Have you ever longed for something with your whole heart?  Have you ever had that moment of yearning when you thought you would burst with the desire?  Perhaps it came as you waited for a delayed plane at the airport, and you sat there imagining the face of a family member or a friend emerging from the jet way.  Perhaps it came as you sat in a hospital waiting room while someone you loved was in surgery.  Perhaps it came around midnight while your teenager, having just recently gotten her driving license, was out past curfew and you were beginning to fear an accident.

Our longings and yearnings take different forms, yet underneath them all is this yearning for reunion, for restored relationship, for hope, for love.  We sense that something deep moves in those longings, something beyond articulation, beyond words, even beyond images.  We may wake in the night and sense a yearning that knows no bounds, a yearning for something truer, deeper, wiser, more beautiful and more lovely than ourselves.  Underneath our longings is that deep desire for God.  The God who brought us into being, who knit us together in our mothers’ wombs, creates in us this longing, this yearning, this hope.

One of the first teachings of scripture, found in the first chapter of Genesis, is that we humans are created in the image and likeness of God.  In some way, human beings bear something of the divine, or–perhaps better said–are intended to bear something of the divine.  The scriptural witness tells us that is God’s intent from the beginning.

And so it is that our yearnings mirror God’s yearnings.  Our longing gives us intimations of God’s longing and desire.  This morning’s gospel presents us with Jesus yearning for Jerusalem , speaking with such poignance that it moves the heart.  “ Jerusalem , Jerusalem , the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”  St. Luke gives us this image of Jesus yearning for the people of Jerusalem –which is to say, yearning  for all of us.  Jesus speaks with the voice of a mother who watches her child proceed down a self destructive path.  Jesus speaks with the voice of a father who can hardly bear to witness a child’s choices which will surely lead to a bad end.  In this speaking, Jesus reveals the heart of God.

We know something about these yearnings.  I would guess that many of you have had that moment when you watch as a son, a daughter, a parent, a friend, insists on going in a way that is foolish.  Despite counsel, warnings, encouragement, teaching, the loved one continues to make choices that will result in real heartbreak.  It does not mean that we stop loving when the choices are made.  It makes the loving all the harder.  It does not mean that we can control the situation, because that is impossible.  It means that we are confronted with our own limitations and with the real fact of free will.  It does not mean that we are to blame; it means that sometimes those we love walk in a path that leads to alienation and heartbreak. 

Sometimes, we are the one doing the walking down that path.  I now look back on some of the warnings my parents issued when I was in adolescence.  What sounded constricting and dumb when I was 16 looks like wisdom from middle age.  I remember also that my responses to their yearning, their hopes that I would be safe, that I would take care, that I would come home, were often impatience, literally stomping my foot and some degree of real hostility.

Sometimes we are the one doing the yearning and sometimes we are the one being yearned for.

As Jesus reveals to us, in God all of that is eternal reality.  God longs for us with infinite desire.  We, by solely treating God as punitive parent, end up either being dutiful with little love or acting out like a bad kid.  Lent invites us to let go of the false images of God we may be carrying around inside.  God is not the angry old dad in the sky.  Jesus reveals a God who loves beyond measure, who dares to call us friends.  Lent calls us to let go of our distorted and downright unfaithful images of God and to allow ourselves to let the true God enter our awareness. 

“How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”  Can we bear to hear that yearning?  Can we bear to let ourselves know how deeply God longs for us, longs for our well being and joy?  It scares us, I think, to be loved that much.  

This season of Lent leads us to Easter.  Yes, we are called to be honest about our sins, and always to do that within the context of God’s mercy and forgiveness.  We are called to remember that we are dust and to dust we will return, but always within the context of God’s eternal life and Easter joy.  We are called to remember that we are the creatures, within the context of the divine longing for us as the works of God’s hands.

We in the Episcopal Church are encouraged to have a Lenten discipline.  I confess to you that my perfectionist tendencies used to produce a “we try harder” sort of Lent that really was about my showing God how well I could do the season.  Lots of doing and self imposed restrictions.  Some of that might have been prayerful, but mostly it felt like a lot of work.  I got to where I hated Lent.  I would start dreading its approached right after the Feast of the Epiphany.  Partly this was my own inner conflict, and partly it was the teaching and preaching I’d heard, yea verily even in the Episcopal Church.  I kept having a sense of God as the great accountant keeping tabs on my sins in the sky. 

