–Boca Raton Tribune

Malachi 3:1-5; Luke 3:1-6

You don’t need me to tell you that the rebounding economy is not rebounding for everyone. You don’t need me to tell you that there are poor people in the United States of America. You may be one. You know as well as I do that without lots of money or a job with good benefits, it’s hard to be healthy in this country, and that depending on where you live or what kind of job you have, it may still be hard even after all the provisions of the Affordable Health Care Act kick in. You know too that the poorer you are, the sicker you are; and if you are not white, you’re sicker still. You also know that no matter what finally shakes out with healthcare in this country, old people and poor people will still have to pay a hidden cost of indignity and the not-so-hidden cost of red tape and mystifying paperwork.

You don’t need me to cite depressing statistics about housing, or food stamps, or available childcare and eldercare—or should I say unavailable childcare and eldercare? You know those numbers. And you know that a lot of people are scared right now, imagining that negotiations aimed at avoiding the metaphorical fiscal cliff could end up hurtling the vulnerable over a literal cliff of their own. You already know without my telling you, for example, that schoolchildren learn better on a full stomach, and your common sense tells you there should be school breakfast programs for every kid who needs a meal, so you don’t need me to tell you that any cutbacks in these programs will not only hurt kids now, but will also have a long-range effect on the economy and on the social fabric.

And I don’t need to tell you about indigent drug addicts and drunks and (here’s an awful word) “de-institutionalized” mentally-ill people; you’ve seen them, so you already know, or you can easily guess, that even if this winter is not too harsh, over the next few months a few of them will die on the streets where many of them live. And you don’t need me to tell you that social workers, state-funded childcare providers, and people who work in public assistance of every kind are among the least well-paid professionals in the country. You can guess yourselves, without any help from me, at the high turn-over and burnout rates in these jobs; and you can easily imagine that it doesn’t take long in that kind of public service for some good people’s idealism and commitment to settle into a kind of functional despair, or sour to cynicism and contempt.

You’ve read about them in those human interest stories that appear in newspapers every Christmas, so I wouldn’t be telling you anything you don’t already know if I were to describe the daily struggles of families that are (what’s that grim phrase?) “less fortunate”—as if living in an apartment with no heat, frozen pipes, and an absentee landlord were a matter of sheer serendipity; as if somehow, had these families just been in the right place at the right time a year or two ago, they’d be living on Easy Street today. Poverty has an awful randomness to it, to be sure; many people, maybe even some of you, are a paycheck or an illness away from trouble; but you know as well as I do that it isn’t all just the luck of the draw.

You don’t need me to explain that the continued existence of poverty in this country is a scandal, that the lack of adequate health care in this country is a scandal, and that scandals by definition are stumbling blocks for the conscience, barriers to belief. Who could believe in a God who says that the poor are dear to the divine heart but whose heart appears to be stone, whose ears don’t seem to hear anything, whose arm hangs down, ineffectual, as if having thrown in the towel? You don’t need me to tell you that it is not our reason that most often denies the existence of God; far more often it is our gut that rebels, our heart that recoils, our gorge that rises to deny the truth of a compassionate God in the face of so much suffering and degradation. And you don’t need me to explain that, as far as the Bible is concerned, it is not God who has the stony heart, but God’s people; not God who’s deaf, but God’s people; not God who has the lifeless arm, but God’s people who have thrown in the towel even as they raise their voice in prayer. And you already know perfectly well that the biblical God is notoriously disgusted by piety disconnected from justice.

And you know, because you’ve read the text from the book of the prophet Malachi, that as a result of this disconnect, God has found it necessary to become a refiner who sits down (because it’s going to take a very long time and a lot of patience), fires up the furnace, and burns away the dross until the gold is pure; and God has found it necessary to become a harsh soap, a fuller’s lye, to bleach and scrub and bleach and scrub again the sons of Levi (that is, the tribe of priests, and by extension, us), until they (and we) are clean enough to carry out, without separation, right worship in the Temple and right action in the world. You don’t need me to tell you that if you are indifferent to or exploit your needy neighbors, you will always read Scripture, sing hymns and pray to this meticulous God at your peril.

