Thursday, December 24, 2015

A Time to Say Yes: Mary’s Story


December 24
Reflection by Jane Hale


A Time to Say Yes:  Mary’s Story

The voice came from out of nowhere, really.  I had just helped my mother prepare the evening meal, and I was in the midst of cleaning up, when suddenly I heard it.  

“Greetings, favored one!” it declared.    

Now try to make sense of that, will you?  First there was the fact that there was an angel in my kitchen.  That was strange enough.  But favored one?  This angel was clearly lost!  

Favored one.   It made no sense.  

I was only13. I had just helped my mother assemble the most meager evening meal.  My hands and tunic were still covered in the flour I had ground, and, in my family’s mud-lined grotto, this greeting was so wildly out of place.  

Perhaps the angel had taken a wrong turn in the jeweled city of Sepphoris, where there were plenty of beautiful and favored people.   I was sure that this creature had stumbled into lowly Nazareth, by mistake.  Do angels make mistakes?  Perhaps he needed directions.

The problem was I could barely speak.

He must have seen the look on my face.  I suppose you could say I was perplexed, but shocked-to-the-core is infinitely more accurate.  I’d been cornered by an angel.

I opened my mouth to ask the lost angel for whom he was looking, and to determine whether or not I could help him find them, but before I could find my voice, the angel spoke again.  “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found great favor with God.”   

He called me by name.  As impossible as it seemed, he was talking to me. Mary.

And then, right there in front of the hearth in my own home, that impossible angel laid out God’s whole impossible plan.  

The Holy Spirit.
A baby.
A son, in my own womb.
When I was a mere child myself.  

More than that, the angel told me that this child would grow up to sit on mighty David’s throne! Not just a son, but a king!  Not just any king, but the Son of God. The Christ.  The long-awaited Messiah.  

This was almost too much for me to bear.  I thought of Joseph, the man to whom I was engaged.  The risks were great.  Neither my family nor I held sway in our town, let alone in our culture.  We were nobodies.  And then there was the small matter that unmarried pregnant women could be publicly stoned to death.  Would my community disown me?  Would my family disown me?  Would Joseph disown me?  Would I disgrace them all?  And how well would all of this go over with the Roman authorities?   How, on earth, was a common peasant girl like me supposed to bear the Son of God into the world? The stakes seemed so impossibly high.  

In a quaking voice, I mustered whatever shred of courage I had left.  “How can this be?”  I asked the angel, who for a moment looked as though he, too, was uneasy about this whole idea.* But, to his credit, he collected himself and assured me that “Nothing would be impossible with God.”

And there it was.  It came down to faith.  
Faith in a God whose love surpasses all understanding.  
Faith in a God who acts in, and for, the world God loves.  
Faith that God will go to the ends of the earth to reconcile God’s creation with God’s self.  
Faith that this crazy plan could somehow bring about a holy child named Jesus and with him, the kingdom of God without end.  
Faith that God saw promise and holiness, even in the likes of me.

I’ll be honest with you. As I pondered this message, I wanted to do what anyone would have wanted to do in that situation.  I wanted to close my eyes and pretend it wasn’t happening.  I wanted to laugh it off, call it impossible, tell the angel there was just no way, that he was mistaken, that he was crazy, and that angels appearing uninvited in your kitchen announcing, “Do not be afraid,” did not actually ease one’s fear in the least.  I wanted to run away and hide.  I wanted to tell him that there was no way a poor, terrified, unwed peasant teenager from Nazareth could pull off such a miraculous feat.  But there was an angel in my kitchen, telling me that this was God’s miracle, not mine.+ Telling me that God was with me, that God loved me for exactly who I was, that God believed in me, and that God was inviting me to bring God into the world in the form of a newborn peasant baby.  

After some thought, against all odds, and in spite of all the excuses I could think of, I said yes.  That yes changed my life, and along with it, it changed the whole world.

You know the rest of the story.  

The long and difficult trip to Bethlehem under orders by the Emperor.
The birth in a cave designated for animals.
The swaddling cloths.
The bright star.
The lowly shepherds announcing his birth.  

My beautiful, vulnerable baby, even in his first moments of life, drew people in from the margins. And he spent his short life turning the whole known world on its head, as he healed the wounded, freed the oppressed, comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.   In him, people met the love of God face to face.  In him, people could envision an alternative way of life that affirmed all people, not just a privileged few.  In him people of all stripes saw themselves as part of God’s holy and reconciling mission with God and one another.  In him, they were saved from the world’s incessant NO, and instead, were transformed by God’s own YES!