Somewhere along the way, about twenty years ago, the reality of the Lenten journey began to break through.  The fact that we were making a pilgrimage together to Easter began to dawn on me.  The fact that we were celebrating our baptisms and remembering to let Christ help us with our sinful behaviors began to press into my awareness.  And thanks to Bishop Mark Dyer, now retired, about the time my sons were old enough to bug tussle on the kitchen floor while I cooked, I discovered something about God’s longing for us.  A friend had given me some tapes of a silent retreat that Bishop Dyer had done at Laity Lodge–this would have been around 1979–in which the bishop spoke with great grace and humor about the kinds of disciplines that we impose on ourselves to prove that we are good and worthy of grace.  He told this story: he had entered a Benedictine monastery as a novice, and was intent on proving just how good he was and how worthy he was of being in the monastery.  In his first visit with the novice master, Mark Dyer requested to sleep with rocks in his bed.  It was his way of self imposed martyrdom.  The wise novice master nodded and gave him permission.  The next morning, Bishop Dyer reported for his work assignment (Benedictines live a rule balanced by time spent in work, study and prayer).  The novice master gave him this assignment: the removal of a group of old tree stumps from part of the property.  Any of you who have ever done something like that have a sense of what had just happened.  The novice Mark started out fast and hard and was quickly worn out, yet still had to keep at it.  When it came time for prayer and lunch, and then a time for rest, he went in and lay down on his bed full of rocks.  Sweaty, pooped, faced with the reality of monastery living, he lay on the rocks that HE had asked for and started laughing.  It dawned upon him that something was awry, and that the yearning of God that had drawn him into this vowed life was not about lying down on rocks.

I don’t know what you have or have not decided to explore on your Lenten pilgrimage toward Easter.  I will offer you this: it is a time for getting those rocks out of your bed.  God yearns for each one of us, yearns with the heart of a mother, yearns with the heart of a friend.  God in Christ comes to us and declares that this is a time for turning toward God, turning toward the longing that is embodied in Jesus Christ, turning toward the face of the One who waits for us, in hope and delight.  God in Christ sees our sins and longs for us to let go of them, to seek the divine face of love and be made new.

Lent 2C

The Rev. Mary C. Earle

Copyright © Mary C. Earle

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Pentecost:  The Breath of God

It is fifty days since the miracle of the Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.  The great fifty days of Easter have been completed.  Now the disciples sit together on the day of Pentecost, together in one place.  Like wind, like tongues of fire, the Holy Spirit comes upon them and they become the new creation.  The disciples become apostles–those who follow also become those who are sent.  Like wind, like fire, like the very breath of the most high God, the Holy Spirit comes within them and they are changed. 

This feast of Pentecost calls us to remember how the church came into being.  We imagine our way back into a time now over 2000 years ago.  We imagine disciples now wondering at the miracle of resurrection, while still dealing with memories of the crucifixion.  We try to remember our origins.  We tell this story: they gathered, they waited, and the Holy Spirit came to them like wind, like fire, like breath.  The Holy Spirit came upon them, within them, among them.  A new community was brought into being, a community where persons of different languages and nations were able to understand each other.  The Church, a people called together, a people called out, was birthed and is birthed through the Holy Spirit.  Each person who heard the disciples speaking heard his or her own language.  The Holy Spirit speaks every language on the face of the earth, for the Holy Spirit dwells within all that is created.

In the biblical Hebrew and Greek, the words used for Spirit have to do with breath and wind.  Let us stay for a minute with the metaphor of breath.  Have you ever had to struggle for breath?  I hope not.  Those of us who have know that terrible feeling of not being able to breathe.  Breath and life are of a piece.  One of the first things that happens when a baby emerges dripping and startled from the mother’s womb is that the baby takes a breath.  When the breath is not taken and the crying does not come, all know there is cause for concern.

