A New Anglican Reads Old Things: "We regretted / The summer palaces"

Emily Garcia, was raised in the Evangelical Free Church. In her freshman year at Princeton she was baptized at the Easter Vigil, and joined the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion four weeks later when she was confirmed on Good Shepherd Sunday. She is a Postulant in the discernment process for the priesthood, is a published poet, and is this year’s Kellogg Fellow at the Chaplaincy.

No Advent season is complete without someone bringing up T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” so I’m here to perform that service for you. Epiphany is the more liturgically appropriate day to talk about the Magi, but I can’t stop thinking about these strange, foreign men on a journey to somewhere they didn’t know.

That’s how Eliot casts, them, at least. Their journey is “such a long journey: / The ways deep and the weather sharp,” and they have plenty of time to regret “the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces” they left behind, plenty of time to listen to “the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.”

After the noise and frustration of travel, Eliot’s wise men come to “a temperate valley,” with “a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, / And three trees on the low sky.” And here they find the place, “not a moment too soon.” But what they find leads this one wise man—the speaker of the poem—to ask, years later, “This: were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” He sees there is obviously a birth, but for the Magi it is “Hard and bitter,” “like Death, our death.” He returns to his kingdom, but he is “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods.” 

So if, on their journey out to Bethlehem, they left behind the “summer palaces” and “silken girls,” they now have lost them in an entirely different way. The palaces, terraces, sherbet, girls and gods—the previous pleasures of their lives—have become alien to them, because of what they encountered in Bethlehem.
A couple weeks ago I preached about St. Bernard’s “middle Advent”—in between the birth of Christ and the return of Christ in glory, when Christ comes to us now, in a “hidden and interior” advent in our hearts. This advent is often not when or what we expect, and we have a hard time pinning it down. As we wait for Christmas, we’re also waiting for Christ to come to us today, in some unknown way.

Eliot’s Magi show us the other side of this same coin—even as we’re waiting for Christ to come to us, we’re also on our way to see him. We’re on a journey to Bethlehem, and although we know there will be a birth when we get there, we can’t yet know what it will mean for us. What in our lives may have to go, may have to die, because of this Birth? When we encounter the newborn Christ in Mary’s arms, will we be like this poem’s speaker, and return to our previous lives, only to feel “alien” in them? Or will we leave “our places, these Kingdoms,” and find our home in a different sort of Kingdom?

Journey of the Magi

by T.S. Eliot

            ‘A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

            Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

            All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Tissot's The Journey of the Magi

God's word is close to us: Sermon for the Feast of Saint Andrew

This sermon was given by Pete Williamson at the HDS Episcopal/Anglican Fellowship on November 24, 2012, for the Feast of Saint Andrew. Pete is a student at Harvard Divinity School.

Saint Andrew is really only a minor character in the New Testament. It always confused me as I grew up, that it was so clear that there were 12 disciples, yet we only really heard anything interesting about a few of them. When someone thinks of St Andrew, they think only of his call, and his brotherhood of Peter (a much more interesting disciple), and not much else. And that’s simply because after this, he scarcely exists in the Biblical narrative. Like any apostle worth their weight in salt, tradition holds that St Andrew went off and founded a church somewhere, became a bishop, and was ultimately martyred in some dramatic fashion. For St Andrew, he was supposed to be martyred by crucifixion on an X-shaped cross, so that he would not share Christ’s fate, and this X-shaped cross is preserved in the flag of Scotland, of whom Andrew is the patron saint, and so this
cross finds its way onto the United Kingdom’s Union Jack (the United Kingdom is a nation just a bit East of here), and thereby ultimately onto the flag of God’s favorite nation, New Zealand. As pleased as you clearly all are to hear this, it’s just trivia and isn’t what I want to focus on about St Andrew. I found myself more intrigued by his presentation in the Gospels.

In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), from which today’s Gospel reading came, Andrew is called at the same time as Peter with the words ‘follow me and I will make you fishers of people’, they become followers on the spot, and little else is said on the matter. On this passage, many a great sermon has been preached regarding obedience, faith, and the willingness to drop everything to follow Jesus. But as I looked into the character of Andrew, I was more entranced by the telling of the story in John’s Gospel. Let me read it:

John 1:35-42
The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (which is translated Anointed or Christ). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas’ (which is translated Peter).

Here we have two of John the Baptist’s disciples who hear John call Jesus the Lamb of God, and they proceed to follow Jesus. Now, we super-spiritualize the idea of ‘following Jesus’, but here it is quite literal. In fact, Jesus doesn’t seem to notice them straight away, and spins around and sees them, and asks the same question that any of us would, “what do you want?”. They follow him to where he’s staying, and the next day, Andrew, one of the two, introduces his brother, Peter, to Jesus.

There’s a few interesting tidbits here. Firstly, who’s this second disciple of John who also follows Jesus? We never hear of him again! Some suggest that he ought to be identified with the beloved disciple, the purported author of the gospel. But there’s nothing really to suggest that. It’s all speculation, but let me propose that perhaps he wasn’t as captivated by this Jesus character as Andrew and ended up following another path, and simply exits the story.

Secondly, St Andrew is the first here to give Jesus the label of ‘Christ’ – a first confession normally reserved for his brother in the other gospels.

Thirdly, in a sense he is the first disciple, earning the name in Greek Christianity of Prōtoklētos, or ‘first-called’, but, in another sense, if you read closely, he is not called at all. He hears John’s proclamation and initially seems to follow Jesus without his consent, or even knowledge.

Finally, of course, it is Andrew who brings Peter to Jesus, and proceeds to take the back seat to his brother from here on in. And it is on this final point that I want to dwell.