But you don’t need me to make you feel guilty either. We feel guilty enough on our own. But if you don’t feel guilty—if, for instance, you have made your peace with social disparities; if you have made up your mind that poor people are here to stay, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it; if you have concluded that throwing money at the health care system won’t change anything, or that government programs are never the answer to social problems anyway—you are not going to feel bad and guilty just because of something I or somebody else may say.  Besides, it would be unfair for me to try to make you feel guilty, since so many of you are engaged day in and day out in work that serves the poor and the sick, work that immediately or remotely heals and counsels and lifts and teaches and comforts and inspires; work that helps change or improve the systems and conditions we deplore. So, you don’t need me to grind away at the guilt machine. And you don’t need me to tell you what you should be doing about all this. You know what to do, and many of you are doing it. You give money, you write to your lawmakers, you vote for change, you belong to organizations that work for justice. You do what you can. You do your part. You try to live more simply. You find ways of making human contact with suffering that is not your own. You teach your children about the real world. You preach. You witness. You occupy. You serve. You find a thousand ways to see, to touch, to learn. So you don’t need me to give you social justice marching orders. The truth is I could learn a thing or two from you.

Let’s see. What else is there that you already know and don’t need me to tell you? Well, you know it’s Advent, and that in Advent we pay attention to the Christ of three comings: the Christ who came long ago, who comes to us now, and who will come again. We reflected on that final coming during the first week of Advent. On Christmas we will commemorate the first coming on the straw of a stable. And you’ve already figured out, I’m sure, that here we’re focusing on Christ’s present Advent, his coming and his availability to us now in the Spirit, and especially (for he does have his preferences) his keeping company with the poor, the hungry, the sick. For if we’re speaking of Advent, then we’re also speaking of Incarnation. And to speak of Incarnation is to speak of the conviction that God is not some vague mythic idea, impersonal archetype, general concept or feeling, not love-at-large, or generic benevolence; but rather that in a specific person, Jesus of Nazareth, God lived a fully human life. Incarnation is the expression of God’s solidarity with us, solidarity so complete and full that in some mysterious way that we can’t fathom, God is changed, and so are we. The Word’s humanity is forever part of what it means to be God. And the Word’s divinity is forever part of what it means to be human.

–WSJ

Incarnation is the Christian truth claim most people, including Christians, find hardest to swallow. It’s the scandal that keeps on scandalizing. It’s always been easier to believe that Jesus Christ was “divine” than to embrace the implications of a full humanity. Matthew 25 says something about this scandalous solidarity. It’s a oneness with all flesh, which sounds very nice and kind of harmless in general; but the scandal really hits you when you realize what “all” includes. You know what I’m going to say next, and you don’t need me to remind you of it, but I will anyway: the “all flesh” of Incarnation compels us to confess that God is a shrinking shape on a nursing home bed, an obnoxious odor in an unventilated room, an empty stomach at a first-grade desk, a family of eight on an income for two, a man on the bus with six shirts and a tin foil hat who chooses you to sit next to, a newborn wrapped in rags and laid on the floor of a stall, poor, hungry, real.

As I said, this is old news. You’ve heard it a thousand times. So why say it again? Why tell you things you already know?

For the same reason we do Christmas every year, read the same old prophecies, make the same old jokes about how weird John the Baptist is, drag out the same old Christmas decorations and sing the same old carols. Year after year after year. For the same reason we tell family stories over and over, like the one about the way Mom and Dad met, or the story of the way you carried on your first day at school. For the same reason the sayings of Jesus were collected, written down, and handed on. We tell things we already know so that we will never forget, so that we will learn the truth of things that matter more than anything, so that our children will know what we stand for, believe in, stake our lives on—what makes us who we are. And because if the church (that’s you and me) doesn’t talk about them, and keep talking about them, fewer and fewer people will be talking about them; fewer and fewer, until finally there is only silence. And just ask anybody struggling for justice about the horror of such a silence, the nasty things that happen when nobody utters a word.

–National Post

We need to tell each other things we already know because there’s knowing, and then there’s knowing. There’s the kind that gives you things to think about, and then there’s kind that gets under your skin, penetrates and aims for your fault lines, breaks you up and leaves you so shattered you require divine rearrangement. We tell each other things we already know so that God will lay what we’re saying decisively upon us and shatter our hearts, for the first time in some cases, in others for the umpteenth time. If that shattering were to happen this Advent, we would be blessed indeed; for God, a psalm says, cannot pass by a broken heart. Our God will come.