It is an easy thing to take our breath for granted, just as it is easy to take life for granted, to forget the grace of the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life.  I first began to pay attention to my breath in 1974 as Doug and I took Lamaze classes in anticipation of Bryan ’s birth.  I learned to puff and blow and take cleansing breaths.  Then later, in the late 1980's when I first began to practice yoga because of a bad back, my dear teacher Esther Vexler, whom some of you know, would ask us to sit and be still and just tend to our breath.  I was in my late 30s and had only paid attention to my breath when I couldn’t get it.  This practice was different.  Esther asked us to pay attention to normal rhythm, and then to begin to imagine that breath moving throughout our limbs and bathing our inner organs.  Again and again, the teacher would ask us to gently direct our attention to our breathing.  We would stretch, and as the muscles moved, she would say “Breathe into the muscle.  Breathe slowly and gently.”  Breathing was foundational to that class.  Consequently the students were led to realize that breath is not to be taken for granted.

The breath, via the bloodstream, enters all the hidden crevices and crannies of our bodies.  Mysteriously for those of us who are not physicians or biologists, the eternal exchange of breathing in and exhaling keeps its own rhythm.  The breath signals life.  How often have we looked for breathing as a sign of life?  One of the first times I saw the face of death was when a beloved family cat was glanced by a car and died on my parents’ front lawn.  When we discovered her lifeless body, the first thing that I noticed was that there was no breath, and consequently no life, no vitality.  Her spirit had departed.

We often forget the gift of breath, just as we forget the breath of life.  We take for granted that anything exists at all.  We fail to notice the miracle that we are here, this morning, living and breathing as a gathered community around this table.  I do wonder sometimes if the fact that the disciples had walked through the valley of the shadow of death had softened them, made them less forgetful about the gift of being alive.  I do wonder sometimes if the horror of the crucifixion might not have given them a peculiar gift of knowing in the midst of harrowing grief–a gift of knowing that life is a miracle.  Could it be that they are able to receive the particular gift of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost because their hearts are no longer so hard?  Could it be that they are willing to be connected to the living God and one another in a new way because they have been awakened by the Lord, the Giver of Life?  They know the gift of life because they have been battered by death.  They are beginning to learn not to take their breath for granted.  They are beginning to learn not to take each other for granted. 

Then, following Jesus’ command, they come together and they wait.  Another gift of walking in the valley of the shadow of death: discovering the limits and error of our own agendas.  This discovery allows them to grow in the forgotten gifts of the Holy Spirit: patience and self control.  We can talk about the gift of tongues all we want, but in an age filled with violence and impulse driven behavior and talking heads, I sometimes wonder if the gifts most needed at the moment might not be patience, self-control, kindness.  The disciples are obedient, which means at base that they are deeply listening.  They are listening with their whole being.  They are gathered, breathing together, waiting.  Then suddenly they are filled with the Holy Spirit, as was the Virgin Mary before them, as was Elizabeth, John the Baptist’s mother. 

Every Sunday we come together here in this sanctuary.  The Holy Spirit has already acted or we wouldn’t be in this place.  The Holy Spirit, who has breathed us into being, gathers us in truth and in love.  The Eastern Orthodox remind us that the first great act of the Spirit with regard to worship is the gathering of the community.  Before the cars arrive in the parking lot, before people descend from a bus on Broadway, before someone walks in from the Cadillac Lofts, the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life and Breath, has begun the movement of Pentecost yet again.  Hearts and souls are stirred.  For some reason beyond cognitive awareness, a person who hasn’t been to communion in months decides to roust from the warm covers of her bed, dress and come to worship.  A widower whose grief had kept him from coming decides that it is time to receive communion.  A couple staying at the Saint Anthony Hotel on vacation find themselves drawn to worship. 

The activity of the Holy Spirit, the activity of the Spirit who gives life and breath and who breathes the church into being, that activity is often hidden and subtle.  In some ways we Episcopalians have been wary of those who speak of the Spirit.  We can be uneasy because of overtly charismatic expressions which some of us don’t trust.  Sometimes we have made the mistake of assuming that the presence of the Spirit has to be signaled by exuberance and wild outpouring of emotion.  While that may on occasion be the case, it is also true that the Spirit who births the Church works within us in sighs too deep for words, sighs too deep for noise.  The Spirit works within us as gently and as quietly as our breath.  Just as our breath mysteriously, without our conscious awareness, moves within us to quicken our flesh, so too the Spirit moves within each person, within the community, to draw us closer to the vocation of following Jesus.

