Our Lady of Capitol Heights

. . .Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child. - Luke 2.5

Rosa Parks was not the first who refused to give up her seat.

Nine months before Parks' courageous act, Claudette Colvin went to jail for the same decision. The fifteen year-old had boarded a bus in th Capitol Heights section of Montgomery on her way home from school when the driver ordered her to yield her seat to a white passenger. When she refused, the driver called the police, who yanked her off the vehicle and charged her with disturbing the peace, violating segregation laws and, for good measure, assault.

Colvin's case went to trial, where she prevailed, but the canny leaders of the civil rights movement chose instead to make Parks the face of the bus boycott. Colvin was too young, for one thing. Also, she did not project the middle-class image which Parks possessed. Perhaps most important, she became pregnant shortly after the incident, and an unwed mother was seen as playing to the racist narrative of the white establishment.

History has born out the wisdom of this move, but one cannot escape the irony: No one thought that a lower-class unwed teenage mother could be the vehicle of freedom.

Mary had the same liabilities, and the same doubts: How can this be? But when she launched into her own version of "We Shall Overcome," she embraced God's insistence on using not only the least, but the least likely. He has exalted those who were humble. 

So be careful before you decide who can and can't be the means of Christ breaking into the world. Who knows, it might even be you.

After this I looked. . . . - Revelation 7.9

Shakespeare called death, "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns." Maybe that was true in 1600, but not, it appears, four centuries later. In fact, we find ourselves awash in accounts of the afterlife. I personally know one individual who claims to have made the round-trip, but there are plenty of others.

Darryl Perry, a financial adviser from Florida, claims that after a six-month heads-up, God spirited him away to Heaven where, awash in brightness, warmth, and color, he met several relatives and, eventually, God who, against Perry's veto, slung him back to earth. Mary Neal, an orthopedic surgeon from Wyoming, drowned while kayaking; she also saw lots of lights and colors before making the return trip to write her book, To Heaven and Back.

Then, of course, there's Colton Burpo who, as a toddler, died of a burst appendix and visited the afterlife preparatory to publishing the best-seller, Heaven Can Wait. Well, it was ghost-written (so to speak) by his dad, Todd, a Wesleyan minister. The franchise now includes a website, a children's book, and a feature-length movie. 

Are these accounts true? I like what my friend and colleague Dr. Tony Miranda of Stark College and Seminary says on the subject: "I don't know. What I do know is, we don't need them." And we don't, because we have one account of such an incident that the ancient church recognized as divinely inspired and has continued to read, one which remains a best-seller (well, the anthology that includes it is a perennial best-seller) after two millennia. Sure, we argue about what it means, but that only proves that for two thousand years now, we've agreed that whatever it means is the truth. The apostle John went to Heaven (without the bother of dying) and, at Christ's behest, wrote an account of his experiences. We know it as The Revelation.  

So what is Heaven like? Well, it's a little disappointing. John didn't meet any dead relatives, such as his brother, James, one of the first Christian martyrs. In fact, to hear John tell it, Heaven seems to be entirely focused on the throne of God and the worship God receives there. In Revelation 7.12, for instance, redeemed souls in glory offer seven-fold praise to the Almighty. The number seven is big in Heaven, if John is any indication. Here, it most likely conveys the idea of the sum total of all possible praise. James and Peter and Paul, all probably dead by the time John wrote, could've been jostling shoulders in the scrum and never even noticed one another, so focused were they on the Lord. 

Mark Twain once noted that, for the average person, Heaven "has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists - utterly and entirely - of diversions which he cares next to nothing about, here in the earth, yet is quite sure he will like them in Heaven." Heaven for eternity; Sunday worship for ninety minutes max.

And toss in another factor: John's Heaven jumbles up redeemed souls from both sides of the world's border walls: from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages. And since John could plainly see this to be the case, we conclude that their nationalities and pigmentations and dialects do not meld into a tasteful beige and a bland Esperanto, but retain all of their racial and regional peculiarities. 

Once again, Twain wonders that "Here in the earth all nations hate each other, and every one of them hates the Jew. Yet every pious person adores that heaven and wants to get into it. He really does. And when he is in a holy rapture he thinks that if he were only there he would take all the populace to his heart and hug, and hug, and hug." 

So as our dreams of endless green fairways and calorie-free ice cream fade in the face of an eternal worship service, and our red-lined racial boundaries buckle, we have to wonder: If Heaven disappoints us, is there something wrong with Heaven? Maybe the better conclusion is that there's something wrong with us.

Jesus said the two greatest commandments are to love the Lord our God with everything we've got, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Then, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, he defined a neighbor as the guy we tell light-bulb jokes about. Since salvation is by grace alone, maybe these two ordinances are not ways to get into Heaven, but ways to like it when we get there.

