because Mary has offered hers up: “let it be with me according to your word.”

Mary’s response brings us up to today’s reading, in which Mary heads for the one person who might understand what she’s just gotten herself into. Elizabeth, her relative, is also pregnant, despite being “advanced in years” and previously judged barren. An angel had been involved in that one also. A year before all this happened, neither Elizabeth nor Mary would have had any thought of being part of a divine project of this magnitude. But here they are.

Elizabeth greets Mary, and her speech takes up most of the Gospel reading. We read Mary’s reply, “The Song of Mary,” between the first two lessons. It’s one conversation.

Why did Luke include this scene? It doesn’t particularly advance the action. But it shows us something we almost never see elsewhere in the Gospels, and never at this length: two disciples talking to each other. And what comes through in both their speeches is a combination of “Oh, good, I’m not crazy,” wonder at being in the story at all, and a fierce joy at what God is doing.

“Oh, good, I’m not crazy.” Neither of them say that; I suspect both were thinking it: Elizabeth, preparing to be a mother when most of her friends are enjoying being grandmothers, Mary, with the angel’s voice—it was an angel, wasn’t it?—ringing in her ears. When you get caught up in God’s projects it helps to have someone with whom to run a sanity check. This is why God puts us into congregations.

Both are a little dazed at being in the story at all. “[W]hy has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” “[F]or he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.” And the joy: present in Elizabeth’s “the mother of my Lord” and developed throughout Mary’s song.

Repentance, about which we’ve been speaking these last weeks, is not the focus of the Christian life. That would be like a photographer spending all her time cleaning her lenses. But it’s necessary so that something interesting can happen. And in the encounter between Elizabeth and Mary, we have an image of what that “something interesting” might look like. Two strong women, dreaming dreams and seeing visions, supported by and rejoicing in each other’s friendship, rejoicing in the first stirrings—quite literally—of what God is doing in their midst.

God’s generous invitation to be part of God’s good news, extended not just to Elizabeth and Mary, but to each one of us. Recall Paul’s absurdly mixed metaphor: “My children, I am going through the pain of giving birth to you all over again, until Christ is formed in you” (Gal. 4:19 NJB). Until Christ is formed in you.

Now, what about this business of God coming to set things right? Here we might focus on these lines from Mary’s song:

He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
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.

Mary’s channeling pretty much the entire biblical witness here: we as a race have turned away from God and as a result regularly commit atrocities against our neighbors, all of whom bear God’s image. So “setting things right” is more than a bit of reform here or there. The status quo is inhuman. No wonder that the British banned the singing of Mary’s song in India during their rule, or that in the 1980’s the Guatemalan government banned its public recitation, or the military junta in Argentina banned its public display.[1]

Is God’s coming good news? If my status and riches depend on oppression and violence, not so much. So, not surprisingly, some of the most pointed prayers in the Book of Common Prayer are assigned to these four weeks of Advent:

Week 1: …give us grace to cast away the works of darkness…

Week 2: …Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins…

Week 3: …because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us;

Week 4: Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation…

So, in one of our prayers of confession, we acknowledge “the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.”Is God’s coming good news? Depends on which side I’m on, the sheep or the goats, and the Advent season pleads with us to take this seriously.

OK, preacher, how do we witness to this? If the status quo is inhumane, what do we do? A good chunk of the New Testament is devoted to this question; consider these snapshots:

Jesus’ instruction: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” (Mk. 10:42-44)

Philemon is a slave-owner and Onesimus a slave: Paul tells Philemon they need to treat each other as brothers in Christ. That plants the seed that eventually results in many countries abolishing slavery.

The first witnesses to the resurrection are women, and Junia is recognized among the apostles (Rom 16:7). Things like these plant the seed that eventually results in women winning civil rights and, in some parts of the Christian Church, the barriers falling to ordination.

“Honor the emperor” (1 Peter 2:17)—and hold the empire accountable for the pretty language it uses to describe its values (Acts 16:35-40).