Do you know that already? Let me tell you anyway, again…

–Joyful Mystery #2: Visitation, by Jim Janknegt

“My soul magnifies the Lord…”

When I was growing up, the nuns who taught me religion made much of Mary’s faith. Her greatness, they said, lay in her obedient disposition to believe the angel’s message and accept unquestioningly  the mysterious assignment to be the virgin mother of the Lord. She may have wondered aloud to the angel how such a miracle was to happen, but she never doubted that it could.

Mary’s faith was what we used to call “blind faith” before we became more sensitive to the fact that blindness does not mean you cannot see. In the religious world of my childhood, blind faith was the best faith you could have. We knew none of us had it, or would ever have it, at least not in the measure of Mary; but we were brought up nonetheless to be fundamentally biased towards belief.

No matter how much I now cherish the practice of doubt and question, I am still persuaded that there is a lot to be said for a second-nature reflex of faith, an instinctive willingness to give God the benefit of the doubt. I give my ancestors in the faith the benefit of the doubt too, which is why I still love the ancient creeds and keep them as the bedrock of my faith. After all, just because people lived in the past doesn’t mean they were naïve. Or stupid. This benefit of the doubt is not blind faith, but it’s my way of saying “yes” to things that lurk in a blur at the corner of the heart’s eye, waiting to clarify in time.

That said, however, I no longer admire Mary’s blind faith. I admire her perceptive faith—her capacity to perceive clearly a promised but (for most of us) still blurry world of divine justice and righteousness. And I admire her ability to inhabit that world now—to act and speak according to promised new conditions that have yet fully to appear. I admire Mary for her religious and moral imagination.

This wondrous imagination of hers is not the fantasy of a utopian dreamer, an escapist or a Pollyanna. She is, the gospel tells us, “lowly,” and the Greek original clarifies the meaning: not “humble” so much as “poor.” Dirt poor. Mary does her imagining the way dirt poor people always do—“amid ten thousand losses,” as Patty Van Ness puts it; or, as Kate Layzer writes, “amid the hard griefs of this world, its bitterness and need.”*

Mary imagines and inhabits God’s new world while embedded in the mystery of human privation, her own and her people’s. Perhaps that’s the only place where such imagination is even possible.

Like her singing sisters before her—Hannah, Judith, Deborah, Miriam—she intones a song whose verses leave no room for doubt: this hard world is real and it is miserable–and it is not all there is to say or see. Its suffering and injustice are horrific, and they are decidedly not the will of the God of “swirling joys.”  And so her imagination sings about tyrants dethroned, poor bellies full, mercy extended to the umpteenth generation. But note how she sings of these things with thanks and praise: it is as if God had already done all the rearranging that the world so desperately requires. That’s a holy, and a true, imagination.

It’s a fierce and dangerous set of verses, this Magnificat. I’m told that an Anglican bishop once prohibited missionaries from reading it in the presence of the local chiefs, knowing that its implications would not be lost on them. It would be news all too welcome among them, and the Church couldn’t stand to lose what it stands to lose.

You’d be taking your life in your hands to use Mary’s song as the opening prayer of a board meeting of most Fortune 500 companies too (or in a meeting of the president’s cabinet.) The gift of a new world and the sway of its just Ruler is not receivable everywhere. It is not even seeable in some places. It takes a lot of imagination. But Mary is undaunted. She is pregnant with imagination. And pregnant with a child. And like most pregnant women, she believes that a new world is being knit together right in her own womb, and that her own child will be the one who makes all the difference.

You don’t have to be a woman, much less a pregnant one, to imagine what Mary imagines. But you can’t imagine anything at all—anything true, that is— if you can’t see beyond your own privilege to confess that things in the world are not the way God intends.

You can’t imagine anything true at all if you can’t contain your getting and spending so that you can receive the vision of the Day of the Lord with an uncluttered heart.

You can’t imagine the new thing God has in store if you don’t regularly feed your soul with the unspeakable misery and ineffable beauty of the world and all its creatures, putting yourself regularly in the company of real suffering people and real amazing joy.

You can’t imagine a new way of life if you try to go it alone without the generations of the faithful alongside you, without a community with whom you faithfully practice imagining, a community within which are told and retold a thousand thousand times the stories of God’s dream—a dream, as Will Willimon writes, “larger than the desperation of any of our particular moments.”

And if you cannot imagine, you cannot hope. If you cannot hope, you are left to your fear.  And if there is only fear, you know where that leaves you, where it leaves all of us, and where it has always left the world.

