Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Reflections on Repentance

This sermon was given on Saturday, December 7 by our friend Greg Johnston at All Saint's Parish in Brookline. Greg is one of the Life Together fellows All Saint's has graciously housed in the church rectory this year.

I want to thank you all for welcoming me here today. And even more importantly, I want to thank you for the welcome you’ve given me in the last three months. Most of you probably don’t recognize me, although some might. Maybe you’ve seen me carrying bags of groceries through the front door of the rectory as you come here on Saturday evening, or maybe you’ve seen me sitting on the bench in the yard.

I’ve been living next door since August as a part of the Life Together Community. A group of us live in the rectory in intentional community, working at congregations and nonprofits across Greater Boston, doing service and community organizing, working for justice. Those of us staying at ASP have come from Texas, North Carolina, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin—and even Massachusetts! It’s been incredible for us to have access to a big house in a great neighborhood like this—it’s allowed us to build a strong community that can help support us in our work outside it.

Well, I’m one of the few from Massachusetts. I grew up in Winchester, which is a lot like Brookline in some ways: it’s white, upper-middle class, great schools, progressive. I grew up in a congregation that was very focused on service: I always volunteered moving furniture at the Mission of Deeds, or working at the Woburn Council of Social Concern soup kitchen, and went further afield on youth mission trips to work in homeless shelters in DC and New York, on a farm in Georgia, and at a youth camp in Puerto Rico. But we’d never really been activists: we spent our time working to ease the symptoms of injustice rather than addressing the causes.

I went to college and, like many young adults, drifted away from the church. Outside the community I was used to, I didn’t have my own spiritual life. With papers and exams and reading, service wasn’t a priority. And I got so caught up in the culture of achievement, of success, that it seemed for a while like the best way to change things would be to go to law school, work in government, eventually maybe run for political office. And if, along the way, I ended up in corporate 

But instead here I am, making $450 a month, living a life of intentional simplicity with six other people, spending my time in prayer and working at a community organization in Dorchester called the Massachusetts Communities Action Network. Why?

One of the first weekends I was working there, a coworker and I were driving to a meeting at a church in Fall River. Now, Tomas is 42 years old. He grew up in South Boston and Dorchester. His family, who were some of the only Latino business owners in Southie during the busing riots, left after their bodega and their home were burned down. He had worked in politics and for the labor movement his whole life. We were going to a meeting with a bunch of working-class congregations in Fall River and New Bedford about the minimum wage. He turned to me and said: “You know, when I looked at your resume, I had no idea why you were taking this job.”

And so I told him. I told him about the lack of real connections between people I’d seen in college, about people so obsessed with getting the best internship that they didn’t have time to really get to know each other. I told him about my family: that the same economic system that forced people working minimum-wage jobs to work sixty hours a week forced my venture-capitalist dad to do the same, that the culture of possessions, power, and prestige that led Walmart to fire employees for organizing had led to my parents’ divorce.

And I told him about the moment, when I was sitting in my college dining hall with a friend, one of the most genuine people I knew, talking about our real selves, our values, our families, who we thought we were, what we really cared about—the moment when I first experienced genuine, holy listening, and the first moment in a long time when I experienced the presence of God.

It was a moment that led me to repent.

Repentance is one of the central themes of Advent, what we call—in a truly-Episcopalian turn of phrase—a “mildly penitential” season. Now, you know I’m a New Englander. And you know I’m a mainline Protestant. I don’t know about you, but growing up we didn’t talk much about repentance. Repentance meant sin. It meant Puritanical ideas about sex. But the contrast we see in the readings today is different. It’s a contrast between “righteousness” and “repentance.”

“Repent!” John the Baptist says. “μετανοεῖτε,” in in Matthew’s Greek. He sounds like one of those guys you encounter on the T—they’re generally guys—who works himself up into a furor over fornication or contraception or Obamacare while everyone politely looks away.