Every Sunday, the movement of Pentecost is reenacted.  The Holy Spirit draws us together to follow Jesus.  We come together and pray that the Spirit will come upon the bread and the wine and upon us, to change us and send us out, to do the work we have been given to do.

On this great Feast of Pentecost, as we celebrate the life of the Church, the life of the world, let us hear the Spirit’s call to be mindful of the living breath of God which keeps us each in being.  Let us be aware of the subtle quickenings of the Spirit within ourselves and within the community, those first stirrings of new creation that are green and tender and easily trampled if we do not take care.  Let us remember that the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, often comes as gently as breath, as subtly as an inner nudging, as quietly as grain ripening on the stalk.  Take care with your breath and the breath of others.  Take care with your life and the life of others.  Take care, for all comes from the living and breathing Trinity, and at the end all will return to that home in God.  Amen.

The Rev. Mary Earle

Copyright © Mary C. Earle

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Martha and Mary

Today we have the story of two sisters, Martha and Mary.  Two women as different from each other as night and day.  Each with her own gift and talent.  Each with her own ability to bear fruit for the gracious kingdom of God . 

Traditionally, there has been a tendency to read this text on a shallow level and to assign Martha to the realm of the distrustful busybody who misses the point.  Mary, on the other hand, tends to get depicted as an overly pious sort of Jesus devotee.  Neither caricature does justice to these two sisters.

First, as Biblical scholar Elizabeth Moltmann-Wendell points out, Martha and Mary are well to do.  It is clear they are not impoverished.  They, and their brother Lazarus, are some of Jesus’ dearest friends.  In John’s Gospel we have a long narrative about these three which tells us much about their connections to Jesus.  Luke doesn’t give us as much detail, but what Luke does tell us is this: Martha was a landowner.  She welcomes Jesus into her home.  She apparently managed an estate.  This is a woman with managerial ability.  She is a woman who could run a business. 

In this story we have this morning, Luke puts us in the world of women’s concerns.  Jesus is not with the all male band of disciples.  He is with two women friends; he has come to dine at their house.  Martha welcomes Jesus into her home.  She offers him real hospitality, a place where he doesn’t have to be “on” as teacher and rabbi.  She offers him a place where he can be at ease.

Mary does not seem to be the kind of woman who enjoys running the ranch, heading up the academic department or being bishop.  She has a different gift.  It is a mistake, I think, to see her as sort of a Jesus-groupie.  My hunch is that she was a woman who loved to learn, and who realized that Jesus is a teacher above all teachers.  She also had figured out that one tends not to learn if one does not listen.

What we have in the story of Martha and Mary is a story of difference, not necessarily a story of opposition.  Martha is distracted and worried.  It is often the case that when a person is in charge–whether as rector, as CEO, as principal of a school, any job that has a desk that could have a plaque reading “the buck stops here”, a job with responsibilities,–it is easy to become distracted by the various cares and worries of the day. 

Martha, in her frustration, goes to Jesus and says, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?  Tell her then to help me.”

She does two things that she may not even be aware of.  Martha indirectly asks for help.  Though she falls into the problematic behavior of trying to entangle Jesus in her irritation with her sister, she nevertheless voices the state of her spirit.  She feels like she is doing it all by herself.  She is weary and fed up.  And she would love for someone, maybe Jesus, to rescue her from this situation and straighten things out.  He deftly deflects that request and hears what she is saying underneath the question.  He hears that she is drowning in responsibility.  I invite you to imagine this: that Jesus knows Martha as capable, managerially adept landowner–not kitchen queen.  I invite you to imagine a tone of compassion, which perceives that the responsibilities have caught up with her.  “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.”  It is not that he is judging that.  He is bringing Martha to conscious awareness, helping her to see what is underneath her distress.  For centuries, Martha has been regarded as something of a whiner or as a woman whose only gift is being overly busy.  That sort of interpretation misses what Jesus is pointing to.

Father Thomas Keating notes that Jesus does not say to Martha, “Mary has chosen the best part.”  Jesus says, “Mary has chosen the better part.”  Keating’s take on this is that as we grow in the spiritual journey, the best part is a life marked by both the devotion of prayer and the life of ministry.  Both are dimensions of a life solidly grounded in Christ.  It is not a matter of Martha OR Mary, speaking of them symbolically.  It is a matter of both ways of being.  For those in the church who have tended to be overly responsible, their spirits may be in need of solitude, of quiet, of listening prayer.  For those who have had an innate inclination to prayer and devotion, their lives may need the embodied reality of working at Christian Assistance Ministries or Habitat for Humanity or Good Samaritan Center. 