Perhaps, it is here that I ask us to consider our individual faith journeys. To consider those times when you felt God’s call. Was it grand, and lofty? Was God’s word placed high on a pedestal, that you felt that you were stealing something which you didn’t deserve? Was it proclaimed by some larger-than-life preacher? By someone who had the appearance of a superhuman? Or was it much closer to home? A friend, or sister, brother, mother, father guiding you towards God? Towards Jesus and his message. I suspect that we have all been beneficiaries of Andrews in our lives.

In our other readings today, we have in the Deuteronomy passage (30:11-14), Moses exhorting Israel that God’s message, his word, is not far away. It’s not too high to reach, too hard to attain. In fact, it’s right next to us. In our heart and mouth. It’s our brother; our sister. Our Psalm (19) today proclaims that God’s message has gone everywhere, even if without words, “Their sound has gone out into all lands, and their message to the ends of the world.” It’s not something we must travel far to hear. And the reading from Romans (10:8b-18) brings these two passages together, quoting them, talking about how God’s word has gone out, and how it is in our heart and mouth, and proclaims that faith comes from what is heard, and challenges us with the question, “how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?”. It is challenging us to be the Andrew in the lives of others, not necessarily to be the Peter whom history remembers, but to be the Andrew who introduces Peter to
God and God’s message of freedom and love.

It makes me speculate about the second follower with Andrew, who simply disappears from the story. Maybe, just maybe, if he had found something in Jesus, which he had valued so highly enough that he shared it with his brother, perhaps he wouldn’t’ve been forgotten so readily. Ya see, Andrew knew that he had found something special in Jesus. He had found the Christ, the Messiah, the saviour for an oppressed people, the one who would make them free. And it was this awareness that made him want to share, that meant that he couldn’t keep it to himself.

Because, if we’re called to share, like St Andrew, then what is it that we want to share? Well, in the first instance, what we ought to share, taking St Andrew as a model, is Jesus the Christ, and discipleship of him. The one sent from God so that we might be restored to God and to one another.

But we find ourselves in a tense spot with this idea. We may feel uncomfortable with the idea that we want to convince anyone of anything. Any talk of ‘conversion’ at HDS is essentially used in purely negative terms. Whatever someone has found to be truth for them is right for them, and we have no right to seek to alter this. And often the culture of HDS would encourage this attitude.

But I think the story can’t really end there, and in reality doesn’t end there for any of us. Because, if an issue is not core for us, then we don’t have to comment on it. But sometimes we get reminded how much we care about something; how essential something is, and we can’t but comment. I know I often feel more comfortable sharing my views on politics or on current affairs, than I might do about core aspects about my faith in Jesus.

A poignant example might be the recent decision where Church of England narrowly rejected a push to allow the ordination of women as Bishops. Now, with pride I have told people about how my mother, in fact, was the first woman ordained by a female Bishop in the Anglican Communion. I have since found out, after talking with my mother, that that’s not strictly true, but we should never let the truth get in the way of a good point. In any case, this turn of events is something where this community has felt a duty not to be silent, not to withhold comment on the decisions of others. So perhaps we’re happy to take the tag line of ‘each to their own’ until we really really really care about  something or really really really disagree.

I bring this up, because I believe that, like St Andrew, we are called to share the goodness that we have found in Christ Jesus. But we are really only motivated to share what is truly core to us. Sometimes by meditating on what it is that gets us passionate, that gets us a little heated (whether in disagreement or just in excitement), we will become aware of what is truly core to us. Because we will only share what is core to us, what is written on our heart.

Perhaps in Andrew we find a challenge to elevate Jesus, his Christship, and our discipleship of Jesus, to that core level where we can’t but share, we can’t but comment, we can’t but introduce.

In conclusion, God’s word is not far from us. And it’s our job to make sure it’s not far from those around us, because, in Chirst, it is on our hearts and our mouths. With the example of St Andrew before us, we are called to share God’s word which has been placed within us.

In the concert of life, no one gets a program: Sermon for the Feast of St. Teresa

This sermon was given at the HDS Episcopal Fellowship on October 15, 2012, on the Feast of St. Teresa of Avila. The preacher, Noah van Niel, is a student at Harvard Divinity School.

A couple of years ago, my Grandparents passed on to my wife and I, a beautiful ceramic tile, painted in the soft blue and white of the Dutch Delft style. On the tile is a Dutch proverb that reads: “Van het concert des levens krijgt niemand een program” which means “In the concert of life, no one gets a program.” Now this is not really a new or radical idea in and of itself. We’ve often heard things like this before, but it’s cute and I found myself reading it much more literally than I think it was probably intended. I started thinking, you know, I hate concerts where there is no program. I’m a wreck. I sit there thinking, what comes next? Which movement are we in? Is this the allegro? DO we clap now? How long is it? How far into it are we? And on and on and on. I much prefer to be able to situate myself within the larger structure of the concert, checking back in every once in a while, knowing that there is some progression that I can map out and trust in. It helps me to relax and enjoy the music. So I don’t apologize for being someone who likes to have a plan; who loves order and structure. It gives me something to grab onto, to hook my anchor on so I can get on with the business at hand.

I believe this speaks to a larger principle about humanity. Well I hope it does, otherwise, this will be kind of a lonely sermon. To varying degrees, we love structure. We need it. We depend upon it to bring order to our lives which otherwise float, unmoored through whatever this things is we call existence. Plans, maps, organizations they are all a part of how we attempt to control the chaos so that we might inhabit it. Civilization strikes me as really just a series of interlocking structures of our own devising, generally agreed upon, that allow life to proceed. Political systems, economic systems, social customs, rule of law, rules of logic or reasoning. Language itself is a set of agreed upon rules and principles which make the unintelligible, intelligible.