That’s not what John is going for. “μετανοεῖτε” means something different. It comes from two Greek words: “μετα,” which often means “across”—a metaphor is something that carries its meaning across expressions; and “νους,” which is understanding or intellect. “μετανοεῖτε” means “Change your mind!” but even more than that... “Change your understanding!”

Benedictine monks and nuns have a principle of “conversion of life.” This really goes beyond Benedictines though, to all Christians. In our baptismal covenant we renounce Satan, evil, and sin—and we turn toward Jesus. We repent. We re-orient ourselves away from the path of evil toward the path of righteousness, of justice. “Repent!” John the Baptist tells us. But what—in a concrete sense—are we supposed to turn away from? What are we supposed to turn towards?

Isaiah gives us one answer: righteousness. In Advent, we read Isaiah as a prediction of the two comings of the Messiah, the Christ: a shoot from the stump of Jesse, who “shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor” (Isaiah 11:3–4). Righteousness, Isaiah tells us, “shall be the belt around his waist” (Isaiah 11:5).

But what’s righteousness? Is it just about wolves and lambs lying together, about unimaginable pie-in-the-sky dreams? Is it just what will happen after the Second Coming, something we don’t have to worry about until then? Is this topsy-turvy world, the world turned upside down, the world that the Gospel proclaims—is this something we can work for on earth?

The psalmist puts it a little more straightforwardly. A righteous person is an ally to the poor, an enemy to the oppressor. The New Revised Standard Version translation maintains the parallelism in the second and fourth verses:

May he judge your people with righteousness,
and your poor with justice. (Psalm 72:2)

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, 
give deliverance to the needy,
and crush the oppressor. (Psalms 72:4)

To judge with righteousness simply means to defend the cause of the poor, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. Sure, there’s some community service here, in delivering the needy. But the overwhelming force of the point is that the righteous king, when judging between the causes of the rich and the poor, chooses the cause of the poor. Community organizing, the way we do it, is all about building an alliance between the cause of the poor and the values of the faithful. As the BCP psalter puts it, and as we’ve all just said, we have a commitment to “defend the needy among the people,” “rescue the poor,” and “crush the oppressor.”

At my site placement I’ve been working on a ballot-initiative campaign to raise the minimum wage and to allow all workers to earn sick time at work. Passing these questions would benefit one million of the poorest workers in the state. We needed 200,000 signatures to put them on the 2014 ballot. We gathered 285,000. People of faith working with MCAN collected 69,000, two or three times the number of the strongest labor unions or progressive political groups. This, today, is “the cause of the poor of the people.” And this is how we, as people of faith, have responded.

This is the conversion of life, the repentance, that I’ve experienced in these last three months. Tomas, you see, was right. When I graduated from college, I could have been making six or seven times what I’m making, working in a job with ten or twenty times the prestige. Working alongside poor and working-class people on poor and working-class issues, living simply in an intentional Christian community founded on faith, prayer, and real relationships—these are choices that come directly out of the calling I experienced from God to repent. Not to feel guilty; not to say “I’m sorry”; but to turn away from a life that wasn’t sustaining me, a life that wasn’t really living at all, and to turn toward the kingdom of God. “Repent,” says John the Baptist, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Repentance has never been easy. Conversion of life has never been easy. It’s never even been comprehensible. St. Cyprian, a third-century African bishop—a man who gave away his entire estate and inheritance over the course of his life to support the poor in his diocese—wrote this to a friend:

“How,” said I, “is such a conversion possible, that there should be a sudden and rapid divestment of all which, either innate in us has hardened in the corruption of our material nature, or acquired by us has become inveterate by long accustomed use? These things have become deeply and radically engrained within us. When does he learn thrift who has been used to liberal banquets and sumptuous feasts? And he who has been glittering in gold and purple, and has been celebrated for his costly attire, when does he reduce himself to ordinary and simple clothing? One who has felt the charm of the fasces and of civic honours shrinks from becoming a mere private and inglorious citizen.”1

Possession, power, prestige—these are things that have become “deeply and radically engrained” within us. We can’t simply decide to root them out and have them gone the next day. There’s no magical switch we can flip. Intentional community, more than anything, is a structure that supports each of us in our practice of eradicating our deeply and radically engrained dependence on privilege and wealth. Having a house, a place for that community to live together in this daily practice, has been so important, and such a blessing—and for that we thank you, again and again.

