Sermon for 1 Advent 2011 - 11.27.11

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

If you came to my house, and you went to the closet under the stairs – that closet with the sloping ceiling, slanting to a narrow point at the back – and if you opened the door, what you would want to do is to stand back with hands at the ready, in case it all came tumbling out on you. And assuming it all stayed in place, you would need to start pulling things out.

You would pull out the vacuum cleaner, and the bag full of wrapping paper scraps for every possible occasion – because you never know when you might need a one-foot square piece of sunflower-print paper (slightly crumbled). You would start sorting back through layers of Snook family history. Old Halloween costumes, craft supplies for crafts not yet complete. Posters made for school projects, explaining fine points of biology and literature. The box of my old elementary school papers, artwork, and photographs that my parents decided would be better gathering dust at my house than theirs. Boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations. Supplies for goldfish and birds we no longer have.

And after you got all of that out of the closet, you would be almost to the back. And there you would see it: under the shelves at the very narrowest back part of the closet, gleaming and white and still looking new: my bread machine: relic of a Christmas long ago, when I was sure what I wanted more than anything else was a bread machine.

I had gone to a friend’s house, she had made fresh bread, the house smelled divine, the bread she made was delicious – and she explained that she just dumped flour and water and yeast in, and the machine did the work, and I decided that even I could do that. I think I actually used it once or twice, and the bread it made was wonderful. But somehow it got put in the back of the closet, and never used again.

And I think back on that bread machine, and I realize: it wasn’t the machine I wanted at all; and it wasn’t the bread either. What I wanted was the smell: the smell of bread baking. Smells can take you back in time in a very immediate way – more than just a memory, a smell connects your brain to experiences, to feelings. I think that humans must have some ancient primeval gene connecting the smell of fresh bread with the love of our mothers.

That smell of bread baking reminds me of my mother, who in my childhood every now and then would bake fresh bread, the old-fashioned way, without a machine, dusting the countertop with flour, plunging her hands in, kneading and rolling and kneading again. My sweet, kind, generous mother, who could easily have bought Wonder bread at the grocery store, but who every now and then wanted to do something special for her family. It reminds me also of her mother before her, who taught her how to do it: my smiling, cheerful, hardworking grandmother, who was a farm wife in the Depression and who knew how to do things the hard way.

What I was longing for, all those Christmases ago, was not bread, it was the feeling. The feeling of being with those wonderful women, of being surrounded by family, of being loved in that very particular way. I was longing for that feeling of love.

What are you longing for, this first Sunday of Advent? The holiday season has officially begun, the Thanksgiving feast has been shared, the Black Friday crowds have stormed the stores. The shopping frenzy escalated on Friday to the point where 9 Wal-Marts reported violence, including fights, a shooting, and an incident where a woman pepper-sprayed the competition to get her hands on some electronics.

Somehow I don’t think this is why Jesus was born in a stable.

And even for those of us who didn’t darken the door of any stores on Friday, many of us are creating Christmas lists, desperately searching for ways to fulfill the Christmas wishes of the people we love (or are obligated to buy for).

And yet, I have to think, those items on our Christmas lists aren’t really what we’re longing for at all – we’re longing for something else entirely.

So what are you longing for? Are you longing for a better job, are you longing for the presence of someone you love, are you longing for healing, longing for relief from stress and worry? Are you longing to go back in time and see someone you loved a long time ago, or do something differently than you did the first time? Are you longing to skip forward to the future and see how something you’ve already set in motion is going to turn out? Are you longing for new relationships, new emotions, new hopes? Are you longing for the world to become a better place, for wars to end and poverty to be defeated and diseases to be healed?

Are you longing, quite simply, to be loved?

This Advent season, that begins today, is the season of longing. It’s the season when we recognize that we have a longing for a perfection we never quite achieve, a certain empty place even in the most contented life. I am convinced that all of our Christmas buying frenzy is our way of attempting to address this emptiness, this longing, this recognition that things are not quite right in our lives, that we have not reached perfection yet. Few of us would say that a bread machine, or any other Christmas gift, would make our lives complete. And yet we always hope that we might come one step closer to filling that empty place in our hearts.

Advent is the time when God says to us: wait. Wait, hope, expect, pray. That empty place in our hearts is a place that ultimately, only God can fill. Jesus came to us as God’s gift of God’s own self, the gift that fills our longings. The promise of Christ is the promise that he has come to us to bring perfect love to birth; AND he will come again to bring his kingdom to completion: that kingdom where the world will be made right again, where suffering will cease, where people will learn to walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us.

In the meantime, the time of waiting for God’s Kingdom, when the world is still imperfect, when our hearts are still longing – that is, that time between Christ’s first and second coming, when we will almost certainly live our entire lives – during this time, our calling as followers of Christ is not only to seek Christ who came long ago, not only to wait for Christ who will come again, but also to look for how Christ is entering into the everyday events of this world today, to look for how Christ’s kingdom is even now breaking into this world – and to JOIN CHRIST in that work.

Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians today, counsels the church in Corinth to wait, with longing hope and expectation – the same way we are asked to wait today, in Advent season – adopting spiritual disciplines of waiting, hope, prayer, worship, community, generosity. All of these things are grounded in what Paul points out: the discipline of gratitude – recognizing God at work in our lives, and understanding the grace God has given us. In our spiritual state of gratitude, we realize that God’s grace comes with spiritual gifts that allow us to do what God has done, to pour ourselves out as gifts to the world, to join God in his kingdom work of bringing love to birth.

I am convinced that all our striving to buy the perfect gift for everyone, that activity we spend so much time and stress on every Advent season, is merely our way of diverting ourselves from our true longings. I think what we really long for is the gift of love. And I think the best way to experience the gift of love is to give it.

So what if we adopted God’s kingdom as our gifting project this year? What if we decided to devote our Advent season to giving the gift of love? Honoring Jesus with the gifts we give? By finding out what Christ is doing, and joining in?

You can do this by giving to help those in need – our Advent outreach fair next Sunday will give you an opportunity to find out about the many ways we help people in need here at Nativity, and if you wish, to make a donation in honor of someone on your Christmas list.

You can do it also by being or becoming a steward – giving money to God’s work – here at Nativity, in our ongoing operations and mission work, and in our building project. The ultimate purpose of everything we do here is to spread Christ’s love, and when we join together in community, we are joining God’s work.

And, you can give the gift of yourself to the people you love – not trying to satisfy their heart’s longings with mere presents, but giving your time, your words, your service. What would it mean to give dinner at your home to someone who is lonely? What would it mean to do a few household chores for someone who has little time to do it themselves? What would it mean to write a Christmas letter to someone who has meant a lot to you, letting them know how much you appreciate them?

It would mean not trying to fill the emptiness in our hearts with mere things. Not trying to say “I love you” with a mere bread machine, or a tie, or a shirt, or something else that might end up at the back of a closet. But instead, doing what Jesus did – joining Jesus in his mission: pouring our love into the world.

Because this Advent season, and every season, I believe that what we are truly longing for is Christ. Christ who has come, Christ who will come, Christ who is always coming to us, to bring the gift of himself: the ultimate gift of love.

Sermon for All Saints 2011

Scriptures for today are Here

Years ago, when we were younger and living in Texas, Tom and I used to take a vacation each year to the Big Bend Country – the part of Texas where the Rio Grande curves in a kind of elbow – a mountainous, desert country. It’s not so different from the desert mountains around here, except for the fact that it is right on the border between Texas and Mexico. In the Big Bend Country, you travel through a vast, empty national park on the US side, so there’s no real difference between the desert on one side and the desert on the other – the only way you know where the border is, is by the river, the Rio Grande.

One day, Tom and I were out hiking in the park, and we saw a trail that led down to the river. The river was just a small, gentle stream, and there we found an old Mexican man with a raft. He didn’t speak English but we managed to communicate; $1 each to go across. So we paid the money, and he poled us across to the other side.

On the Mexican side, we walked up the riverbank, fended off the children trying to sell us pretty rocks for a dollar, and walked up a dusty path to a tiny town, where we sat on the porch of a rickety restaurant and ordered the only things they had on the menu: borracho beans with fresh-made tortillas and Dos Equis. We sat on the porch, swatted flies, listened to the ceiling fan and the recorded conjunto music, and watched what little activity took place on the dirt main road of this tiny town. And then, after awhile, we decided to walk back down to the river and cross back over to the U.S. side. **

I don’t know if it was because it was a different place, or a different era, but there in the Big Bend Country, there were no passports, no checkpoints, no guards. The border was thin and porous, hardly recognizable as a border at all.

The ancient Celts, living in Britain and Ireland long before Christianity came there, recognized certain places as “thin places,” border crossings between heaven and earth. Somehow at these places, they felt the borderline was thin and porous, and the spirit world could pour through at any moment. So they built shrines at those places, and later Christians built churches and cathedrals and graveyards on top of the old shrines. And I’m told if you go to those places, sometimes you can feel the border between heaven and earth crack open just a little bit, and feel the presence of God.

The Celtic people also recognized certain times of the year as border crossings, such as the three-day harvest festival when they remembered their ancestors. Later Christians baptized and made this festival our own in our three-day festival of Halloween, All Saints and All Souls, all three of which happened this past week. And today, we are observing All Saints Day.

All three of these days in a way take us down to the border crossing between heaven and earth; they help us to look at questions of life and death. Halloween does this in kind of a parody – dressing up as the things we fear – monsters and ghosts, and the living dead, vampires and zombies – to somehow shake our fists at death, laugh in its face, proclaim life instead. All Saints was originally the time when the Roman Catholic Church remembered saints and martyrs, who they believed were able to skip Purgatory and go straight to heaven; and All Souls was the time when they remembered all the faithful departed, and said masses for ordinary dead loved ones.