And I would argue this is what religion attempts to do with the Divine. And I don’t think that’s in and of itself a bad thing. In Christianity, and in Anglicanism in particular, there is a definite structure to worship, to prayer. We have a whole book that outlines the way in which every conceivable kind of worship service should be run. This is one of the things I find very helpful about our tradition. Much as in the same way as at a concert, I can relax into the worship service, knowing where my attention should be at any given time. “Oh now I’m supposed to be listening to the Bible.” Oh now I’m supposed to be confessing my sins” “Oh now I’m supposed to be remembering the supreme Sacrifice Jesus made on the cross for my sake.” I like the poetry of the prayers and the form and cadence that the language brings to the liturgy. When I find myself in a more free flowing church, I find it much more difficult to worship. I can’t get past the nagging questions: “where are we now?” What are we doing next? How long does this go?”

However, this orderly worship does not necessarily leave us predisposed to the kind of mystical religious experiences spoken to by some of the early church fathers or medieval mystics. Imagine my delight then, when I discovered Teresa of Avila! Here, with such works as the Interior Castle, was someone laying out a plan, a map or guide of how to have a mystical experience. This was perfect for someone like me! For those of you who don’t know, Teresa was a Carmelite nun in Avila, in central Spain in the 16 th century. She wrote a number of works on mysticism and her central metaphor in the Interior Castle, the work I’m most familiar with, is that of a huge mansion situated inside ourselves. There are various rooms, or stages which one passes through in prayer which culminate in a continual, consistent, union or rapture with God. She uses the language of divine marriage, in the sense of two becoming one flesh. It all sounded very wonderful so I set about reading the Selections of the Interior Castle. A mystical map to the divine AND in an abridged version! I was sold.

As I read I made a point to literally draw out the different rooms as concentric squares creating a kind of rough floor-plan of this spiritual mansion. I started at the outer level, then moved progressively inward. I mapped myself on the floor-plan, trying to figure which room I was in and trying to determine how to make it to the next one. It was like Super-Mario or something, trying to make it to the next level.

However, I learned quickly that while she may have done me a great service
in laying out what she saw as the necessary steps to a complete union with the Divine, the
closer you got to the center, the more and more inward you had to travel. As I mapped it,
the rooms got smaller and smaller as you moved along, in proportion to the number of
people that actually make it to those stages. But as I read I realized that spiritually the
inverse sizing is true: the deeper you go the wider and larger the rooms become for the
closer and closer you get to a union with a God who is not held within the walls of a room,
no matter how large. The journey was one from specificity to expanse. The deeper you
moved the less and less form played a part. Wordy and worldly prayers gave way to
longings and groanings and yearnings and moanings which bespoke an inward impetus
towards this force, whom, once tasted, once glimpsed, became the sole focus of the life of
prayer. The closer you get the more you have to relinquish control, not maintain it. You
didn’t move from room to room, God pulled you from room to room. Teresa bottoms out at
point where she says, that the truly divine encounter, even a breath of that union simply
cannot be explained adequately; it just must be experienced.

“They say that the Soul enters within itself and at other times, that is rises above itself.
With such terminology I wouldn’t know how to clarify anything. This is what’s wrong
with me: that I think you will understand by my way of explaining, while perhaps, I’m
the only one who will understand myself” (39).

Now we, as intellectually responsible and highly intelligent, rational beings here at Harvard Divinity School tend to distrust this kind of highly personal, untranslatable, individual experience. It does not lend itself to being analyzed. But this is exactly the same place Paul is calling us to in Romans. That place of “inward groans” where the “spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” That place where quiet and cloudiness and ambiguity reign over order and structure and form. This is where God resides because there he can transcend the shackles that our structures and our language and our outline place upon Him. It is here, beyond the realm of the intelligible, that he can communicate most honestly and directly with us.

“What God communicates here [in spiritual union] to the soul in an instant is a secret so great and a favor so sublime—and the delight the soul experiences so extreme—that I don’t know what to compare it to. I can say only that the Lord wishes to reveal for that moment, in a more sublime manner than through any spiritual vision or taste, the glory of heaven. One can say no more—insofar as can be understood—than that the soul, I mean the spirit, is made one with God” (122).

So if we are to really commune with God, if we seek that union with him that I believe he seeks with us. We must give credence to the inward longings of our heart. We must pray simply with sighs too deep for words. We must fight against our need for structure in the name of the sublime. We must learn to embrace the place of feeling, the place of longing and the place of the unintelligible, this is where God resides and the exact reason we cannot, in our limited means, express these things more intelligibly almost works as proof that this is the realm in which God is at work: in the formless, the murkiness, the fogginess of our hearts. Places we can’t even penetrate without the profound effort of letting go of our need for order. We cannot write a program for God’s symphony!

At a certain point the structures we’ve erected to allow us to function and flourish, especially in our spiritual lives, can become the fetters, the chains, which bind us to it; “It” being the structure itself, and not God. They become the shackles that hold us down and from which we must break free if we are ever to rise up and soar, transcending ourselves and our  humanity and reaching the heights or depths of the all-powerful, ever present God. Like a rocket ship that sheds its various apparati as it climbs higher and higher through the atmosphere and into the weightlessness and freedom of outerspace. This may not come
easily. But as we move forward on this journey of faith it becomes more and more apparent
that the house we have built for God to live in is too small, it’s stretching at the seams. The
shirt we have knitted him to dress him up in our image, is ripping apart on his back and
he seeks to break free, expand into the full capacity of our hearts and minds and beyond.
And we can pray, out of a spirit of weakness that God would fill us so completely that we
are overflowing with his presence, and logic and language and learning break down and
we are left with the moans and groans and sighs of our pre-formed selves crying out in
supplication. That is a heavenly call.

