The Sign of the Child

the rite of Holy Baptism

During Advent, we are preparing for the coming of the Christ, culminating in the celebration of the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day.  Note how odd this is.  We are getting ready for something that already has happened!  Well, this would be odd, except that in ritual time we remember what is past in such a way as to make it present.  The coming of the Christ is not just something that happened more than two thousand years ago.  The Christ who came in Jesus is still coming.  Are we ready for the Christ to be born in us?   What would that even look like? 

It looks like embracing vulnerability with reverence and care, both our own vulnerability and that of others, recognizing that life is fragile and precious; not unlike our embrace of a newborn child.  The most important question facing any community is always, “How do we care for the most vulnerable among us,” and the most important mark of spiritual maturity is our capacity to engage that question creatively and compassionately.  It is as we live into this question that we discover God-with-us.  The Christ is born in our response to poverty, disease, injustice and sorrow; in our embrace of the dignity of life under the conditions of finitude and estrangement; and in our celebration of community that makes life not only possible, but joyful.

These are the things that matter; not our ideological or moral purity; not being right or good in a narrow, legalistic sense, much less successful socially or financially.  What matters is how we choose to respond to our mutual vulnerability.   It is just that simple and that difficult.  Spirituality is about what we do with our vulnerability, individually and collectively.

Scripture invites us to see vulnerability as the source of our power.  It is precisely in having the courage to acknowledge our vulnerability that we become open to the help of a power greater than ourselves:  God-with-us.  The sign we are given to imagine this truth is the birth of a powerless child. 

In our reading from the prophet Isaiah, King Ahaz is caught between rival political centers of power.  The kingdom of Judah is being coerced into an alliance with Israel and Aram against Assyria, the dominant imperial power in the region.  Ahaz refuses to accept Judah’s vulnerability.   He believes that security depends upon the projection of military might.  The prophet advises Ahaz to place his trust in God rather than military alliances, and even offers him a sign from God to reassure him.  In a show of false piety, Ahaz declines the offer. 

God gives Ahaz a sign anyway.  Isaiah tells him that the young woman will bear a child, and name him Immanuel, which means “God-with-us.”  Before the child is old enough to eat solid food and tell good from evil, Israel and Aram will be no more.   It is not the fleeting might of kings, but the powerless child, who exemplifies God-with-us.  It is solidarity with one another in our vulnerability that is the source of lasting power.   In his fear of insecurity, Ahaz neglected the care of the poor and needy in his community and become enamored with wealth and might.  He put his trust in rulers and armies rather than in God-with-us.  He lost himself and his country in the process.  When we treat vulnerability with contempt, we neglect the bonds of solidarity that nurture life and sustain community.   It is these bonds the endure even as nations and empires are passing away. 

What a different response to vulnerability we see in Joseph’s treatment of his fiancé.  He and Mary were engaged but not yet living together when he discovered that she was pregnant.   Imagine his sense of betrayal, the scorn he would have suffered in a culture in which male honor meant everything.  Imagine Mary’s fear of rejection in a culture where women where economically dependent on male relatives for their well-being and even their lives.   If Joseph divorced her, who else would have her? 

By law, Joseph could have prosecuted Mary and invoked the death penalty for her and the father of her child.  What will he choose to do?  Seek the ultimate revenge at the risk of his own very public humiliation?  Quietly divorce her without a fuss and leave her to fend for herself and her child?  Joseph resolved to quietly divorce her and minimize public shaming.   This gets him off the hook, but Mary and her child are no much better off in the long run. 

Then Joseph has a dream.  This dream is a sign that Joseph is open to other possibilities, willing to accept his vulnerability and not move too quickly to deny or resolve it.   Just because Joseph was hurt doesn’t mean he is a victim.  He can choose to respond otherwise.   He can trust Mary even if he doesn’t fully understand what has happened; refusing to project on to her the guilt he might feel for failing to protect her honor.    He can choose to see the child as “from the Holy Spirit” rather than a bastard.   In embracing the vulnerability of this child, and the aching vulnerability this child opens up in Mary and in Joseph, Joseph discovers God-with-us and the freedom to respond to God’s invitation to love.   