In short, the default strategy is consenting to God transforming our life together in the church (“let it be with me according to your word.”) and that acting as a catalyst—as leaven—for the whole loaf. And, when it comes to it (“We must obey God rather than any human authority.” ([Acts 5:29]), not being afraid to cause “good trouble.”

God is coming to set things right and—wonder of wonders—we’re invited to be a part of that. How might that play out in the week ahead?

[1] See http://enemylove.com/subversive-magnificat-mary-expected-messiah-to-be-like/, accessed 12/7/2021.

Hope (1st Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2024)

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Readings

And so we begin another year, with all the hopes and fears anything new brings. The readings and the liturgy can pretty much carry us along; perhaps what the sermon can offer is attention to three of the images in or behind our readings.

The first is that word “righteous” in Jeremiah. “A righteous Branch… execute justice and righteousness… Jerusalem… called: ‘The LORD is our righteousness.’”

“Righteous” and “Righteousness” are today pretty much restricted to religious contexts. That’s a pity, because ‘righteous’ (tsaddiq in Hebrew) is a remarkably useful word. A person who is righteous (a tsaddiq) is a person who does what needs to be done to fulfill the obligations of a relationship, even if it means coloring outside the lines.

In the Old Testament one of the classic examples of the tsaddiq is the widow Tamar. She owes it to her dead husband to have a son who’ll carry on his name. But her father-in-law, Judah, is standing in the way, and has shown no sign of budging. So, off with the widow’s garb, on with the prostitute’s garb, and she has the son by an oblivious Judah. Judah’s outraged—until she shows him the credit card receipt—but then has to acknowledge her as the more righteous: she’s done what’s necessary to carry on her husband’s (Judah’s son’s) name. She’s the Tamar who shows up in Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew.

The Lord, precisely in this sense, is righteous. It doesn’t matter how powerful Israel’s enemies are. It doesn’t matter how deep a hole Israel has dug herself in. The last thing the Lord will say is “Well, you brought this on yourself; what do you expect me to do?” The Lord is righteous. If that means bringing Israel out of Egypt, opening a way through the sea, the Lord will do it. If that means toppling the Babylonian Empire so the exiles can return home, the Lord will do it. If it means taking on human flesh to live as one of us, the Lord will do it. The Lord is righteous.

It’s that confidence in the Lord’s righteousness that animates the psalm. It doesn’t matter what combination of external enemies and self-inflicted wounds the psalmist is dealing with: the Lord can and will sort it out. That’s the confidence the psalm—and our tradition—invite us to share. The Lord is righteous, creative, stubborn; the Lord will sort it out.

The second image is from the Gospel, “the Son of Man coming in a cloud.” We heard those same words last Sunday in vision from Daniel 7. Recall the vision: Daniel sees a series of four beasts, each more terrifying than the last, with the last one hounding God’s people. But then the Ancient One comes onstage, the beasts are dealt with, and “the Son of Man coming in a cloud”—that one receives kingship. (And so we heard the text at the Feast of Christ the King.) It’s a remarkably hopeful vision: the face of the human future is not bestial, but human. The terrorists don’t win. The surveillance state doesn’t win. God bats last; God and humanity win.

You see, if the future that awaits us is bestial, then the dissipation and drunkenness Jesus warns us against in today’s Gospel sound like pretty good options. If the future that awaits us is bestial, then the invitation “to cast away the works of darkness” is futile. But the future that awaits us has a human face, Jesus’ face, so hope—with the swimming upstream that it entails—is the rational response.

The Lord is righteous. This Son of Man secures a human future. Two images from our readings. The third image lies just below the surface and serves as the motor. It’s captured in one of the carols that didn’t make it into our hymnal: “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day: / I would my true love did so chance / To see the legend of my play, / To call my true love to my dance: / Sing, O my love, O my love, my love, my love; / This have I done for my true love.” That’s the story we’re in, “we” as the human race, “we” as each individual. How the Nicene Creed manages to summarize this romance, this love story, without using the word ‘love’ is a head-scratcher. Anyhow, as love is necessarily a joint project, God’s standing invitation: let’s write this story together. And in that spirit the Church invites us into this season of Advent.

