Prepare the Way of the Lord!

[Our readings were Baruch 5:1-9; Canticle 16; Philippians 1:3-11; and Luke 3:1-6.]

As we know, Advent is a season of preparation. We are busily cleaning our homes, getting out decorations, making travel plans, deciding what gifts to give, attending parties, and so on. Of course, that’s really not the “preparation” that the Church calls for in Advent, but it seems that this is what we are all doing—and all we are doing—these days. It’s little wonder that we often are tired of Christmas before Christmas gets here.

But into our Advent “busy-ness” comes John the Baptist. He interrupts our cluttered schedules to demand that we make preparations of a different kind. Although he appears in the New Testament, he is more in the style of an Old Testament prophet, challenging us to examine ourselves, both as individuals and as a society. Advent is a time to prepare to welcome Jesus and not just our Christmas guests.

When I was a child, whenever my parents were expecting guests, my mother would work extra hard to make sure the house was “just so.” Everything had to be perfect; no detail was too small. Another way to say it was that the expected arrival of guests called for self-examination of our house—cleaning and fixing up.

John the Baptist calls us to a different type of self-examination. I don’t think he’d have had much time for straightening up our houses—after all, he was a locusts and wild honey type of guy. What he did go in for was repentance and preparation.

We tend to think that “repentance” involves feeling bad about what we have done. When public figures get caught out having committed various misdeeds, either public or private, their usual, carefully massaged response (normally vetted by lawyers and PR consultants) expresses their heartfelt sorrow and normally deflects responsibility for their actions onto someone or something else, so that they seem to be kind of apologizing for something that they say wasn’t really their fault to begin with.

That isn’t repentance as John the Baptist meant it. Repentance is quite literally changing your mind, turning around, reorienting yourself.

In the Gospel today, we heard a famous quotation from Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight… the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth.” I want to tell you of a different kind of trip.

What MapQuest had indicated was a real road was, in fact, a road under construction. The father said to himself that he should have known better. When he had turned onto the road and left the main highway, there had been a warning: “Proceed at Your Own Risk. Construction Ahead.”

Just past the turn-off, the surface was paved, but there were no markings, just blacktop. But, after a few miles, the asphalt gave way to gravel and a thin layer of tar. The smell of the tar and the sound of gravel bouncing up against the bottom of the car woke up the children. “Are we there yet?” “How much farther?”

“We have a ways to go,” said the father as he wondered whether he still had an old-fashioned map in the car.

When the gravel ended and they hit dirt, he started to worry. It didn’t help that they seemed to be the only ones on this road, and they had seen no one else coming from the other direction. Even worse, what at first seemed to be dirt was actually mud. He decided to keep driving and hope that this was just a bad patch–that the “real” road, the good road, was just ahead.

Soon, however, the noise of gravel against the car’s undercarriage had given way to a slurping sound as the tires kicked up mud and then sank into it.

He thought, “I have to keep going, If I can just keep moving forward, we’ll be all right. We’re behind schedule, but we’ll be all right if we can just keep moving.”

But the car became mired in the mud, sunk right up to the axles, tires half submerged. He turned the engine off. “What’s happening, Dad?” the children asked from the back seat. “Are we there?”

Help came in the form of a tow truck that traveled that stretch of road a couple times a day in case things like this happened. The car was towed back to the main road, and directions were given for a much longer, but passable, route.

The family would call that part of the vacation “the repentance trip” because it embodied so well the definition of repentance–an active turning around, going a new direction, a change of heart, a change of mind, rather than continuing down the same path, moving in the same direction that is leading nowhere or somewhere dangerous, fast.

Repentance isn’t an emotion; it isn’t feeling remorse or regret or guilty or ashamed. It’s not simply wishing that you were a better person or that bad things didn’t keep happening to you. Repentance is change, movement. Repentance is turning aside from your current path and when you do, you will find God waiting there for you.