In his embrace of Mary and their child, Joseph demonstrates the freedom to love that embracing our vulnerability makes possible.  He risks downward social mobility, the contempt of his neighbors, and hurt pride for the sake of a love that gives life.  This freedom was powerful, allowing him to respond creatively and compassionately to a situation that others would have found maddening or overwhelming.   Joseph turns what others might see as weakness into a source of power, with consequences that would change the world. 

Advent is a time to consider how accepting we are of our own vulnerability and how we respond to the vulnerability of others.  It is the most important question, and the source of our power to make a difference in the world.  This Advent, I’ve been most inspired in this regard by the example of the Swedish student activist, Greta Thunberg:  Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019.  With great dignity and determination, Greta challenges us to face the question of our vulnerability in how we respond to the ongoing climate crisis.   At 16, Greta embraces her dependence upon adults to respond to this crisis while holding us accountable to do so.  What others would see as a disability, Asperger’s syndrome, Greta has turned into a source of power:  her difficulty reading social cues fuels her commitment to address global suffering directly, indifferent to either praise or condemnation. 

Even when the most powerful man in the world treats her, as he treats any sign of human vulnerability, with cruelty and contempt, she chooses to respond creatively.  The Trump era will pass away.  The bonds of solidarity that Greta nurtures will endure.   Just as Ahaz was given the sign of the vulnerable child, perhaps Greta is our sign of God-with-us.  In the history of salvation, much stranger things have happened.  Just ask Joseph and Mary.

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The God of Hope

Faith in Action Bay Area Vigil at San Francisco City Hall

This morning I want to speak to you about hope.  St. Paul tells us that faith, hope, and love are the preeminent gifts of the Spirit and that the greatest of these is love.[1]  This is true, but we must not forget hope.  Indeed, Paul himself speaks of God as the God of hope as well as the God of love, and prays that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.[2]   

Walter Brueggemann, the great biblical theologian, said, “Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”[3]  Hope is rooted in memory and is the antidote to despair.  This is a prominent refrain throughout our scripture traditions.  “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you” is the basis for the covenant between God and Israel, its commitment to social justice, and sabbath observance.[4]  When tempted to despair, the psalmist sings, “I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord; I will remember your wonders of old.”[5]  The prophets admonish Israel for forgetting the covenant, and ground their hope for the future in recalling the history of God’s saving actions and God’s faithfulness even when we forget.[6] 

Both the Passover meal, recalling God’s liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, and the Eucharistic meal that we celebrate, recalling Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, make this saving history available to us as an empowering reality in the present.  “Do this in remembrance of me.”  The Greek word for “remember," anamnesis, has the connotation of making a past action present.   We remember so as to become agents of God’s liberating action now.  

Scripture, and history more generally, provides us with a usable past so as to imagine a future with hope.   Memory is not simply an exercise in nostalgia.  As St. Paul reminds us, “whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.”[7] 

Rebecca Solnit, perhaps our greatest living commentator on hope, reminds us,

that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past.  We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats, cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and for the worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation.  A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope. 

This is precisely the kind of memory that scripture preserves.  It is a story told from the perspective of history’s victims, a view from the underside, that provides us with an unexpurgated perspective on the ongoing struggle for social justice and peace.  The Jews are bit players in history, a slave people, who discover their dignity and strive to form a more just and egalitarian community as an alternative to empire.  Jesus is executed as a political subversive by the Roman empire, precisely because of his championing of this prophetic Jewish vision.  The church continues, alongside the synagogue, to preserve this subversive memory in service to the God of hope.  

This history is not one of straightforward linear progress, but neither is it simply one damn thing after another.  Solnit recognizes that

It is important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.[8]

There is no deus ex machina operating behind the curtain of history.  We are not puppets on a string.  The universe is not determined, but neither is it random.  It is creative.  The power of the Holy Spirit given to us is the capacity to respond to the openings that God continually makes available to us.  What we do does matter, though not always in ways we anticipate and often long after we have left the scene.  But at the very least, we can become part of the memory of future generations that engenders hope, and empowers action in response to new openings that we were unable to see. 

