Advent – Peculiar Faith

Advent, Apocalypse, and AIDS

Many of us heard a portion from Matthew’s account of the Gospel yesterday morning in church, on the first Sunday of Advent. Matthew’s Jesus is talking about the so-called “end of the world,” the day and hour of which no one knows (not even him). But its arrival will be dramatic and dismaying: “Then two will be in the field,” he says; “one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and one will be left” (Mt. 24:40-41).

It’s fairly easy to dismiss those traces of an ancient apocalyptic scenario, but I can tell you firsthand what it feels like.

Around 1983, the year I graduated from college, people began to disappear. I started paying attention to this strange phenomenon two years later, my first year in seminary.

I knew a couple, Terry and Francis, who lived in New York. Each of them worked for the same advertising and marketing company, sharing ideas and strategies both inside and outside of the office. With hardly any warning, Francis was struggling to manage work and home life without Terry, as if Terry had suddenly been snatched away by aliens from outer space.

A seminary classmate told me about some friends of his back in San Francisco, David and Brad. They had moved there as roommates a few years earlier from the Midwest. They might as well have been a couple as they spent nearly all their spare time together exploring the city, taking trips to Napa Valley for wine tasting, or sailing on the Bay. Just as suddenly as Francis had, David found himself alone, without Brad by his side.

Before long, we knew more about the aliens who had been snatching these people away. They were given names like pneumocystis pneumonia and carposi sarcoma. A seminary professor started referring to this phenomenon like a thunderstorm—you just didn’t know where the lightning would strike next.

The storm was called HIV and AIDS, and we had no idea what the next ten years had in store for so many. Even if we did, no one could have prepared adequately for that kind of assault. Back then, young men who were perfectly healthy one day were admitted to the hospital the next, never to be discharged—just as Matthew’s Jesus described, one was taken, another left.

Sometimes more than one, far more. I heard of someone who lost more than 250 friends and acquaintances to this disease. I’m not sure I can believe that. Perhaps he was exaggerating. Or perhaps my mind’s gatekeeper refuses to let that information in, for fear of what it would do to my sanity. I did sometimes wonder how he, the one who had lost so many, had kept himself from going completely mad, running into the streets and screaming incoherently. Perhaps he eventually did, and I, for one, certainly wouldn’t blame him.

A dear friend of mine, Jim Mitulski, was the pastor of the gay-positive Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco at exactly that time of apocalyptic dismay. For longer than I can begin to fathom, Jim was conducting at least one funeral every weekend in his congregation, sometimes more than one; that he kept anything like his sanity is a miracle of God’s grace.

I consider Jim a powerful minister of the Gospel and a prophet of divine justice, who continues that ministry today as one of the best preachers I know. It’s also extremely important that this history is remembered, and now, thanks to a wonderful podcast project called When We All Get to Heaven, this slice of history is available to many more.

This is a remarkable documentary project telling the story of that church based on an archive of 1200 cassette tapes recorded during the height of the AIDS epidemic (many of them are Jim’s sermons). I cannot recommend this podcast more highly.

The importance of memory for activism also appeared in 1988, when the United States and many other countries began observing World AIDS Day each year on December 1. This became an important moment on the calendar for remembering—all those who were sick, those who had died, the many instances of truly heroic caregiving and tender accompaniment of so many thousands. It was also an important observance for the sake of public health; we cannot combat a deadly disease without being made aware of it, knowing its causes, and taking action for prevention and treatment.

AIDS Ribbon Collage, Arum Studios, South Africa

For the first time since 1988, the United States government will not be observing World AIDS Day today. This decision is a departure from a decades-long tradition observed by both Republican and Democratic administrations; many public health experts and medical professionals are denouncing this decision as “shameful and dangerous,” and even reminiscent of the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic when the government largely ignored this disease. Just like the policy decision earlier this year to end USAID grants for HIV prevention and treatment worldwide, the decision not to observe World AIDS Day has profound social consequences for public health—people will die.

And so Advent begins, as it always does, with a healthy dose of apocalyptic Christianity. Quite honestly, I happen to like Advent’s apocalyptic character; it faces the hard realities of the world directly and then invites, even begs us to summon hope from our traditions.

That combination of memory and hope—and the world-changing activism it can inspire—appeared vividly to me shortly after moving to Berkeley in the early 1990s. I saw a T-shirt while strolling through the Castro district in San Francisco; in simple poignancy were these words on the shirt: All I want is a cure and my friends back.

I can’t think of a better one-line summary of the character of Advent. For all its liturgical complexities and religious patina, let’s not miss that poignancy, especially on this day, when our own government is yet again trying to erase so many of us.

And let every community of faith boldly proclaim the heart of the Gospel on this very day: God Erases No One.

Apocalypse: Then and Now

Macabre fascination or teenage PTSD? Full-throated world-ending transformation or the blossoming of God’s own realm of peace with justice?

Rather than choosing among those modes and moods, a combination of all of them (and more) bounces around my religious imagination as the season of Advent approaches—this very weekend! This seems especially the case as the first Sunday of Advent is upon us, which launches what I have come to call, rather affectionately, “National Eschaton Week.” The lectionary and prayers always set an apocalyptic tone for what many assume is just prep time for gift wrapping and soaking fruitcake in more rum.

I sound flippant, and part of me is, which is likely a survival mechanism). I grew up in an Evangelical subculture resting on the edge of Christian fundamentalism—let’s just call it “Fundagelical Christianity”— in which “apocalypse” meant only one kind of thing: the second coming of Christ, the rapture of believers, and the terror (especially as a teenager) at the prospect of being “left behind” (no, I have never read those novels and never will). And still, and yet: I have come to love Advent, even the first Sunday, which is quite likely my favorite Sunday on the church calendar.

I stumbled upon a poem just recently by Steven Charleston—an indigenous elder of the Choctaw nation and a bishop in The Episcopal Church. It does not at first seem related in any way to Advent, at least not the kind of Advent brimming with the apocalyptic undertones of my childhood. But I find it exactly the thing for the season now upon us:

Come sit with me beside a pool of wonder.
Take time to watch still water.
See how deep your mind can go,
when you drop it like a stone,
into hidden depths of the heart,
where even reason cannot follow.
We will never know every answer.
Our task is to be stewards of the mysteries of God,
in awe of what we have yet to learn,
mystics beside the pool of living water,
where shadows
are as welcome as the sun.