In John’s Gospel we discover a Martha who has taken Jesus’ counsel seriously.  In that story, Jesus is summoned by these sisters to heal Lazarus, who is dying.  Jesus takes his time going to Bethany , and by the time he got there, Lazarus had died.  Martha ran to meet him, and Mary stayed at home.  Clearly these sisters have different gifts.  Martha took Jesus to task–not surprising, given what we know of her personality.  She said to Jesus, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  She has the chutzpah to scold Jesus.  This is not a woman who does nothing more than lose herself in trivialities.  This is a woman who speaks the truth.

Jesus, no doubt sad and stunned, says to Martha, “Your brother will rise again.”  Then he reveals himself to Martha–her honesty and self disclosure are met by Jesus revealing his true self.  “I am the resurrection and I am the life,” he says.  Imagine that you are Martha, and your dearest brother is dead.  He’s been dead long enough that the body has been anointed and shrouded.  You have begun your own journey of grief, yet Jesus is saying, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Martha’s response is amazing.  “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”  Martha’s confession is equal to Peter’s.  Martha has been freed of the captivity of anxious responsibility and has somehow embraced the better part.  In her we see a woman in whom  prayer and action are of a piece.  In her we see someone who is teachable, who has responded to Jesus’ frank estimate of spiritual state with a desire to deepen in faith. 

Later in the story, Mary also chastizes Jesus.  She too says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Mary has learned something from Martha.  She is taking some responsibility, speaking up, encountering Jesus with her real feelings and grief.  Martha AND Mary.  Action AND contemplation.  Ministry AND prayer. 

From the medieval church we receive a tradition that Martha, continuing to grow in her own ministry and vocation, did not collapse into a heap after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Meister Eckhart, a 14^th century mystic and Dominican monk, perceived that Martha learned to sit at Jesus feet out of a desire to be with him as friend, rather than out of a desire to advance in the spiritual path.  In other words, she enjoyed being in his presence.  She enjoyed being with him, so she could be with him without expecting to get something out of it.  As a result, Meister Eckart notes, Martha is a strong woman who cares about the concerns of the world, who can act responsibly, and who can get a kick out of being alive.

In the middle ages, following traditions received from the Church Fathers such as St. Jerome , a legend emerged that Martha and Mary had left the Holy Land after the Lord’s resurrection and had made their way by boat to Marseilles in present day France .  There Martha supposedly founded a community of sisters who followed a rule of life and cared for those in the surrounding countryside.  One day, Martha  came to the aid of a village being besieged by a dragon.  Unlike St. George, who reputedly killed a dragon, Martha subdued the beast.  Even today, on votive candles found in your local San Antonio grocery store, you will encounter images of Martha with a dragon on a leash.  

These medieval stories also tell us that Martha was a powerful preacher whose words had the power to convert many to Christ.  She was also reputed to be a healer, who even raised a man from the dead, calling on “Adonai, our Risen Lord Jesus Christ” who had raised Lazarus from the dead.

While the medieval stories are no doubt embellishments, they do help us to realize that how Martha and Mary have been seen through the years has varied.  That in and of itself leads us to the question of interpretation of a scriptural text.  I for one have a real suspicion of easy interpretation that simply says, “Martha’s work isn’t important and Mary’s is.”  I wonder what sorts of cultural norms are being upheld by that. 

Taking a long look at the history of interpretation of this passage, one discovers that some of the most grumpy curmudgeons among the Church Fathers had real respect for Martha and Mary as leaders and as women who were able to preach and heal. 

Listening deeply to this text invites us to let go of shallow interpretations of scripture–and one another.  Letting this text work on us calls us to remember that Christ listens to not only what we say; Christ listens to our deepest yearnings, and invites us to risk becoming fully human.  Amen.