It is in this sense that Christ is always still coming.  The end of history is nowhere in sight, and its fulfillment in the communion of all things in God, the old dream of the peaceable kingdom, is not yet realized.  The church remains a site of the incarnation, the coming of God-with-us to form a people in the image of Christ, the image of, and hope for, universal salvation.   Christ is still coming, and we are the people that God has been waiting for.

And so, we find ourselves each Advent, with John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan river.  He is gathering a people to prepare for action to renew the promise of God’s kingdom; ritually re-enacting liberation from slavery and entrance into the freedom that God promises, moving from the wilderness, through the waters of baptism, into the Promised Land.  This is an act of memory, recalling who we are and what we have done with God’s help.  The people of God are waking from their nightmare, and Christ is coming to create an opening into God’s dream of the future.  Hope begins with memory, but it ends in action.  Get ready. 

Advent is the time to wake-up, remember our story, and reclaim our power.  As Solnit reminds us,

Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that, yes, we can change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.[9]

My litany includes people from St. James, St. Mary the Virgin, St. Aidan’s, Holy Innocents, Grace Cathedral, St. John’s Presbyterian, Calvary Presbyterian, First Unitarian-Universalist Congregation, First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, Congregation Sherith Israel, Grace Fellowship Church, St. Mary’s Cathedral, St. Peter’s Catholic Church, St. Paul of the Shipwreck, St. John of God, St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Congregation Or Shalom, the Kitchen Jewish Community, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, St. Mary and St. Martha Lutheran Church, Senior Disability Action, and Lincoln High School, who gathered more than 100 strong at City Hall on Wednesday.   

We gathered there to petition the Mayor to meet with us, having received no response from two previous requests in the past month, to discuss how to ensure that the most rent-burdened, low-income seniors in San Francisco can age in place with dignity; more than 30,000 of whom pay more than 30% of their income in rent and include members of our own congregation.  We were there for Martha Barrios, age 65, who works two shifts as a house cleaner to pay $2,000 a month in rent. We were there for Irma Soberanis, age 75, who makes $1,690 a month caring for the elderly and pays $850 a month in rent. We were there for Javi Vasquez, age 58, a retired baker who is disabled and blind, yet lost his apartment through an Ellis Act eviction and would be homeless if he had not won the housing lottery to get a subsidized unit. 

We remembered the Torah’s admonition to care for the widow, and Jesus’ warning against the greed of those who devour widow’s houses.[10]  We were there praying for what our ancestors dreamed in Psalm 72:  a community in which leaders exercise God’s justice, defending the needy and rescuing the poor, delivering them when they cry out in distress and preserving their lives.  We were looking for an opening, doing what was possible trusting that God would do the impossible.   And in that collective action we discovered a sense of community, and meaning, and power, and joy that far exceeds what we could ask for or imagine.  On Friday, the Mayor agreed to meet with us next month.  Hope begins with memory but it ends in action. 

We are the fragile, green shoot emerging from the dead tree stump that Isaiah foretold.[11] We are the people upon whom God breathes a holy, fiery spirit to live into God’s future when others forget hope.[12]  In the stories we tell and the actions we take, we keep finding an opening into that future.  Christ is coming, and we are the door through whom Christ will come – again and again and again.  

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”[13]   Amen.

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[1] I Corinthians 13:13.

[2] Romans 15:13.

[3] Quoted in Rebecca Solnit, “‘Hope is a​n embrace of the unknown​’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times,” The Guardian (July 15, 2016).

[4] Deuteronomy 15:15.  See also Deuteronomy 4:9–14; 5:12–15; 7:17–19; 8:10–18; 9:4–6. 

[5] Psalm 77:11.

[6] Isaiah 46:8-13; Ezekiel 16:59-63.

[7] Romans 15:4.

