​Advent 1, Year B
 
Looking With Advent Eyes
 
"But in those days, after that suffering...." What a way to start the new year! 
 
And yet as I look back on the calendar year almost over and the liturgical year just past,  I can feel this passage in my bones and in my breath--fires raging, people fleeing, clouds of toxic smoke circling the globe; habitats destroyed, species eliminated; almost 1.5 million of the world's citizens now dead from a disease we didn't even know existed a year ago--and here, in our country, over 100 people diagnosed with Covid every minute of the day.  Millions of our fellow citizens on unemployment while others watch their businesses teeter on the brink of collapse.  The New York Times tells us the world economy is in the worst shape it has been since the Great depression.  Though our political climate is less toxic now than it was a month ago, there are still deep divisions and seemingly unbridgeable rifts in our body politic. 
 
We know those days; we know that suffering--in our shared life and in our own lives as well.
 
All the losses--many of which we must grieve and mourn alone; that sense of being trapped; the Zoomgloom that those among us who now work or learn online experience on an almost daily basis; the mind-numbing drudgery of seemingly endless weeks of Blursdays;  the longings we feel--to hug our kids or our parents or our very best friend; for a pat on the arm or an arm draped around our shoulders; for laughter that doesn't sound like one hand clapping; for seeing the smiles
on people's faces.
 
We know those days and that suffering. 
 
But there's more to the story than those days and that suffering.  There's the fig tree.  And therein lies the promise made by and lived out through Jesus's own life--the good news of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.  The promise of the Son of Man gathering his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.  The promise of the reign of God come close--at the very gates.  Here. Now. 
 
What does that mean?  How can that be?  What does that have to do with you and me? In the here and the now?
 
There are those who hear this passage--this apocalyptic passage--from Mark as a statement about what happens at the end of time when all history has unfolded and all nature has run its course.  But is that really how God works--suffer now but at the end of time, if you are fortunate enough to be among God's elect, you'll be gathered into eternity and everything will be hunky dory.  And the rest of us--cast out into utter darkness.  That runs counter to all I know about the loving God who created you and me and all that is and was and that shall be.  God brings folks in from the utter darkness of their days and of our world.
 
We know that.  We know that from our very lives in this very moment:  the joy of a teenager grown into and growing more comfortable with the adult she is becoming; the relief even a slight change in the political climate brings; the delight of a hot meal with family outside on a cold afternoon thus easing the disappointment of a Thanksgiving alone; the gracious moments that punctuate this crazy time.  God drawing near.  Here.  Now.
You see, God's time is not linear.   God's time breaks into linear time--somewhat like that monolith found in the Utah desert.  Surprising.  Unexpected.  Seemingly inexplicable.  Causing folks to say "Huh?" or maybe "Wow".  God's time breaking into our ordinary and our darkest days.  God's time prompting our "Wow" or maybe our "Thanks".
 
"But about that day or hour no one knows...Beware, keep alert....And what I say to you I say to all:  keep awake."   For most of my life, I have read and heard those words--"Beware, keep alert,....keep awake" with a sense of foreboding and gloom."  But change it up just a little.  The Greek word--"blepo"--we translate as "beware, keep alert" has a slightly different meaning--more like "Be watchful.  Attune the eyes of your spirit.  Attune the eyes of your heart."  And the word we translate as "keep awake"--gregoreo--means "keep watch, be vigilant" but really more than that.  Gregoreo has a "don't just stand there, do something" component to it. 
 
It makes me wonder:  Could "Be aware", "keep alert", "keep awake" be an invitation--an invitation to look with Advent eyes at one another and the world we all share?  Eyes open to the deep needs and piercing wounds that mark the lives of those around us; eyes trained to see the delight and wonder that are a part of even the darkest of days; eyes alert to God's abiding grace lived out in the to and fro of life in and of God's creation. 
 
Yet looking with Advent eyes is but a part of this invitation.  There's so much more to it than simply seeing what's before our eyes, for we are asked to live Advent lives as well--in season and out--responding as Jesus does to the need and hurt that mark our most human lives--as we follow Jesus in healing the sick, feeding the hungry, turning over the tables of those who would exploit the most vulnerable among us, bringing hope to our broken world. 
 
Take out those Advent lenses; put them on; look out at the world we all share.  Then listen to the  one we follow urging us, "Don't just stand there, join in the work of God."
 
 
 
 

​22 November 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
The Reign of Christ
 
“And these will go away into eternal punishment,
but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matt. 25)
 
            In April of this year, at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, parishioner Anne Lane wrote a poem, called “The New Neverland.” It goes like this:
People I never see.
Places I never go.
Things I never do.
Truths I never hear.
Lies never corrected.
Clothes never worn.
Love never requited.
Kindness never extended.
Trips never taken.
Gifts never delivered.
Medicine never available.
Remedies never offered.
Illness never treated.
Misery never eased.
Joy Never shared.
 