Those words (from Charleston’s book Hope as Old as Fire: A Spiritual Diary) invite me to frame Advent as a season of stillness and reflection, a time of embracing a raw hopefulness as we “steward” the profound mysteries of God. This kind of introspection, laced with a quiet anticipation, can feel quite counter-cultural while holiday music blares from sidewalk speakers along streets lined with brightly lighted trees and a sense of holiday bustle shimmers around nearly every corner. (Even in the cute, nearly Norman Rockwellian resort town where I now live, a local restaurant was blasting heavy-metal versions of Christmas carols through their outdoor speakers at such a volume this past week that I was tempted to eschew my longstanding commitment to pacifism.)

Charleston’s invitation to find stillness stands in contrast not only to the wider culture at this time of year but also to the biblical texts assigned by the lectionary for this coming Sunday. We don’t even have any hints about the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem on the first Sunday of Advent; the lectionary will instead, as it always does, present us with images of the end of the world itself—at least, that’s what I used to think those texts signaled.

The Greek verb from which we get our word apocalypse simply means “to reveal” or unveil. While most of us (myself included) usually use the word “apocalyptic” to refer to something horrific or for some kind of disaster, there’s nothing about the word itself that demands that kind of meaning. We will hear a wonderful passage from the ancient Hebrew prophet Isaiah on Sunday (2:1-5) that invites us to embrace a hidden trajectory of hopefulness in Earth herself, a divine commitment to life revealed and unveiled in ways which we might miss if we aren’t paying attention.

The character of “unveiling” in such texts seems to invite not a “conclusion” to the world but that sense of an ending that means something more like “goal” or “purpose.” And that helps me read Paul’s letter to the Romans quite differently than I might otherwise. The portion assigned from that letter for Sunday (13:11-14) has Paul urging the Romans to stay awake. He doesn’t mean we ought to prepare for a day of doom (even if circumstances might become dire), but rather to stay awake to the presence of God’s life-giving Spirit in the world around us, and to take note of its shimmering emergence and gentle blossoming in places we may not have expected.

This might well be why I have come to love Advent so much, even the first Sunday of this odd season. The commotion and chaos of the wider world, both in the first century and today, can easily prevent us from seeing the tender flow of divine grace running through our own lives, and in our relationships, and throughout our communities, as well as the ecosystems of this precious Earth; Advent invites us to notice.

Here in the northern hemisphere, Advent always begins as Earth is tilting toward the darkest time of year, when the deep stillness of winter does not signal death but rather the quiet preparation for the renewal of life in the spring. The planet’s tilt and the seasonal lectionary, as well as our liturgical prayers and hymns all invite us into that same kind of interior space.

These rich textures for Advent seem especially important when the wider world around us appears hellbent toward disaster and destruction. In such a time of anxiety, whether in the first century or today, I actually relish Advent’s robust apocalyptic tone. As Bishop Charleston would say, the texts for this season invite us to dip into hidden pools of living water, hopeful and confident of a much deeper unveiling of life still to come.

My reasons for loving Advent seem to grow and shift every year. Mostly I embrace the somewhat rude and jolting textual images for the season as a powerful reminder about why Christmas itself matters: God remains in solidarity with us and with the whole world of God’s creation.

Advent’s seeds of hopefulness, planted in the winter soil of a wounded world, shall not fail to take root and blossom into new life at the hands of the God who remains forever faithful.

That outrageous assurance is why I love Advent.

“When the Light Breaks Through,” Catherine Picard Gibbs

Turn Around and Build a World with God

Imagine Luke the Gospel writer as a filmmaker. In the snippet we heard from Luke this past Sunday (3:1-6), the camera is zooming way out for context: there we see the Roman Emperor Tiberius in the fifteenth year of his reign; zooming in a bit, we see that Pontius Pilate is the Roman governor of Judea (a province of the Empire) while Herod is the ruler over Galilee; this was the time when—zooming in further—Annas and Caiphas were the high priests of the temple in Jerusalem.

Time and place matter to Luke—they matter theologically and spiritually and not merely as scenery on the stage. The Gospel is “good news” precisely because of this: it deals directly with the material circumstances of human life and society—from the temple just down the street, to the governor on the hill, and all the way to the emperor on his throne.

To put this in another way, the Christian Gospel does not support a disembodied faith and it cannot be detached from messy entanglements with the wider world (as much as I would sometimes prefer it could be). To suppose that Christian faith is a matter of private and interior piety emerged only recently in Church history, mostly in the modern West, and among people who were perfectly comfortable with the way the world is.

But for people who believe the world must change, the Christian Gospel proclaims the God who is with us in that shared struggle for a better world—and the time is now to get to work.

That’s the good news Luke wants to tell as he launches the ministry of John the Baptist, which will prepare the way for the ministry of Jesus, and Luke frames this moment with the short glimpse into first-century geo-political realities and imperial rulers (along with a few clergy thrown in for good measure).

For Luke, “preparing the way” for Jesus stands in stark contrast to the way already charted by the likes of Herod, and Pontius Pilate, and Tiberius—and this is essentially why repentance is at the core of the message John the Baptist preaches.

Luke is the only gospel writer to give us substantial backstory for John—not only John’s familial connection to Jesus (they were something like second cousins), but also about John’s elderly mother, Elizabeth (who thought she would never have a child), and also his elderly father, Zechariah, who was a priest in the Jerusalem temple. John was born into a professional religious family, in other words, but oddly he did not follow in his father’s footsteps.

Or perhaps that’s not so odd—children of religious parents, especially clergy, tend to resist and even reject the religion of their youth. John did this rather dramatically: he didn’t just sidestep the temple; he fled Jerusalem entirely.

John goes out to the wilderness—Luke doesn’t say for how long, and he may have lived there with a community of religious radicals and social dropouts (think “hippie commune in the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco in the 1960s,” that kind of community)—he goes out to the wilderness, exactly where so many of the prophets of ancient Israel went to discern what God is calling God’s people to do at that time and in that place.

And that’s where the lectionary picks up the story this past Sunday. God calls John back from the wilderness to go to the towns and villages of Judea, to the river valley region referred to as “the Jordan”—which was, not just coincidentally, the seat of both religious and political power in that imperial province.

God calls John to preach repentance in those towns and villages—not out in the wilderness, but in the public square and in houses of worship.

I always find it helpful to recall that the Greek verb we usually see translated as “repentance” is not merely about remorse for having made a mistake. To “repent” means to change your mind and alter your course. You’ve been headed the wrong way—it’s time to turn around!

To “prepare the way of the Lord” means turning around when you’ve been following the way of Herod, Pontius Pilate, and Tiberius.

