Sermon from 3rd Advent

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Preached for the 3rd Sunday of Advent with St. Paul's Episcopal Church.

Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice.

"Rejoice always," St. Paul reminds us in the scriptures, "pray without ceasing, and in all things give thanks"; today we remember to rejoice. We mark the midway point in our Advent journey towards the Nativity of our Lord by remembering in the midst of our spiritual preparation, that it is God's joy we prepare ourselves for. If you took the distance traveled between Memory and Hope during Advent, and strung it like a violin, Joy would be the bow for God to pull across it. If Memory were to fashion its Hope into a bell, Joy would be the tongue to make it sing. And it is true that God's victory is great enough to ring that bell until the end of time. Always is, of course, a lot of the time; and there is an irony in marking a time specifically, to remember that we should be rejoicing, all the time. But such is the case when midway on our journey of faith our lives are also often marked by sorrow. We have a tradition in scripture and our lives of worship of singing songs of praise even when they seem to be unmerited by outward circumstances. Rejoice, always, the scripture says, and today we remember to rejoice.

I cannot hear St. Paul’s reminder to rejoice always and give thanks in all things without thinking of the women I used to teach preschool with. In those days, my colleagues were mostly middle-aged women from Pentecostal and non-denominational traditions; and they spent more time rejoicing in the Lord than anyone else I had ever met. These women gave thanks for everything. They could be in the midst of the greatest personal trials, families swamped with medical bills, cuts in hours and pay, burdened by the labor of continuing ed most of them were taking, and yet their mouths were always praising God- always speaking joyfully of the gifts God had bestowed upon them, and always expectant of the greater joys which their greater labors promised them. Their hope in a God who would restore all things and make all things new in his coming again was manifest in constant thanksgiving for the minor joys which bore the signs of joy to come. I never quite got the hang of this. Joyful was typically the last thing I felt in the middle of the school day. I just didn’t have time for it. From the first family to arrive in the classroom the day was a mad rush all the way through projects and story times and playgrounds right up until lunch and nap time at the edge of which some twenty five sets of feet moved in different directions with half-eaten plates of spaghetti for the trash with twenty-five cranky faces teetering on the verge of an afternoon meltdown, twenty-five sets of arms hauling cots twice their size to twenty-five different corners of the classroom. It felt, every time, as if the whole day might fall apart right there. Yet within minutes of this chaos, the lights of the classroom would be off, and nearly all twenty-five pairs of eyes would be shut in much needed rest; my teaching assistant would take out a magazine at the table to read, and I would take my lunch-break. Most days this involved walking to my car in the parking lot, closing the door, and putting my forehead on the steering wheel. But on the days when I had enough energy to pull the prayer book down from the dashboard, I would open it to the noonday office and read the words of the psalm we hear this morning. "Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed* will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves."

We find this psalm in the set of prayers designated for the middle of the day as a holdover from the Rule of St. Benedict. Benedict had his monks recite the entire psalter through once a week, and during the middle of the day he assigned the Psalms of Ascent, psalms from the middle of the end of the psalter, pilgrim psalms. Their made them among the easiest psalms to memorize and the easiest to recite during the middle of the work day, where the brothers might be in the midst of some field of their labor. Their density, the potency of their language and vision, made these psalms perfect for conveying whole themes of the faith in a swift moment of time, a function itself a holdover from their original use as psalms for the pilgrims journey on the way to the Jerusalem temple. Psalm 126 reminds the faithful of the rejoicing they may expect at the end of all their labors. I, for one, was much more prone to anxiety. But my colleagues in teaching reminded me by their daily witness that fear was not to rule the day for us. Our experience was rooted in the victory of God, and our hope was in its ultimate fulfillment. For them, the minor joys of any ordinary work day were strung together in the fuller goodness of God, a fragrant garland for the righteous where nothing was ordinary, no good thing was present without the touch of God.

"When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion* then were we like those who dream, Then was our mouth filled with laughter* and our tongue with shouts of joy." The psalmist remembers the joy of Israel's past mid-way through a journey where the fruits of such a victory have yet to ripen again. The Lord had indeed begun to restore Jerusalem from destruction, the captives had been returned from their exile and the Temple rebuilt. It is easy to imagine the rush of excitement which the signs of such a restoration brought on, the vivid hope of a return to the glory of former days. Yet something was still missing. Jerusalem was far from being the center of the known world, indeed her restoration was dependent on the tenuous support of a much more powerful nation; and the Presence of the Lord had yet to dwell in the Temple as it had in the days of old. Fortune had been restored to Zion, yet this fortune was like a first gentle rain over what long had been the desert of exile. Israel still longed for the rushing river which they had known of God's favor in the past. Fortune had been restored, and yet the psalmist also prays, "Restore our fortunes Oh Lord, like the watercourses of the south."

