FIRST SUNDAY OF CHRISTMAS

1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26
Psalm 148
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52

Prayer of the Day: Shine into our hearts the light of your wisdom, O God, and open our minds to the knowledge of your word, that in all things we may think and act according to your good will and may live continually in the light of your Son, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” Luke 2:48.

I have often wondered why we have this story about Jesus slipping away from Mary and Joseph to listen to the scribes as they taught in the Temple. This is the one and only New Testament story we have about Jesus’ childhood. You would think the evangelist could do better. Why not give us the story of Jesus winning the Nazareth Elementary School spelling bee? Or Jesus making the winning touchdown for Galilee Regional High School in the big game against arch rival Judea? Or how about Jesus receiving his Eagle Scout medal? Why not a story about Jesus’ youth that we can hold up as an example to our children? Why does the one story we have about the childhood of Jesus have to be a story about Jesus doing exactly what we all tell our children they must never do? Why this story about Jesus being naughty?

It might be helpful to step back for a moment from the task of figuring out what this story means and ask a different question. We might try asking, “Where do I find myself in this story?” As a parent who has raised three children, my sympathies go first to Mary and Joseph. Let’s face it, this is every parent’s nightmare. For three long days Mary and Joseph lived that nightmare. They must have wondered whether they would ever see their son again. They must have struggled not to imagine the worst. They must have asked themselves a thousand times, “Why didn’t we just keep a better eye on him?” So I can imagine the relief Mary and Joseph experienced when they found the boy, Jesus, safe in the temple. I can well imagine how they must have been torn between their longing to take him in their arms and hug him with all their might on the one hand, and on the other their urge to slap him silly for putting them through three days of hell.

When I was a teenager, I think I might have had a different take on this story. I would have sympathized more with Jesus. I understand, as I suspect a lot of children do, what it is like to have a calling, a passion, an interest that parents just don’t understand. “Why do you waste time on that project of yours when your homework still isn’t done?” “Why can’t you go out and play with the other kids?” “Sitting in your room with a book is a waste of a beautiful day like this.” “You have to start being practical. You can’t expect to make a living off painting watercolors, or writing poems or turning over rocks to find interesting bugs.” “You have to start thinking about your future.” I can hear Joseph telling his son, “It’s nice to be religious and to have an interest in the Bible, Jesus. But that won’t help you build chairs and tables in the carpenter’s shop.” There was a time when I could identify with a kid whose dreams and whose interests were different from family and cultural expectations.

I also have to say that I can identify with the scribes in this story. Like me, they were teachers who sought to engage their people with the scriptures. That can be a frustrating task, especially when it comes to young people. It is often so hard to connect with kids whose interests and concerns are so different from my own. Frankly, that is an area in my ministry where I would like to have been able to do better than I did. Believe me, I tried. Thus, I can understand how overjoyed these scribes must have been to find a young boy who seemed to love the scriptures, who asked them deep and probing questions, who thought deeply about his answers and always came back with yet more questions. I can imagine that these scribes were overjoyed to meet this boy Jesus, who was so inquisitive, hungry for knowledge and eager to learn. This is the kid all teachers dream about having in their class.

Maybe the evangelist wants to remind us that real life is messy. The Nativity is nothing if not good news for people like us who live in a messy world with a lot of loose ends. Sometimes the most promising student turns out not to be “the good kid,” the one that follows all the rules, gets the homework done on time and scores high on the SAT. It might just be the kid who ran away from home and isn’t even supposed to be in class. Sometimes our worst parenting blunders turn out to be the tools God uses to accomplish God’s purpose for our children-which might be a lot different than our own hopes and dreams for them. Sometimes you have to swim against the tide of home, family and friends to be the person you really are-even when it inflicts pain, causes disruption and results in feelings of hurt and betrayal. Jesus didn’t come into the world to make any of that easier. Instead, he came into the midst of our messy lives to inject his own divine life into them. However complicated, messy and mixed up things may get in our lives, Jesus is at work weaving all their loose ends, unfinished business and broken pieces into the fabric of God’s new creation. That is what we mean when we say that the Word of God became flesh.

So, you see, there is a place for everyone in the biblical narrative. Whether you are the frantic parent racing to keep up with a kid that seems altogether of control; or whether you are a young person struggling to figure out who you are under the suffocating weight of parental, school and societal expectations; or whether you are a preacher fighting to make the voice of God heard in a world that isn’t listening, there is a place for you in this great epic saga we call the Bible. As I have told every confirmation class I have ever had, every Bible class I have ever taught and every congregation to which I have ever preached: the Bible is not a book about stuff that happened way back when. It is a book about what is happening today. The Old, Old Story of Jesus and his love is not over yet. There are more chapters to be written, more characters to be introduced and twists in the plot that we cannot foresee. To be sure, we know that the end will be Jesus’ return in glory. But that end isn’t in sight yet. For now, as Paul would say, “we walk by faith and not by sight.” And we walk by faith because we do not walk alone. We travel with Jesus and his disciples in every age knowing that, whether we see it, understand it or perceive it, Jesus is about his Father’s business of redeeming our lives.

Here is a poem by Jane Kenyon about God’s injection of Jesus’ life blood into the world.

Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, 1993

On the doomed ceiling
God is thinking:
I made them my joy,
and everything else I created
I made to bless them.
But see what the do?
I know their hearts
and arguments:

We’re descended from
Cain. Evil is nothing new,
so what does it matter now
if we shell the infirmary,
and the well where the fearful
and the rash alike must
come for water?”