We need to put as much effort and attention into our preparation to receive Christ at Christmas as we do in selecting the perfect holiday gift, putting the most dazzling light display on our house, and putting on the most glittering party. We have a serious disjuncture between the secular calendar and the church calendar right now. Outside the church, we are partying, shopping, and decorating. But here in our liturgy, we hear John calling for a different kind of preparation. We hear it every Advent. “Prepare the way of the Lord!”

John makes us uncomfortable, just as he made the powerful of his day uncomfortable. May he make us uncomfortable enough to truly repent and prepare for the coming of Jesus.

Is the world safe for the coming of Jesus! Have the paths be made straight? Have we made them straight? We soon will hear of a young woman, eight months pregnant, who will make a journey over hills and through valleys to Bethlehem. There is still time, a little bit of time.

May we use that time to hear the warnings of Baruch, Isaiah, and John, to forsake our sins, to put on the robe of righteousness and prepare to greet with joy the coming of our Savior.

[My thanks to the Rev. Amy E. Richter, St. Anne's Episcopal Church, Annapolis, Md., for the parable of the repentance trip.]

Throwbacks

For some reason (my children would probably say it's age longing for lost youth!), I enjoying watching football games between teams who are wearing throwback uniforms. This year, the original AFL teams are celebrating their 50th season by wearing uniforms from 1960 and using their team cities and names from that year (Tennessee Titans = Houston Oilers, New England = Boston, and so on). Some of the old uniforms are pretty cool and others show why the team changed them.
For example, here are the "Houston Oilers" playing the "Boston Patriots" last week in Massachusetts. The snow adds an extra touch. I like snow games--as long as I'm watching them on TV! Seeing the "Oilers" again reminds me of when I was a kid and we moved to Houston.












On the other hand, here are the Patriots the week before against the Denver Broncos. I can see why the Broncos ditched those uniforms quickly! Those socks are supposed to have vertical stripes, but apparently Jabar Gaffney thought it would be cute to twist them.


Here's what the Broncos changed to in 1963. I'm not sure this was an improvement (Especially the helmet!)


















My favorite is the 1960 "Los Angeles" Chargers. I think its a big improvement over the current uniform.

The New York Titans had a rather non-descript uniform. It's easy to understand why they completely changed it when they became the Jets. (Note the red stripes on the referee's shirt! They really wore those in the 60's in the AFL!)

















The Dallas Texans became the Kansas City Chiefs after a few years and it looks like the only thing they changed was the helmet.




















Here are some other examples, not all good. Here are the Pittsburgh Steelers recreating their uniform from the early 1960s.




















Here's an older version of the Steelers.























And here are the Los Angeles Rams of the 1950's. Don't you just love those yellow jerseys?

And college teams aren't immune. In 2006, the Florida Gators came out against Alabama in replicas of their 1966 uniforms. I liked the uniforms a lot better than I did the result of the game--a Florida victory in what would be Mike Shula's last year as Alabama's coach. Maybe Alabama's approach to uniforms is the right one. It's hard to do a throwback uniform when you almost never change what your team wears!

Come and Rest

[Our lessons were Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23; Ephesians 2:11-22; and Mark 6:30-34, 53-56.]

I read the other day about a speech given recently by Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric. He said that women who take time off for a family do so at the risk of their careers. “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” Mr. Welch said women who take time off can still “have a nice career,” but their chances of reaching the top are smaller. “We’d love to have more women moving up faster. But they’ve got to make the tough choices and know the consequences of each one.”

I read a lot of comments about Mr. Welch’s speech with many agreeing and many disagreeing that this is the way it should be. Only a few comments questioned whether this is, in fact, the way it actually is in 21st Century America.