Proper 11C

The Rev. Mary C. Earle

Copyright © Mary C. Earle  

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Wake Up! Stand Up! Lift Up Your Heads!
Advent I, Year A

Wake up!  The season of waiting and preparation is upon us.  The season of yearning, of longing, of desiring the holy has arrived.  Advent begins today, granting us blessed rest from the frenetic craziness of the secular Christmas which began sometime right before Halloween.  Advent begins today, and we are bid to wake up, to stir ourselves from our spiritual slumber.  We are asked to watch, to be still and alert, to simplify, to listen, to receive, for Christ is coming.

None of those movements of waking, watching, preparing are practiced by our larger culture.  From magazine ads, billboards and television, we are encouraged to pump ourselves into a frenzy.  We are invited to numb ourselves with a variety of behaviors and addictions–from too much food, to too much booze.  From too much shopping to too much work.  All of this “too much” has the effect of making us spiritually asleep.  We keep ourselves deadened by never truly engaging life, whirling, spinning from activity to activity with little joy and even less compassion.

Advent invites us to stop.  To stop in our tracks.  To stop in our tracks and wake up.  To notice what and who are right in front of us, coming as Christ, waiting to step into our numbed out lives, waiting to bring us life and community.

We spend these days before Christmas Eve waiting and preparing for the birth of Jesus.  That new life of God is birthed into our lives in three ways: we sing of his coming in the manger at Bethlehem , in our lives at the present time, and in power and great glory at the end of time.  Christ was born.  Christ is born in us daily.  Christ will come again.  We sing of Christ’s coming, and in our liturgy we plead for that coming.  Advent grants us permission to long for God,  to set aside our masks of self satisfaction and self sufficiency, and to speak those hidden longings: “O come, o come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel .”   We acknowledge both our captivities and our desires, our chains and our freedom.

This season allows us space and time to divest ourselves of whatever gets in the way of greeting our Lord–greeting the Word made Flesh–in the manger, in our daily lives, at the end.  Advent allows us space and time to be quiet, to focus in, to prepare for our holy guest in his many disguises, as Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it.   The church year invites us to put aside the consumer Christmas found in the shiny catalogs and the malls, and to listen to the narrative of scripture in a new way.

As we begin to discern just who is to come, we may begin to see what shape our preparations need to take.  We begin to shape the preparations to suit the guest.  Madelyn L’Engle has observed that Advent is like a triptych, a picture with three different panels depicting three aspects of the coming of the Lord.  In this Advent triptych, “chronological time opens up and we can see simultaneously Christ’s earthly coming to a manger in Bethlehem, his coming to each of us by faith in Word and Sacrament, and the anticipation of the future day of the Lord: His coming again in glory.” 

Luke tells us that this day of the Lord, the day when all will be brought to fruition and fulfillment in Christ, is a day when we are to be hopeful.  “Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.  Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  (Luke 21:27-28)

Stand up and raise your heads.  Look up.  Do not cower, do not freeze in fear.  Stand up to greet the one through whom you were created.  Hold your heads high to greet the Christ who was born into our midst as the babe at Bethlehem .  Your redemption is drawing near.  Stand up, for we are watching for the Christ who comes to us in love and mercy.  Stand up, for we are straining for that first glimpse of the Christ who comes into our midst to set us captives free.

There is a great irony in the gluttonous preparations for Christmas that are happening right and left.  There is a great irony in the gnawing, gobbling drive to buy lots, get lots, spend lots.  That inexorable drivenness that all of the hype likes to encourage, that inexorable drivenness is the antithesis of joy.  Christ did not come so that we would spend November and December, and maybe even October and September, thinking mainly about stuff.  Christ did not come to encourage us to trample one another at a post-Thanksgiving shopping spree.  Christ did not come so that we could all turn into Golom from the Lord of the Rings trilogy–as you will remember, Golom has the magic ring, which he calls “my precious”.  And Golom has become monstrous because of his hoarding of treasure, his attachment to the ring.   He has completely lost his true identity to the ring, and has become distorted, twisted, grasping. The ring can represent anything–attachment to power, or influence, or money.  Whatever we massage inside us, muttering, “My precious, my precious.”  If we will allow it, Advent will allow us to know the Golom within us, the part of us that is afraid we will never have enough, or needing to have more so that we can know we exist.  Advent will allow us to invite Christ to come mercifully to heal the part of us that has become distorted, ugly, afraid.  We are given the opportunity to remember, as Thomas Merton tells us, that God is “mercy within mercy within mercy.” 