[8] Solnit, op cit.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Deuteronomy 26:12; Mark 12:40.

[11] Isaiah 11:1.

[12] Matthew 3:11.

[13] Romans 15:13.

Woke Humanity: Getting Ready for the Rupture (not Rapture)

Happy New Year!  In the Christian tradition, we mark time according to the liturgical year rather than the calendar year.   Today is not only December 1, it is the First Sunday of Advent – a new liturgical year.  As James Alison reminds us,

At Advent, it begins again: the cycle by which God breaks through the clutter of our lives to announce to us that the Presence is very near, irrupting into our midst, hauling us out of our myths , our half-truths and the ways we have settled for what is “religious” rather than what is holy, and alive, and real.[1]

It is so easy for us to sleep walk through life, oblivious to the Presence, the Mystery, the Something so much bigger than we are that is at the same time so intimately familiar as to be taken for granted.   Advent invites us to wake-up and to renew our practice of the Presence of God.   It is this sense of God-with-us that is the ground of our hope. 

Jesus invites us to be present to the Presence.  Underneath the mythological language in his somewhat enigmatic teaching recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, lies a simple invitation to wake-up.  What does a woke humanity look like? 

Jesus’ answer may seem a little bit odd to us.  “For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”[2]  Let’s unpack “the coming of the Son of Man” for a minute.  First “Son of Man” can be a title, used to designate someone anointed by God for a special task.  Jesus speaks self-referentially using this phrase, but it also simply means “a human being.” 

“The coming” is a gerund derived from a Greek verb, παρουσία, which means “to be present” as opposed to being absent.  A more literal translation would be “the becoming present of the human being.”  So Jesus is talking about what it is like when a human being becomes present to her experience, with the connotation of becoming available to be useful for God.  The woke human is present to reality in such a way as to be an agent of God’s will. 

Jesus is the model of the woke human being, and he is a model meant to be imitated.  St. Paul gets this when he writes to the churches in Rome to wake-up and “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”[3]  We are to become like Jesus in being awake and transparent to God’s desire.  Again, we are invited to become present to the Presence.

OK, so what is this woke humanity like?  Well, it is like in the days of Noah.  Huh?  This is where we have to engage in some demythologization.  In mythology, floods are a symbol of disorder and destruction, often the expression of cataclysmic violence.  In the Genesis account of Noah and the ark, we are already half-way to a demythologized reading of the story for we are told, “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.”[4] 

In Noah’s time, people went about their daily lives, oblivious to the impending disaster all around them, right up until the day Noah entered the ark; “and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.”[5]  They were not awake, and so were swept away by the flood of violence.  Noah and his family were awake and able to respond appropriately to reality.  They survived the flood and preserved a sustainable community of life.  Woke humanity builds the ark.

Jesus said it would be the same in his day.  Two guys would be working in the field.  One would get taken away, the other would remain.  Two women would be grinding meal.  One would get taken away , the other would remain.[6]  Here, Jesus is referring to the wave of violence sweeping through Israel in response to Roman occupation.  Some would be swept up into the violence cataclysm; others would remain awake and aware of God’s Presence.  Jesus’ words would prove prophetic when a Jewish revolt against Rome led to the destruction of Jerusalem. 

Now, no one knew precisely when crap was going to hit the fan.  But anyone who was a awake could read the signs of the times.  The point was to be present to the Presence so that you would know how to respond when it did; not to be swept up into the violent reaction but to remain steadfast, grounded in God’s mercy and available for the work of repair.  The woke human has a compassionate compass that always points toward the Presence of God even in the midst of the flood. 

This teaching of Jesus is not about the Rapture – about being rescued from reality when it gets hard to acknowledge.  It isn’t about escapism, much less denial.  It is a teaching about the Ruptures in our experience, the moments when our humanity needs to be awake to the Presence of God so that we can remain rooted in reality and capable of responding in alignment with God’s mercy.