Unfortunately, I do think that in many cases for women and men, survival, not just advancement, in the work force comes at the expense of the family. When times are hard (and for many of us, these are the hardest times we’ve seen) and jobs are scarce, we see employers often taking advantage of their leverage over their employees to work longer hours, often for less pay. After layoffs, fewer employees are left to do the work which never seems to diminish. Working parents are forced to leave sick children in schools because they either fear or actually have been told that their jobs are in jeopardy if they miss work to care for them. As Mr. Welch says, if you’re “not there in the clutch,” there are consequences. But what does it say about our culture if it forces people to choose between their families or their jobs?

The Church does have something to say on this. It rejects the idea that each person has no value but his or her ability to contribute to a company’s or economy’s bottom line. Instead it calls for a solidarity in which there is a unity that binds us together and works to help the most vulnerable in society, whether they are refugees or orphans or widows. Even when language, culture, or distance separates us, we are still our brother’s (and sister’s) keepers. As Pope Benedict recently pointed out in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (or “Charity in Truth”), “the primary capital to be safeguarded and valued is man, the human person in his or her integrity: ‘Man is the source, the focus and the aim of all economic and social life’.” If there is no true “work-life balance” as Mr. Welch asserts, that is something to be deplored, not celebrated.

We are a busy people who often don’t feel we can take time for rest, especially now. I read a story not long ago that employees are increasingly feeling that they can’t take their authorized vacation time, because they may be absent “in the clutch” in Mr. Welch’s term. We don’t have the freedom to rest from our labors.

It is against this context that we hear today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus has sent the disciples out for the first time to call people to repentance, cast out demons and anoint the sick. As they return, they are clearly exhausted. That sounds increasingly like us today.

“Many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.” Does this sound familiar at work or even at home? It does to many.

After they report what they did to Jesus, does he urge them to do even more with a greater effort? No, he asks them (and us) to “Come away and rest for a while.”

Many of us are not permitted by our cut-throat economic culture to rest. Many more of us make that choice for ourselves. After all, if we are resting, we aren’t producing. But when we ask people how they are doing, the reply is often things like “I’m exhausted.” “I’m running myself ragged.” “I’m wiped out.” “I’m spent.” “I’m running on empty.” “I just need a nap.” (I myself often identify with the last one.) We are over-worked, over-extended, stretched-thin, stressed-out, and burnt-out.

We are wearied by many things in our lives. Modern life’s pace is faster than ever before, computers and cell phones sending their instantaneous messages around the globe. These technological marvels have not led to more leisure time for us. Instead, most people are busier than ever.

I have read that the Germans have a word for how we often feel: weltschmerz or “world weariness”. As one writer puts it,

We are wearied by many things in our lives. In our work lives, people speak of being tired of the rat race, the daily grind, or climbing the corporate ladder. In our political lives, people are tired of broken promises, empty rhetoric, and partisan bickering. In our personal lives, we are tired of being alone, tired of the bar scene, tired of the routine. We are tired of feeling angry all the time, or feeling afraid all the time, or feeling worthless all the time.

But Jesus tells the weary disciples “Come and rest for a while.” And he tells us that too. While work does have value, it is not the measure of our existence. When we gather around Jesus, we may tell him all the things we have done and all the things we have taught. We hold up before him our busyness and our weariness as objects worthy of praise and reward. We tell him that we have been so busy that we haven’t even had time to eat. Surely all these things will prove how important and valuable we are.

And our Jesus looks past all of this to remind us that all that we are and all that we do are gifts from God in the first place. Rather, he looks into our hearts and sees what we truly desire, what we truly need. In the words of Psalm 23 which we heard today, Jesus makes us lie down in green pastures and leads us beside the still waters and restores our souls. And he says to us, “Come away to a place all by yourselves and rest a little while with me.”

It's Not About Glory ... [Proper 10, Year B]

[Note: I managed to fall behind on posting these the last few weeks. In a clear sign that the world does go on anyway, I don't think anyone noticed!]

[Our lessons were Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 85:8-13; Ephesians 1:3-14; and Mark 6:14-29.]