This psalm stands in-between the memory of promise and the hope of fulfillment, yet it is not a lament for what has not yet come; it is a song of joy for what is. This is a psalm about ranan. Ranan is a primitive Hebrew root word for a ringing shout and cry. Ranan is about movement, the shaking of the voice and the trembling of the body. Ranan might refer to being overcome by something, or a great torrent in the sea, or even the tremulous sound made by pole or mast when a great wind passes by. Placed in the human voice and body, it is an inarticulate outcry. Sometimes this crying can be a wail of entreaty or supplication. But it just as easily means a proclamation of joy and praise. In this psalm we read it as rejoicing, rejoicing that fills the mouth over with laughter, rejoicing that shakes the body to its core, rejoicing so evident that everyone who sees it stops to marvel at the blessing of the Lord poured out. What is more, this psalm connects the rejoicing associated with God's people in Zion with the rejoicing of God's people in their daily life. The psalm begins in the Temple and ends on the farm because for God's people, there are no ordinary joys, all are a gift from the Lord of Hosts; and the joy of a harvest reaped from the years long labor is both a source of blessing for the present, and a token of the joy to come.

We sing these hymns of joy today in the midst of our own labor with God. We reach back in the collective memory of our church and sacraments to the rejoicing of our earliest days when we first knew that the Lord had come into the world of our flesh to claim it as his own. We are a people who were formed by rejoicing at the greatness of the Lord's activity among us. A follower of Jesus was identifiable by their rejoicing in things once cast down being made new. We remember the rejoicing of his mother Mary when she first conceived by God's Holy Spirit, the rejoicing which she shook her sister Elizabeth by the shoulders with, the rejoicing with which she praised God for his favor of the poor and and lowly and hungry of the world. And we remember the promise of Christ for a return of God's victory in creation made anew again by the fullness of his presence.

For God's people, midway on the journey of faith, there are no ordinary joys; because we gather in the worship of our soul's truest delight, the font of every blessing, the one store of all good gifts and all true rejoicing. All good things come from God, from the smallest joys to bloom among the ashes of our daily lives to our greatest victories, from the quiet joy of walks beneath the bare winter branches of our streets, to the raucous laughter of our closest friends, to the long-awaited harvests of our life's labor. Some joys catch us by surprise and some are eagerly anticipated, but all seem just past the reach of our manipulation, all are gifts, and all will be gathered by our Lord as a garland of righteousness for God's rejoicing people. The occasions we find for joy are the reality of God seeping through into our Earthly life, currents springing up from the places in our lives where the veil is thinnest between this world and the life eternal. We do well to stoop down close to them when they come, and take a full measure of their blessing, that our bodies may tremble and our voices sing with joy at the nearness of the Lord.

Christ Occupies the Throne

Preached with St. Mary's House for Christ the King Sunday.

Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

It would be easier if the dead stayed dead. It would be easier if the hungry ceased to eat and simply perished with their need. It would be easier if the naked disappeared in their shame, easier if the prison walls were high enough and thick enough to hide the loneliness and the abandonment which they contain. The wounds which we inflict upon one another are bloody ones, hard-to-look-at messy wounds that we are used to making for the sake of getting through the day, managing life as best as we've received it: another stranger passed on the way to where we need to be, another dollar cut from funding for our schools, another plastic grocery bag blowing in the wind. It would be easier if the wounded ones would simply die already, and easier still if they would stay buried in their graves right beside our faded memory of the wrong that we have done and all the wrong that has been done on our behalf. It would be easier if the dead stayed dead. Because it is very hard indeed to believe that the dead shall rise again, very hard to face the wound of our wrong-doing laid open fresh before us, and very hard to imagine that the one who has received the wounds of all into his own flesh upon the cross will be throned in glory as a judge above us. Hard because it speaks, deeply, of a reckoning that few of us would be prepared to face.