To “prepare the way of the Lord” means removing the mountains of social privilege for a few that block access to a life of thriving for all.

To “prepare the way of the Lord” means raising up the valleys of despair to make a path of companionship for the brokenhearted.

All of this is classic prophetic language, a plea to change course, and especially for the sake of the most vulnerable among us. And all four Gospel writers weave John into that long lineage of prophetic witness, especially Isaiah.

The collection of various writings in the one book we call Isaiah stretches across several centuries, from a time of warning about impending political disaster, through the catastrophe of Israel’s exile in Babylon, and to the return of God’s people to their homeland.

Anticipating that moment of joyful return is what the lectionary gave us from the prophet Baruch on Sunday (Baruch 5:1-9). Baruch was the scribe for the prophet Jeremiah—not an enviable position, needless to say. Jeremiah was constantly getting into trouble for denouncing both the religious and political establishment of his day, and Baruch had to write it all down.

But Baruch drafted his own prophetic texts as well, beautiful texts that encourage God’s people to live with joy, the kind toward which Jeremiah’s lamentations could only point.

Here’s the truly astonishing thing: Baruch is writing to the exiles still in Babylon as if they are already returning to Jerusalem. “Take off the garment of sorrow,” he says. “Your people stand ready to rejoice at your return.”

Note this carefully: prophets have a very strange sense of time. They are not interested in predicting the future. As Baruch seems to suggest, we build the promised day to come by living it now.

We build the promised day to come by the way we live right now.

John the Baptist belongs to that long line of Hebrew prophets with precisely that posture, preaching preparation not prediction. The vital implication here is this: the future is actually wide open. Contrary to the religious formation of my youth, there is no cosmic blueprint with which world events are aligning; there is no heavenly timetable to which prophets have special access; there is no pre-determined plan unfolding in elections and markets and wars.

Quite honestly, I often think a detailed plan would make life a bit easier, especially when a radically open future feels scary. Facing an open future means we have some serious decisions to make about how we live, decisions that will shape the kind of world we will inhabit.

That word “world” can mean, as it did for biblical writers, both small and large realities—the world of one’s own faith community, or the world of the neighborhoods in which we reside, or one’s own country as a world, as well as this planetary world of many countries.

What kind of world do we want to inhabit?

That’s the urgent question prophets always ask. It’s the question religious traditions urgently pose, which they can help us answer, and then shape us to live that answer as a community of God’s people.

As I reflect on Advent this year, and the prophets, and the world in which we currently live, I am increasingly convinced about a crucial way to frame Christmas. It’s this: the coming of Jesus is God’s offer to collaborate with us on what the future will look like.

God has hopes and dreams for God’s own creation. God’s will is that all would thrive and flourish. And God is always calling and then equipping communities of faith to make these divine dreams a reality. It’s time, as John would say, to turn around and build a world with God.

John’s father Zechariah sang a song of praise for this world-building God, whose manner of arrival surprises every generation (Luke 1:68-79). That song—which Luke actually calls a “prophecy”—has since then become a Prayer Book canticle, and the lectionary invited us to recite it in worship on Sunday.

That prophetic song of praise is offered for this: God arrives not with military strength, not robed in royal majesty, and not armed with anything we might expect to be useful for a world-changing mission; God always arrives in “tender compassion.”

The “dawn from on high,” Zechariah sings—that light which will guide our feet along the way, along the good road we build together and with God—that dawning light is tenderness and compassion.

Advent invites us to live as if God has already arrived and is always arriving, not with doomsday predictions but to inspire us and to work with us to build a world to inhabit with joy—a world of peace, with justice, and thriving for all.

That work—that great work—begins with our own hearts, with our hearts being cracked open by the tender compassion of God.

Sing for a Change

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

So sings Mary of Nazareth, a young woman (likely a young teenager), living in an occupied first-century province of the Roman Empire. She’s pregnant, and unmarried, and without many resources, and still she sings of the God who brings down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly (Luke 1:47-55).

We recited her song—usually referred to as the Magnificat—in church yesterday, in place of a psalm, and we sang not one but two metrical versions of it during worship.

In this third week of Advent, the appointed texts are starting to sound like Christmas. But this classic song from a young girl made me wonder: Has the world really changed very much since she first sang it? Have there been any kings sitting on thrones in their kingdoms, any tyrants ruling their empires since then?

Yes, of course. And yet, composers have not stopped setting Mary’s song to music, in nearly every generation. Kingdoms rise and fall, and still the Magnificat is sung. Empires come and go; but right here in a twenty-first century world, we still sing Mary’s song of the God who shall not fail in freedom and mercy.

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

So sings a small group of young Black women in the middle of Tennessee. I stumbled upon their story just recently, about a group of students at Fisk University in Nashville.

It was the summer of 1871 and these young women were making their way back to Nashville after singing together at a concert. Traveling in the South at that time was dangerous, especially for Black women. Sure enough, a mob of white men started to harass and threaten them as they walked to a train station.

Clustered together on the platform with no train yet in sight, surrounded by violent men, the young women began to sing a hymn. They likely sang one of the Negro spirituals from the plantations, with words about the tender mercy of precious Jesus.

Quite remarkably, as they sang, the mob of white men slowly began to disperse, one by one. As the train approached, only the mob’s leader remained; he stood there with tears streaming down his cheeks and he begged the women to sing the hymn again.

Have there been racists and episodes of violent bigotry and lynch mobs since then? Yes, of course. But the song of those women made a difference for that young man who wanted to hear it just one more time.

(Those women, by the way, became the award-winning, world-renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers, a choral organization still in existence today, at Fisk.)

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

My own mother sang such divine praise when she became pregnant with me at the age of thirty-nine, at a time when that was considered too old for a safe pregnancy. She was convinced that she would never have children, and she was distraught about this.

She often said how much she identified with Hannah, the figure from the Hebrew Bible who was also without children. Hannah prayed and wept to God for a child—just as my mother said she herself did—and Hannah eventually gave birth to Samuel, the great prophet of ancient Israel and anointer of kings. The song of praise to God that Hannah sings eventually became the inspiration for the song Mary sings in Luke’s account of the Gospel (1 Samuel 2:1-10).

Imagine growing up as I did hearing from your mother about your own birth framed with the stories of Hannah and Samuel, and of Mary and Jesus! That’s more than just a little pressure! Who could possibly live up to such biblical expectations?