I look back on that visit from the angel back in Nazareth so long ago, remembering how strange it felt to be invited into God’s plan to bear Jesus into the world.  But I realize now that we are—each and every one of us—invited to be God bearers.   We are each invited to be people who, through the power of the Holy Spirit, birth Jesus into this hurting and hungry world through our own hands, our own hearts, our own lives.  We are invited to bring Jesus and his healing justice and transforming love into the brokenness, into the messiness, into the margins, into the places that our culture would rather just forget.  

It can be unsettling at first, and, in truth, it can be downright heartbreaking at times, but God believed in me, just as much as God believes in every one of you.  We each have the opportunity to answer God’s unique call to us with our own Yes, and with that Yes, we have the chance to join God in the transformation of the world.  

As we celebrate the birth of Jesus this Christmas Eve, I ask you to consider that, through God’s deep love and the work of the Holy Spirit, Jesus continually seeks to be born anew in you, if you’ll only let him in.  We are made to be Godbearers, all of us.  And, as a wise angel once told me, even at times when the odds make that seem so very unlikely, once you say Yes, absolutely nothing is impossible with God.   


*Buechner, Frederick.  Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who.  San Francisco: HarperOne, 1993. p. 39. 
+Dean, Kenda Creasy and Ron Foster. The Godbearing Life.  Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1998. p.49.



Wednesday, December 23, 2015

O Emmanuel




















December 23, 2015
Reflection by Jane Hale

"Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign: the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel” (Isaiah 7:14)

Several years ago, I took a teen group on pilgrimage to Grand Teton National Park.  We camped and hiked in breathtaking mountain forests that were thick with buzzing wildlife, sparkling mountain lakes, and lodgepole pines that shot clear up to the sky.  To this crew of New Englanders, the vast expanse of forest around the Tetons felt like an Eden of sorts, a thin space where God seemed as close as the morning mist, or the mountain breeze.  We spent a good portion of most days hiking, and as we did, we could sense that every breath was infused with holiness.  One day, however, the trail that was usually bathed in lush greens, lead us into a strange and unfamiliar landscape. A forest fire had utterly ravaged the entire mountainside several years before, leaving nothing but a vast expanse of charred earth and branchless, blackened tree skeletons in its wake. It appeared, at first glance, to be a wasteland, and we sat together in silence, our hearts heavy with the burden of such indiscriminate destruction and loss of life.  But as we sat, we began to notice something we hadn’t seen at first glance.  There were tiny shoots of tender green pine trees emerging from the crevices between the charred, felled trees and rocks:  a sign of new life—tender, bright green, and shining— in the most unexpected of places. 

So it is with Christ:  a shoot from the great stump of Jesse; a peasant, infant king; compassionate companion to the outcast and oppressed; the crucified One that death could not contain; God-With-Us.

Where might you find Christ?

O come, o come Emmanuel.  Help us to seek you not only in the majestic and thin spaces, but also in the unexpected places, the hidden places, even the places that seem most devastatingly God-forsaken.   For there, we will find you—tender, bright green, and shining— a humble, and yet glorious sign among the peoples that God is truly with us, even now, ready to lead us into new and unending life. Amen.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

A Time to Build


















December 22, 2015
Reflection by Jane Hale

O Rex Gentium
O king of the peoples and their desired One,
you, the cornerstone, who make two into one:
come and save us, whom you fashioned out of clay.

In this season of Advent, at the beginning of the liturgical year, we, as Christians, are anticipating God’s arrival into the beautiful messiness of human community.   And we do this every year, so we know the drill.

We are expecting Christmas.  We are expecting God to be with us.  Yes, we are expecting Good Friday and the crucifixion, but we are also expecting Easter, the forgiveness of our sins, and the victory of life over death in the resurrection. We know what God has done in Jesus Christ, and we know what God has promised us.

In today’s O Antiphon, we sing that God in Jesus is the cornerstone, the one who binds us together, the one in whom the divided unite.

But right now, we as a nation and as a world, are reeling from an epic number of mass shootings, terrorism, and war, and there’s no doubt about it. We are hurting.

In some cases, we are hurting so badly that we are tempted to point fingers, and sling harmful rhetoric, and even violent acts, at our brothers and sisters of other faiths.  In some cases, we become so fearful of the unknown that we feel that it is safer to slam the door on our global neighbors who are seeking refuge from the trauma of war.  In some cases, we are tempted to forget who—and whose— we are, because sometimes, it is downright hard to be the people that we have promised God we would be.