Alfred Lloyd Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.” that says pretty perfectly what I just
spent the last ten minutes trying to say.

“Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they”

To that I would only add…Amen.

Messiah!

This past weekend I was blessed to attend a Handel's Messiah performance by the Handel and Haydn Society at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was conducted by Harry Christophers, and featured some incredible soloists, such as the countertenor Daniel Taylor. 

To say that I was moved by the experience would certainly be an understatement. The swells of sound, the staccato of the violins, the voices pure and clear, the electric conducting of Mr. Christophers...sent chills down my spine, brought me to tears, and moved me to want to stand up and shout: "AMEN!!!" many times. The three-hour piece is pure inspiration from Baroque composer George Frideric Handel. Handel selected many biblical passages (particularly from Isaiah and Corinthians) and put them to soaring music in a theological narrative that begins with anticipation of the birth of Christ, rejoices in the incarnation, laments the sorrows and suffering of an embodied existence, and then finally celebrates the ultimate triumph over death through the promise of the resurrection. It is a powerful, powerful piece of music, and one I have long loved. 

Something about the amazing energy of this particular performance of the Messiah really resonated deeply within me, and played a theological chord in my heart in a way that only soul-stirring music can. What I found myself feeling, in my bones and flesh and tears, was the sheer improbability and pathos of the incarnation, which I explore in three phrases from the Messiah that particularly stayed with me. 

For unto us, a child is born... (Isaiah 9:6)

What struck me this time when I heard this oft-repeated refrain was the "us." For unto us a child is born.  We are all waiting, like Mary, as eager parents, ready to receive this new life in the world. But we aren't just waiting for something we hope will happen. We are waiting for something that is inevitable and already-done. God is already with us. God is coming to us. God will come again to us. 

The kingdom of the earth is become the kingdom of our Lord (Revelation 11:15)

In the famous Hallelujah Chorus, this line is particularly memorable. The potential for transforming the suffering in this world is so rich, because through the incarnation, the sacred and the profane are brought together, the kingdom of earth becomes the kingdom of God. We have the potential to bring about divine love and justice in this broken place, because God came in a broken body to bring good news to us. This world that we live in is sacred, already blessed, and yet aching for healing through the further flowering of God's love made flesh. 

And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God. (1 Corinthians 15:20)

In God's decision to come as a human being to this world we are all redeemed and blessed in our own bodies ("...and the Word was made flesh.") Our bodies are no less human (worms will still destroy our dead flesh buried in the dark earth), and yet in their very human-ness they are capable of seeing God. This means that each movement of our limbs, each neuron firing in our brains, each breath...has the capacity to be a prayer. When we move we move in God, when we breathe we breathe in God. This incarnation has already happened. We have been granted this amazing gift and we await its coming again, within ourselves. We are already blessed. We await Christ's coming as a human child Advent after Advent, day after day, breath after breath.

"The middle advent": Christ is coming--where is my heart?

Detail from Fra Bartolomeo's
Vision of St. Bernard

This sermon was given by our Kellogg Fellow, Emily Garcia, on 2 December 2012. The readings for the day were Jeremiah 33:14-16, Psalm 25:1-9, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, and Luke 21:25-36; you can read them all on the same page here!

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t feel strongly about the Gregorian calendar as most of America uses it. January to December, twelve evenly spaced months, with a handful of holidays, each proceeded by shopping seasons and themed napkins, and accompanied by maybe one Monday off of work. It’s just one straight line, front to back, left to right, over and over again. Pretty boring stuff.

So I never would’ve guessed that when I became Anglican, one of the things I’d fall in love with would be our Church calendar! It’s a wonderful thing. I was taught that it isn’t a line, but a circle, reminding us that God is both beginning and end, recalling God’s eternity. And the Church’s calendar isn’t an even grid, but is a cycle of changing seasons, running close to the seasons of the natural world.

These seasons are anchored in the stories of our tradition, and especially in the life of Christ as we know it in the Gospels. The movement of the seasons is the movement of stories, as a collection of narratives draws us along.  And in each season, in each different color and pitch, we’re invited to hear echoes of our own lives. Each season is capacious and complex enough to speak to us no matter where or how we find ourselves that year.

            To refresh your memory: Today is the first day of the church year, the first Sunday in Advent, as we prepare the mystery of the Incarnation; then comes Epiphany and the brightness of how God is revealed to us; and Lent, the solemn penitential season, dark and full of God’s mercy; and Easter, that bright white season of alleluias and the Resurrection; then Ascension Day, as Christ leaves his disciples, and the fiery red day of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, and the long green growing season of Pentecost. This ends—last week!—with the feast of Christ the King, a reminder of Christ’s kingdom as it is coming into being and as it will be.

And then, back to Advent again. The word “Advent” is from a Latin word that means “to come.” In Advent, we slow down from the rush of summer, and quiet our minds, and try to pay attention as we wait.

            But what are we waiting for?  

            Since we’re in church, the answer to that question is, naturally, “Jesus Christ.” We are quieting down, opening our eyes, and waiting for Jesus.

But the trick in Advent is that we’re waiting for him twice. Most obviously, as we live in the narrative of the prophets and the Gospels, we await his birth, this long-awaited “righteous Branch” which will “execute justice and righteousness,” as Jeremiah says. The Nativity is the strange and humble way in which this righteous branch springs up, a vulnerable beginning to the security and safety promised in Jeremiah.