I certainly couldn’t live up to that, and I haven’t. But I have tried to pay attention to this over these many years: for both Jewish and Christian traditions, the stories of Hannah and of Mary are not only about these individual women; they are mostly about the communities they shaped with the faith they lived.

We do tell complex stories about ourselves and our communities, weaving our lives together with the dreams of our ancestors from centuries ago. And we do this as a way to keep us rooted in a history of faithfulness for the sake of a future of hopefulness.

The Gospel writer we call “Luke” did precisely this. He loved that song of Hannah (which he then gives to Mary to sing while pregnant), and Luke loved the opening verses we also heard in church yesterday from Isaiah (which he then gives to Jesus when Jesus launches his ministry of healing and liberation in Nazareth), and Luke also loved the prophet Joel, whose words he then uses to describe the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Luke told stories with ancient texts that were not his own, but they became part of him, and then part of the communities to which he wrote, and now they are part of us.

It matters that these stories constantly feature faith, and hope, and also love in a world where the word “success” usually matters more.

I’ve been reflecting recently on what exactly “successful” means, probably because my parish has been steeped in our annual fundraising campaign for 2024, just like many other congregations; ‘tis the season! As we track responses and tally the totals, I can’t help but wonder whether any biblical figure would qualify as “successful” by today’s standards.

Success in modern Western society is based on a set of recognizable and measureable metrics: more money, more cars, more land, and more acquisitions. The more we own, the more we control, the more we dominate, the more successful we are.

Success might be our collective problem in the world right now, not our solution. As environmental educator and activist David W. Orr has succinctly noted: The world does not need more “successful” people; the world desperately needs “more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds.”

What we need this very moment are more artists and musicians and bakers and gardeners and caretakers of dogs and cats and of all sorts of creatures who share this precious Earth with us, all of us working together to build communities of tender care and fierce justice—whether or not anyone thinks any of this is “successful.”

Mary of Nazareth didn’t sing for success; she sang her song from a broken heart, cracked open by the suffering of her people, and stubborn enough to believe that the God of her ancestors remains faithful to God’s own promises—even when it doesn’t look like “success.”

She sings her song in an occupied land, vulnerable to violence, and then vulnerable to the scandal of her pregnancy, and still she sings, not with certainty but with hopefulness. As the great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has insisted, Gospel hope is not just some vague feeling that things will all just work out in the end; it’s actually quite evident that not everything will work out.

Hope is instead the conviction, against a great deal of data to the contrary, that God is tenacious in overcoming evil with good; that God insists on turning the world’s sadness into joy; that God shall not rest until at last a new realm has dawned where the lost are found, and the displaced brought home, and the dead raised to new life.

That’s the story we must tell, and the music we must compose, and the pictures we must paint, and the energy all of us must cultivate together for a world that can’t imagine trusting that story anymore but still longs to hear it. Just like that young man on a nineteenth-century train platform, with tears streaming down his face, who wanted to hear the hymn one more time—the world is desperate to hear Mary’s song once more, sung with conviction, sung by the way we live, sung for a change.

I suggested all this on a Sunday that marked the 35^th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. While I’m deeply grateful for the privilege to preside at the Eucharistic Table, what matters most is the community of God’s people gathered there.

Having returned to fulltime parish ministry nearly four years ago, this much has become quite clear: we need to help each other to hear Mary’s song anew, and then to learn how to sing it by the way we live.

This, too, is very clear these days: there’s no time to waste. So let’s sing…for a change.

For the New World Coming, Leave the Old One Behind

Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon recently gave me a visceral view of what an apocalyptic Advent looks like. Their recent Netflix film Leave the World Behind also starred Mahershala Ali and Myha’la, but Roberts, Hawke, and Bacon matter for the “old world,” which I’ll describe shortly.

But first I need to recall the kind of Christian tradition I grew up in, which relegated “conversion” to an interior matter of the heart. By confessing one’s sins and turning to Christ as Savior, one leaves the old self behind for a brand new life ahead. This turning away from the old to embrace the new, moreover, is meant to happen just once; conversion is a moment in time.

There are some biblical texts to support that view of the spiritual journey, but not many. The prophets of ancient Israel and the overall arc of the Christian Testament certainly affirm the importance of what the modern West calls “personal conversion,” but the emphasis falls squarely on the transformation of the world and not only the “heart.” Depending on the particular biblical book or writer, a changed heart might be a prerequisite for a changed world, or it might be a result, but they never remain in isolation from each other, at least not for long.

This notion of social change and a world transformed has been difficult to imagine for many of us in the “comfort class” of the modern West. As the modern world increasingly made life easier (especially for white people in the middle and upper classes), biblical denunciations of the “world” and equally bracing declarations of a new world coming sounded not only unlikely but a tad bit embarrassing. Transporting that transformation onto the interior landscape of each individual made the whole religious enterprise much more palatable—and far less biblical.

So along comes Sam Esmail’s film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, Leave the World Behind, which is perhaps the best Advent movie ever made. When a privileged white couple physically leaves the metropolitan world of New York City for a remote getaway spot on Long Island, they quickly realize that have taken parts of their “old world” with them—not only their reliance on modern technology (which is oddly and increasingly crumbling over the course of the film) but also their own latent racism and class privilege, which no longer insulates and protects them (if it ever really did), and which they must let go, like so much technology baggage that no longer works, anyway.

I grew up enchanted with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and My Best Friend’s Wedding, had a crush on Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society, and of course fell in love with Kevin Bacon in Footloose, the soundtrack of which one of my dearest friends and I listened to while we drove from Chicago to San Francisco for our Big Gay Adventure. That these three actors clearly show their age in the film is a perfect image of the old world being left behind, while Mahershala Ali and Myha’la—whose work I barely know but whose talent is breathtaking—embody beautifully a new world emerging.

I know I’m not the only one who has been feeling generally “off” for quite some time, often fighting back tears or struggling to grasp the world around me as if through gauzy filters. Yes, we’ve lived through a global pandemic, but that seems more like a symptom than a cause of some deeper malaise so many of us are shouldering and which we just can’t shake. Amanda Sanford, the Julia Roberts character in Leave the World Behind, delivers a somber, rather insightfully prickly, and spot-on speech to her younger companion-of-color roughly half through the film. Amanda is an advertising exec who doesn’t like people and hasn’t felt right about the world for decades—and yet she has kept on keeping on, and now…well, I won’t spoil the film for you.

I cannot help but hear the gorgeous opening notes of Handel’s Messiah, the text of which many Christians heard this past Sunday morning from Isaiah (40:1-11): “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.”