So this Advent, wait and watch, ponder and pray, light candles and do whatever you do; but more than anything else, dare to imagine. Imagine a poor woman named Mary, singing. Imagine a baby leaping in a cousin’s barren womb. Imagine an infant surprise wailing in a manger under shooting stars. And see that old fox, Herod, jittery and wobbling on his lofty throne.

–Visitation, African Gospel Mafa

————–

*Text of  the Cantata, “Advent,” by Patricia Van Ness, Composer-in-Residence, First Church in Cambridge, Congregational (United Church of Christ).

Amidst ten thousand losses and swirling joys

At this very instant

On this sacred Earth

I wait.

Come to us,

Beauty, Wisdom, Goodness, Peace,

Solace, Grace, Counsel, Love.

Through the open archway this cold night

Air, rich as gold, flows.

Fine snow glistens on our faces.

Each flake,

Every exquisite crystal blossom

Is a covenant of your love

Told a thousand thousand times.

Amen.

—

*Text of the hymn, “Called from the World to Mystery,” by Kate Layzer

Called from the world to Mystery, from mystery to love,

we hold the hope within ourselves of certainties above;

and you, O God, who plant this hope in us and scatter it like seed

amid the hard griefs of the world, its bitterness and need,

have sent us as your laborers in fields sown by your grace–

the harvest and the harvesters caught in divine embrace–

for you in Christ held nothing back; may we likewise be free,

until when we have poured out all, we merge with Mystery.

—John the Baptist in Jail, visited by two disciples. Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1399–1482.

When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples 3 to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:2-1)

Whenever I read this gospel passage, it’s hard for me to get past the sobering news it opens with: John the Baptist is in jail. Sometimes I imagine him there, pacing in his cell, railing against the powers that arrested him. Sometimes I see him squatting in a corner, staring at the consequences of his conscience. But sometimes I can’t see him at all. I don’t want to. It’s just too sad to think of such a vital man confined.

And he was a vital man. John was no cartoon crazy-man waving a placard, menacing the downtown crowd with threats of doom. He had substance. The size of the movement that sprang up at his preaching testifies to a spiritual genius.  Jesus always loved him. In this gospel we read the Lord’s praise of him: John, Jesus says, is the greatest man alive.

But now John is in jail. That old fox, Herod, put him there. John could never be bought off. He was no reed shaking in the wind. Herod was the shaky one. When John criticized his corruption, Herod arrested him. He wanted to kill him, but because he feared an uprising, he didn’t dare. Instead, he decided to let John rot in jail. That’s not the way it ended, of course. Eventually Herod had to kill him, for reasons so tawdry you can’t help feeling outrage two thousand years later.

But now John is in jail. And as John languishes in a cell, Jesus moves center stage. John’s absence from the scene gives a boost to Jesus’ ministry. In the swelling crowds around Jesus, some of John’s followers begin showing up, ready to switch loyalties. More will follow. John’s influence is waning.

Jesus takes no pleasure in John’s decline. His reverence for John goes deep. He may even once have been a follower. He was certainly responsive to his preaching and showed it by presenting himself for John’s baptism. All the same, Jesus does not try to save John’s movement or protect John’s leadership. Instead, he begins to speak of John’s ministry as a preparation for his own.

John is not the one who will bring in God’s new age, not even to his own followers, all those people he had baptized in the Jordan. Jesus puts it this way: “John is the greatest man who ever lived; but the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” Anyone who accepts the message Jesus preaches will receive a healing even John can’t imagine, a freedom even John can’t grasp, a joy even John can’t deliver.

So quickly does Jesus’ star rise that everyone starts to wonder whether he is the messiah. In jail, John gets wind of the speculation and wants Jesus to confirm it. He sends envoys to him. “Tell us: are you the one?”

Jesus replies: “Go tell John this: the blind see, the lame walk, the dead rise, and the poor have God on their side.” The gospel doesn’t record John’s reaction when he heard this message back in his cell, but the Baptist knew his Bible. Jesus was roughly quoting Isaiah, who said that when the blind see, the lame walk, the dead rise, and the poor get justice, it’s a sure sign that God is nearby, and will soon set about removing the wicked and breathing new life into the whole creation.

When John hears what Jesus says about himself, he must realize that a joyous future is dawning, a new day ushered in by none other than Jesus of Nazareth.