Not too long ago, a Lutheran pastor of a small church was asked if her church would grow and become really big. Her reply was, “No, there’s just not a huge market for the message ‘Jesus bids you come and die.’ Instead, people want to hear, ‘Jesus wants to make you rich!’”

That’s the message we want to hear. At some level, we all want to be victorious, successful, and wealthy, so if someone says that Jesus wants that for us too, great!

Or, maybe not. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus keeps telling people not to tell anyone about his healings and miracles. That’s because Jesus knew how tempting it would be for people to jump on the Jesus Christ Superstar bandwagon (to borrow the title of a 1960’s era rock opera), not realizing that the miracles alone were not enough to show what Jesus was really about. Jesus knew that we would only see who he is when we see the cross. Unfortunately, we choose the healings and miracles as our focus every time. So, this week, we get a warning.

If you focus on the details in the story of the murder of John the Baptist—and there are enough colorful, gory details to make a good TV news story—you may miss its true meaning. The real theme of this story is not the drama of life and death that captures our imaginations so well; it is the confrontation between political power and religious faith.

If faith is to be true to itself, its prophets must be willing at need to speak truth to power, even when that comes with a cost that sometimes can be fatal. In his work The Prophets, Abraham Heschel says that a significant aspect of the office of prophet in Israel was to remind the king that “his sovereignty was not unlimited, that over the king’s mishpat [justice] stood the mishpat of the Lord.” This idea frequently clashes with what governments see as their needs. So, it is with Amos.

In 21st century terms, Amos was a threat to homeland security and he might well wind up on a “no-fly list” today. When he prophesies of the fall of Israel, Amaziah, the priest of Bethal says that Israel can not bear all of Amos’ words.

But they are not Amos’ words, they are God’s. The prophet is not guided by his own desires and conviction, but instead is under the compulsion of the Spirit to speak God’s words instead of his own. And in this case, Amos is speaking words of God’s anger against a society which stands on its religion while neglecting common humanity and which has reduced the meaning of sin to cultic, religious, and narrow moral scruples.

John the Baptist is in prison for his prophecy. He has told King Herod that his marriage to his sister-in-law Herodias was unlawful; words which Herod and certainly Herodias did not want to hear. So she works out a scheme which will silence this prophet forever.

This puts Herod in a difficult position. It is clear that he recognizes John’s holiness. But he also wants to please his wife and his daughter Salome and he now feels bound to his rash oath, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you.” We can understand something of what Herod is thinking. We sometimes have to make ethical decisions in our own lives when different pressures conflict within us. While our decisions may not have the impact of Herod’s, we are just as capable of making them for the same reasons Herod gave in and ordered John’s death—pride and security at the expense of the truth. Our challenge is to examine our own decisions as individuals and as a society and ask ourselves whether we are making the right choices to further the establishment of God’s Kingdom in the world.

It may seem that this story is oddly placed in Mark’s Gospel, dropped in after Jesus’ sending the disciples out into the world. But perhaps not. Jesus warned the disciples to do their work in poverty and expect rejection. Just in case, like the disciples, we haven’t gotten the idea that this isn’t about our own glorification, we hear about the end of John the Baptist. Just in case we think following Jesus in the way of the Cross is about glory and not the Cross, we hear John’s story.

It isn’t about wealth and power, glory and prizes. It’s about a crucified God who offers us life and salvation and who bids us come and die. Has the line to sign up started yet?

Going Home [Proper 9, Year b]

[Our lessons were Ezekiel 2:1-5; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; and Mark 6:1-13.]

Going home can be the cause of mixed emotions. It can be pleasant to see people and places that once were familiar, but now are parts of our past. But it is important for us to remember that we aren’t the same people we were then and that the places and people we knew have changed as well. I remember as a teenager returning after only a year to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where I had spent the previous seven years. We stopped by to visit with the people who had bought our house. I was shocked to see unfamiliar furniture in the familiar rooms and that even the kitchen counters seemed lower than I remembered them! The house had changed with its new owners and I had changed as well—after all, I was a growing teenager. I’m sure you can recall examples of your own.