This God of comfort so many of us are longing to encounter—perhaps only because we at last hear the word “comfort” said out loud—this is the God whom Isaiah tells us to expect and make ready to meet: “Prepare the way for the Lord,” Isaiah says.

And out from the desert steps John the Baptist, whom the lectionary also gives us on the second Sunday of Advent (Mark 1:1-8).

Wait. That can’t be right! What kind of comfort is this that shows up in a wild figure wearing ludicrous clothing and eating a ridiculous diet? Divine relief looks rather unkempt, or maybe just scorched and frazzled, like the image by French artist Lynda Miller Baker.

That image of John can remind us just how out of place he is in the grand story of modern Western progress. Most Americans love that story in much the same way we love to narrate the success of our own lives—the success that comes under a rather pitiless scrutiny in Leave the World Behind.

Starting back in the eighteenth century, with the birth of liberal democracies and the industrial revolution and the invention of everything from electricity to antibiotics, the very notion of progress itself seemed to be woven into our shared destiny—a destiny ordained by God!

Speaking truthfully about modern Western history presents a very different and much messier story, one with enduring heartache, and considerable suffering, and ongoing violence. I want to promote healing for such a world, but I wonder now whether it all just needs to be left behind. Is that John’s message from the wilderness? Isaiah’s?

This much seems clear: the way forward for people of faith, the “good road,” or the highway for our God as Isaiah described it, is mapped with change and transformation, not with progress. That word “progress” comes saddled with the same baggage as the word “evolution.” Far too many people think both of those words mean that everything is constantly getting better. Evolutionary biologists would beg to differ, of course, and so would most historians.

Believing in “progress” usually requires practicing denial and refusing to see what must change—a whole world that needs to be left behind, or in the image of the second letter of Peter, burned up (3:8-15). True to classic Advent themes, the lectionary also gave us alarming apocalyptic images of all things passing away and even melting, and perhaps for reasons both Rumaan Alam and Sam Esmail would enthusiastically endorse.

We wait for “new heavens and a new earth,” Peter says, because we need a world where “justice is at home”—and this present world is not it, not without dramatic change.

This is the rude message of the prophets that come to us every year in Advent. As Carl Jung once insisted, “Every transformation demands, as its precondition, the ending of a world—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” And that’s what Christian traditions mean by “conversion”; that’s why the prophets preach repentance; that’s why the new liturgical year begins with Advent, not Christmas.

Rather than a single moment, conversion is a lifelong journey of change, and rather than unfolding on an interior landscape only, it kindles a fire on the world around us. And this is exactly why paying attention is not only a banner for Advent but a primary discipline in nearly every one of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions.

Keep awake and pay attention—not to how your own story is “supposed” to go or the way a community ought to run or where we think God should show up, but pay attention to how things actually are, at this very moment, and pay attention to the voice of one crying out from the wilderness—repent, slow down, turn around, and change your course.

Or perhaps we need to say it as clearly as Alam and Esmail do: leave the old world behind.

If we do that—or rather, in all the many ways we do that—we declare along with Mark that this is just the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

“Gospel”—that’s good news. Neither Advent nor Mark will let us embrace its goodness until some things change; our hearts, yes, but also the world.

White supremacy, patriarchal domination, ecological destruction—those are just some of the pieces of an old world from which I have benefitted enormously as a white male, and the cost is unbearable.

That world needs to be left behind, and there’s no time to waste.

“Such is the Kingdom of God,” Daniel Bonnell

Stay Woke and Keep Awake

Like many other white people, I first heard the term “woke” roughly ten years ago after the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of Michael Brown. The term quickly became associated with Black Lives Matter activism, and also with wider social concerns that included both gender and sexuality.

“Woke,” however, has much earlier origins. After the horrors of institutional slavery, the devastation of the American Civil War, and the rocky period known as “Reconstruction,” the early twentieth century held a great deal of promise and potential for racial healing, and a new chapter of economic prosperity for all racial groups.

But there were also notes of caution, coming mostly from Black musicians and visual artists in the 1920s and 1930s: “stay woke,” they said; pay attention and be vigilant; don’t take anything for granted.

Turns out, those were important cautions; the era of Jim Crow segregation and lynch mobs soon followed.

The Gospel writer known as “Mark” composed his account of the Gospel not long after a turbulent and violent period in first-century Judea. “The Jewish War,” as it is sometimes called, occurred right around the year 70 when Judeans rose up against their Roman occupiers; Rome destroyed much of Jerusalem during that war, including the Temple. This came right after decades of severe economic hardship among those we would call the “working poor” during the reign of King Herod.

Many of us heard that time of upheaval referenced in church yesterday, on the first Sunday of Advent. The opening verse of the Gospel passage—“after that suffering”—probably refers to those unsettling events (Mark 13:24-37). Mark’s Jesus, in other words, is trying to prepare his listeners for a time of significant social unrest and political violence. “Keep awake,” he says; pay attention and be vigilant; don’t take anything for granted.

“Stay woke” and “keep awake” come from two very different cultural and historical eras, yet the message of vigilance seems remarkably similar. The key question they pose is this: to what should we be paying such close attention? World events? Our own anxieties? Portents of doom in sea and sky?

The Gospel passage assigned for the first day of the new liturgical year (one of my favorites on the calendar) comes from a chapter sometimes referred to as the “mini-apocalypse” in Mark’s account of the Gospel. It’s striking that this chapter is the longest speech of Mark’s Jesus (in Mark, Jesus is mostly an action figure and doesn’t actually say very much), and it’s also striking that this longest speech is steeped in apocalyptic images.

Christians have interpreted this passage in many different ways over the centuries—from the fall of Rome, when it was sacked by barbarians in the fifth century, to the nineteenth-century reframing of the Second Coming of Christ as that sense of inner peace that passes all understanding.

Regardless of the interpretive framing of such texts, Advent will always provoke, stymie, and vex. How could it not when Mark’s Jesus warns us that the sun and moon will refuse to give their light, and all the stars will fall from the sky?

I know there are some Christians who truly do expect that kind of fundamental realignment in our solar system and an unraveling of our galaxy. I don’t—and I don’t think even Mark thought such events were likely, not in his lifetime and probably not ever.

If astronomical chaos is unlikely to happen any time soon, perhaps Mark is inviting us to wonder what is likely to happen in a world that seems to be careening toward catastrophe on nearly every front.

Ethnic cleansings, hospital bombings, ecological collapse, mass extinctions—how do we read those signs of these times today? If we stay awake and pay attention, will we find God’s presence in such moments of distress? What kind of hope—I mean, real and tangible hope—does the Church offer to a world in pain?