God thinks Mary into being.
Suspended at the apogee
of the golden dome,
she curls in a brown pod,
and inside her the mind
of Christ, cloaked in blood,
lodges and begins to grow.

Source: Poetry, December 1995. Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She attended the University of Michigan in her hometown and completed her master’s degree there in 1972. It was there also that she met her husband, the poet Donald Hall, who taught there. Kenyon moved with Hall to Eagle Pond Farm, in New Hampshire where she lived until her untimely death in 1995 at age 47. You can read more of Jane Kenyon’s poetry and find out more about her at the Poetry Foundation Website.

FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Micah 5:2-5a
Luke 1:46b-55
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45

Prayer of the Day: Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. With your abundant grace and might, free us from the sin that binds us, that we may receive you in joy and serve you always, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

The lectionary has done us a great disservice in attempting to silence the prophet Micah before he comes to the point of his proclamation. As you will see when you click on the link, the program governing Oremus Bible Browser was unable to honor the ecclesiastical directive cutting off the last line of vs. 5, in which the prophet declares:

If the Assyrians come into our land
and tread upon our soil,
we will raise against them seven shepherds
and eight installed as rulers.

The peace Micah promises is no abstract, utopian fantasy. It speaks to his peoples’ concrete circumstance, namely, imperial domination under the brutal reign of Assyria. Peace comes about through revolution, through the overthrow of Assyria and restoration for the kingdom of Judah under a new regime. Perhaps the lectionary gurus thought it tasteless to bring up colonial oppression and the struggle to overthrow it at this time in the church year. After all, this Sunday will fall just two days before Christmas. All four Advent candles will be lit and, more likely than not, the holy family will be comfortably ensconced in the manger with the shepherd’s looking on as the magi make their way under the star overhead. Chances are, this will be the Sunday of the children’s Christmas pageant. It’s not the time to be bringing up unpleasant subjects like injustice, political oppression and poverty.

Or perhaps it is. At least Mary the mother of our Lord seems to think so. The lectionary people were not quite as successful in censoring her. For Mary, the messiah’s coming is not about gift exchanges, family reunions and fun activities for kids. It is not exactly comforting either. Like Micah, Mary understands salvation in “this worldly” terms of a radical reversal of the status quo, a new order under which the “last are first and the first are last.” The messiah she proclaims “br[ings] down the powerful from their thrones, and lift[s] up the lowly; he…fill[s] the hungry with good things, and sen[ds] the rich away empty.” Luke 1:51-53. Those of us who live comfortably and have wealth sufficient to engage in our nation’s annual orgy of consumption and gluttony known as “the holiday season” have good reason to tremble at the coming of messiah. The shocking narrative of Christ’s Nativity is nothing like our cultural Christmas. The two cannot be reconciled and, I am coming to believe, neither can they co-exist. That replicas of the manger become a cultural fixture this time every year testifies less to America’s Christian heritage than to the American church’s abysmal failure to tell the story of the Nativity. We have been complicit with America’s hijacking of the gospel and its relentless efforts to render the Christ child “cute,” and therefore non-threatening. We have created an ecclesiastical environment in which the miracle of the Incarnation is drowned out by the din of Christmas.

I think it is high time for the church to let the Grinch have Christmas and return to celebrating the Nativity. When we get it right, it becomes painfully clear that the biblical story has no resemblance to the sentimental, saccharine Christmas so many of us have come to love, the one marketed by Hollywood, Hallmark and Hobby Lobby. The feel good Christmas that begins already in mid-October creeping into our stores, oozing out of our radios and lighting up our neighborhoods is about as empty of hope and meaning as the Santa Clause making his appearance on the cancer ward in Eunice Tietjen’s poem. By contrast, the Nativity is the story of an unplanned pregnancy, scandal, homelessness and political oppression in which God is nevertheless with us forging a new thing. That’s real news and it is news worth telling.

It might spoil Christmas for a lot of folks if we speak concretely about God’s judgment during this highly celebrated season of mushy good will, judgment that might terrify us, but which is good news for the poor. But I’m not sure we should be concerned about that. If now isn’t the right time, when will the time ever be right? What better time could there be for talking about the fact that one in thirty of our nation’s children is homeless than in this season when we worship the child of a homeless couple forced to give birth in a barn? What better time to talk about Jakelin Caal Maquin, the 7-year-old refugee girl from Guatemala who died of dehydration and shock in the custody of our Border Patrol than this holy season when we remember another young family driven to flee across the border as refugees from violence? These are, after all, the ones for whom the miracle of the Incarnation occurred. These are the ones among whom the Word becomes flesh. These are the ones God would “lift up” and “fill with good things.”

I might be a liturgical/theological Scrooge. But at least I am in good company. Listen to what Martin Luther had to say in preaching on Christmas:

“Now let everyone examine himself in the light of the Gospel and see how far he is from Christ, what is the character of his faith and love. There are many who are enkindled with dreamy devotion, when they hear of such poverty of Christ, are almost angry with the citizens of Bethlehem, denounce their blindness and ingratitude, and think, if they had been there, they would have shown the Lord and his mother a more becoming service, and would not have permitted them to be treated so miserably. But they do not look by their side to see how many of their fellow men need their help, and which they let go on in their misery unaided. Who is there upon earth that has no poor, miserable, sick, erring ones, or sinful people around him? Why does he not exercise his love to those? Why does he not do to them as Christ has done to him?” Sermon for Christmas Day, Martin Luther, from his Wartburg Church Postil, 1521-1522.