But we have trouble accepting change and growth. Just like us, the people of Nazareth in today’s Gospel had trouble seeing beyond their memories of the youthful Jesus to recognize the power in him. “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”

The people of Nazareth were unable to see beyond the familiar person to understand what they were hearing and seeing. (What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands!) As Jesus said, prophets were without honor in the home towns.

It’s actually hard to truly honor a prophet. In the Jewish tradition (and thus ours), a prophet’s role was to speak for God, to speak God’s words. Often, those are words that people don’t want to hear. We don’t want to really hear them because God’s truth is hard for us to accept. It requires sacrifices of self and a radical obedience to God that can be costly, unpleasant, and unpopular.

Today’s reading calls on us to listen for the true prophets of God, even when they are familiar to us or when they are not who we would think of as “prophets” or when their message isn’t what we want to hear. May we be courageous enough and open enough to listen to the prophets among us and to heed the word of God that they reveal.

Our Gospel readings the last three Sundays have given us insights into the nature of Jesus’ kingship. He has sovereignty over the created order, so he is co-equal with the Creator. He has authority over life and law; he is one with the giver of life, the source of healing, and the author of law. He has power over evil spirits, so he shares equally in authority with the God of heaven.
Jesus’ authority derives from his absolute obedience and ultimate openness to the will of God.

His authority is exercised by being in relationship with those who come to him in faith, unlike earthly rulers who impose remoteness from those over whom they rule. His rule looks first to the powerless and those on the margins, the celebrated and privileged have no special status with him. Finally, Jesus exercises his kingly power by sharing it freely with those who come to him in faith.

Don't Tell Anyone! [Proper 8, Year B]

[Our lessons were Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; and Mark 5:21-43.]

In our Gospel reading today, after Jesus’ raises Jairus’ daughter—we never learn her name—from the dead, he said something rather odd. “He strictly ordered them that no one should know this…” In fact, that was a frequent instruction of Jesus—that the things he did should not be reported. Why did Jesus say this? Why didn’t he want his deeds trumpeted throughout the countryside?

I think it might be for this reason: At this point, before his death and resurrection, the miracles of Jesus lacked context. To the people of Galilee and its surrounding areas, the acts of Jesus must have seemed only isolated displays of power. But, the real meaning of Jesus’ authority over death was not that he could do miracles or that, with enough faith, the worst things of life would pass us by. (We particularly know that to untrue.)

Jesus’ death and resurrection show us what it really means for Jesus to be greater than death. Jesus wasn’t spared suffering and death. He wasn’t resuscitated merely so he could die again. Instead, God took the life that Jesus had led—a life like ours—and the death he had died—even as we die—and transformed them into something new and better, revealing a new meaning and purpose to human life.

God doesn’t promise us a freedom from the pain and loss and grief and death that is a part of the human existence. Neither does He promise us freedom from the joy and pleasure and passion and excitement that are a part of life.

Instead of removing or protecting us from these things, God does two things. First, God knows all of our human experiences and lives all of them. He sanctifies us and our lives by His experience of them. God shares every aspect of our lives.

Also, God promises us a resurrection like that of Jesus. This means that nothing will be truly lost. God will make something new and renewed of our lives and of our deaths, and of the lives and the deaths of every one for whom he died—which is truly everyone. God promises that there is meaning and hope in each of our lives and in each of our deaths. God promises that His word of love will be the strongest word, and the best word, and the last word. God promises us that He will make all creation new, and that we will indeed be a part of that.

And we can take comfort that our parting from the dead is only temporary. We pray for the dead, not because they need it, but because we do—it helps us keep them close in our hearts. It helps us remember, that as they are with God and God is with us, so they are with us always. As we said in our Psalm:

Weeping may spend the night,
but joy comes in the morning.

