December 1, 2013 - First Sunday of Advent
Hello Brother and Sisters! It is my great honor to get to share with you on this, the first Sunday of Advent. This is the time when we make good use of what, for the northern hemisphere, is the darkest time of the year. The harvest festivals are over, the trees have shed their leaves, the cold is settling in, and the sun is rising later and setting earlier every day, leaving us in womb-like darkness longer. The stillness of winter is coming, and it is a good time to reflect.
And it is my favorite time of year to get in touch with the story of a pregnant teenager who might be in big trouble. Mary is a very young woman who is promised in marriage to an older guy, Joseph. But before she is married, she is visited by and has a very important conversation with an angel, and is now she is pregnant, but not by her betrothed. Mary and Joseph live in a patriarchal, tribal society. The law says that Joseph would be within his rights to minimize his shame by divorcing Mary and sending her back to her father's house. Matthew chapter 1 tells us that "Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just as he was resolved to do this, an angel of the lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit." And so Joseph wakes up with some seriously countercultural marching orders.
Joseph breaks with the norm, he breaks with law, he risks being ridiculed and he takes action himself and follows a dream. The angel had told him that Mary is going to have a son, he is supposed to name this kid Jesus and Jesus is going to save people form their sins. But really, what Joseph is doing is not a normal thing to do, to go ahead and act on this information. But Joseph accepts the risk and dives in.
We will return in Mary and Joseph in a few minutes.
This Sunday's teaching came with an assigned theme. The first Sunday of Advent is supposed to be about Hope, so that's what we'll be talking about. But, once I got started on this I had to step back and remind myself – Hope for what? What kind of Hope are we talking about here? We can hope for all kinds of things all the time. Like, we have hopes about the health of our friends and family. We can hope to win the lottery. In our culture it is popular to talk about the power of positive thinking – that if you think positively – then you can attract good things to yourself. That is not it. The question is what is our faith life inviting us to hope for? What I realized is that the hope of Advent is not this kind of hope. It's not about me. The Hope of Advent is the hope for what we hear about in Isaiah. It is a Hope for all humanity to get to be at peace and make war no more. It's the hope for what, in the language of our religious tradition, we might call the Kingdom of God. The premise is that we believe in a God that is all loving, and intends a peaceable, workable world for us. So that's the Hope we are talking about here.
But I have to confess to you that this Hope of Advent can be very challenging to me. This is certainly the tradition I grew up with, but sometimes it feels like we don't have a whole lot of current data to support this idea. Really, these days I have a tendency to feel like the world might be going in a bad direction.
For example, last summer, 97% of the Greenland ice sheet showed some surface melt, and only 24% of the Arctic Ocean had ice cover. These were record-breaking occurrences. Last month, Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest storm ever recorded at landfall, killed at least 5,600 people in the Philippines. Meanwhile as of last night the United Nations Climate talks in Warsaw were stalled over issues of financing. "There is absolutely nothing to write home about at the moment," said Fiji delegate Sai Navoti, speaking on behalf of developing countries.
The U.S. stock market is booming, but that doesn't mean very much for most of us. Between 2009 and 2012, incomes for the top 1% of Americans grew by 31.4% while for the bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4%. There are 16.4 million American children living in poverty, or more than 1 in 5 children in the US, up about 5% since 2007. Our shockingly mean-spirited government has decided that the best way to tackle childhood poverty is to have poor kids eat less. As of November 1 more than 47 million Americans have lost some or all of their food stamp benefits. That's 1 in 7 Americans, most of them children.
Meanwhile, the 2 1/2 year conflict in Syria has taken over 115,000 lives. Other countries where violent conflict kills more that 1,000 people per year include Colombia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Mexico, Sudan, Iraq, and Egypt. U.S. drones were responsible for deaths in at least 3 of those countries. (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen)
I'm not feeling good about the way things seem to be going.
I submit to you that Matthew's Gospel might have been written for people who also did not feel so good about how things were going. This audience for whom the Gospel of Matthew might have been written needed some Hope. Biblical scholars think that this text was written in the late 80s, for a largely Jewish audience about decade or two after the traumatic defeat of Jerusalem in year 70. This destruction of the temple probably really rocked people's faith, and raised questions about God's faithfulness, will and protection. This trauma would have forced the community to debate over how to behave faithfully. Furthermore, the community to whom the Gospel of Matthew was probably directed was living under the Roman empire, and in the intervening decades have be ruled by the likes of Caligula and Nero. This community might not be feeling good about the way things have been going. Hope might be a stretch for these early Christians.
