On God’s Time
December 23, 2010
I wrote last week rejecting Advent’s principle of waiting on the Lord. To me, the Lord is already ever-present in us through the Holy Spirit and the gifts of Pentecost, and Advent seems to make it seem that Christ remains this ethereal exterior being rather than dwelling within us.
However, I have found that there is something to this waiting thing. In being challenged to think about waiting, I have been reminded of how impatient I can be, and how out of sync my sense of time is with that of God.
It happened this morning on a downtown subway platform. I arrived and like everyone else looked for the train at the end of the tunnel. Nothing. An uptown train passed by on the other side. Still nothing. Another uptown. No lights. And then a THIRD uptown train. FINALLY, there appeared some lights at the tunnel. And by then, I was fuming. I had plans to fit in some holiday shopping before work, and I wouldn’t be able to fit it in. How could the trains be so inefficient?
Then a memory: Ecuador 1999. I’m waiting for a bus in Quito, and there’s no bus schedule to be found. I ask one of the men waiting for the bus when the bus is supposed to come. He shrugs his shoulders and responds, “It’ll come when it comes.” He had no expectations, but he was hopeful.
The man’s nonchalance was such a change from my New York City sense of time, laden with expectations of efficiency for the train, the show, the line, the drinks, the dinner, the check, the website, the download. By my clock, those minutes waiting feel like ages.
But there’s another clock that I’ve totally forgotten about- God’s clock. This is the pace at which canyons and continents are made, the speed that stalactites form and planets mature. It is a way of time that I completely forget about here, where starlight is all but gone, and nature is contained and contoured to our liking in city parks. On God’s clock, as Peter wrote, “a thousand years is as one day.”
When I become aware of this clock, of this pace, I suddenly realize how ridiculous my impatience is, like an ant marching in a fever. The train will come in its time, as all things do. And I can wait.
A Christmas Colbert Clip
December 23, 2010
A bonus video for your viewing pleasure. What was that that Jesus said about the poor? Oh right…
| Jesus Is a Liberal Democrat | |
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Incarnation
December 22, 2010
I’ve been thinking a lot about Incarnation and what it means that Christ was fully human and fully divine. I’ve been thinking about what it means for me to be an Incarnate being – a creature of flesh and sinew and sensation.
You see, I’m one of those privileged people who gets to think for a living. I write text, I compose music, I preach, I teach, I organize activities, etc. Obviously, the vast majority of the human species, throughout time, has not lived this way, but I do.
The Kingdom of God, however, cannot be conceived by thought alone. If it were, then the divine logos, the Word of God, could have been revealed to us as a book, or a poem, or an idea. It could have been a formula or a creed or a doctrinal statement. It could have been an argument.
The Word of God, however, is none of these things; the Word of God is an infant, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. The Word of God was revealed to us as a person who got calluses on his hands, who had animated dinner conversations, and who drank excellent wine at weddings. The Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us.
It’s so tempting to reduce Christianity to a religion of ideas and to equate Christian formation with theological study. It’s so easy to say that the soul is sacred and the flesh is profane, that white-collar work is more respectable than blue-collar work, and that it’s what’s on the inside that really matters. To do so, however, is to deny the miracle of the Incarnation.
That’s what I’ve been doing. For the last year or so, I’ve been slowly gaining weight, eating food on the run, and generally treating my body as an inconvenience. This, too, denies the miracle of the Incarnation.
My Advent discipline was to watch for the places where Christ is breaking into the world. My Christmas discipline is going to be fully inhabiting my body, living in the flesh as an act of prayer.
I invite you to join me. Go for a hike. Eat a fantastic meal. Look at something beautiful. Give someone a back rub. Play with your dog. Have an incredible make out session. Build something with your hands. Stretch. Cook. Run.
Live.
Violence in the Bible: Authority Through Ultimate Force
December 20, 2010
I love Westerns. Actually I can’t stand watching them – I get really anxious because people are so vulnerable, life is so precarious, and the guys holding the guns tend to be so cold. I worry about the women and children. But I make myself watch one or two Westerns a month – like a penance. Because I teach the Bible, and I need to remind myself constantly that these stories do not take place in my own place and time.
Open the Bible to any page, and people are vulnerable, life is precarious, and the guys holding the whips and the weapons, chains and chariots and the nails tend to be so cold.