Death always waiting.
            Liturgically speaking, we are today in the end times: celebrating the reign of Christ at the end of the church year, before we begin to tell the story of Jesus all over again next week on the First Sunday of Advent. And so it is a day when the theme of judgment runs through our lessons—especially the proverbial separation of the sheep from the goats in the 25th chapter of Matthew, the former to go into eternal life, but the latter into eternal punishment.
            Now, whenever I hear words in scripture that seem to draw such stark and even alarming contrasts, I’ve learned to suspect that something more is going on underneath the surface than we might at first think.
            Take the phrase, “eternal punishment.” At first, it conjures up images like Michelangelo’s painting of the last judgment in the Sistine Chapel: human figures wailing in terror and pain at the punishment inflicted upon them. And goodness knows there have been plenty of fire and brimstone sermons preached like that as well.
            But hold on. It turns out that “punishment” is not nearly so unambiguous a word as you might think.
            True, there is one kind of punishment which takes the form of violence inflicted as a form of revenge upon an enemy or a wrongdoer. But somehow, such retributive punishment doesn’t square in my mind with a God whom we otherwise know to be full of mercy and loving kindness. So there is another kind of punishment—the kind that is administered as a corrective, the kind that makes a teachable moment out of a mistake. It’s the kind of punishment a loving parent gives to a child, not by way of retribution, but by way of encouragement to be and to do better. “Go and tell your friend you’re sorry for what you said.” “Let’s see how we can fix what you have broken.” “Why don’t you take a time out?”
            And sure enough, when you go back to the original Greek text of Matthew 25, the word used by Jesus for “punishment” is kolasis, meaning corrective punishment, rather than timoria, which is the word for vengeance. And not only that, but the origin of the word kolasis is actually a gardening term, referring to the pruning of trees. It’s a taking away of what impedes growth and maturity. As the Greek philosopher Aristotle put it, kolasis is for the sake of the one who suffers it; timoria is for the sake of the one who inflicts it.
            Early Christian writers made a similar distinction between these two kinds of punisment. The second-century theologian Clement of Alexandria, for instance, wrote to the effect that “God does not punish (timoria), for such punishment is retaliation for evil. Rather God offers chastisement (kolasis), as children are chastised by their teacher.”
            So, if we plug that idea back into the “eternal punishment” at the end of Matthew 25, we get a rather different reading, don’t we? Instead of God exacting vengeance on those who have not shown compassion, it reads that God will intervene to correct and redirect them toward the good. Those who have already learned to show compassion, will enter into the “eternal life” that comes from having already discovered the true meaning and dignity of being human. For others—which really means most, if not all of us—well, we still have a ways to go.
 
            But what about the word “eternal” in the phrase, “eternal punishment”—is there no end to how much we have to learn, or how long it will take to learn it?
            Sorry, but to tease that out, we’ll we have to go back once again to the Greek. The word used there is “aionion,” which comes from the word aeon, or age (and from which we get the word “eon”). In the Judaic understanding of Jesus’ time, there were two such aeons: the current time of human failing and corruption, and the messianic time to come when God would intervene to set things right. The thing is, in Jesus these two ages begin to come together—as we heard in Thursday’s Morning Prayer reading from Luke, “the kingdom of God is within us.” This age, and the age to come, converge in Christ to become a part of who we already are in him.
            So eternal (aionion) does not just mean limitless time, but something more like the convergence in time of all things into union with God, even things which in this age seem to be incompatible—much like railroad tracks, that at our feet are parallel, but at the horizon come together in a point.
            The “eternal punishment” of God, then, is more properly understood as the corrective instruction given by God to us human beings so that we might gradually mature into the fullness of who we were created to be—or as Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians (from which we read today), to “mature personhood” which is the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”
            I began with a poem written back in April, “The New Neverland,” which was full of the disappointment and longing of the times we live in. But in July, Anne also wrote another poem, “The New Holyland,” which is full of hope and anticipation. The two poems, read together, strike me as a vivid illustration of this interweaving in Christ of both the current age and the age to come, of the eternal life for which we are destined and the eternal growth through which we come to it.
            The second poem goes like this:
 
People who care.
Places of peace.
Chances to learn.
Truths told.
Lies exposed.
Clothed in grace.
Love returned.
Kindness practiced.
Adventures ahead.
Gifts abounding.
Medicine healing.
Remedies working.
Illnesses cured.
Misery relieved.
Joy shared.
 
Life always celebrated.
 
Amen.

​Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
8 November 2020
 
 
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” (Mt. 5)
 
 
            As I said last week, I am going to do today something that I’ve never done before: repeat a sermon almost word for word from a week ago.
            My reason is simple: going into this election week, we as a Christian community needed to be reminded of the core values that shape who we are; and so now, coming off of the election a week later, we need to be reminded no less of exactly the same thing, now that we know the election’s outcome.
            As the hymn we heard a week ago put it (and which we will hear again as today’s offertory), God has work for us to do, and a lot of it!
 
            Four years ago, on the Sunday after the 2016 election, we were all a bit stunned by what had happened (however we might have voted individually). On that day, searching for something that might help to guide and reassure us, we read the Beatitudes as our affirmation of faith—the same text that shows up as last Sunday’s gospel, and which we have repeated today. At the time, we were anxious about what the future might bring, and we found in the Beatitudes some signposts for what we might do. In retrospect, we probably should have been much more worried than we were. Who could have imagined then a world and nation as out of joint as they are now, and yet also so full of renewed hope?
 
            So like many of you, over the last few months I worked myself up into quite a state as the election season progressed. And then one day, a friend said something that changed my attitude entirely: “I will not,” he said, “sell my soul to any particular outcome of the election.” (Repeat)
            A bit cryptic? Yes. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was absolutely right: we cannot let a transitory historical event such as an election alienate us from the core values by which we live—those convictions we return to over and over again in times of crisis or decision. Now that we know who won on election day, we as a faith community must still hold on to the substance of who we are and what we believe in, and put it into action.
 
            Hence, my invitation a few weeks ago for you to send in your own thoughts about what St. Michael’s core values are. Reading those messages has been quite inspiring—for they demonstrated what a deep, well-grounded faith there is in this congregation. What struck me most, is that the comments clustered together around common themes—there were no outliers, no strongly dissenting voices.
            Many of the reflections centered around the theme of the dignity of every human person: we are progressive, inclusive, and practice a radical acceptance shaped by a common respect for one another.
            Other reflections focused more on healing, compassion, and attention to the nurture of the individual.
            Still others had as their focus a commitment to spiritual maturity that brings hope, forgiveness (or letting go of what separates us from others), gratitude leading to generosity, a willingness to try new things, understanding and awareness, and a sense of beauty, awe and wonder that ends in tenderness. One person summed it all up by saying that St. Michael’s has an “atmosphere in which one can make a serious investigation of what it means to live a life informed by the spiritual.”
 
            If I were to try to draw a thread through all these comments, it would be that we as a community have a profound realism to our faith: there are no gimmicks in what we do; we try to grapple with the world as it really is, and all of its ambiguities and problems, and we also try to accept people as they really are as well, “to love all of us” as one person put it. We are a community nurtured by the example of actions, with a strong sense of civic moral duty, or as one person put it, “Love is an active verb” here, an attitude that allows us to welcome Jesus by welcoming the stranger.
            And our realism is not just practical; it also has a mystical, contemplative dimension—a “mystical realism,” if you will. It causes us to recognize that God is much bigger than we know, or can know, and that our spiritual life too is much bigger than organized religion. Our practices of faith include our church life, rather than the other way around.
            Which is all a way of saying that we try to be a place where people can hear God’s “yes” to them, where just to be a human being is sufficient to belong. As Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians, “All the promises of God find their Yes in Christ. That is why we utter Amen through him, to the glory of God” (2 Cor. 1:20).
 
            Which brings me back to the past week. Perhaps a way of responding to what has happened, would be to expand Jesus’ own beatitudes, by adding blessings appropriate for our own time. Working from our “core values,” what if we created a list that read something like this:
 
            Blessed are the healers, for they shall be healed.
            Blessed are those who welcome the stranger, for they shall receive Christ.
            Blessed are those who strive after decency, for they shall create trust.
            Blessed are the truth tellers, for they shall forge understanding.
            Blessed are those who listen, for they shall be given wisdom.
            Blessed are the compassionate, for they shall overcome division.
            Blessed are those who value the presence of the other,
                        for they shall come to truly know themselves.
            Blessed are the loving, for they shall find joy.
            Blessed are those who persevere in the struggle for what is right and just,
                        for they shall not be overcome.
 
As our offertory hymn in a few moments will put it,
            By praying through our doing, and singing though we fear,
            by trusting that the seed we sow will bring God’s harvest near:
            God’s will is done and ‘all things are made new.’
            God has work for us, work for us to do!
How much clearer that challenge seems now, than it did even a week ago! Amen.

​Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
All Saints Day
1 November 2020
 
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” (Mt. 5)
 
            I propose doing something here today that I’ve never done before: preaching a sermon that I fully intend to repeat again (with some adjustments)—next Sunday.
            My reason for doing so is simple: going into this election week, we as a Christian community need to be reminded of the core values that shape who we are; and then coming off of the election a week from now, we will need to be reminded again of exactly the same thing, regardless of the election’s outcome.
            As the hymn we heard a moment ago put it, God will have work for us to do, no matter what happens this week—and a lot of it!
 
            Four years ago, on the Sunday after the 2016 election, we were all a bit stunned by what had happened (however we might have voted individually). On that day, searching for something that might help to guide and reassure us, we read the Beatitudes as our affirmation of faith—the same text that shows up as today’s gospel. At the time, we were anxious about what the future might bring, and found in the Beatitudes some signposts for what we might do. In retrospect, we probably should have been much more worried than we were. Who could have imagined then a world and nation as out of joint as they are now?
 
            So like many of you, over the last few months I had worked myself up into quite a state as the election season progressed. And then one day, a friend said something that changed my attitude entirely: “I will not,” he said, “sell my soul to any particular outcome of the election.” (Repeat)
            A bit cryptic? Yes. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was absolutely right: we cannot let a transitory historical event such as an election alienate us from the core values by which we live—those convictions we return to over and over again in times of crisis or decision. Whoever wins on election day, we as a faith community must still hold on to the substance of who we are and what we believe in. (In that regard, I am reminded of a speech Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave on February 1, 1933, just two days after the election victory of the National Socialist party in Germany. The timing was actually coincidental—the speech had already been planned—but Bonhoeffer used it to resist the rise of an idolatrous form of nationalistic leadership by appealing to his own core conviction that lordship belongs solely to Christ.)
 
            Hence, my invitation a couple of weeks ago for you to send in your own thoughts about what St. Michael’s core values are. Reading those messages has been quite inspiring—for they demonstrated what a deep, well-grounded faith there is in this congregation. What struck me most, is that the comments clustered together around common themes—there were no outliers, no strongly dissenting voices.
            Many of the reflections centered around the theme of the dignity of every human person: we are progressive, inclusive, and practice a radical acceptance shaped by a common respect for one another.
            Other reflections focused more on healing, compassion, and attention to the nurture of the individual.
            Still others had as their focus a commitment to a spiritual maturity that brings hope, forgiveness (letting go of what separates us from others), gratitude leading to generosity, a willingness to try new things, and a sense of beauty, awe and wonder that ends in tenderness. Not surprisingly, people pointed to a holy respect for the Eucharist as the common denominator that binds us together. One person summed it all up by saying that St. Michael’s has an “atmosphere in which one can make a serious investigation of what it means to live a life informed by the spiritual.”
 
            If I were to try to draw a thread through all these comments, it would be that we as a community have a profound realism to our faith: there are no gimmicks in what we do; we try to grapple with the world as it really is, with all of its ambiguities and problems, and we also try to accept people as they really are as well, “to love all of us” as one person put it. We are a community nurtured by the example of actions, with a strong sense of civic moral duty, or as someone else put it, “Love is an active verb” here, an attitude that allows us to welcome Jesus by welcoming the stranger.
            And our realism is not just practical; it also has a mystical, contemplative dimension—a “mystical realism,” if you will. It causes us to recognize that God is much bigger than we know, or can know, and that our spiritual life too is much bigger than organized religion itself. You might say, that our practices of faith include our church life, rather than the other way around.
            Which is all a way of saying that we try to be a place where people can hear God’s “yes” to them, where just to be a human being is sufficient to belong. As Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians, “All the promises of God find their Yes in Christ. That is why we utter Amen through him, to the glory of God” (2 Cor. 1:20).
 
            Which brings me back to the coming week. Perhaps a way of approaching what is to come, would be to expand Jesus’ own beatitudes, by adding blessings appropriate for our own time. Working from our “core values,” what if we created a list that read something like this:
 
            Blessed are the healers, for they shall be healed.
            Blessed are those who welcome the stranger, for they shall receive Christ.
            Blessed are those who strive after decency, for they shall create trust.
            Blessed are those who listen, for they shall be given wisdom.
            Blessed are the truth tellers, for they shall forge understanding.
            Blessed are the compassionate, for they shall overcome division.
            Blessed are those who value and respect the dignity of the other,
                        for they shall learn to know themselves.
            Blessed are the loving, for they shall find joy.
            Blessed are those who persevere in the struggle for what is right and just,
                        for they shall not be overcome.
 
            And you might have other beatitudes of your own to add to this list. As our hymn put it a little while ago,
 
            By praying through our doing, and singing though we fear,
            by trusting that the seed we sow will bring God’s harvest near:
            God’s will is done and ‘all things are made new.’
            God has work for us, work for us to do!
 
And I’ll have much the same to say again next week. Amen.