And that is why I think Matthew is challenging the community to eschatological thinking. (Eschatology is about concepts and beliefs about the future, specifically about the "end times." Most commonly, we're talking about this idea of the Kingdom of God, a time that is not corrupt, in which evil is defeated and God is in full control.) This can be a tough concept, and a tough reading for us. If we try to take this literally, we're going to miss the point. There is no point in expecting a rational interpretation of "Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left." Instead, what's I think important for us to take away from this is that Jesus is trying to get his followers to think big here. He's trying to explain that things are not always going to be the way they are now. We get used to living under certain conditions and we can get stuck assuming that this is the way things will always be. We accept the dominant culture, we make ourselves comfortable, "eating and drinking, marring and giving in marriage" (like before Noah), and we can lose sight of the fact that another way is not just possible, but that change will come. We cannot really predict when things are going to change, or how big that change will be. But I think the message here is we need to be prepared to be surprised, for our lives to really be shaken up. Don't get so invested in the way things are that you become a barrier to change.
There's another critical component to the Hope of Advent. That critical component is us. Hope is not a passive state, Hope is a verb. To quote Walter Brueggemann, "Hope is a human act of commitment to and investment in the future. Hope is an act of human courage that refuses to cherish the present too much or be reduced to despair by present circumstances. Hope is the capacity to relinquish the present for the sake of what is imagined to be a reachable future."
I think that in order to be able to have the courage to Hope, it helps a lot to be able to make ourselves have perspective from outside of the dominant culture. If we are to sustain a hope for a very different, peaceable world, we need to be able to pull away from fear, we need to be able to pull away from a culture of violence, anxiety and despair. And it helps to not be too invested in comfort, or too invested in perceiving ourselves a certain way.
Our faith life can give us structure and support for us to pull away from the dominant culture. We have inward ways of pulling away, and outward ways. For the last month, we have been talking about the spiritual journey, and I think Nat Ried did a beautiful job of describing spiritual retreat, in which you literally physically pull yourself away for a while. Nat described that silent retreat is an intense weekend of being open to God, "to the experience of the divine, in whatever form that comes." Nat said, "The invitation is not to study, not to pray even in a recognizable way, but rest a while, just be." Having the opportunity to "just be" in the presence of God, in the presence of Love, helps us to cultivate a foundation that is rooted in something other than the dominant culture. This dark, quiet season of Advent is a good time to nurture what Nat called this "deeper realm of experience", which he says, "needs constant reinforcement. Not because it is not real, but because it is profoundly counter cultural."
The inward journey helps build the platform for this radical Hope of Advent that then becomes the jumping off point for acts of hope. I see acts of hope all the time, really. It happens when people are actively part of building the vision that we have for a peaceful, just future. I mean, Syria has given up its chemical weapons. Iran is negotiating over its nuclear capability. I'm not saying that any of this is going smoothly, or that there are a bunch of nice people involved in these talks, but I do think that these are moves that are in the general direction of beating swords into ploughshares way more than in the general direction of war. Another example that stood out to me because it gave me perspective on my job – China will do away with labor camps, in which prisoners work in coal mines for 12 hours a day, 365 days a year. Hugely hopeful move. On a more local level, this year has seemed like a particularly active year for 8th Day members to open their homes to people in need, creating hopeful reality.
One of my favorite, visionary examples is the100,000 Homes Campaign. It was daring to state, when they started, that they would house 100,000 chronically homeless people in three years. But we are now 2 ½ years into the campaign and over 74,000 people who were homeless have been housed.
One of the most courageous acts of hope that happened this year was when a woman in a school in Georgia confronted a would-be school shooter and talked him out of hurting anyone. Antoinette Tuff works at the front office of a school in Dekalb, Georgia where a 20-year-old man with an assault weapon snuck in and started shooting at the floor. It seems that his intent was to wait for police to show up and to shoot at them. He said he had nothing to live for. But Ms. Tuff talked with the young man, she related to him some of the struggles she has in her own life, she told him she loves him, and she offered to walk outside with him to surrender so police won't shoot. And the incident ends with no one getting hurt. Antoinette Tuff is a hero who readily admits that she was completely terrified through the entire encounter. But she's able to put aside her fear and have a countercultural hope for God's grace and for a surprising end to this situation. Antoinette Tuff became an active part of the vision for something better, just, workable, peaceable.
Which brings us back to Mary and Joseph, our pregnant teenager and the husband who is not the father, but who is willing to roll with it anyway. These two are in a vulnerable situation. After making the decisions they have made, they aren't going to fit back in so well where they came from. They have set out on a journey that offers them not much security. Joseph's is kind of the ultimate hopeful act, taking a risk to bring about a hope-filled, alterative reality.
This Advent, I invite us all to pull away from the culture we are steeped in, so that we can see it for what it is. Start with pulling away from consumerism – with which we're about to be even more overwhelmed than usual. Cultivate a hopeful imagination for "new futures that the fearful think is impossible." (Breuggeman) And then keep participating in the little hopeful acts that you do every day to bring about the Kingdom of God, the alternate culture. The sharing economy. The opportunity for humanity at peace. Small hopeful acts matter, and can turn into bigger changes.