            But as you probably noticed in our reading from Luke today, Advent also begins with a different coming of Christ—the second coming, “that last day when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead,” as the Collect says. This part of the story is as of yet unwritten, except for in broad bright symbolic visions. The signs mentioned in Luke, we have seen them already—we see distress among nations; we hear the roaring of the sea, we feel the fear and foreboding in the world. The folks who wrote the Gospels had first-hand experience with such things, and they wanted to remind each other that the kingdom of God, with its new green leaves, is near. So in this second coming we await a Christ who will bring to its fullest blossom and fruition the kingdom which is already alive and growing on earth.

            The season of Advent is a strange layering of a beloved past—a fulfilled promise—and an unknown but promised future. Christ is coming.

            And! if that’s not enough narrative and movement for you, just wait, there’s more! Because St. Bernard of Clairvaux, an eleventh century monk, in his sermon on Advent says that there are in fact “three comings of the Lord.” Bernard says, “In his first coming our Lord came in our flesh and in our weakness; in this middle coming he comes in spirit and in power; in the final coming he will be seen in glory and majesty.” This middle advent is “a sort of road by which we travel from the first to the last.” Unlike the other two, it is invisible, and hidden “within our own selves.” Christ is coming to us—now.

            What does it look like to wait for this invisible advent of Christ’s spirit and power? What should we do to be ready for it? And what does it look like when it happens?

St. Bernard reminds us of John 14:23 : “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him.” He then asks, “Where is God’s word to be kept? Obviously in the heart, as the prophet says: I have hidden your words in my heart, so that I may not sin against you. Keep God’s word in this way. Let it enter into your very being, let it take possession of your desires and your whole way of life. Feed on goodness, and your soul will delight in its richness. If you keep the word of God in this way, it will also keep you.”

That’s how we wait for the middle advent—by keeping God’s word in our hearts. Today in our Gospel we were warned against letting our hearts be weighed down with dissipation—be spread thin, lost, spent wastefully. Instead, like St. Paul, we should ask that the Lord will strengthen our hearts in holiness. We can say with the Psalmist, “Show me your ways, O Lord, / and teach me your paths.”

            Now, as to what this middle advent looks and feels like, Bernard has his own story to tell. He says, “I admit that the Word [Jesus Christ] has also come to me—and I speak foolishly—has come often. As often as he has come to me, I have not perceived the different times of his coming . . . I perceived that he has been present, I remembered that he had been there. Sometimes I was able to anticipate his coming, but I never felt it, nor its departing either. Even now, I don’t know whence he came into my soul and where he went . . . and by what way he entered and left . . .”

            This invisible advent of Christ in spirit and power is not easy to pin down. When I first read this, I thought, Oh man, I definitely know the feeling of having just missed the point! But I think St. Bernard is simply explaining here what it’s like for us—finite humans, moving along in time and space—to encounter God.

Sometimes Christ comes to us in an interaction with another person, a friend or a stranger. Sometimes Christ comes in the words of the Bible, as we read it alone or hear it in church, or suddenly remember a verse in the middle of the day. Christ comes to us as we sing together, Christ comes as we take Communion, Christ comes when we share meals.

And sometimes, Christ comes to us in complete silence, with a slow or sudden but certain  sense of his immediate, immanent presence to us.

            All of these, are a kind of middle advent, and these are the advent which we live day after day and year after circling year. Christ has come.

Now, the season of Advent has neither the unrelenting joy of Easter nor the unbroken solemnity of Lent. Advent is called “mildly penitential.” (Which, for the record, always sounds to me like “partly cloudy” or “fold in gently”.)

But this isn’t a wish-washy thing—it’s mildly penitential because our attention is caught in tension between a serious penitence and a sense of joyful hope as we wait to see what God will do. Yes, we admit that our hearts are often weighed down with dissipation, drunk on the unnecessary excess of life, and tangled in worry over things that don’t actually matter. Yes. We know this is wrong, and we ask for God’s mercy and grace as we work to right ourselves and our world.

But we also know—we also know that something good is coming. We know that the Lord’s compassion and love are, as the Psalmist says, “from everlasting,” that for those who are committed to him, “the paths of the Lord are love and faithfulness.” We remember that Jeremiah’s promise was for us, too, and that in our own lives there are righteous growing things waiting to spring up. We know that Jesus will be born in Bethlehem; we know that he will come later, in unimaginable glory; and we know that he will come to us, now, today, tomorrow, here, in our lives.

This balance, between penitence and happy anticipation, feels to me like kneeling in sincere confession with a small smile in the corner of your mouth. We know we are imperfect, and we need God’s mercy—and, we are confident in God’s mercy, happily awake and alert to see what God will do next.

            What makes this prayerful anticipation even better is that Christ is coming to us no matter what. Are you happy, is your heart light? Christ is coming to you. Are you weary, is your heart heavy? Christ is coming to you. Are there parts of your life which you know are not pleasing to God or even to you? Christ is coming to you, too.

Christ has come, and is coming, and will come, and we don’t always know what it looks like.

So I have some questions for us as we pray both together and alone this Advent. We might think of these when we find ourselves alone on our walk to class or work; perhaps as we lie down to sleep, or as we brush our teeth in the mornings. When we take a study break, or when we turn off the computer to look out the window, maybe we can say to ourselves:

Christ is coming. Where is my heart?

Christ has already come to me. When did he do that? What was that like?

Christ will come to me. What might that be like?

God has been made manifest to us, and he will be made manifest to us again; am I awake? Am I watching? He is coming—where is my heart?

Amen.

The Widows' Might: Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good

This sermon was given by our Kellogg Fellow, Emily Garcia, on 11 November 2012. The readings were 1 Kings 17:8-16, Psalm 146, Hebrews 9:24-28, and Mark 12:38-44. You can read them all here!