God Answers

[Our lessons were Job 38:1-11; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; and Mark 4:35-41.]

When we think of Job, we usually think of the cliché, “the patience of Job.” This is from a reference in the Letter of James that was translated that way, but the Greek word used is actually better translated as “endurance” or “persistent.” And, in fact, if you read the Book of Job, you don’t see much patience, but you do see that Job is persistent in his claims that he is suffering undeservedly.

To understand God’s answer to Job, which we hear today, we need to know what the question was. Job’s question emerged from a particular view of the world that was shared by ancient Israel and its neighbors and which sounds very familiar to us today. According to this concept, those who live a good life obedient to God’s commands will be rewarded with good fortune—long life, health, wealth, and other blessings. Conversely, those who sin and disobey God’s commandments will receive misfortune—illness, poverty, and other woes. This legalistic concept, which focused on right and wrong, was thought to be the essence of justice. You got what you deserved; you reaped what you sowed, and so on. When inevitable tragedy struck, people would console themselves in the belief that the outcome is just and that the victims must have deserved the “punishment” in some way.

Before we get too pleased with ourselves for being far more advanced than that, we would do well to recall some comments after recent disasters. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said that the attacks were God’s punishment for what they perceived as our nation’s failings. Similarly, after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast four years ago, some said that the devastation was punishment for the decadence of New Orleans. One anti-abortion activist even claimed to have seen the image of an 8-week-old fetus in the satellite picture of the hurricane!

To Job, the suffering he endures—his flocks stolen, his servants murdered, his children killed, his health ruined, his home destroyed—makes no sense. Job knows that he has not sinned or disobeyed God—and still he suffers. His framework of the world—a world of clearly-defined right and wrong—has failed him, but he holds on to it the more tightly as the only thing left standing between him and the chaos of the world.

We are a lot like Job. When tragedy strikes, we often seek to discover what the victim did that might have caused it. Sometimes there are benefits to that approach, but frequently we seem to be seeking for something the victim did wrong, as if to be able to say, “See, he deserved it!” If you look at the stories of traffic accidents or shootings on the web sites of our local TV stations or newspaper and scroll down to the comments people post, you’ll see what I mean.

To a large degree, this is understandable. We like to believe that we are in control of our destiny. If we do good, good will be done to us. While we know, at least at an intellectual level, that it doesn’t always work out that way, we—as did Job—instinctively hold this up as a shield against chaos.

Job even sought a legal solution to the failing of his legal framework. He challenged God to a legal hearing, certain that if he can just get his day in court, he will be vindicated, justice will prevail and chaos tamed. Job demands to know why he, an innocent man, must suffer: “Let the Almighty answer me!” Job’s question is of course our own.

God’s response is to describe the greatness of creation. God doesn’t answer as a lawyer or a judge, but as a poet. God doesn’t correct Job or teach him a lesson, but instead shows him the Divine glory. The chaos which Job wants to hold off is a part of God’s creation, too. But God never really tells Job why he has suffered. As Barbara Brown Taylor has written

Job’s question was about justice. God’s answer is about omnipotence, and, as far as I know, that is the only answer human beings have ever gotten about why things happen the way they do. God only knows. And none of us is God.

Job comes to understand that despite the existence of chaos, the world does rest on a secure foundation. God will support and sustain his people in times of pain and loss. Job may not have gotten an answer to his question, but he has received a revelation—he has seen the Divine and lived.

Like Job, we long for answers. But for us, the content of God’s answer to Job is not nearly as important as this simple fact: God answers. The chaos is still there, as it was for the storm-tossed disciples in our Gospel reading today, but so is God. And that is enough. In the tempest of life, God comes to us to speak of peace. He is the Crucified and Risen Lord who is with us in storm and calm, when we have all the answers and when all we have are unanswered questions.