I think that Luther would probably take a dim view of much that passes for Christmas preaching these days. I think he might have a word or two for people who clamor for closed borders, cheer when twenty million people lose their medical insurance and finance corporate tax breaks by taking bread out of the mouths of homeless children and then show up in church on Christmas Eve singing hymns to the newborn king. I think Luther’s first order of business would be to tell such a congregation that it is in no sense Christian. He was not above playing the Grinch and “stealing Christmas” if that was what it took to tell the story of the Nativity.

Yes, I understand that the gospel is good news and that preaching is not all about clobbering one’s hearers over the head with moralisms and inflicting guilt. Furthermore, I, along with most of my colleagues, am just as caught up in the rip currents of this frantic season and its false values as anyone in my congregation. I don’t have the standing to address my people in the way John the Baptist did his. More importantly, God’s last word is never condemnation. It is always salvation. To be sure, the rich and the powerful are also objects of God’s compassion and grace. But this good news sometimes has to be heard first as bad news before it can be received as good. We need to see ourselves as we are before we are capable of understanding what it means to be loved by God. We need to understand that from which we must be saved before the promise of salvation can have any meaning. We need shock therapy to jolt us out of our coldness, our indifference and our self-centered fixation on our own security and on what we regard as ours.

The truth is that the same unjust and oppressive systems killing refugee children on our border, denying medical care to the chronically ill and financing corporate economic interest at the expense of our poorest and most vulnerable neighbors are also hardening our hearts, suffocating our souls and distorting the image of God in which we were created. That is the condition from which we need so desperately to be saved. We need for the Word made flesh to become incarnate within us so that we can become human again. Salvation for us means learning to weep for Jakelin Caal Maquin. It means having compassion kindled in our hearts so that we can see beyond the blinders of our social, racial or political stereotypes and respond to those neighbors in our midst lacking food, shelter, medical care and human companionship. Until that happens, we will never recognize or receive Christ Jesus, however melodic our hymns to his praise might be.

The following poem is deeply upsetting, but illustrates, I think, the emptiness of Christmas in an environment crying out for the good news of the Nativity, the Word made flesh in the heart of human suffering.

Christmas at Saint Luke’s Hospital

By Eunice Tietjens

Here in this house of mystery and death,
This challenge flung at God, who has set pain
And heart-ach and slow torture in his world,
Dawns Christmas Day.

We have outwatched the night.
Vainly, in tight-lipped silence, we have wrung
From creeping death a piteous hour or two.
Now it is day. The long white corridors,
Naked and empty in the winds of dawn,
Stir in the light, and grow alive again
With flitting nurses and internes in white,
Who talk and laugh together-as they must.

They wish us “Merry Christmas,” and we try
To cover our soul’s nakedness, and smile,
And as we wait, dumb with long agony,
A jingling of loud bells breaks the white clam
Absurdly. A man enters, dressed in red,
Tricked out in furs, white-bearded for the saint
Of rapturous childhood, and his deep eyes wear
A haunting, wistful mask of gaiety.
He laughs and capers, jingles bells and jokes
With mad abandon, speaks a word to us-
A frothy nothing; then, still jingling, goes,
And the white calm returns.

Source: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Vol. 5, No. III (December, 1914). Eunice Tietjens (1884 –1944) was an American poet, novelist, journalist, children’s author, lecturer, and editor. She was born in Chicago on July 29, 1884. She was educated in Europe and travelled heavily. She lived in Florida, New York City, Japan, China, Tahiti and Tunisia, among other places. Tietjens served as a war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in France from 1917-1918. She began early on writing and served for twenty-five years as associate editor for Poetry. You can learn more about Eunice Tietjens and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Isaiah 12:2-6
Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18

Prayer of the Day: Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way of your only Son. By his coming give to all the people of the world knowledge of your salvation; through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
 
“And the crowds asked [John the Baptizer], ‘What then should we do?’ In reply he said to them, ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.’ Even tax-collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, ‘Teacher, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.’ Soldiers also asked him, ‘And we, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.’” Luke 3:10-14
 
What practical difference does the reign of God make? John’s answer is clear and direct. For those of us who have closets full of coats and pantries filled with food, his imperatives don’t seem all that severe. But for people living hand to mouth just one bad harvest away from starvation, emptying their meager surplus of food or parting with a spare coat could put their very survival on the line. Tax collectors in first century Palestine were more like wealthy mafia dons than the modestly paid IRS agents we know today. Extortion was the means by which they earned their living. So, too, the soldiers responding to John’s preaching were not anything like the military personnel that serve in our armed forces. They were not particularly patriotic, disciplined or subject to any code of military ethics. They were more like warlords whose attachment to Herod Antipas protected them from all legal reprisal for their brutal conduct. For all of these various people, John issued a clarion call to stake everything on his assurance that the reign of God has drawn near. The price of obedience was far higher than simple obedience to the law with a little charitable giving on top. John is inviting his hearers to begin living boldly and corporately into the reign of God.

If we fast forward to Luke’s sequel, the Book of Acts, we can find the earliest believers putting John’s admonitions into concrete action. “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.” Acts 4:32-35. I think there are some interesting parallels between these kingdom ethics and intentional anarchism that might be worth exploring.

In his recent book, Two Cheers for Anarchism,[1] James C. Scott calls attention to a type of collective lawbreaking in which we all engage, namely, speeding. He uses, as an example, a major roadway with a speed limit of 55 miles per hour. Everyone knows that the police are not likely to prosecute drivers traveling at 56-60 miles per hour. For that reason, the de facto limit is 60 or perhaps even 65 miles per hour. This ten mile per hour “safe” zone thus becomes “occupied territory,” space that has been seized from the government, though without any formal “movement” or “organized resistance.” In the same way, the early church did not originate as an organized opponent of the Roman Empire. Its purpose was not to overthrow Caesar. Yet the mere existence of this community that refused to recognize the social hierarchy based on imperial office, Roman citizenship, gender and slavery threatened the empire’s legitimacy. The church claimed and occupied space for the reign of God within the heart of the empire and thereby destabilized its grip on the totality of human existence.