I’m certainly not perfect. I know for a fact that I never will be, this side of that second Advent, the Second Coming in Glory. It’s a good thing, really, that Advent comes every year—that every year we hear the call to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

And so I ask you, on this Second Sunday of Advent 2013, as we’re surrounded by advertisements for gifts, by news stories of people being beaten at Walmart over a good deal on a new Xbox, as we hear about strikes for fair wages at Walmart and McDonald’s, as we hear about activists turning in a stack of petition sheets for workers’ ballot issues a foot-and-a-half taller than a T-re—I ask you, what are you doing, individually, congregationally, and as a whole church, to repent? What are you doing to defend the cause of the poor? To deliver the needy? To crush the oppressor?

“μετανοειτε!” John the Baptist cries out. “Repent!” “Change your understanding!” “Change your life!”

Amen.

1 Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds. Fathers of the Third Century: Hippolytus, Cyprian, Caius, Novatian, Appendix. vol. V of The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Accordance electronic ed. (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1885), n.p.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

How to Stay Awake? A sermon for the first Sunday in Advent.



This sermon was given on the First Sunday in Advent (Year A) at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard by Emily Garcia, the Kellogg Fellow. The readings for the day are available here.

Good evening and Happy New Year! It’s the first day of our church year, and tonight begins a full year of the Gospel According to Matthew, a full year of stories we’ve heard before but we’ll hear again with different ears and different lives.

In Sunday school this morning we turned the arrow on our circular church calendar to the first purple square, the first day in Advent. During the lesson I told my littlest students that Advent is a time of waiting, when we get ready to enter the Mystery of Christmas. I said to them, “Let’s go with the Holy Family, the Shepherds, and the Magi, to make the journey that was not just back then. It’s happening now, too.”

This overlap or concurrence of time—past, present, and perpetuity—is central to the season of Advent. What happened then is still happening now is happening always, and we’re present to all of it. Advent has three main stories in the Bible that overlap, and the people or each story are waiting for Christ, the Messiah, in slightly different ways.

We hear the prophets, as they await the Messiah. (Tonight we heard Isaiah.) We hear John the Baptist and the Holy Family as they await the birth of Christ. (That’ll start next week.) And we hear Christ himself, and Paul, and John the Revelator as they predict and await the return of Christ in glory and majesty in the Second Coming, the end and new beginning of all creation.

In our readings, our prayers, our liturgy, we wait with all these voices for all these different things. In the drama of each true story we live and re-live that particular desire for God.  We wait, attentive, urgent, for when God will come—a powerful Messiah to save a people, a small child with a star overhead, the Son of Man crowned in glory.
When will God come? We’re waiting!

But in church, you know, we’re waiting for just less than a month. It’s a manageable little season, scented and festooned, a lyrical rush to and through celebrations of warmth and togetherness. In church, the dramatic waiting ends.

What might it mean to wait like this in the rest of our lives? or FOR the rest of our lives?

As you might know, many of the earliest Christians did in fact live their whole lives waiting for the Second Coming of Christ. This included the Apostle Paul himself, who wrote this letter to the Romans. Their expectations are dramatically staged in the words of Christ we heard: normal everyday life will continue as it always has, until suddenly, it won’t anymore. An act of God will surprise everyone, even the disciples and the angels in heaven. And so we should stay awake, attentive, even if it’s impossible for us to know what’s coming at the unexpected hour.