Occupy Wall Street looks at times like an open wound that seems impossible to heal. Little wonder then that so many have found it to be so irritating. On the city-wide day of action that took place this past Thursday the irritation was palpable on the sidewalks of New York as demonstrators spread out to several local subway stations with placards and chants in tow. At the 23rd Street Metro stop angry New Yorkers butted past and into sign-holders with the same clear message of distaste and distain that had already taken firm hold in Lower Manhattan. What exactly are you doing here? What do you hope to accomplish? And most importantly, why are you in my way? For a movement that claims to advocate for 99% of the population, they inspire no small bit of ire from the majority of people who see their work, and I suspect that this is primarily because that work confesses a wound in our society that most of us have little idea how to start bandaging. We do not like to be confronted with our wounds. We would rather not see the scars that war has left upon our veterans and rather not hear the growl of our neighbor's empty stomach. We admire and lift up people who can "hold their own", who can hide their pain and pull up their bootstraps and move on. The occupiers are something of the opposite of this. They say: "Look at what you have done. Look at the need and the pain you have ignored. Come here so we can make peace with one another and begin to do something new."

The new thing being done in Zuccoti park over the past two months can not be buried with the raid which cleared the park out in the dead of night this past Tuesday. Its spirit, so easily identifiable wherever it springs up, had already spread to cities across the globe, and experienced something of its own resurrection in New York itself on Thursday, and it is amazing to behold. It is street theatre, it is visionary, it speaks truth to power. It feeds many with stacks of donated and shared take-out food, cultivates conversation between the unlikeliest of characters, it seeks consensus and to let unheard voices rise. It dreams big, vulnerable, crazy dreams. It dances and sings and meditates and holds inter-faith prayer services and silent vigils by candle-light. It fist-bumps with understanding cops, it suffers through rain and cold, it travels in tents. It seeks to occupy a space of privilege, and then ensure that all are welcome there. The new thing done in Zuccoti park is in many ways a very old thing, a very biblical thing, and its expansive, embracing, messy nature may be precisely what makes it so hard to get a firm hold on. Yet to dismiss it as incoherent, or misplaced, or lazy or even partisan is in one sense, simply to isolate oneself from the miraculous work of healing which this open wound conducts beneath its surface.

Jesus occupies a throne of glory in this morning's Gospel. Jesus comes to occupy a place of power that his followers had only hoped to see in their own lifetime, a Messiah whose authority is at last, clearly demarcated by angels in attendance and all the nations of the world prostrate before him. But when he comes to occupy that place of power he brings with him the very company whose association so undermined his authority while he walked among them on the Earth. The wounded ones, the troubled ones, the ones who could not help themselves. I was hungry, this King of Glory says, I was thirsty, I was naked, I was alone. I was on a cross and you abandoned me so you would not have to see the gruesome image of wounds you were afraid to face because you could not bandage them. It may be that one fundamental difference which remains between the Church and occupiers is that we believe culpability goes far beyond the 1% and extends to all of us but one. The one God, the Presence to which all our life and all our memory is present, before whom all remains open for as much as we ourselves have tried to hide it deep inside us, is the one source of our forgiveness, and yet remains as close to us as the hunger and the thirst and the nakedness and isolation nearest by. Come now, this King of Glory says, and look at what you have done. Come now and look at the need and the pain you have ignored. And when you are ready to step out of the punishment you have inflicted on yourself with this denial, come to me so that my mercy may pour over you and we can begin with something new.

The kings of this world have rarely coveted such offers of mercy and renewal as these, and it should not surprise us to see the harbingers of any new peace blinded by pepper spray, shoved to the pavement, and nipped at the heels by motorbikes of the police. This past week has seen a coordinated effort across many U.S. cities to shut down demonstrations of non-violent civil disobedience with undue force, and for any citizen it is more than a cause for alarm. For any Christian, it is a call to go and look for Jesus, because our faith teaches us that where there is a cross of hunger and thirst for righteousness his labor of reconciliation in the world will not be far behind. The parks can be cleaned out, but the wounds of injustice, and disparity, and greed which this nation has inflicted and endured with little question for so long cannot stay buried in the ground. They persist in rising to the light for the healing of the world. A small part of the world, it seems, is already waking up to a brand new way of living. And, in the midst of this revival, the task before us Christians is as clear as it was two thousand years ago. Go forth, and be with Jesus. Visit the imprisoned and the lonely and the poor. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Heal the sick. Raise the dead up from their graves.