The point, here, is not to advocate lawbreaking for its own sake. Clearly, the New Testament church was not in the business of encouraging criminal conduct. It was rather concerned with embodying the life it had inherited from its Lord, a life of organic communitarianism modeled not on the hierarchical principles of the empire, but upon the interdependent relationship of limbs, eyes, ears and tongue for the functioning of a healthy body. The church represented God’s alternative way of being human made concrete in Jesus’ faithful life, obedient death and glorious resurrection. That “way,” of course, brought the church and its members into a collision course with imperial culture.

Another book I have been reading sheds further light on John’s proclamation and the church’s witness. Called to Community: The life Jesus Wants for His People,[2] is a compilation of essays and fragments written by authors as disparate as Benedict of Nursia, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Henri J.M. Nouwen and Jean Vanier. Each author discusses aspects of intentional Christian community from the perspective of monasticism, common purse communities, commune type arrangements and house churches. These essays do not paint any utopian pictures. Intentional Christian community is not for the faint of heart and few brave enough to undertake it are able to go the distance. I am coming away with two impressions thus far: 1) Intentional Christian communities are fragile, subject to exploitation by unscrupulous leaders with no accountability, vulnerable to isolationist tendencies and cultish leanings and, in most cases, they end unhappily; 2) Intentional Christian community is nonetheless possible in spite of its dangers and difficulties (I have discussed a few thriving specimens in my post for Sunday, August 24, 2017); and 3) Jesus never calls us to do anything that is easy.

The question, then, is how can American churches often resembling more voluntary associations of likeminded, but fiercely individualistic people, become organic and interdependent communities that live into the reign of God in Christ Jesus? What if we were to change our focus from preaching justice to the rest of the world to practicing justice among ourselves? What if we were to commit to ensuring that no member of our congregations will ever go without necessary medical treatment? What if we were to ensure financing for full time clergy and lay leadership for our poorest congregations? What if we were willing to sell off all congregational or synodical assets necessary to finance these goals? What would it take for us to become a community with a politics based on service, an economy based on human need and a culture grounded in mutual compassion? What if we turned our attention to becoming what we believe God intends for all creation?

This is not to say that acts of charity can replace systemic societal reform or that the church should not concern itself with what goes on outside its walls. To the contrary, the good news of Jesus Christ is addressed to the “cosmos” for which he lived and died. But we have to start somewhere and where we start matters. Bold proclamations condemning racism are somewhat undercut when they come from a church that continues to be over 90% white. So, too, preachy-screechy social statements calling for a more just economic order ring hollow when they come from congregations who underpay their pastors and staff and who live lives that are often tangential to the church’s mission and largely independent of one another. What made the New Testament church’s witness so persuasive was its remarkable communal, interdependent existence telling the whole world that there is a better way than imperial bondage. The early church seized space for the reign of God. It became the river that brought John’s prophetic imperatives to the gates of Rome.  That is what intentional Christian communities do. Often they fizzle out over time. Sometimes they fail. But always, like John, they are a light burning, shining and preparing the way of the Lord. John 5:35; Luke 3:4.

Here is a poem by Martin Espada about communal struggle that I think John the Baptizer would understand.

Vivas To Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913

Vivas to those who have fail’d!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
—Walt Whitman

1. The Red Flag

The newspapers said the strikers would hoist
the red flag of anarchy over the silk mills
of Paterson. At the strike meeting, a dyers’ helper
from Naples rose as if from the steam of his labor,
lifted up  his hand and said here is the red flag:
brightly stained with dye for the silk of bow ties
and scarves, the skin and fingernails boiled away
for six dollars a week in the dye house.

He sat down without another word, sank back
into the fumes, name and face rubbed off
by oblivion’s thumb like a Roman coin
from the earth of his birthplace dug up
after a thousand years, as the strikers
shouted the only praise he would ever hear.

1. The River Floods the Avenue

He was the other Valentino, not the romantic sheik
and bullfighter of silent movie palaces who died too young,
but the Valentino standing on his stoop to watch detectives
hired by the company bully strikebreakers onto a trolley
and a chorus of strikers bellowing the banned word scab.
He was not a striker or a scab, but the bullet fired to scatter
the crowd pulled the cork in the wine barrel of Valentino’s back.
His body, pale as the wings of a moth, lay beside his big-bellied wife.

Two white-veiled horses pulled the carriage to the cemetery.
Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding
the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around
the tombstones. Blood for blood, cried Tresca: at this signal,
thousands of hands dropped red carnations and ribbons
into the grave, till the coffin evaporated in a red sea.

III. The Insects in the Soup

Reed was a Harvard man. He wrote for the New York magazines.
Big Bill, the organizer, fixed his good eye on Reed and told him
of the strike. He stood on a tenement porch across from the mill
to escape the rain and listen to the weavers. The bluecoats
told him to move on. The Harvard man asked for a name to go
with the number on the badge, and the cops tried to unscrew
his arms from their sockets. When the judge asked his business,
Reed said: Poet. The judge said: Twenty days in the county jail.