          I imagine almost everyone here is familiar with this story from Mark, about the widow’s mite—m-i-t-e, a small copper coin. Growing up, I was told—and maybe you were too—that this is a story about the attitude with which one gives. Jesus denounces the scribes, the religious establishment. They’re giving offerings at the temple treasury, which would be given to people in need—widows, orphans, the sick, the hungry. Jesus says the scribes’ motivations are self-serving; they give only in order to receive praise and attention. But this widow gives with no expectation of either, and, I was taught, with a generous and happy heart. The religious leaders give only a small percentage of their great abundance, and this poor woman gives everything she has. In my little illustrated Bible I remember a picture of small woman draped in veils and bent over, smiling to herself as she (thinking she was unnoticed) dropped a penny in a box.

          But you know, when I read it last week, I was struck by what wasn’t in the story. We don’t know this woman’s name. We don’t know how old she was—she could’ve been my age, or younger, or older. We just know that she had lost her husband, and that she was poor. And—contrary to what I was taught as a child—we actually don’t know about her motivations. We don’t know about her demeanor. Jesus doesn’t say that she gives happily, joyfully. We don’t know if she walked up to the offertory box with a spring in her step and a pious smile on her face—  

Or if, maybe—Maybe she dragged her feet. Maybe she frowned, or was sad as she gave her two coins. Maybe the claws of anxiety were digging into her—she was thinking about what she would eat, she was thinking how she would take care of her children or grandchildren. Maybe, as she dropped the coins in, she immediately regretted her action, and wished she could’ve taken back her money.

Did she give because she felt moved, by the love of God and the love of the law? Or did she give because it was a routine—something done by force of habit, grumbling as she went?

 We don’t know. But we do know, that her manner perhaps didn’t matter to Jesus. What matters is that “out of her poverty” she gives “everything she has.” It was not necessarily a gracious gift, but apparently it was the greatest gift.

The widow of Zeraphath is an even more striking example of apparently imperfect giving. Elijah is sent by God to live with a widow, but somehow God failed to mention this to the widow, and she is not exactly happy to have suddenly an impertinent stranger asking things of her. At the gate of the town, she’s willing to give this foreigner a drink of water, but when he adds, “Oh by the way, get me some bread while you’re at it,” she puts down her foot. “I’m gathering some firewood, so that I can go home, use the last of our oil and grain, and cook one last meal for my son and I, so that we may eat it, and die.” She says, You want ME to give YOU the last of everything. I imagine she is incredulous at this man’s demands—doesn’t he know there’s been a drought? I imagine she is upset, to turn away a stranger. I imagine she is exhausted from worry and work, she is already mourning her son in advance, she is wishing this man would leave her alone.

Elijah then uses the prophetic formula—one word in Hebrew, rendered in English as “Do not be afraid”, which was used by prophets and angels alike to say, “Hold on! I have good news for you!” The widow then does what Elijah asks, but it doesn’t say that her heart was completely changed. We don’t hear that she trusted him, that she embraced this “Lord your God.” Perhaps she gave him the last of their food out of exasperation, exhaustion, hopelessness. It was absurd for a stranger to ask for the last of their food, and she gave in to the absurdity.

And the result is that she herself is given a gift beyond anything she could have expected. She and her son and this strange prophet are kept alive by an unexpected act of God.

          Reading these women’s stories in the last week has been incredibly humbling for me.

What I saw first was that they gave when they had apparently nothing to give. I am not an extremely wealthy person, but I am certainly a person of privilege and I live very comfortably. I have the money and time to go out to eat once in a while. I buy clothes, even though I already have plenty of clothes! I have multiple warm coats for this cold winter, and if I still don’t have snowboots it’s just because I’d rather spend that money on buying mystery novels and pastries.

          And! With all of this, all of this extra, this fun, I have not yet been able to meet my ideal goal of tithing, giving ten percent of my income to those who need it and to the Church. I could cut down on my expenses, and I hope I will get there someday, but I’m not there yet.

          How is this, that I can’t even cut down on my fancy coffee and clothes, and these women gave when it meant little or no food at all. 

That’s the other thing about these widows, especially Elijah’s widow. It’s not just that she gave in extremis—meaning, “at the farthest reaches” or “at the point of death”--but this wasn’t an easy thing for her to do! She’s not some ideal holy figure, a rich man who didn’t really want his wealth, who didn’t really like eating a lot anyway, who was not just ready but eager to give everything away, like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, or Saint Francis, or the Buddha. She wants to have food. She wants to feed her son. She doesn’t want to share. And still, she gives. She gives when it is not easy.

And that’s certainly something that I’m not good at. I give a little, yes, but I seem to be waiting for a moment of overwhelming generosity to sweep over me. I keep waiting to be gleeful and serene in order to sign away large portions of my paycheck. For some reason, this moment has yet to come. And, unlike the widow of Zarephath or the widow in the temple, I’m having a hard time giving mightily, as they gave—giving much, even when I don’t necessarily feel like it.

          Now, I’ve been talking about money this whole time because that’s something I’ve been struggling with. But you know there are many things we can give and many ways of giving. It seems that for many of you students, time is a more urgent resource than money. And for all of us, our attention and emotional energy, physical energy are also closely guarded resources, which we try to spend wisely and as we want to.

          So, my experience of reading these stories has been one of being humbled. I have been brought up short by how far I am from living precisely as God wants me to live. But reading these stories has also been encouraging.

Because what these stories say to me, is that (as Luther has said) we shouldn’t let the perfect get in the way of the good.

The widow of Zarephath resisted the opportunity to give. She relented, but did not necessarily do so with a glad heart. But because she gave food to Elijah and welcomed him, God fed her, and her son, and Elijah. And they didn’t just eat, they weren’t simply nourished, but they witnessed a miracle.

          And the widow in the temple, no matter her manner or feelings or reasons, was held up by Christ himself as an example of a generous giver. And Christ, if anyone, knows what it is to give.