Maybe Heaven, like coffee or opera or Russian novels, is an acquired taste. And maybe the process of acquiring that taste is what the Bible calls "sanctification." And maybe we'd better start developing our appreciation for the Heaven that really exists. So go to church on Sunday, and sit next to somebody who isn't like you - or somebody you don't like! If it won't help get you into Heaven, it will help you get into it once you're there.

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place - and I did not know it!" 

- Genesis 28.16

If you've ever watched a police procedural show on television, you've heard someone say, "We've put out a BOLO on the suspect!" The acronym stands for, "Be On the Look Out for." The idea is that the person you want is out there, but you might not spot them if you did not know to be looking.

Advent is the BOLO season of the Christian year. The Messiah is coming, but in ways, and in places, and through people we don't expect: a helpless baby, born in a no-star hotel, to an unwed mother. Zecharias sees an angel where he expected only a cloud of incense. The shepherds see a heavenly battalion where they expected only sheep. The wise men see a star that defies their carefully-crafted zodiac. 

The ongoing soap opera of Harry and Heels (the literal translation of "Esau" and "Jacob"), reminds us to pay this kind of attention. Jacob has conned his big brother one time too many and made Canaan too to hold him so he does a runner to Haran, some five hundred miles to the north. (Think of Al Pacino's character in "The Godfather" who takes it on the lam to Sicily after he offs a rival mob boss.) Just a few days into his trek he sacks out on a hillside expecting nothing more than a bad night's sleep. (I've never understood why someone would use a rock for a pillow.) Instead, God appears; even so, Jacob must pay attention. Notice a couple of interesting things.

In one way, the vision fits Jacob's expectations. What he sees is probably not a "ladder," but a "stairway" reaching to Heaven (like the Led Zeppelin song). Some scholars believe this was a ziggurat, the stepped pyramids with a central staircase that featured in the pagan religions of Mesopotamia. The idea was that the priest would ascend the steps to get in shouting distance of the gods in order to cut a deal. The Tower of Babel was probably designed along these lines.

However, notice a few important differences: First of all, instead of a portal for human beings to ascend to the heavens, this was a means by which heavenly agents entered human turf in order to be active in their affairs. More importantly, God does not park in the penthouse. The best translation of verse 13 indicates that God stood "beside" the whole structure (NRSV). So Jacob learns that heavenly intervention in the world is not achieved but received, and that the God of Abraham and Isaac is not absent but present. Most important of all, God's promise in verse 14 is that "all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and your offspring." The gist of the blessing that Jacob had swiped was the ultimate coming of the Savior to set right Adam's original sin. 

"Surely the Lord is in this place - and I did not know it!" 

So here's the payoff: Advent offers a time of preparation for the arrival of Christ in our world in new ways that reconfigure our religious expectations. God works within our cultural matrix, but repurposes our theological categories with the shock of grace.

So, waking or sleeping, working or resting, be on the lookout for Christ, who comes to us daily, often in a distressing disguise. When he comes, we must do what Jacob did: mark the moment by offering to God whatever means of revelation God chooses: a rock for a pillow, or an emotional rock in my psychological shoe; a perfect child, or a stew-hustling identity thief who troubles the family hearth. God uses it all to bring in the Kingdom of Heaven.

As the poet Elizabeth Barret Browning writes, "Earth's crammed with heaven/And every common bush afire with God/But only he who sees takes off his shoes."

He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God. - 1 Kings 19.8

No one should live more than a ten minute walk from a good walk.

This is the position of the National Recreation and Parks Association and Urban Land Institute, which has coaxed the mayors of two hundred and twenty cities across America into signing on to support their project. The idea is that urbanites should be able to reach a green space within a half-hour's trek from anywhere in their town. Experts insist that even a brief walk through nature provides wonderful health benefits. Minneapolis has long since achieved the ten-minute desideratum and, perhaps as a result, ranks as the healthiest city in the country. Of course, multiple studies add that adequate sleep and a healthy diet have similar effects. 

Consider, then, the case of Elijah.

The crusty old prophet bursts on the scene declaring famines, eating carrion, sponging off widows, raising the dead, confronting kings, calling down divine fire and, for an encore, making it rain. At the end of all this frenetic prophetic exertion, he sort of flames out. The queen threatens his life and he bolts, paving his retreat with prayers that lay the blame on God. Then an interesting thing happens: he takes a nap. When he wakes up, he eats some bread (whole-grain and organic, no doubt). and has a drink (water; not soda). Then he takes a walk - granted, he exceeds the ten-minute minimum by over five thousand percent but its still a stroll to an outdoor location.

Then he hears from God.

Many of us live ten minutes or less from our next crisis. Sometimes it seems that only nanoseconds separate us from an angry mob of demands. When our skins get thin and our prayers grow peevish, it may be time to follow the Lord's prescription: take a nap; have a snack; go for a walk. Don't wait for ideal conditions: Elijah slept in the shade of a day hot enough to bake bread on a rock! Don't insist on an extended vacation: if you don't have forty days, the scientists tell us that even forty minutes will do. 

Make your way to the mountain of God; then you can judge molehills accurately.