Reed was a Harvard man. He taught the strikers Harvard songs,
the tunes to sing with rebel words at the gates of the mill. The strikers
taught him how to spot the insects in the soup, speaking in tongues
the gospel of One Big Union and the eight-hour day, cramming the jail
till the weary jailers had to unlock the doors. Reed would write:
There’s war in Paterson. After it was over, he rode with Pancho Villa.

1. The Little Agitator

The cops on horseback charged into the picket line.
The weavers raised their hands across their faces,
hands that knew the loom as their fathers’ hands
knew the loom, and the billy clubs broke their fingers.
Hannah was seventeen, the captain of the picket line,
the Joan of Arc of the Silk Strike. The prosecutor called her
a little agitator. Shame, said the judge; if she picketed again,
he would ship her to the State Home for Girls in Trenton.

Hannah left the courthouse to picket the mill. She chased
a strikebreaker down the street, yelling in Yidish the word
for shame. Back in court, she hissed at the judge’s sentence
of another striker. Hannah got twenty days in jail for hissing.
She sang all the way to jail. After the strike came the blacklist,
the counter at her husband’s candy store, the words for shame.

1. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

Strikers without shoes lose strikes. Twenty years after the weavers
and dyers’ helpers returned hollow-eyed to the loom and the steam,
Mazziotti led the other silk mill workers marching down the avenue
in Paterson, singing the old union songs for five cents more an hour.
Once again the nightsticks cracked cheekbones like teacups.
Mazziotti pressed both hands to his head, squeezing red ribbons
from his scalp. There would be no buffalo nickel for an hour’s work
at the mill, for the silk of bow ties and scarves. Skull remembered wood.

The brain thrown against the wall of the skull remembered too:
the Sons of Italy, the Workmen’s Circle, Local 152, Industrial
Workers of the World, one-eyed Big Bill and Flynn the Rebel Girl
speaking in tongues to thousands the prophecy of an eight-hour day.
Mazziotti’s son would become a doctor, his daughter a poet.
Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river.

Source: Espada, Martin, Vivas To Those Who Have Failed (c. 2015 by Martin Espada, pub. by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.) Martín Espada (b. 1957) is a Latino poet and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he teaches poetry. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and was introduced to political activism by his father, a leader in the civil rights movement. Espada received a Bachelor of Arts in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Juris Doctor from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. For many years he worked as a tenant lawyer and a supervisor of a legal services program. In 1982, Espada published his first book of poems, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero. In 2001, he was named Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. You can find out more about Martin Espada and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

[1] Scott, James C., Two Cheers for Anarchism, (c. 2012 Princeton University Press) pp. 14-29.

[2] (c.2016 by Plough Publishing House).

SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Malachi 3:1-4
Luke 1:68-79
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6

Prayer of the day: Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way of your only Son. By his coming give to all the people of the world knowledge of your salvation; through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” Malachi 3:2

“Be careful what you wish for.” That was one of my Mom’s favorite sayings. It has often proven itself in my own experience. Christmas gifts for which I longed as a child frequently lost their charm before the dawn of the new year, leaving me to wish that I had coveted something else. Though the promotion I worked so hard to get brought a higher salary and a greater degree of financial flexibility, it also burdened me with responsibilities that brought stress and anxiety, commitments that took me away from my family and round the clock duties that robbed me of what little time I had for leisure activity. Wishes always come with an invisible price tag. In the words of Galinda in the musical, Wicked:

“I couldn’t be happier, no I couldn’t be happier,
Though it is, I admit, the tiniest bit, unlike I anticipated.
‘Cause getting your dreams, strange as it seems
Is a little bit complicated.
There’s a kind of a sort of cost,
There’s a couple of things you’ve lost.
There are bridges you crossed
You didn’t know that you crossed till you crossed them.”

Sometimes a wish come true ends in tragedy. How many stories have we not heard of lottery winners discovering that their “ticket to a dream” turned out to be a nightmare? Garth Brooks got it right: “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”

In this week’s lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures the prophet Malachi sounds a cautionary note against his peoples’ longing for the day of the Lord. He seems to be asking his hearers, “Do you have any idea what you are asking for?” He goes on to say, “[the Lord] is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.” I don’t know, but I suspect the folks listening to Malachi had a reaction similar to mine last Sunday as I participated with my church in the intercessory prayer. The rubrics typically call for the minister leading the prayers to end each petition with, “Lord in your mercy,” and for the congregation to respond, “hear our prayer.” This week the congregational response was changed to “Let your kingdom come.” As so often happens when a familiar liturgical response is altered, I read right over the words on the page and reflexively spoke the customary refrain.

This alteration was hardly a departure from any liturgical norm. After all, we speak the same words every week and I pray them every day in the Lord’s Prayer. Seeing them in this new context, however, gave me pause. I wondered, do we really know what we are asking for when we pray “Thy kingdom come, they will be done”? Do we fully appreciate the borders that will have to open up, the claims of sovereignty that must be surrendered, the privileges and entitlements that must be relinquished if everyone is to be assured of daily bread-the essentials to living well? Are we prepared for all the consequences that might flow from the abolition of an unjust economic system impoverishing millions even as it pays our salaries, finances our retirement plans and enables us to enjoy a lifestyle that is, by the standards of most the world’s peoples, extravagant? Do we imagine that the reign of God can be born in our midst without the birth pangs about which we read in last week’s gospel? Malachi’s words remind us that the kingdom cannot come until we have been made ready for it. Thus, when we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” we are praying for a radical transformation of ourselves and of our world.