The whole season of Advent poses that question of hope with urgency, and we cannot squirm our way out of it, and we dare not try, either.

This urgency of hope shaped the insights of Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. She studied carefully the rise of totalitarian regimes, including in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. One of her main takeaway points is rather startling. A momentous difference between the modern Western world compared to all the centuries that came before, she argued, and which makes authoritarianism possible, is the loss of any expected Final Judgment.

That’s not just a startling but also rather peculiar thing to note about the modern world, except that it sounds as if she could have written that cautionary tale today. Losing any sense of divine judgment has meant, she noted, that the worst people among us no longer fear accountability, of any kind, and the most oppressed among us have lost nearly all their hope.

To fill that intolerable gap, the modern world tries to fabricate the paradise we long for, but ends up creating the hell we dread (German concentration camps in the 1940s, she observed, resemble nothing so much as Medieval visions of Hell).

That’s one hell of a quandary, and I’m grateful for the multiple ways we might engage with the question of hope posed by Advent.

Theologian Daniel Day Williams, for example, suggests that the classic and fantastical images of Advent—the Second Coming of Christ, the Final Judgement, and the End of Time—that these are symbols residing on the boundary of knowledge; they perch there, like sentinels, marking that line beyond which, they declare, our reason and experience will fail us.

That doesn’t make all those notions irrelevant or disposable. To the contrary, these symbols on the very edge of what we can know invite our trust. Life takes us up to the very edge of the map, where the road abruptly ends, beyond which we must choose whether we can trust that God is with us, that God will accompany us, and that God will provide what we need.

When the world is falling apart—either on a global stage or in our own living rooms—we yearn for something more than scolding from our sacred texts (we should have known better!); and we need something far more than mere moralizing from our religious traditions (shape up or things will get worse!). We must instead dare to find the very presence of God in the midst of our terror, and then help others do the same.

Let the fig tree be your parable for this, Jesus says (Mark 13:28). When the tree starts to put forth its leaves, you can trust that summer and its fruits are coming. Pay attention like that, Jesus says, for the sake of trust.

The symbols on the edge of our knowing—and the fig tree itself is one of them—these symbols can stretch our imagination toward the God who is always coming to meet us, always already appearing among us, always bidding us still onward toward that horizon over which we cannot presently see—and thus we must travel with trust.

This is why, by the way, my little parish along the “arts coast” of west Michigan devotes so much time to visual art. There is always a featured image on our liturgy leaflets, and in our weekly ad we place in the local newspaper, and we place nan image prominently in our weekly email newsletter (you, too, could subscribe to that!).

Art of all kinds can help us expand our imaginations, liberate us when we get stuck, and enhance our willingness to reach beyond the edge of what we can know with something like courageous trust.

In a world brimming with pain, God is not calling any of us to perfect knowledge or flawless solutions—these are far beyond us. But we must not therefore remain idle or merely sleepwalk our way through a disaster.

God is calling God’s people to live as a community of storytellers, and divine artists, and hospitable hosts, and players of musical instruments, and bakers of heavenly pastries, and tenders of gardens, caregivers to other animals, and funders of budgets, and still much more as all of us together offer healing to a wounded world with images of peace, as champions of justice, and lovers of beauty.

There’s really no time to waste; and we have got to stay woke and keep awake.

Gandalf’s Question and the Wilderness of Hope

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” Frodo said.

That’s the Hobbit Frodo, from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. You need not have read the books or seen the films to appreciate that quote. Simply know that Frodo had been given an epic task many times his size—and the world’s survival depended on his success.

frodo_ring — Elijah Wood as Frodo in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s *Lord of the Rings*

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” Gandalf responded, Frodo’s wizard companion. “And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide,” Gandalf declares. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

What time is it, anyway? High time to wake up, take notice, pay attention?

Is it time, finally, to repent?

Haven’t we heard that before? Aren’t some of us sick of that word? Preachers, I mean, especially. How much time should this take, anyway?

Does anybody really know what time it is (I don’t)
Does anybody really care (care about time)
If so I can’t imagine why
We’ve all got time enough to cry

Those of a certain age will recognize those lyrics from a band called “Chicago.”

My hometown. My kind of town, Chicago is.

Chicago—where they broke some heat records this past summer, during this past July, the hottest month measured on Earth since records began in 1880.

“In those days…John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness.”

John_baptist — Anton Raphael Mengs, “St. John the Baptist in the Desert”

We always hear about that wild man in the wilderness in this second week of Advent; this year, we heard Matthew’s version (3:1-12). But what exactly does Matthew mean by “wilderness”? Are there any wild places left on this planet not contaminated by plastic? Did you know that nearly every day it rains tiny plastic particles at the top of the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France, and at the top of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and likely over every mountain range on Earth?

It’s hard to know where my attention rightly belongs at a time like this, if not up there in the mountains, then maybe…

down here at the border, with the thousands of children separated from their parents, many in cages and put there by my government;
or maybe with more than a thousand incarcerated men of color fighting California wildfires for $3 a day and who are then barred from working as firefighters after their release from prison;
or where whales beach themselves, starving to death, their stomachs filled with plastic—presumably with whatever plastic hasn’t already rained down on pristine mountaintops.

These days are those days when John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching repentance.

Wilderness—a place of purgation, of starting over, of being refined by fire—and who exactly is that preacher out there? Matthew says he’s the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke.

Isaiah, it should be noted, had some peculiar notions about the wilderness, about wild places—where the wolf lives peaceably with the lamb, and the leopard lies down with the baby goat, and the calf dwells amiably with the lion, that wacky place where bears graze with the cows (Isaiah 11:6-7).

More than a few Bible commentators quickly propose that these are really only metaphors, poetic ways of speaking, not about wolves or sheep or lions and bears, but of humans, and about that day when human warfare shall cease.

That sudden eruption of peace would be wonderful, of course. But I see no reason to shy away from reading Isaiah just as wildly as his wilderness, to let him stretch our credulity and push us beyond—far beyond—what seems polite and reasonable; after all, not everything in the Bible that sounds just a bit outlandish is only, in the end, a metaphor.