For us Episcopalians, we’ve never believed in the idea of Purgatory, which is found nowhere in the Bible; though we do remember many people as saints, heroic examples of witnesses and martyrs for the faith. We also recognize that there are many faithful people, quietly living lives of devotion to God and service to others, and it is up to God to recognize their quiet sainthood; so we don’t make that much distinction between All Saints and All Souls Days. We believe that it is up to God to bring all of us, as God’s children, into God’s home: that country that waits for us beyond the final boundary of death.

Which is a faith that is beautiful and true, and I believe it. But we should not make the mistake as Christians of thinking that the whole goal of our life of faith is to escape from this life into a better life on other side. Chrstian author Brian McLaren (Everything Must Change) states, "More and more Christian leaders are beginning to realize that for the millions of young adults who have recently dropped out of church, Christianity is a failed religion. Why? Because it has specialized in dealing with 'spiritual needs' to the exclusion of physical and social needs. It has focused on 'me' and 'my eternal destiny,' but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, poverty, and dysfunction”, i.e., life on this side of the border between life and death. McLaren asks, "Shouldn't a message purporting to be the best news in the world be doing better than this?"

Well, the answer is yes – Christian faith should focus our eyes on this world too. Because if our lessons for today make anything clear, it is the fact that the life of the Body of Christ takes place here on this side of the border as well as in the heavenly court; it takes place now, in this moment, as well as in a future hope. The Christian life is not only about escaping suffering into the beautiful vision of the heavenly city in our lesson from Revelation today, where we will hunger and thirst no more, and every tear will be wiped from our eyes.

The Christian life is also about working to alleviate hunger and thirst here, to wipe tears from the eyes of people who are suffering now: taking our life of sainthood seriously here. It is about becoming a community grounded in love, the love that God has given us (as 1 John says) – “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God.” What we will become, the communion of saints that lives through eternity, has not yet been revealed, but children of God is what we are. And because God loves us, God gives us love to share with others.

In fact there is something beautiful and true about this fact: that in the earthy reality of our lives right here, in places of suffering and anguish as well as times of joy and laughter, Jesus is here, loving us, making our life holy.

I believe this is what Jesus is talking about in our gospel lesson today, one of the most famous passages in all of Matthew’s gospel, known as the Beatitudes (“Blessed”). The original Greek word translated here as “Blessed” is “Makarios,” which means “happy.” Jesus seems to be saying not so much that God will bless you in your suffering as that happiness comes in the midst of suffering – you are “happy” now. This doesn’t seem to make sense – we all know that suffering is real, and it is hard to find happiness in the midst of it. Yet Jesus seems to say with no irony, Happy are the poor in spirit, happy are those who mourn, happy are the meek.

And to me, this seems the opposite of truth, it almost seems to promote a Pollyanna style of faith. But the truth is, of all world religions, Christianity may be the one that is most realistic about suffering, because we worship a Savior who suffered . We worship a Savior who chose on his own to cross the thin and porous border between heaven and earth, to leave the place where there are no tears, to come to a world where suffering, hunger, thirst, death are everyday affairs.

In 2006, the rock star Bono, lead singer of the band U2, spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, a famous speech that has been quoted thousands of times: “God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so…. But the one thing we can all agree -- all faiths, all ideologies -- is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”

I think this is what Jesus means when he says to the sick, suffering and poverty-stricken folks who crowded around him in the hills of Galilee to watch him heal and to hear him speak, Happy are you when you are poor in spirit. He is saying more than just the kingdom of heaven will be yours someday. He is also saying, the kingdom of heaven is among you now. He is pointing to his own presence, for the kingdom of heaven comes to us in the person of Jesus, the one who loved us so much he came to be among us. The border has already been crossed, the barricades have already come down. The kingdom of heaven has already leaked across the border into this world. And it is here among us; it is here IN us. It is what empowers us to live as saints in the world.

It is in the name of the God who crosses all borders, that we live our lives as baptized saints and citizens of God’s kingdom. Making choices, crossing borders to be with others who need our help. Because he is here with us, we make the choice to be with them. And we know that someday a new border crossing will open up for us. And we will be with him, God’s beloved children, every tear wiped away.

So, on All Saints and All Souls Days, we remember all Christians who have died, and give thanks for their lives. Because we believe the promise of Jesus was true for them, and will one day be true for us, that as we make that final border crossing between earth and heaven, that our Lord will be there to greet us, welcome us, and pole our raft to the other side – where there is no crying, no sighing, but life everlasting.

** Years after we crossed the Rio Grande at Boquillas, I happened to be listening to Robert Earl Keen one day and I realized that he had crossed the Rio Grande at the same place. There couldn't possibly be another crossing just like it. He sang about it in his song "Gringo Honeymoon" - click the link to hear his amazing, fabulous song. He had the same experience we did, except -- we didn't rent the donkeys (too expensive); we didn't meet the cowboy who was running from the DEA; and we sadly didn't hear the crusty caballero play the old gut-string guitar.