In truth, I am more than half afraid of the coming of God’s reign when I see signs of it. I fear that I will be on the losing end of the new creation-among the mighty that must be cast down and the rich sent away empty. Luke 1:52-53. Yet Jesus assures me that I cannot lose more than he offers me. And I cannot receive what is offered until my hands are empty. That promise enables even people like me to hear the words of poet Langston Hughes with hope rather than dread.

I look at the world

I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!

I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.

Source: Poetry (January 2009) Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was an important African American voice in the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920s. Though well-educated and widely traveled, Hughes’ poetry never strayed far from his roots in the African American community. Early in his career, Hughes’ work was criticized by some African American intellectuals for portraying what they viewed as an unflattering representation of back life. In a response to these critics, Hughes replied, “I didn’t know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren’t people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too.”  Today Langston Hughes is recognized globally as a towering literary figure of the 20^th Century. This poem is one of a few that were never published in his lifetime. They were recently discovered by a rare book cataloger at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. You can read more about Langston Hughes and discover more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website (from which the above quote is taken).

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

Prayer of the Day: Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. By your merciful protection alert us to the threatening dangers of our sins, and redeem us for your life of justice, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” Jeremiah 33:15.

We are hopelessly messianic. Though the Psalmist warns us “put not your trust in princes,” we tend to do just that. We can’t seem to rid ourselves of the notion that our most vexing problems could be solved by getting the right person in power implementing the right policies. For that reason, we fall prey to populist demagogues who manage to put a face (often the wrong one) on our deepest fears, who offer simplistic solutions to complex problems and who make wild promises they cannot possibly keep. Though they are not necessarily intelligent, they nevertheless possess a shrewd, rat-like understanding of what it takes to rise to the top. Instinctively, they know that attractive lies become truth to a gullible public through constant repetition and that “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” The Boxer, Simon & Garfunkel (1970). Sadly, the words of that song have proven themselves in every generation, including our own. We have followed all too readily these self proclaimed messiahs to our ruin and the ruin of millions ground up under the wheels of their egotistical fantasies. We seem incapable of resisting their siren calls.

This being the case, we might be tempted to look with a jaundiced eye upon Jeremiah’s promise of a “righteous branch” from the house of David. After all, we learned from the Hebrew Scriptures that many such Davidic branches (David himself, for that matter) left much to be desired in the way of righteousness. Last week Jesus warned his disciples to beware of persons proclaiming themselves to be the messiah. So how can we remain alert for signs of the coming of the Son of man? How can we know what we are looking for and when we have found it? Our gospel lesson for this Sunday gives us a clue. Jesus tells his disciples, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.” Luke 21:32. “All things” must include “the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” Luke 21:27. The New Testament witness is that God’s messiah has come and that his glory has been manifested through his obedient life, faithful death and glorious resurrection.

Given the grim realities of our violent planet, it is hard to continue believing that the gentle reign of God in Jesus Christ is to become reality for the whole creation. It is difficult to discern any signs of that reality in the monotonous drone of what we mistakenly call “news.” It is not easy to imagine God’s will done on earth as in heaven under God’s righteous branch. Yet imagination is precisely what is most needed. The whole point of the prophets’ poetry, Jesus’ parables and the imagery employed by John of Patmos in the Book of Revelation is to jolt us out of our one dimensional way of thinking and tickle our imaginations. The Bible was written to break our fixation on what is and force us to catch a glimpse of what might be. Advent is the season of imagination, creativity and newness. In this dark age of fear, that sees no salvation beyond more guns, higher walls and stronger armies, Jesus’ disciples have the joyful task of offering a world full of broken promises, failed politics and worn out ideologies the precious gift of a holy imagination.

Here is a poem by Tracy K. Smith about the reawakening of imagination and its power to restore creation.

An Old Story

We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst of us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.

A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended

Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.

Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.

Source: Wade in the Water, (c. 2018 by Tracy K. Smith, pub. by Graywolf Press). Tracy K. Smith (b.1972) is an American poet and educator. She was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, but was raised in Fairfield, California. Her mother was a teacher and her father an engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope. Smith became interested in writing and poetry in elementary school where she was exposed to Emily Dickinson whose poetry had a profound influence throughout her formative years. She is currently serving as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, an office she assumed in 2017. She has since been nominated for a second term. She has published three collections of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. You can read more about Tracy K. Smith and sample more of her poetry on the Poetry Foundation website.

SUNDAY OF CHRIST THE KING

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93
Revelation 1:4-8
John 18:33-37

Prayer of the Day: Almighty and ever-living God, you anointed your beloved Son to be priest and sovereign forever.  Grant that all the people of the earth, now divided by the power of sin, may be united by the glorious and gentle rule of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,  one God, now and forever.

“You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” John 18:37.

This coming Sunday we celebrate the feast of Christ the King. This feast day, which marks the conclusion of the church year, is relatively new to the church calendar. The Roman pontiff, Pope Pius XI, instituted The Feast of Christ the King in 1925 for the universal church in his encyclical Quas Primas. He saw the ascendancy of nationalism as a denial of Christ as king and viewed with alarm the rise of dictatorships in Europe and the captivating allure of their autocratic leaders. This nine decade old proclamation is as relevant now as then, given our president’s open embrace of nationalism, his enthusiastic support among white Christians and the shameful failure of American Christian leaders to name this lie for the heresy it is. For more on that, see my post of July 27, 2017. Protestant churches using the Revised Common Lectionary also observe Christ the King Sunday (titled Reign of Christ Sunday by some). These include my own church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as well as the Church of England, the Anglican Church in North America, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ and the Moravian Church.