I mean this: the God who can inspire humans to beat their swords into plowshares is actually too small for a prophet like Isaiah. The God Isaiah apparently had in mind is the God who rewrites the biological scripts of predation and reweaves the very fabric of creation without any trace of violence or destruction. “No one,” he imagines this God to say, “will hurt or destroy on my holy mountain” (11:9).

peaceablekingdom_isaiah11 — John Swanson, “Peaceable Kingdom” (based on Isaiah 11)

I’m guessing this is why Paul quoted Isaiah directly, by name, in his letter to the Romans. We heard from that letter for the second Sunday of Advent, too, probably because Paul really did single out Isaiah by name. I had never noticed that before, and these days it makes perfect sense.

Perhaps only Isaiah is sufficiently outrageous for Paul, sufficiently wild with hope to qualify as a champion for Paul’s outrageous take on the Gospel. Let’s recall some of its glittering nuggets that he offers to the Romans: this is the letter in which Paul invites his readers to imagine God acting “contrary to nature” by grafting the wild branch of pagan Gentiles on to the one true tree of Israel (11:24); in which he reassures his readers that by dying with Christ, we rise (6:1-11); in which he describes the whole of God’s creation groaning with anticipation for the day of salvation (8:19-23).

This is the letter where Paul insists that nothing whatsoever can ever separate God’s creation from the love of God in Christ (8:38-39)—and this is the hope, he declares, that the scriptures (like the stuff that wild and crazy Isaiah wrote) are supposed to inspire in us (15:4), the hope which we cannot see but without which we cannot live, the hope each of us needs, desperately.

But wait. Why is hope so vital, so mission-critical?

Because without it, we could never take seriously the question Tolkien’s Gandalf poses to every generation: what will we do with the time that is given us?

In these days, in this time that has been given us, the answer to Gandalf’s question will likely be very difficult to utter much less live. It will mean the kind and depth of repentance few have ever attempted. It will mean living in radically and dramatically different ways.

It will mean tapping into hope as if our lives depended on it.

Because they do.

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“Do not be Terrified”: Hope for the Apocalypse

“The situation is dire, and the future looks grim; now is the time for hope.”

Typical critiques of religious faith include complaints about rosy-colored optimism, or a kind of mass delusion. But I have been reminded recently that what is often derided as “pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking” isn’t actually outrageous enough to be biblical. It’s only when our imaginations are truly stretched and taxed, when a vision of flourishing life takes incredulity to new heights, only then are we tapping into the astonishing promises of a wildly extravagant God.

“The situation is dire, and the future looks grim; now is the time for hope.”

This is not new; we’ve been here before—exactly a year ago, in fact. And the year before that. And the year before that, just as our liturgical calendar insists. As Advent approaches and the liturgical year winds down, we start hearing from so-called “apocalyptic” texts on Sunday mornings, whether from ancient prophets or gospel writers.

I refer to these as “so-called” apocalyptic texts because of the unfortunate historical baggage the word “apocalypse” drags along with it, which is most often associated with unspeakable disasters.

So let’s remember that this ancient Greek word does not demand that we think of catastrophe when we hear it. The word “apocalypse” comes from a rather ordinary Greek verb that simply means something like taking the lid off a jar—which is why it’s often translated as “revelation.” In that sense, an apocalyptic moment is whenever something that was hidden is being revealed.

So let’s consider what that word might mean when we apply it to something more momentous than a jar, like human history. Most people assume that apocalyptic texts predict the coming of disaster in the midst of relative peace and calm. Remarkably, it’s more often exactly the opposite: in the midst of unfolding disaster, apocalyptic texts reassure us that hope is not in vain; beneath the repeated surges of social collapse and violence, there dwells an unconquerable joy. Or so most apocalyptic writers try to insist.

A classic example of this is the text from Isaiah appointed for today, which is one of my favorite texts about social and economic justice as well as the end to death and destruction.

It’s important to remember that the several writers who contributed to the one book called Isaiah did not, for the most part, live in happy times. To the contrary, many of the texts in Isaiah were produced following the unimaginable catastrophe of exile, of seeing God’s own people defeated by invading armies and carted away from their homes to a foreign land where they would reside for many generations.

And yet, and still Isaiah writes of hope in soaring terms, not because of what he was at that time able to see, but because of his trust in the faithfulness of God. God’s faithfulness, not ours, that makes all the difference for hope. And Isaiah imagines such divine faithfulness to sound like this:

I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating…
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight (65:17-19)

“The situation is dire, and the future looks grim; now is the time for hope.”

A friend of mine said that to a small gathering of bishops a few years ago, and they seemed very perplexed by it. Even religious leaders can have trouble grasping the dynamics of hope in times of distress. Luke’s Jesus seems to be noting something similar in the hair-raising passage appointed for this day (21:5-19).

As Jesus enumerates impending disasters and world-ending scenarios, he points toward the one thing his listeners thought would be the most stable and secure, the one location of divine guarantee—the temple in Jerusalem. Even this, Jesus says, will be deconstructed and dismantled, every single stone of it. stones_israel

I read Luke’s Jesus in the light of Isaiah’s resilient hope: something old needs to die before the new thing God is creating can come about.

Letting go, clearing space, removing the rubble—even the most cherished bits of rubble—this is what faith sometimes demands when we live in hope.

But I’m also noticing something else in this gospel passage that I hadn’t quite noticed before. Luke’s Jesus says, “do not be terrified.” Most of us, I’m guessing, are more accustomed to hearing Jesus say, “don’t be afraid.” The stakes seem to have gotten much higher in this passage, traveling from ordinary fear to sheer terror.

As I pondered what that difference looks like, I thought about the high school in Santa Clarita, in southern California, the site of the latest incident of gun violence where three students died, including the shooter (he was a student, too), and I thought about how many students go to school every day in this country whose ambient fear can quickly turn into terror.

I also thought about all the young children separated from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico—some of them not much older more than infants. The latest count at the end of last month was a staggering 5,400 (though some agencies suspect the number is much higher). Terror must surely saturate those detention centers at the border, wounding and scarring not only the children being held there but all the adults who work there.

As if this were not enough, I was reading about the devastating brush fires in Australia, still burning out of control, and I came across a story of people helping kangaroos, possums, and koala bears who had been singed or badly burned in the fires; these are wild animals yet very readily and apparently gratefully accepted help from humans, even embracing them. The clinical director of the only koala hospital in the world summed up why: “[These koalas] are terrified.”

koala

It turns out that the Greek word for “terrified” can also be translated as “startled” and it appears only twice in the gospel according to Luke: the first time in the apocalyptic passage appointed for today, and the second time in a story about resurrection, about encountering the risen Jesus. Stories of resurrection are also apocalyptic and startling—stories that reveal the stubborn persistence of life beneath the shroud of death.