This piece of Paul’s letter though takes up this need for wakefulness and attention and shows us what it might look like. The first two sentences are thrilling: “And besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”

What does it mean to wake from sleep? “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

My very first reaction to this was to write in the margin, “St. Paul doesn’t want me to kiss my boyfriend.” It’s easy to read it that way; I could also say, Paul doesn’t want me to throw that party for my friends, or have that pastry for breakfast, or try on some fancy clothes, or learn more French swear words, or zone out in an adventure novel, or, yes, enjoy more than just the intellectual presence of the person I’m dating. I could say—and in fact, I have often said—Just another case of Paul being too far gone in intensity and extremity, Paul wanting us to stay as straight-laced as possible.

But of course it’s more complicated than that! Consider what Paul was asking and expecting of these earliest Christians—that they would be a persecuted minority, that they would live   waiting for something they didn’t understand, that they would completely change how they lived and thought and died in a time when that simply did not happen. That they would believe and act in a completely new, unwritten way. That they would live this new way discovering how it worked as they lived it, discovering each day how to be a Christian.
           
Of course drunkenness—and hangovers, for that matter—would make it hard to think clearly, to pay attention. Fighting amongst themselves wouldn’t help at all—that would be a big distraction. Soaking up the excessive and hard-heartedly sensual Roman culture wouldn’t reveal new aspects of God. And “desires” here is better translated “covetousness”—a serious need for anything that didn’t have to do with God : there simply wasn’t room for this in this final race to the Return of Christ amidst a cruel and confused culture.

Most of us might not find the imminent coming of Christ—which still might happen any day now—to be what makes life urgent. And most of us, people of privilege, don’t find our culture to be as aggressive towards Christianity as pagan Rome was. So what are we waiting for? What reason do we have, today, to be attentive, and urgent?

Well, there is still so much that only God can give us! And we still want and wait for what he gives. Only God gives us perfect love that drives out fear, rescue from all that seems to have power over us, and the grace to love others in the same way.

And so, we’re still waiting for something! We’re waiting what St. Bonaventure, founder of the Trappist order, called the middle advent. This part of the story is the coming of Christ “in spirit and power” into our own hearts. An invisible and hidden advent in our inner selves that has already happened to us and will continue happening. We never know when it will come, and we often miss it when it does, but it still happens—God continues to come into us and say true things, do true things to us, with us, in us.

And like the earliest Christians, there are things that distract us from this quiet middle advent of Christ.  Some, in fact, might be some of those things I mentioned somewhat sarcastically before: things like novels, pastries, kissing, clothes, et cetera. Am I reading so many novels in order to ignore what’s happening in me, in my life? Do I eat only in order to distract or comfort myself, when I might instead look for a real source of strength or comfort? Am I using physical intimacy or using another person, instead of enjoying it in the context of love and affection? Am I trying on fancy clothes as a way of winning the social game, being better than others? If I am enjoying these things in that way, then yes, actually, they might very well distract me from God’s voice in my life.

These are maybe small or silly examples. There are many things that can distract us from the attention and urgency of waiting for Christ. Is there something in our lives that takes up perhaps more attention than it should? Or that takes up attention without giving anything good or beautiful in return? What loud thing is getting in the way of God’s quiet voice? Right now, this week, what’s distracting us from hearing God?

Advent tells us to wake up from these things. The night is far gone and the day is near! Be ready! Be waiting! Pay attention!

You know, the downside of living this way is that we’re always waiting to be caught unaware. The upside is that we’re always waiting to be caught unaware! We’re always the prophets looking forward, always the shepherds about to be accosted by an angel, always Mary right before the Annunciation, always the disciple waiting to see God’s power and glory in the heavens. This middle advent is never over, and every day we get to wake up waiting for something to happen. Who will need our help today? What chances might we have to say a kind word that is dearly needed? What will God say to us?

Let us pray.
Almighty and eternal God, we’re waiting for you. We ask that you would so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated unto you, and then use us, we pray, as you would, always to your glory and the welfare of your people. Amen.