          What I learn from these stories is that God is able to work through our crooked hearts, and our crooked responses to his invitation to give.

Most of us—especially those of us who grew up in the church—have a false ideal of giving with a completely pure heart, and these stories say to me—Give even when your heart is not pure, and God will be pleased. Grumbling is not an excuse for not giving; God can work with what you give. Don’t let your idea of the perfect get in the way of the good.

          I’ve had an example of this in the past two days, at the interviews for the discernment process in the diocese. There were about twenty of us who are hoping and wishing and wondering if we might become priests or deacons. On the first morning, Bishop Tom thanked us for offering ourselves to this process and to the Church.

I thought to myself, What a messy, messy offering we are. We are certainly not the first fruits of this harvest—We are a big group of insecurities, anxieties, minor complaints and major flaws.  They kept saying this, ‘Thank you for offering yourselves for this process’, and I just kept thinking—I would never want a gift like me or like us!

And then! At some point, it hit me, and I rolled my eyes at myself and said—Oh man!  This is exactly what you’ve been learning from those stories! Promising our shared service, offering ourselves in whatever way we’re needed—this is a gift, even if it is far from a perfect one. –And—this is the big piece that I’m still taking on faith—it is an offering which is pleasing to God.

          We are about to present ourselves here for Communion. “Lift up your hearts!” And we will offer our imperfect hearts and our distracted minds to God.

And then, we will bless the bread and wine, God’s gift to us. And we will ask to be blessed ourselves, in order to be given to each other and to the world. “Unite us to your Son in his sacrifice.” As we offer our money for those in need, and then as we offer ourselves in prayer, I would invite us all to consider two things in our own lives: First, Where are we already offering our gifts to those who need it? Where are we already giving money to those who need it? Where are we already giving our time and attention to those who need it? Where are we already giving like these widows?

And second: Where can we give more? Could I cut just one day’s worth of cafés and give that money to the Food Bank? Could I cut my inward absorption just a little, and spend some of my attention and energy on the people I meet, the bus drivers, the card-checkers, the grocery clerks? Could I take five hours of my month to spend just part of one day volunteering somewhere? Even if I do not smile when I give—even if I feel anxious or irritated or resentful or confused—where can I give more?

Amen.

"Great Delight" : Children and the Bible

The author, Emily Garcia, was raised in the Evangelical Free Church. In her freshman year at Princeton she was baptized at the Easter Vigil, and joined the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion four weeks later when she was confirmed on Good Shepherd Sunday. She is in the discernment process for the Episcopal priesthood, is a published poet, and is this year’s Kellogg Fellow at the Chaplaincy.

John Henry Newman, almost
as handsome as Paul

 “I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the Bible . . .”

-John Henry Newman, from Apologia pro vita sua

I found this sentence at the opening of an old, worn book on my shelves: Selected Prose and Poetry of John Henry Newman. (Not to be confused with the other Newmans, Paul the actor and Arnold the photographer.) It’s old and worn because it was printed in 1907 (“Price, paper, 30 cents”)—not because I’ve read it so many times. I heard of Newman and his importance to Anglicanism and Catholicism ages ago, and thought I’d finally give his prose a go.

I confess, I found it slow-going. And through the long sentences, big ideas, and reams of dates and unknown names, my attention kept returning to this opening line of the chapter “The Young Mind of Newman,” from his Apologia pro vita sua.

“Delight” is a lovely word, and right next to it are the ideas of satisfaction, joy, pleasure, and deliciousness. This is certainly how I feel about reading the Bible. Even when the taste is bitter—the Psalmist’s virulence, the prophets’ violence, Paul’s harshness—it is delicious, a thrill. 

             I teach Sunday school at St. John’s in Charlestown, and I hope very much that as my sweet three-year-olds and saucy five-year-olds become older and wiser (and taller than me, and smart-alecks)—I hope they will continue to be brought up “to take great delight in reading the Bible.” Certainly they delight in it now!

The curriculum we use is called “Godly Play,” and its premise (or the premise to which I’m most faithful) is that we need to teach kids HOW to engage with the Bible and with Christian traditions—it’s not useful for them to memorize the books of the Bible if they are too terrified or bored or disenchanted to open the pages! This is part of why I kept returning to this sentence of Newman’s: because it says “brought up to take delight.” Some of us will love the Bible and love reading it no matter what people say to us about it. But many children—and young adults, and adults—need to be shown how to take delight in such a contradictory and complex text.

            So may I make a recommendation? If there are any children, teens, or young adults in your life, I would encourage you to share with them what the Bible means to you. Does it confuse you? Then say so! Do you find it funny at times? Show them what makes you giggle! Does it move you to tears? Give them the chapter and verse! Is there a character you remember, a scene that stands out in your mind? Mention it in conversation! You don’t need to be a scholar or have the whole thing perfect in order to share what you love.

            And if you don’t have any feelings about the Bible? Perhaps you might listen extra close to the lectionary readings this Sunday, and see what you think—and what you feel, and what you imagine, and what they make you think of.

"A Very Human Book": Hannah's Song and Reading the Bible

This sermon was delivered on 18 November 2012 by our Micah Fellow, Tiffany Curtis. The readings for the day are available here. 

 

In our readings today we hear Hannah struggle with her sense of anguish and distress over her lot in life. She is irritated, provoked, weeping, praying. She won’t eat. She is so immersed in her grief that Eli believes her to be drunk. 15But Hannah answers, ‘No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.’ Eli tells her that she should go in peace, for God will grant her petition. Hannah indeed becomes pregnant—the desire of her heart, according to the scriptures—and she gives birth to the prophet Samuel.