Don’t forget.  Turn around. Because our common life depends on us being the kind of people God knows we can be.

Following Jesus doesn’t mean that we won’t face hardship, or pain, or suffering.  On the contrary; the world is hard and full of hurt.  It does mean that we are called, in faith, to turn from responding to hurt with more hurt.  It means that we are called, in faith, to turn from valuing our own comfort and privilege over the well-being of our neighbors.  It means that we are called, in faith, to Love with all of our hearts, even, and especially, when it’s hard. We are called to build respectful relationships where there is division; to stand up for victims of injustice and hate; to wage radical peace amidst violence; to welcome the downtrodden, the suffering, and the outcasts; and to care for one another—the stranger included— with wild abandon.

This is the scandalous Good News of the gospel:  that we are both loved beyond measure, and called, in faith, to partner with God in incarnating that love for others— building the peaceable kingdom together, the beloved community for all—here and now.

In our baptism, we make a promise, not to be cleansed of our sins just in time for God to show up at some later date, but to participate in the very life of God in the here and now—to be the Body of Christ broken open for the life of the whole world.

Take some time to listen to the stories of others in your neck of the woods, and consider where you are noticing hurt, violence, oppression, or division.  In what ways might we, in the face of division and consternation, join God and others in incarnating the Good News—building the beloved community, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our relationships, and in our own hearts? How might we be called to collaborate with our neighbors, incarnating the Love of the Living God in your own context? Together, hand in hand with our neighbors of other faiths, we can create a groundswell of life-giving change in the world. It won’t be easy, but God is our cornerstone, our firm foundation, our hope, and our guide. And with God, all things are possible.             
Thanks be to God.

(Excerpted and adapted from my sermon preached on December 13, 2015)

Monday, December 21, 2015

Time for Renewal



Come, shine on those in darkness and the shadow of death.
Click on the Antiphon above to hear it chanted. 
 
Light within all light
Soul behind all souls
At the breaking of dawn
At the coming of day
We wait and watch.
Your Light within the morning light
Your Soul within the human soul
Your Presence beckoning to us from the heart of life.
In the dawning of this day
Let us know fresh shinings in our soul.
In the growing colors of new beginnings all around us
Let us know the first lights of our heart.
Great Star of morning
Inner flame of the universe
Let us be a colour in this new dawning.

May the angels of light
Glisten for us this day.
May the sparks of infinite beauty
Dance in the eyes of those we love.
May the universe
Be on fire with Presence for us this day.
May the new sun or moon’s rising
Grace us with gratitude.
Let the whole earth shine
And its waters breathe with Spirit.
Let eternal winds stir the soil of our soul
And fresh awakenings rise within us
May mighty messengers of light
Glisten in all things this day
May we be summoned to reverence,
May we hear the great call to life.

FROM: John Philip Newell, Praying with the Earth: A Prayerbook for Peace. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 4.




Sunday, December 20, 2015

A Time for Leadership

December 19, 2015


O Key of David, O royal Power of Israel,
Controlling at your will the gate of heaven:
Come break down the prison walls of death
for those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death;
and lead your captive people into freedom.





Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Parent; to whom be dominion and glory, now and for ever.  Amen.
(BCP. 815)



Saturday, December 19, 2015

A Time for Peace



December 19, 2015 
Reflection by Phil Bjornberg


O Flower of Jesse’s stem,
you have been raised up as a sign for all peoples;
kings stand silent in your presence;
the nations bow down in worship before you.
Come, let nothing keep you from coming to our aid.


In Advent we proclaim that Isaiah’s words have been made manifest through the Christ child, the branch growing forth from the tree of Jesse. And those of us who follow this Christ child affirm that yes, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding and the fear of the Lord rested upon his shoulders. We affirm that he has judged the poor with righteousness. We know all too well how, through those convicting parables, the words of his mouth have assailed us in all our shadowed places. We say all of this with holiday cheer and merriment, even, because we believe it’s the best thing — he’s the best thing — that has happened to us.

But then we get to the part about the lions laying down with the lambs, child-friendly snakes, and neither animals nor humans hurting or killing. What do we do with this lingering prophecy that has yet to be fulfilled?  Why is the stump of Jesse taking so long to fill the whole world with the knowledge of God?  The little child has come to us — two thousand years ago and counting — and we have not yet made it to God’s holy mountain. The cows are grazing in high density barns waiting to be processed into cheap beef for our hamburgers. The lamb is still getting shorn to make clothes that will last only a season or two. Children don’t come anywhere near a snake’s lair because most of them don’t play anywhere outside much anymore.