We have succumbed to this belief: “I am what I have.”  What a sorry definition of what it is to be a human being.   Christ comes to us in his many different disguises to set us free from that illusion, to wake us up from its narcotic power.  Christ comes to us and seeks to release us from all the old captivities.  Christ comes to us in love and mercy, with the divine power to make things new,

Christ did not come, the wondrous gift was not given, so that we could fritter away Advent running from store to Christmas party to post office, scurrying anxiously from place to place, feeling the coming of Christmas with dread.  Christ came to set us free from all our captivities–Christ came, Christ comes, Christ will come again–to break those bonds asunder.  Now is the time to let yourself know what your captivities are.  Perhaps you are paralyzed by guilt.  Perhaps you are afraid that you don’t matter.  Perhaps you nurse grudges habitually.  Perhaps you think you can go it alone.  Perhaps the worm of envy has found its way into your heart.  Perhaps the demon of competition is leading you to murder the spirits of your co-workers. We have to start where we are.  We have to let ourselves become aware of the wounds and the captivities.  We wake up to the ways in which our lives are captive to many competing values, most of them not related to the gospel. 

Christ comes that we might have life, and have it more abundantly.  Christ comes out of love, walking into your life and mine every day, comes into our routines in his many different disguises, hoping that we will wake up, stir from our speed and our obsessions, wake up and see, wake up and recognize, wake up and love.

Stand up and raise your head.  That is the posture of the Christian, and that is the posture of Advent.  If I stand up, I can look into the eyes of my neighbor.  If I am standing–not hurrying–I might actually look, might see, might behold, might know. 

Stand up and see the need of your neighbor.  Stand up and look at one another.  The poet David Whyte says that we move at a great velocity in this society, and that one of the laws of physics is that we can only see what is traveling at the same speed as we are.  If we stop, stand, raise our heads, we will behold people we have not seen.  We will notice the night sky laced with stars.  We will see the faces of those we hold dear.  We will be confronted by that Christ in his many different disguises.  We will find ourselves noticing, awakening, stirring.  And without a doubt, we will find ourselves feeling uncomfortable.  When we stop, we might discover our own meanness, our own latent cruelty, our own stinginess, our own hard hearts, our own rigid insistence that we have to be right.  Advent gives us space and time to know anew that there is time to prepare, time to allow our flinty hearts to soften, time to slow enough that we might see the living Christ in our midst, bringing redemption near, near as our breath, near as a heartbeat.

This season of Advent reminds us that at every single moment, God’s love is breaking into the world again.  We may be watching television or making the morning commute.  We may be driving through the take out line at Taco Cabana or sitting in the doctor’s office.  Yet God’s love breaks through.  I wonder sometimes if our running around during December is not an attempt to avoid this proclamation: God in Christ is breaking through every moment.  If we let ourselves see that by changing our velocity, by being still, by waking up and waiting with hope, our lives may be brought into question.  Our values may be turned upside down.  If we let ourselves know that Christ is coming here, now and always, then we are faced with a choice.  We may receive and participate.  Or we may just keep watching television, idly ignoring Christ in our midst.  Or worse, we can find ways to oppose him.

Something new is coming.  Always.  God is about the business of making all things new, even when we are not ready.  Especially when we are not ready.  The Word made Flesh comes daily into our lives, for in truth every day is a little Advent.  This season shapes us for living as faithful followers of Jesus–Jesus who tells us to love our enemies.  Jesus who tells us blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the sorrowful.  Jesus who calls us to be reconcilers.  Jesus who tells us do not judge, lest you be judged.  The Word made Flesh confronts us daily in many different ways, but we are going to fast and we are too stuffed on stuff to see it.

Wake up.  Watch.  Wait.  Stand up and raise your heads for your redemption is very near–near as your neighbor, near as your breath, near as the beating of your heart.

Amen.     

The Rev. Mary Earle

Copyright © Mary C. Earle

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Being Tempted

When I was on retreat a couple of weeks ago, the priest giving the sermon said this: "I think God is far less interested in sack cloth and ashes than in our being vulnerable enough to allow the divine life to take shape within us."  She went on to say that the God who created us has hopes that we will allow the very life of God to be formed in us, taking the form of servant ministry.  One of our most basic temptations is not to believe this truth about the One unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are