The brilliant Zen Buddhist teacher, angel Kyodo williams, expresses this need to be rooted in reality – to be awake – as the ground of our hope.  She says,

I think that if we can move our work, whatever work we’re up to, whatever kind of desire that we have for our own development in life, to be willing to face discomfort and receive it as opportunity for growth and expansion and a commentary about what is now more available to us, rather than what it is that is limiting us and taking something away from us, that we will — in no time at all, we will be a society that enhances the lives of all our species. We will be in a society that thrives and knows that the planet must thrive with us. We will be in a society that knows that no one that is suffering serves the greater community, and [is] an indicator of the ways in which the society itself is suffering.[7]

This hope emerges out of the experience of rupture, the sense of distance between the way things are and the way they could be.   This rupture is the death of denial and the resurrection of hope.  It is as we move through the rupture, present to the Presence, that we become open to the flow of God’s mercy that is the source of the world’s healing. 

“But for us to transform as a society,” Williams says, 

we have to allow ourselves to be transformed as individuals. And for us to be transformed as individuals, we have to allow for the incompleteness of any of our truths and a real forgiveness for the complexity of human beings and what we’re trapped inside of, so that we’re both able to respond to the oppression, the aggression that we’re confronted with, but we’re able to do that with a deep and abiding sense [that] ‘there are people, human beings, that are at the other end of that baton, that stick, that policy, that are also trapped in something. They’re also trapped in a suffering.’ And for sure, we can witness that there are ways in which they’re benefiting from it. But there’s also ways, if one trusts the human heart, that they must be suffering. And holding that at the core of who you are when responding to things, I think, is the way — the only way we really have forward — to not just replicate systems of oppression for the sake of our own cause.[8]

Woke humanity is only possible when we are willing to do our inner work.  This work requires us to take time to pause, to sort out what is God’s will, God’s desire verses the dis-ease we have internalized.  Again, Williams is helpful here:

There is so much momentum to every aspect of what drives us, what moves us, what has us hurtling through space, including all of our thoughts and even our own sense of our emotions; how we interpret any given feeling, any experience of discomfort; where that discomfort sits in our bodies. It’s not just that we have a feeling of pain or awkwardness. It’s that we then interpret that.

And those interpretations — much to our chagrin, we come to understand through a process of observing them — are not clean or not free of all of the things that are impacting us outside. And so even our sense of what pains us and what makes us feel shame, feel guilt, feel awkwardness, feel put-upon by people, feel disempowered, has to do with the external information and cues that we have received. And they’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And for the most part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them — kind of like that drawer that collects everything in your house.[9]

So, we need to engage in a kind of regular inner house-cleaning.   This is the work of contemplative prayer, meditative study of scripture, journaling and self-reflection.  All these and more are forms of the practice of the Presence, in which we come to know ourselves in the image of God. 

“To do our work,” says Williams,

to come into deep knowing of who we are — that’s the stuff that bringing down systems of oppression is made of. And so capitalism in its current form couldn’t survive. Patriarchy couldn’t survive. White supremacy couldn’t survive if enough of us set about the work of reclaiming the human spirit, which includes reclaiming the sense of humanity of the people that are the current vehicles for those very forms of oppression.[10]

To be “woke” it isn’t enough to want to change the world.  We have to be willing to change ourselves, our perception of reality, and our way of relating to ourselves and others – even to our enemies.  Waking-up and remaining awake, even as others are being swept up by the flood, this is the work of Advent.  It isn’t about “religion” as yet another means of escaping reality.  It means being plunged into reality, the deep baptismal waters, where we encounter what is truly holy, and alive, and real.  Be present to the Presence.  We have work, good work to do, and God is with us every step of the way.  Amen.

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[1] James Alison, “a puncturing fulfillment” at http://jamesalison.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/eng51-1.pdf.

[2] Matthew 24:37.

[3] Romans 13:14.

[4] Genesis 6:11.

[5] Matthew 24:39.

[6] Matthew 24:40-42.

[7] Krista Tippett interview with angel Kyodo williams at https://onbeing.org/programs/angel-kyodo-williams-the-world-is-our-field-of-practice/#transcript. 

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.