And righteousness? Justice? We are so drunk on the process of hurting and destroying one another that we can no longer see past the ends of our military-might-political-fight-I-am-always-right noses. Death tolls rise, wars rage on, hunger and sickness strike day after day.  Have we have lost sight of the mountain altogether?

If the little child has come, and shall lead us, are we simply not following? Did we miss our chance? Did we get lost along the parade route and never realize the party broke up? ‘Tis the season to dream big dreams and hope big hopes; but, the hardest questions remain:

Why is the earth not yet filled with the knowledge of the Lord? 

What will you do to wage peace on your street?


Friday, December 18, 2015

Empowerment: Grace and Will in Overcoming


December 18, 2015 
Reflection by Phil Bjornberg
O Lord of Ancient Israel,
giver of the Law of Moses on Sinai:
rescue us with your mighty power.
Richard Rohr writes, “I think the Twelve Steps are inspired by the Holy Spirit and that they are a most successful programmatic teaching of the true Gospel.” [1]
The power to overcome human suffering is unleashed in the alignment of human will with divine will; the human spirit must flow with the Holy Spirit.  Personal power must be aligned with the power of grace.  How does this happen?  The alignment of our will with God’s will must happen at the heart level; through authentic choices of faith that are empowered by God.
Contemporary Western secular culture forces us to prefer a spirituality of achievement, performance, worthiness, and self-reliance, and surely avoid any talk of "all people have sinned" and "fallen short of the glory" (Romans 5:12, 3:23). There is no longer room in America "for the last to be first and the first to be last" (Mark 10:31). Conformity to cultural virtue is much more important than love of littleness or love of any outsider (read "sinner").
For generations now, it’s as if Christians have been saying, "We have the perfect medicine for what ails you: grace and mercy. But the only requirement for receiving it is never to need it!" Jesus called himself a physician and made his case clearly: "Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners" (Mark 2:17). Bill Wilson recognized this truth and understood that the only way to give everyone equal and universal access to God is to base salvation/enlightenment on woundedness instead of self-created trophies. If we are honest, this utterly levels the playing field. Julian of Norwich understood this great turn around and said proudly: "Our wounds are our very trophies!" They are the "holes in the soul" where the Light and the Life can break through. [2]
The way of the Twelve Steps is remarkably similar to Jesus' Way of the Cross, St. Francis' Way of Poverty, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux's Little Way. These and many other saints and mystics teach the power of powerlessness either directly or indirectly.  It is the imperial ego that has to go, and only powerlessness can do the job correctly; but, if we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego.
Until one bottoms out and comes to the limits of their own fuel supply, there is no reason to switch to a higher octane of fuel. Why would you? You will not learn to actively draw upon a Larger Source until your usual resources are depleted and revealed as inadequate to the task. In fact, you will not even know there is a Larger Source until your own sources and resources utterly fail you. [4]
 None of us go to the place of powerlessness on our own accord. We have to be taken there. Sad to say it, but it is largely sin, humiliation, failure, and various forms of addiction that do the job. Sometimes, having ruined your marriage, your children, your job, or your sterling self-image, you have to say, "My way isn't working." [5] Maybe there is another way, maybe I really do need to change. That is very often when you are finally ready to begin a sincere spiritual journey. At that point your religion morphs into a living spirituality. [6]
Are you abandoned to the will of God, able to mindfully empty the fuel-tank of your own self-reliance each and every moment of every day?  Are you ready to relinquish your best ideas about God and make a decision to turn your will and your life over to God’s care?  Are you willing to become willing to surrender that in which you are most secure?  
God, we offer ourselves to you – to build with us and to do with us as You will.  Relieve us of the bondage of self, that we may better do your will.  Take away our difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those we would help of Your Power, Your Love, and Your Way of Life.  May we do your will always.  Amen [7]






References:
[1] For more on the Twelve Steps and the Gospel, see Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Franciscan Media: 2011).
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2005), MP3 download.
[3] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Franciscan Media: 2011), 115.
[4] Ibid., 3.
[5] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Little Way: A Spirituality of Imperfection (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2007), MP3 download.
[6] For more on the theme of spiritual development and growth, see Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass: 2011).
[7] Adapted from the Third Step Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous, pg. 63 “The Big Book”.