We will continue to have good reasons to be terrified, perhaps increasingly so as ecosystems falter and previously secure institutions collapse. So it seems to me that what we Christians do in churches will matter more and more.

Gathered at the Eucharistic Table, we can remember the faithfulness of God, the God who startles us by bringing life out of death. We might also remember the possums, the kangaroos, and the koalas.

Why? Because in times of distress and terror, it’s quite natural for human communities to divide and fragment and splinter; some unsavory types will almost always exploit those moments for their own gain, as we see today in detention centers and concerning gun violence.

We must bear witness to another way, the way of deep solidarity. Just as possums, kangaroos, and koalas reached across the species barrier to embrace their rescuers, we must learn anew how to reach across the many lines that divide us from each other; that, too, is what the Eucharistic Table offers. And we will need this more and more.

After all, the situation is dire and the future looks grim; now, now is the time for hope.

bread_wine_grass

Messy Bodies, Smelly Dogs, and the Christmas Gift of Repentance

Many Christians were launched into this third week of Advent with the fiery rhetoric of John the Baptist. He’s an odd figure, in more ways the one. His desert roaming and locust-eating offer a stark contrast to inflated Santas on glittering front yards and reindeer shimmering on rooftops. John_baptist

John stands as a forerunner, a figure preparing the way for Jesus. Not so terribly odd for this season, except for the grating substance of his message: repentance.

That word more than merely grates. Repentance is one of those words that makes a growing number insist on being spiritual but hell-no-not-religious. It qualifies as one of those “trigger words,” especially for those who have heard it only in tirades of condemnation.

As a gay man, I heard that word as a young adult not only as judgment on my sexual desires but for my bodily self, who I am in the world. I came to internalize that judgment, thinking of my very own flesh as wrong, bad, even disgusting. This is what leads a shocking number of young people to suicide; one would be too many. Quite frankly, I am astonished with gratitude that I am still alive after those many years of suffocating religion.

My life changed dramatically in my mid-twenties, when a dear friend recounted the confession he made to a priest about being gay. In essence, this was the content of his confession: “I confess that I have been rejecting the goodness of my sexuality and the divine gift of my bodily desires; I repent.”

My friend told me this, transforming entirely my concept of sin and repentance, not to mention my image of God. Repentance, I realized, is not primarily about remorse; or rather, such regret is not its purpose. The word itself means turning, changing one’s mind, shifting the course of one’s whole life. To repent is to turn away from shadowy realms and toward the light, toward the light of thriving, flourishing and fleshy life, a life of joy, just as God intends.

This Advent season, now on the brink of the Christmas season, is drenched in bodily stuff, in flesh. Biblical writers don’t often dwell on abstract concepts but turn often to bodily images to convey spiritual insights – particular places, landscapes, banquets, other animals. Christmas celebrates newborn flesh in a manger, a feeding trough for cattle and sheep. Bodily, fleshy stuff matters, more than we can imagine; it’s precisely there, in bodies, where we encounter the mystery of God.

Here in the United States, we’ve been living through a period of rather intense moments of bodily stress. The killing of African Americans by law enforcement officials over the last few years has brought black bodies newly onto center stage. The seemingly unending wave of sexual misconduct cases has brought bodily vulnerability and bodily power into the spotlight of our entertainment industry and Congress alike. The entire planet is becoming increasingly aware of the many bodies living in the midst of a climate crisis; the body of Earth itself is groaning (as the Apostle Paul noted many centuries ago). Bodily, fleshy stuff matters – more than we can imagine.

These are indeed distressing moments but perhaps also fruitful ones of repentance, of turning around and changing our minds about flesh and bodies. This matters in Western culture where bodies of all types are objectified, categorized, made into commodities to buy and sell. Perhaps BlackLivesMatter and the flood of “metoo” hashtags and starving polar bears can prompt a profound moment of repentance, of turning toward the flesh once again, not as a consumer product but where the One who creates it is pleased to dwell, with abundant joy.

We need to be intentional about this. It won’t “just happen” on its own. And this is why, in part, I live with a dog. My Australian shepherd dog Judah will not permit me to sit in front of my computer forever; he insists on hikes, playing, wrestling, running down a beach, getting dirty, smelly, and covered in sand and mud and ocean foam. He stands panting after all that rolling about in the muck, panting happily as he stands there as a complete and utter mess; it’s glorious.

judah_rodeo_090916 (2) I actually love the smell of a wet, dirty dog. I sometimes bury my nose in Judah’s furry neck and relish that earthy, canine odor. It speaks flesh, a word made flesh, and there I remember: God really does love this glorious mess – God loves me.

On the endless list of things we all need to do in this “holiday” season, I would add one more and put it at the top. In your encounters with others, all of them, notice that we are bodies with flesh. With colleagues, reach out a hand to touch a shoulder; with strangers, shake a hand and feel your skin against skin; with friends and family, make sure you embrace them – a lot. And don’t ever miss an opportunity to fondle the silky ears of a dog, scratch the chin of a (willing) cat, or take delight in that tumbleweed of animal fur rolling through your living room.

All of this seems ridiculously inconsequential, hardly the revolution we now need. But it matters more than we can imagine, this regular, deliberate, intentional reminder of the flesh we are, the flesh God loves.

There are many reasons why physical touch has become risky these days. There are many more reasons why it is so urgently necessary, the reminder of our fleshy bodies, the stuff through which God chooses to speak and be known.

Repent, turn again toward the flesh, where God takes great delight to dwell, with an abundance of (messy, smelly, confounding, liberating, intoxicating) joy. That’s the gift I wish I could place under every single tree – wrapped in Judah’s beachy scent.

pt_pinole_beach1_crop_062615

Advent 1: Just Come Already

Just Come Already

Come, God,
Just come, already.
Rend the heavens,
Like Isaiah said,
And come on down.

(Please do some mending after
the rending, too; we’ve shredded
so much of what you’ve made.
Sorry about that.)

Or come up,
Or come over,
Wherever you are,
Just come.

(We’ll gladly set aside our
postmodern convictions and
deconstruction strategies, and
all those hermeneutical suspicions)

Because we’ve been weeping
Too long, and lip-biting yearning
Too long, and running around the den
tearing up the sofa,
ripping up the carpet,
breaking windows
Too long, waiting for you to come home,
blaming each other
and killing each other
Too long, and pining away
Far too long for your sweet face,
And your lovely voice,
And your tender touch,
For so long

We’ve forgotten
The love that makes us
Write these things,
Crying softly,
Making a bath of hope
from our tears.

advent_1_1_1