God on a Tear November 27, 2011 First Sunday of Advent, Year B Isaiah 64.1-9

            The home-stretch of the 1990 Minnesota senate race found candidate Paul Wellstone down by double-digits, yet he continued to scrap. Campaign manager Patrick Forciea explained the strategy: “We are going to get as close as we can, wait for a lightning storm and then head out to the golf course and wave a 9-iron around.” In the end his opponent stumbled and Wellstone won by a sliver.

With time running out for Israel Isaiah adopts a similar strategy: He takes to the wilderness and brandishes a verbal lightning rod in the face of the Almighty. Like Leer on a storm-strafed heath or Captain Ahab on the pitching decks of the Pequod, the prophet dares God to do the worst on the argument that divine action – even judgment – is better than divine indifference. “Oh, that you would rend the heavens.” The verb describes ripping cloth, as the Almighty blasts into oblivion the veil that makes Heaven seem distant.

But Isaiah sneaks in another idea here: This word appears frequently for the rending of garments as a sign of mourning. (Isa 36.22, 37.1) Father and potter: God who begets and shapes us, if You cannot excuse, can You at least mourn?

At Advent God’s church confesses that we should have done better by now. Two millennia after Our Lord’s appearance and still we wallow in partisan bickering and cut daily deals with the devil to survive. All our religion is menstrual rags. If Christ should split the eastern skies the blast of his breath would blow our works away and leave us as naked as Adam’s fig leaves left him after the Fall.

And yet we cry for Christ to come. We dare to wave the nine-irons of our prayers in the lightning storm of eternity for two reasons: First of all, God is better than no-God; better to be ignited than ignored. Secondly, the God who condemns is the God who grieves. At the moment of Christ’s death the Lord rent the temple veil, an act of judgment, of grief and of mercy. Naked we wait love’s uplifted stroke: Even so, Lord Jesus, come!

Let ‘Er Rip!

Doug

           

Every Seditious Dog Has His Day November 20, 2011 Christ the King Sunday, Year A Ephesians 1:15-23

            The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once launched a short-lived political paper called “The Watchman.” An aristocrat who took exception to the decidedly republican tone of the sheet’s politics once glanced at the epigraph on the masthead and condemned it as “a seditious beginning!” Upon being told that the motto was a quotation, not Coleridge’s own work, the detractor scoffed, “Poo! What odds is it whether he wrote it himself or quoted it from any other seditious dog?”

            The slogan ran: “That all may know the truth; and that the truth may make us free!”

            Paul reminds the Ephesian believers that the preaching of the gospel is the seditious baying of the Hound of Heaven. As Paul piles up the synonyms – rule and authority and power and dominion – he ransacks the vocabulary of majesty common to Jewish angelology, Roman bureaucracy and Ephesian thaumaturgy. And he weds this rebellious grito to the unseemly assertion that a dead Jew walked out of his tomb, that defeat is God’s secret weapon, and that submission the ultimate form of sedition.

            Then he adds insult to injury when he insists that this crucified conqueror belongs especially to a scruffy set of so-called saints whose founder skipped town half a step ahead of a riot, a man whose preaching undercut the local economy by lowering demand for high-quality idols. He . . . gave Him as head over all things to the church. The Kingship of Christ is God’s great gift to the visible body of believers. Thus the church never courts politicians, begging for a place at the table, but calls them to account and issues terms of surrender.

            Earthly authority, whatever its surface piety, never welcomes the barking of the seditious dogs of the gospel. In 1612 the great Baptist leader Thomas Helwys published A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, the first call for religious liberty ever written in English. He sent an inscribed copy to King James, noting on the flyleaf that, “The king is a mortal man and not God, and therefore has no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.” They jugged him for that crack and he died in prison four years later.

            The church can only celebrate Christ the King Sunday by simultaneously celebrating Nobody Else the King Sunday. If we dare to do so, we may know the wrath of a world that dislikes the Seditious Dog we serve. We will, however, certainly come to know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe.

Ruff, ruff!

Doug

Collect

Almighty God, by the humiliation of the cross You exalt Your Son to rule in the highest heavens. Grant that we may be true to the crucified Christ though it means being traitors to every lesser loyalty, that by embracing the same cross we may find in Him our place at Your right hand. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Benediction

May all your knowledge make you to know Christ,

            And all your wisdom make you fools for Him.

May all your riches make you rich in Christ,

            And all your hope be your belief in Him.

May all your loyalty be unto Christ,

            And all your worship be alone for Him.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

           

            

Knock, Knock . . . Who’s There? November 13, 2011 Proper 28 Ordinary Time, Year A 1 Thessalonians 5.1-11

           “Sister, open for us.”

            New York Times reporter Christina Lewis Halpern admits to hearing the plea outside her door in a Nairobi convent. She admits to hearing female weeping, male shouting, female screaming.           

She admits that she did not open the door.

            The mosquito netting tangled her legs as she half-awakened. Fear tangled her mind as she came fully awake. “Surely they would go away. Surely someone would come. Surely they would leave me alone.”

            “Sister, open for us.”

            The next morning Halpern learned that gunmen had invaded the convent, shot a guard and stolen cash meant for the order’s missions in Uganda and Sudan. She admitted her cowardice and asked for and received the forgiveness of the terrified nuns who had sought refuge at her door. (For the full story, see http://www.nytimes.com/ 2011/10/30/ magazine/at-an-african-convent-desperate-knocks-and hours.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq= sister,%20open%20&st=cse.)

            When, drawing on the teaching of Jesus, Paul warns “that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night,” he may well have just this image in mind. Scholars debate whether the “day” in question refers to the end of history (the subject of the preceding paragraph) or, in the Old Testament sense, a time of judgment within history. Certainly the terms destruction and labor pains come from the prophetic vocabulary for the latter.

            When horrors overtake a benighted world, God commands Christians to heed their cries. “Let us be alert” – the word does not mean to wake up, but to fend off sleep in the first place. Practical difficulties should not entangle our agile compassion. Personal safety should not anesthetize our ready response. We rush to the rattling doorknob and reject the chattering syllogisms of safety. “Sister, open for us”: Surely they will go away. Surely someone will come. Surely they will leave us alone. But we are the ones Christ has sent.

            If we fail we may, in the final undying dawn of eternity, receive the forgiveness of those we abandoned, whom someone else sought out and saved, but better to receive their embrace here in this present crisis. Shakespeare’s Portia, on seeing her lighted home from afar exclaims, “How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” May we awaken, and so shine.

Open Up!

Doug

Collect

Lord God, You have appointed your beloved Son as the judge of the living and the dead. Grant that we who see the day of judgment approach may fling wide the doors of salvation and welcome the lost into the safety of Your kingdom, not stopping first to consult our own convenience or security. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.           

Benediction

When the day comes as a thief in the night,

            May you be the night watchman.

When the day comes as the pangs of labor,

            May you be the physician on call.

When the day comes to drive away the dark,

            May you be one who walks in light.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.