By ending the church year with a confession of Christ as King, we remind ourselves that history has an end and the end is Jesus. The day will come, St. Paul tells us, “that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow…and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of God the Father.” Philippians 2:10-11. Yet care must be taken in proclaiming Jesus king. As Jesus points out to Pilate, his “kingdom is not from this world.” That does not mean that the Kingdom of God is somewhere other than here and now. Rather, it means that the reign of God is not government as we know it. It is not imposed by the consent of the governed, by rule of law, by force of arms or by any other coercive means. God’s sovereignty is of a different order. God rules the world through the power of God’s Word spoken through the prophets, the apostles and, in the fullness of time, in and through his Son. God’s weapon is the persuasive power of the Holy Spirit working repentance, faith and reconciliation. God overcomes the world by loving the hell out of it.

You have no doubt seen bumper stickers boldly asserting that “God is in control.” I guess that is supposed to be comforting, but I don’t care much for that expression. Control is something you exercise over your lawn mower or automobile. It is not something you exercise over someone you love. When somebody calls you a controlling parent or spouse, they are not paying you a complement. Nothing ruins friendship, marriage, family and community quite as effectively as someone’s desire to exercise control. Arguably, God could come with a show of force, as he does in the Left Behind books, and impose God’s will on earth as in heaven by sheer might. But that would make God little more than Caesar on steroids. God does not want to reign over creation in that way.

All of this might appear to gainsay the sovereignty of God and make God look weak. But, as the Apostle Paul points out, it is this very “weakness” of God that is actually God’s power-a power that finally overcomes all others. I Corinthians 1:18-25. The cross of Jesus redefines for all time the meaning sovereignty. For this reason, I do not believe that God engineers events in history so that they occur in accord with some predetermined plan. I do not believe that the murder of six million Jews was part of God’s design or intent. Nor do I believe that God wills cancer, auto accidents, hurricanes and earthquakes. Is God triumphant over all of these things? To be sure, but God’s triumphal victory is a strange kind of victory. God’s power is God’s patience. God does not fight fire with fire. That only results in a bigger fire. God refuses to be drawn into the vortex of retaliation and retribution in which we are enslaved. Instead, God responds to the wastes of our wrath with forgiveness, an offer of new life and eternal love. God does not clobber evil. God simply outlasts it. Against God’s eternal determination to save us, our stubborn resistance finally runs out of steam. That might take some time, but God is nothing if not rich in time. The redemption of all creation is too important a job to rush.

In a world where only the ruthless seem to rise to the top, it takes faith in what is yet unseen to confess Jesus as king. In a world where our leaders insist that there is not enough to go around and urge us to grab what is ours and cling to it with all our might, it takes faith in God’s eternal love to keep looking for signs of a kingdom in which all are fed, cared for and free. In a world that keeps telling us that the “only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” it takes faith to beat swords into plowshares. Disciples of Jesus are called to live a “perpetual spring” in the midst of winter. Here is a poem by Amy Gerstler to that effect.

In Perpetual Spring

Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion   
and the lamb cuddling up. 
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.

Source, Bitter Angel: Poems, (c. 1990 by Amy Gerstler, pub. by New York: North Point Press).  Amy Gerstler (b. 1956) is a graduate of Pitzer College. She holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College and is currently a professor of writing at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars program, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and the University of Southern California’s Master of Professional Writing Program. Gerstler has authored over a dozen poetry collections and two works of fiction. She has also produced numerous articles, reviews, and collaborations with visual artists. You can read more about Amy Gerstler and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Daniel 12:1-3
Psalm 16
Hebrews 10:11-25
Mark 13:1-8

Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, your sovereign purpose brings salvation to birth. Give us faith to be steadfast amid the tumults of this world, trusting that your kingdom comes and your will is done through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” Mark 13:2

Every time a read these words I recall the first time I came into New York. It was the winter of 1977 and I was traveling on the Amtrak from Indiana where I was going to school to visit my brother, a pastor who was then serving a church in Brooklyn. I arrived at Penn Station in the early afternoon. Upon my brother’s instructions, I took the subway down to World Trade Center Plaza where we were to meet. I remember coming up out of the subway station and staring up at the Twin Towers like a typical tourist. They were so overwhelmingly big and tall that they nearly blocked out the sky. I wonder what I would have thought had someone said to me, “Hey kid, see those sky scrapers? In twenty five years these buildings, their steel beams, their sheer glass windows and the offices they host will be rubble.”

The Temple that stood during the time of Jesus was a magnificent piece of architecture. It would undoubtedly be considered one of the monumental wonders of the world, were it still standing. I expect it would have been as hard for the disciples to imagine the destruction of that temple as it would have been for me to foresee in 1977 the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. For that reason, the disciples and Jews generally believed that the end of the temple meant the end of the world as we know it. Its fall would be a prelude to the dawn of a new heaven and earth.

Given the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to for us to conclude that Jesus’ prediction of the temple’s destruction hardly required much in the way of clairvoyance. Anti-Roman sentiment was strong among the people of Judea and Galilee. Tensions were particularly high during the feast of Passover, a celebration of the liberation of enslaved Israel from imperial bondage in Egypt. The people in Jesus’ day longed for another Exodus from the bondage of Rome and were ready to follow any leader who promised to deliver one. In reality, the chances of a military confrontation with Rome ending well for the Jews were less than slim. Hence, Jesus’ warning against believing such promises of deliverance and following self-proclaimed messiahs. But people are bound to see only what they want to see and believe only what they want to be true. All the ingredients for a suicidal insurrection were present.