I got interested in Westerns while I was in seminary. My wife Elizabeth told me that, when in college, she’d taught a class on apocalyptic movies. Well I love apocalyptic movies! I love dystopias! What could she recommend? And she told me, most of the films she’d used were old Westerns. …What? But those take place in the past. And she said ‘well, it’s the future too.’ European culture tried to expand eastward, but it hit a wall…of Eastern culture. So it expanded west. And it went – it stretched itself as far and as thin as it could go, all the way to the California coast, and it could go no farther. But it was stretched too thin, so it crawled back again. And the wave left ghost-towns in its wake, dying outposts of European culture, populated with people who, for one reason or another, couldn’t go back. Women in last year’s Parisian dresses, now caked with dust, scars on their faces. Men in tattered three-piece suits, trying to maintain civilization in cheaply-built towns that look like a strong wind could knock them over. People basically waiting to die, because civilization has no future.
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the young woman is with child
December 20, 2010
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)
I looked at this lectionary this morning and immediately thought, What kind of sign is this? Young women get pregnant and have kids all the time. As for naming him Immanuel, people often look at their life experiences and see them as being evidence that God is with them or is not with them. Take a look at postcards 13 and 14 from the postsecret project. So really, is this a sign of any import? And then, as they say in teacher parlance, I made a text-to-self connection. (Or maybe it was text-to-world?)
In 2001, I went to Cuba with a group from my college to study Cuban music and dance. As part of a final research project, I interviewed a woman in her twenties to gather her impressions about relationships between men and women. She insisted that we have the conversation outside, for fear that someone would overhear her or that our conversation might be recorded. So we talked quietly about relationships and her own hopes and fears. She told me that she did not want to get married. She never wanted to have children. None of her friends were married, and none of them wanted to be. She told me that it was so difficult to make a living, to live in a decent place, and to have enough to eat, that none of them wanted to bring a child into the life and world that they inhabited. In that community and in that society, if the young woman is with child, it is a sign of hope for the future. It is a sign of courage to give your child over to a world that you trust will be better than your own.
And yet, I look at the community in the Bronx where I teach high school and it seems like such a different situation. Last year, I personally knew of 5 girls who were pregnant in our school of 350 students, and there were probably many more than that all told. To me, these young women with child look like a sign of despair. They seem to speak of women who believe that there will be no opportunities for them after high school, that their only value is in their bodies and their ability to have children.
The young woman is with child. Is this a sign of hope or despair? How do we interpret this sign in our times?
Beauty in the ordinary
December 18, 2010
Captured at behind Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, near Bronx River Houses, last winter. May we walk with eyes open to the beauty and opportunity around us.
thief in the night, or bum in the manger
December 18, 2010
The last post by Dan about the Second Coming inspired me to write about it as well.
We may be inclined to ignore the Second Coming because there simply is no way to tell when it can happen, and Christ makes this explicitly clear (Only the Father…). In fact, the only thing we can expect regarding Christ’s return is that it will be totally unexpected. He will come like a thief in the night, and all of our vigilance is for naught.
Indeed, in almost every interaction with the Lord both biblically and in daily experience, the Lord acts in ways we cannot anticipate, and if we could anticipate them, they happen so contrary to our assumptions we make fools of ourselves.
The Magi followed a star to the land where a King had just been born. And being learned men, with much common sense, they did the sensible thing and went to the political authority of that area, King Herod, probably expecting to find his heir. How could they have possibly deduced before getting there, that their King was born a bum in a manger?
A friend recently got hit by a car, and is temporarily incapacitated. Between groans of frustration that they can’t do the things they were hoping to soon do, and lamentations of their injury’s pain and inconvenience, they told me the accident happened to allow them to re-adjust the parts of their life that needed happening. Now I hope that a Divine smack-down via really fast and heavy metal object would not be all that necessary for someone to make a little life adjustment. But it does fit the narrative of a personal Second Coming, where the Lord comes to one unawares and as unready as a deer in the headlights, like the Zen sword master to the apprentice.
Our Father seems to be exacting, discerning, uncomprimising, and endowed with a screwy sense of humor. But that’s par for the course for most fathers. And as with most fathers, we cannot fight, compromise, or bargin with God and hope to come out on top. We can simply love the Lord and delight in all the unexpected gifts that catch us so offguard
What are we waiting for?