But that line from Isaiah is not all Jesus said that day. What if, as they turned away to return to John in jail, the emissaries overheard the conversation between Jesus and the crowd? That stunning line—“No one ever born is greater than John.” And the addendum—“but the least in the kingdom is greater.” What if they reported that to John, too? In that dismal cell, would he have been glad to be praised so highly? Or might that praise have sounded like a eulogy? A kind word spoken over the grave of his movement. John is great! Bur John is yesterday! Long live John! Now, let’s get on to Jesus.

The handwriting is on the wall. I imagine that John knows it. Something new is afoot, and it doesn’t include him. He has done his part. He is not needed for what God is doing now, nor for what God will do tomorrow. The world will not turn to him in that jail for its healing. It will not find in his prison a durable hope. And it will not search for a key to release him. John has to stay in jail. And Jesus has to leave him there.

Leaving John in jail is hard. It seems heartless, ungrateful, unfeeling. There will always be good reasons to stay behind with John. You want to get him out of jail so that he can keep doing the good work he was doing. You want to honor his contributions, to let him know you care about what happens to him. But it can’t be that way. You have to go on without him if you want what Jesus promises, the new life he wants to give you from God.

Still, it’s not easy to leave John in jail. If you ever tried to leave some John of your own behind, you know what I mean. If you ever tried to break from an okay way of life that was keeping you from a great one, you know what I’m talking about. If you’ve ever tried to let go of something solid, a bird in the hand, to take that risk that’s been calling to you for a long, long time, calling you to stake your life on a promise or a dream, you know what I mean. You need to leave John in jail and go forward.

Leaving John in jail is not easy. You know what I mean if you’ve ever been forced to consider that a cherished tradition may not serve a purpose anymore, or that a hard-won opinion may now be off the mark. You know what I’m getting at if you’ve ever had to change your mind about something that matters, put old certainties on the shelf.

You know what it means if you’ve ever had to fight against a fierce desire to be right; a desire so strong it compelled you to lay down rut after rut on already well-worn ground in a daily effort to preserve things the way you need them, the way you want them, the way you think they should be.

You know what I mean if you’ve ever admitted that what was first is not always best, what used to be is not always right, what you’ve always known is not all there is to know, not all God has in store.

You know what it means to leave John in jail if you’ve ever looked an old enemy or a misplaced love in the eye and offered to start over, to find a way, to go forward and not look back.

You know something about how necessary it is to leave John in jail if you’ve ever been on your knees pleading for things to be different; praying that the heaviness in you might shift, that a steadier light might shine from your spirit, a forgiving voice emerge from your throat.

You know what I mean if somehow, even once in your life, you had the strength to let the burden of your past just go, and step into a breaking day.

Christmas is just a couple of weeks away, and most of us are up to our necks in sweet angels, fluffy sheep, good will toward men, gingerbread and drummer boys. You don’t see spiky desert stubble at the mall. The hard prophets of Advent don’t put in guest appearances on TV talk shows. You can’t order a leveled Advent mountain on the internet. You can’t email a jacked-up valley or a superhighway made straight for God in the nowhere of starved and broken hearts. You can’t download the messianic hue and cry that alerts us to the appearance of the Lord’s Great Day. The only appearance causing any real excitement is the appearance of the latest greatest gadget under the tree.

We settle, most of us, for the tried and true at Christmas — a favorite carol, a nostalgic replay of a perfect childhood memory, that cup of eggnog, a pious cliché. Comforting things. Good seasonal routines. They do the trick, they make us warm, they take the edge off our deeper sadnesses. Even the terrors of the holidays — estranged siblings, abandoned parents, the pleas of the needy, consumer madness — have their own predictability, a perversely familiar feel.

No, there’s nothing really unsettling in sight; it’s a soothing time, same old same old. Assembly required. Batteries not included. Been there, done that.

But meanwhile, back in the scriptures, and somewhere deep in the human heart, God is calling for a break in the usual action. God is working with a beginner’s mind. A new thing is coming. Contrary to TV specials and most Christmas sermons, it is nothing like anything you already know, it is nothing you have ever seen, it is not what you are used to, what you bank on, it has little to do with the way things were, once upon a time.

It is a real human being with a face on fire from tomorrow’s light. It is a real divine savior who can make the difference you are dying for, the difference you are dying without. He is just and he is free, and he walks closer than is prudent to the edge of love, for you and for your healing. He is so new, so real, that he is the scariest man who ever lived. It is the great irony of faith that we will be safe only with him.

The scriptures say he is coming soon. He has bright morning in his eyes.

When he comes, leave John in jail and follow him.