Glory & Absurdity (4th Sunday of Advent)

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Readings

The texts still ringing in our ears suggest point and counterpoint (on the one hand… on the other hand…). On the one hand, we celebrate the glorious history of our salvation. And it is glorious. About ten centuries before Jesus, the Lord promised to David, King of Israel and Judah, an eternal dynasty. And despite all the wars, a long exile, and all the other vicissitudes that accompany life, the Lord fulfills this promise, as the Gospel reminds us: “behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.” And this is a reign not only over the house of Jacob. His reign will include all nations, and for this reason one of his servants, Paul, writes to the Christians in the capital of the Roman Empire, which letter we know as “Romans.” “Romans.” Every time we use this name it’s an invitation to recall something of the daring of this letter, directed to the capital, and proclaiming a future for the human race that ignores completely the pretensions of empire. That empire fell—in the West—in the fifth century, and fifteen centuries later the followers of Jesus compose more than 30% of the world’s population and are found in every country of the world.

Yes, it is a glorious history. And we, like the recipients of Paul’s letter, are invited to sense some of this glory in the midst of all that passes for glory in our culture and world.

On the other hand, there’s the continuity between the experience of King David and the Virgin and our quite unglorious experiences on the other. That continuity…

David. King of Israel and Judah, as our lesson opens he’s now in a position to build a temple worthy of the Lord his God. To Nathan his prophet the project seems so obvious, so natural, that he doesn’t even think of consulting the Lord. “Go, do all that is in your heart; for the LORD is with you.” That very night the Lord sends a message to David via Nathan, a combination of good news and bad news. The bad news: you are not to build me a house (a temple); the good news: I will build you a house (a dynasty). This promise of an eternal dynasty sustains the people during the darkest moments of their history, and is the basis for the hope for the Messiah, Son of David.

At the same time, this “you are not to build me a house” represents an enormous danger. Why? Because at that time, the construction of a temple for the king’s god signaled the god’s approval of the king. And this was particularly important for David, who was not himself the son of a king. So not building a temple would be something like winning the presidential election, but not moving into the White House. “No, Mr. Putin, you won’t be visiting President Biden in the White House, but at the Holiday Inn.… It’s actually a very nice suite… OK, I’ll tell him that you won’t be coming at this time…” So David not building the temple places a large question mark over his entire reign, and this may have something to do with the number of rebellions he had to put down.

If we ask the reason for this prohibition, the text gives no clue. There are attempts to answer the question elsewhere in the Old Testament, but here, no.

Mary. Real estate agents tell us that the three most important factors for the value of a home are location, location, and location. In a society that values honor, like Mary’s society, the important factor in marriage is timing: first the marriage, then the pregnancy. This doesn’t seem all that complicated, even for the Lord. Nevertheless, for Mary the order is pregnancy, then marriage, which represents a permanent stain on both Mary’s and Jesus’ reputation. “We were not born of fornication” gets hurled in Jesus’ face (John 8:41).

Again, if we ask what this divine decision was about, we encounter only silence.

That is, both David and Mary experienced what we know all too well, these elements in our life that don’t appear to have any meaning, these absurd elements that hobble our efforts and threaten the most beautiful of our days.

As we recall this dimension in the history of David and Mary, we might recall something St Paul wrote: “And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made fully present in weakness.’ I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9 [RSV*]).

I wonder if these lines from Paul have something to do with David’s and Mary’s experience.

“Too elated” is a wonderfully diplomatic phrase, something like Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance.” If the Old Testament is any indication, it’s a regular problem for God’s people. Moses: “Take heed lest you forget the LORD your God… when you have eaten and are full, and have built goodly houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Deut 8:11-14).“Too elated” indeed.

“Too elated” is not, of course, a typically Episcopal problem. We “solved” that problem when we drove out the Methodists a couple centuries back! So we can hear week after week that we are sons and daughters of the living God, that we can talk directly to our Creator without any intermediary, no roaming or data charges—and we’re not elated. This is not necessarily a good thing. It’s like being in the driver’s seat of a Ferrari or Jaguar and not being tempted to go even a mile over the speed limit. We could do with a bit more elation. But I digress.