December 17, 2010
Something dawned upon me today as I thought about this “waiting” thing in Advent. I’ve been puzzled over what it is I’m supposedly waiting for. As Ula and others have indicated, the Lord’s birth already happened over 2000 years ago: it feels in a way like we’re waiting for a rerun.
However, maybe this waiting for the re-enactment of the birth of Christ is actually symbolic of something else: our hoping, our yearning for Christ’s return in glory, his second coming to Earth. We’ve heard about this event time and time again throughout Christian traditions: “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” “Thy kingdom come/Thy will be done,” “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,” “be ready, for the day of the Lord cometh like a thief in the night.” Christ’s return is something we’ve always been told is on its way.
With that belief in mind, Advent could become a far more weighty time of expectation. However, here’s the problem: I don’t know so much as I ever really believed in the Second Coming. There are many Christians out there who take it very much to heart, from the people who made the “Left Behind” movies, to those who believe global warming and the Middle East conflict are sure signs of the End Times, but for me, I don’t think I ever really bought it.
Although my Catholic upbringing made me quite aware of hell and sin, along with virtue and redemption, the Second Coming was always kind of an ancillary tenet, something we all agreed on but didn’t talk about too much.
It’s strange, because so many other “fantastical” parts of of the Nicene Creed, are perfectly legitimate to me. I honestly CAN accept that Christ was born of a virgin, that he did perform miracles on Earth and was resurrected from the dead. I can believe in these things as miracles from a very different time from ours, the distance of antiquity perhaps making it much easier to accept.
However, when I turn my head away from that age and back to ours, the idea of the Second Coming seems somewhat preposterous. It seems as unlikely and mythical as Santa’s sleigh landing on my rooftop. These days, the world seems much less ripe for such God’s arrival in fire and light: it seems more like the miracles and the disasters are ours to make. As Edgar O’Shaugnessy put it, these days it seems “we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.”
But more importantly, my Christian upbringing taught me that that Christ is here already. That the second coming already happened, in a way on the day of Pentecost, when the Lord poured out his spirit on the people and gave them the power to do his will on Earth. If we are the body and blood of Christ on earth, then what need have we to wait for his return?
As the old song goes, “We have been told we’ve seen His face and heard His voice alive in our midst:/ Live in my love with all your heart.”
If that is the commission we’ve been given, then why wait?
Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of death.
December 14, 2010
In Monday’s gospel reading, Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane, preparing for surgery. At his most human and most vulnerable, realizing that the outcome is not entirely up to him. “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.”
But, advent is for me always Mary’s time. The painting by Henry Tanner is my favorite Mary – at her most human and most vulnerable. No reproduction could do this life-sized painting justice. Yet, even at this size, we can see a young Mary, a Jewish Mary, a Mary not wrapped up in royal blue. Mary at the moment of being told that she will be carrying God’s son. Her expression, as you stand before her, seems to change. One moment joy is on her face, another moment it is fearful awe. And then there are moments of “You’ve got to be kidding!”
Mary is at her most vulnerable here. And yet, in a way, at her strongest. Knowing I would be leading ritual for Transmission the week before Christmas, I attended a program on Mary as a Mother given by Rev. Barbara Crafton a few weeks ago. She spoke of Mary’s courage in immediately accepting the announcement of her pregnancy. I said, let me play “devil’s advocate”. I have always been moved by Mary, long before I was committed to any religion or any view of God. But really, what choice did Mary have. God never asked her, never said he would change the situation if she objected.
Barbara answered (and I paraphrase) that the closest analogy she could make was to her own death. I cannot choose the time or the place that I will die. But I can choose the “who”. Who will I be when I die. Who will I be when I meet God.
My surgery had not yet been scheduled at the time of that conversation with Barbara Crafton, but my aneurysm was present and accounted for, and challenging my every day. I did not offer to lead ritual on December 21 with a guarantee that I would be alive and well on that date, I offered to lead ritual with faith in the value of what we do and what we are.
So, what I ask for in preparation for December 21 is your response. What does Mary mean to you? Is she a part of your faith at all? What challenges does she pose for you, as we countdown (or countup) to Christmas?
Are there prayers, or poems, or pictures or songs that move you? That express challenges?
Like Jesus in the garden, I pray that I will be there in body on December 21. Mary and I will definitely be there in spirit.