Then come the famous words of the Song of Hannah, echoed in the gospel of Luke in the Song of Mary. Hannah sings a song primarily of joy. It is triumphant, and also full of energy and complex images and emotions. It speaks of justice for those who have been forgotten, neglected, marginalized. It gives glory to God for lifting up the oppressed. And it also states clearly that this joy and justice is in opposition to others, that it is defined by its opposite…

Hannah says: my mouth derides my enemies, their bows are broken, they are without jobs or food, they are forlorn. Those who were full of food will go hungry, the rich will be poor. The wicked shall be cut off in darkness, and God’s adversaries shattered…This is not just some feel-good love song to God. This is a complicated text, and like much of scripture, we are invited to sort out what it might mean for us in our lives.

Particularly thinking about the experience many of us have just had, of working together with other people of faith so that the hungry might be fed, these texts sound a little incongruent to my ear. I just worked for 2 hours side-by-side with people of many nations, skin colors, faiths--including a faith in reason and humanity rather than a faith in God. And now I come to church and I hear that those who are not like me, those who in biblical times might even have been called my enemies--deserve my scorn and the wrath of the Lord.

We have a few options. We can accept this book as the literal Word of God, including the parts we don’t like, and perhaps dig in and explore some of the darker aspects of God as portrayed in scripture. I think this merits much more reflection than it is ever given in more liberal Christian contexts, where the love of God is emphasized above all else. But that’s not what I am going to explore tonight. We can also spiritualize this kind of thing and view it metaphorically: crushing our enemies can mean the enemy forces within us, the complexities and darkness that we find within ourselves, those tendencies that threaten to pull us away from our truest selves, from our faith. An internal struggle. This sort of allegorical reading of the Bible can be extremely beneficial, and has a noble history in Christianity, particularly pre-Enlightenment. But I am not going to go into that approach either.

What I do want to talk about is something that has been so present in my heart since one of the brothers at the Society of Saint John the Evangelist preached last month on the psalms. He said that the psalms are powerful because they hold the full range of human emotions, including joy and including murderous rage. And that by delving into the psalms together we are acknowledging the breadth of human experience, and honoring emotions that might not be our own. This resonated with me so much because one of things I have always loved about the Bible is how darn contradictory it is. It offers different accounts of stories side-by-side, and shows us the lives of faithful heroes and moral idiots alike, sometimes in the same person. The Bible has always seemed like a very human book to me, and that’s much of what makes it holy for me. We humans have been struggling to relate to the divine and to each other for millennia, and much of that struggle is depicted so colorfully and beautifully in our scriptures. That means that we find parts of the Bible that can be hard to swallow, mixed right in with incredibly moving images of Godly and human justice and compassion. We find the deliciously erotic love poetry of the Song of Songs in the same book that we find stories of mass rape and murder, of men betraying their own brothers.

In our world, too, in a single moment you can observe a couple hand in hand in Harvard Square, obviously rapturously in love, and then almost trip over someone who has lost a limb, whose face is red and blotchy from exposure to sun and cold, and whose hand is outstretched, a thin paper cup held between nicotine-stained fingers, and whose defeated eyes look at you imploringly. This is the nature of reality. The complexity, the contrast, the both/and is what it means to be a human being!

The simple ways of reading the texts of our lives, of reading the holy texts we have been given by our ancestors, is usually not the most compelling. It’s not compelling because it flattens an inherently bumpy topography. It ignores shadows and wrinkles and scars. It refuses to see reality as it really is.

This week I was at dinner with a really fascinating group of women, including two psychologists. Pam, who does mindfulness work as part of her psychotherapy practice, shared that a psychologist had done a study on survivors of the Holocaust who had thrived in their lives even after surviving death camps. This researcher wanted to know what traits these survivors shared that made this possible. According to Pam, what she found was that they all saw reality as it was. In other words, they were clear-eyed about reality.

I wonder if engaging fully with scripture as it really is can help us practice engaging life as it really is, including the things that we don’t like, including the most painful traumas of our lives. Scripture reflects the complexity of the human experience, and reading it with clear eyes might just help us to be clear-eyed as we move about our society, as well.

In the gospel reading for today, the disciples ask Jesus about how they will know that “things are about to be accomplished.” His response is that they should be wary of people who claim to be him, and to not be alarmed by the news of famines, wars, earthquakes, because these are just the beginning of the birth pangs of what is to come. Once again, this isn’t a Jesus-loves-me-this-I-know Jesus, but a more intense Jesus, warning against people who will lead his disciples astray, warning of catastrophes and tragedies. Following this theme of clear-eyed vision of complex reality, Jesus is essentially telling his disciples just that. He is saying, accept reality as it is, be alert to the complexity of these times. Jesus is saying that God is somehow mysteriously present even in earthquakes and famine and war.

Indeed, somehow God is present in this mad swirling mass of humanity and chaos and stars and dark matter and fish and trees and roaring waters and loneliness. God defies our expectations. God defies our knowing. God defies our sense of time and place and order.

And in that dizzying sense of life’s complexity, in the ways it is reflected in the scriptures, in our friends and family, in our intimate relationships, in our yearning to do good in this world…we have the invitation to accept reality as it is, which includes the possibility of what it could be. Reality as it is includes hope. We have the capacity to come together—hundreds of people in a university hall operating an interfaith assembly line to feed folks, knowing that we are only making a small difference in people’s lives—just one meal, and yet that is a sign of hope!

As the poet Emily Dickinson says, “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”  If we can stop one heart from breaking. If we can feed one family in Boston. We shall not live in vain. No matter how great the problems of this world, no matter how complex our human experience, no matter how dark our scriptures, if we have enough love for life to see it as it really is, we have enough to hope. We are not living in vain. We have cause to sing alongside Hannah: My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God!