The destruction of the Temple took place just as Jesus warned, but it was not the harbinger of the messianic age. It turned out to be just one more instance of blood letting and destruction along the violent path of history. There would be more such events. Kingdom would rise up against kingdom; there would be wars, earthquakes, wild fires, terrorism and mass shootings. Great skyscrapers would fall and countries once beacons of democracy would slip into the abyss of fascism-but the end was still to come and there was no word on when that end could be expected.

Whatever else this gospel might have to say, it reminds us that the ground under our feet is not as secure as we like to imagine. The gains we have made in furthering the civil rights of racial minorities, women and LGBTQ folk are in danger. The constitutional freedoms of speech and due process are under attack as never before. Even the seasonal rhythms of our climate are becoming increasingly unstable. The church, that one rock of sameness and stability in our lives, seems to be bleeding out-at least in North America. Still, Jesus urges his disciples to live faithfully in a world that is coming apart at the seams and look for the signs of his coming.

More than that, Jesus assures us that the violence of the world’s unraveling is not a  vortex into oblivion. The death throes of the old order are the “beginning of the birth pangs.” Those of us who have either given birth or witnessed one know that it does not happen without the rending of flesh, the shedding of blood and a good deal of pain. In the midst of all the violence, loss and chaos God is at work doing a new thing. In fact, it is precisely here that God does God’s best work. This is not an easy word to hear for those of us who are comfortable with the old order and enjoy the privileges that come with being white, male, heterosexual and wealthy relative to the world’s millions of poor. Our natural inclination is to hang on tight to the familiar features of the doomed world in which we feel safe and comfortable. But in so doing, we render ourselves incapable of taking hold of the new life God longs to give us. We need finally to decide whether we will surrender to the gentle reign of God or cling to the dying structures of injustice and oppression.

There are signs of new creation for all who have eyes to see it. The latest election has brought into our congress the voices of women, people of color, Muslims, sexual minorities and other voices that have been ignored for far too long. The church is experiencing an injection of youthful leaders more concerned with mission and ministry than erecting buildings and preserving institutions. If the administration of Donald Trump has uncovered the worst in American culture and history, it has also called forth the best in us and forced us to confront injustices with which we have become far too comfortable. “A terrible beauty is born” of these trying days. None of this is to say that the reign of God is any closer to fulfillment than it was two thousand years ago. But make no mistake about it. The new creation’s birth pangs began with the resurrection of the crucified messiah and they continue. God is a faithful midwife and can be trusted to see this delivery through.

Here is a poem by William Butler Yeats memorializing the Irish uprising of 1916 brutally suppressed by the British within weeks of its inception.  Though a disaster for Ireland in military terms, this tragic and violent event gave birth to a vision of and determination to achieve freedom that ultimately prevailed. Yeats skillfully weaves his ode to the rebellion and its aftermath with allusions to the events of Holy Week.

Easter, 1916

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
&nbs
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Source: This poem is in the public domain. William Butler Yeats (1865 -1939) was an Irish poet. He was born in Sandymount, Ireland and spent childhood holidays in County Sligo. Yeats studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends, spiritualism and the occult. He later abandoned his pursuit of spiritualism as he became increasingly drawn to the Irish struggle for independence. Yeats served two terms as a senator of the Irish Free State. He was a leader in the Irish Literary Revival of the late 19^th and early 20^th century along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. You can read more about William Butler Yeats and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

It’s election day. I already voted over a week ago. So how to spend the day? I elect to spend my morning at the beach, LeCount Hollow to be more precise. It’s a foggy morning out here on the Cape. The sun is struggling to break through the cloud cover, spilling a silver sheen on the breakers. I have the beach to myself today. Not many people come out here on a breezy and overcast day, but such days are my favorites for strolling along the shore.

I never tire of inspecting the tideline. It constitutes an ever changing mosaic of multicolored seaweed, shell fragments and sea worn stones. Most shells that make it to shore here are pretty well broken up by the relentless pounding of surf and sand.

But every so often I come across one that is fully intact, like this sea snail shell.

Seagulls and seals are year round residents, as are the coyotes that roam the beach at dawn and dusk. You stand a decent chance of sighting a minke whale off shore on any given morning. Great white sharks have also been observed, but not by me.

What does any of this have to do with the election? Nothing, really, but that’s the point. Sometimes you have to withdraw from the pressing issues of the day to get some perspective on them. The great preacher and theologian, Karl Barth, once said that we need to read the Bible with the newspaper at our side. I don’t disagree with that, but if the newspaper is the only source you have in front of you to help you discern the message of the scriptures, your interpretation is likely to be skewed. The news isn’t always what we think it is. If CNN, Fox, NBC or ABC had been around two millennia ago, I doubt you would find their reporters covering the birth of a baby to a homeless couple in a barn standing in a small town at the frontier of the Roman Empire. Sometimes you have to look past the headlines to find the real news.

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work,” says poet, Mary Oliver. If we are going to be fully attentive to the Spirit of God, then we need periodically to get away from the cries of urgent matters demanding our immediate attention so that we can hear the call of significant matters that require our sustained attention. We must learn to let the great historical events of the day percolate up through the matrix of those truths that are eternal, the ones we learn from listening to the voices of waves and seagulls. We must learn to discern the patterns left at the shoreline in order to make the connections required to live faithfully and well.

I don’t know what the political landscape will look like tomorrow morning. But I know that the ocean will still be there with all of its wonders. I know that the love that binds together my family, my church and which extends itself to neighbors I do not yet know will remain no matter what shape the electoral map takes. I believe that, come what may, God, who  loved the world enough to send it his only beloved Son, will find a way to hold it together.