Whatever we do with the earlier part of Paul’s text, his more general point “power is made fully present in weakness” speaks directly to David and Mary and each one of us.

It’s not the script most of us would have chosen. Supermanwould have been more like it. (And the nice thing about playing Superman was that all you needed was a towel with one of the narrow sides tied around the neck!) Power, power, and more power.

What Mary is presented with is rather different. All her weakness and vulnerability remain. But what will grow within her is nothing other than the Son of God. And through that One those lines from her song will be fulfilled: “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.”

And what the angel presented to Mary, our gracious God presents to each one of us. The weakness and the vulnerability don’t disappear. But what God would grow within us and among us is nothing less than the down payment on the fulfillment of all the hopes and dreams captured in the carols we will start singing this evening.

The Christmas story gives the absurdity and the futility of the world its full due. If the stories of David, Mary, and Paul are any indication, God’s not above using some of that to prevent too much elation. But at the end of the day, neither the absurdity nor the futility get the last word. “Power is made fully present in weakness,” and through Mary’s “let it be to me according to your word” the Savior of the world is again at our doorstep.

That Rendezvous at the Jordan (The 2nd Sunday of Advent)

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Readings

Good morning, and welcome to the second Sunday of Advent. The prof in one of my undergraduate philosophy classes explained his lectures this way: I’m pretty much talking to myself; you all are free to listen and to expand the conversation. Not a bad description of this sermon.

This sermon will be on the short side. The challenges today’s texts pose are more behavioral than conceptual.

“And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [John], and were baptized by him in the river Jordan.” Jerusalem to Jericho: I walked the middle stretch of that route the last time I was on an excavation in Israel. The first stretch is the more or less flat stretch from Jerusalem to the edge of the plateau; the last stretch is the flat bit once you reach the Jordan valley. The middle stretch: a narrow path that drops 3,500 feet.

I don’t go down to John—I don’t seriously enter Advent—if my world is working, if I can say “We’re doing OK.” Later in Mark we’ll hear Jesus say “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do” (2:17 CEB). If I think I’m healthy I don’t make an appointment with a doctor, much less trudge down, then up from the Jordan.

If I say “We’re doing OK” our second reading has two things for me to think about. First, the new heavens and the new earth are coming, which will mean a sharp devaluation in our current currency. Even a wheelbarrow load won’t be enough to purchase even a slice of the bread of life. So how’s my balance of the new currency—love—doing? When Paul says “Owe no one anything, except to love one another” (Rom. 13:8) it’s that new currency he’s talking about.

Second, my “We’re doing OK” tells me I’m working with a really impoverished referent for “we.” What “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18) tells me is that my neighbor is part of my “we.” The divine patience Peter describes is also the patience so that this penny can drop.

No, we’re not doing OK. So, down to the Jordan…

Down at the Jordan, John “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Repentance. This Advent I’m finding this question uncomfortably useful: “Do I spend more time and energy angry at the sins of others or at my own sins?” As that famous Pogo cartoon put it “We have met the enemy, and he is us” (Earth Day, 1971). Not that the others are sinless, but focusing on their sins is unlikely to be productive either for them or for me.

I’ll risk an example. As Katherine Cramer, professor of political science at the UW Madison explored in her book The Politics of Resentment (2016), there’s a lot of resentment in rural Wisconsin directed at urban Wisconsin, a good part of it unjustified. But not all: Back in 1959 Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture in the Eisenhower administration, told farmers “get big or get out.” We like cheap groceries, and pay insufficient attention to the folk who foot the bill.

“Do I spend more time and energy angry at the sins of others or at my own sins?” Since I don’t know how soon I’ll have an answer I like to that question, here’s my backup question: “Do I spend more time angry at the sins of others or praying for these others?”

Watching the news, reading the newspaper, scrolling through the internet: these are spiritual activities, whether we do them in a disciplined fashion or not.

“And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [John], and were baptized by him in the river Jordan.” Let’s join them.