​24 December 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Christmas Eve
 
Those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined (Hebrews)
 
            As a season, Christmas is an odd time for the way it moves in two completely different directions at once. On one hand, it heads in the direction of fantasy and make-believe, with such beguiling characters as Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and all those others whose stories we enjoy so much in their telling.
            Yet on the other hand, in the nativity story we hear tonight, the Christmas season takes a turn in a completely different direction toward the hard, cold reality of life as it really is. If you pay close attention to all the details, you can’t escape the fact that the birth of Jesus and all the surrounding events are a story about poverty, political oppression, homelessness, genocide, migration, and deception. You can leave all that out, and focus on the happier parts like the angels and idyllic shepherds, but then you haven’t got the real story at all—at least, not in the way the Bible tells it. Just think of some of the details that usually get left on the cutting room floor of the Christmas narrative: the burden of taxation, the jealousy of Herod, the slaughter of the innocents, the flight into Egypt, Joseph’s fear of returning home.
            In December of 1940, as war was overtaking the continent of Europe, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote an Advent letter to his former seminary students, many of whom had already been conscripted to fight. “War,” he observed, “makes clear only in a particularly vivid and unconcealed form the true nature of the world. War isn’t the first thing to bring death, to reveal the sorrows and troubles of human bodies and souls, to unleash lies, unlawfulness, and violence. … But war makes all this which has already existed without it and before it, obvious to us all, however much we would still like to overlook it.”
            When I read those words recently, I was struck by how applicable they would be to our own circumstances right now, if we were to substitute the word “pandemic” for “war.” Let’s try it: “Pandemic makes clear only in a particularly vivid and unconcealed form the true nature of the world. Pandemic isn’t the first thing to bring death, to reveal the sorrows and troubles of human bodies and souls, to unleash lies, unlawfulness, and violence. … But pandemic makes all this which has already existed without it and before it, obvious to us all, however much we would still like to overlook it.”
This pandemic is not the first time human fragility and sorrow and conflict have existed, but we have certainly been made aware of them in these days in a particularly heightened way. Going back to the Christmas story, we are, you might say, more keenly aware this year of the real nature of the world into which Jesus was born, than we may have been in times past.
            So what did Bonhoeffer do with the darkness that he faced in those grim days of 1940? They turned him back to a verse in Ecclesiastes that I, for one, had never noticed before. It is a verse that comes just after that familiar section that reads, “For everything there is a season …” But then the text goes on: “That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.”
            It’s a dense verse, especially that last phrase, “God seeks out what has gone by.” In fact, the underlying Hebrew is hard to translate into English at all. The New English Bible renders the last phrase as “God summons each event back in its turn”; the King James Bible puts it as “God requireth that which is past”; or the Inclusive Bible offers “God calls the past back into existence.” In any case, Bonhoeffer took that phrase to mean that in the end, nothing of life is irretrievably lost—not to death, nor to suffering, nor to sorrow, nor to anything else that can afflict us.
            And that, for Bonhoeffer, as he was surveying a world crumbling all around him, was the meaning of Jesus’ birth: in him God places a hand on human life as it is, both its greatest beauty and its greatest suffering, and will not leave any part of it untouched by the mercy, acceptance and compassion that God extends to it. In Jesus, in other words, we discover that the life that concerns God, is this life. Not another one, but this one. Not life as it should be, but life as it is. There is simply no part of it that God will abandon.
And here’s the rub: the absolutely essential corollary to that discovery, is that the person whom God loves, is you. Not another, better version of you, but you, as you are. In Bonhoeffer’s exact words, at Christmas we receive the news that “God’s hand again rests upon the world and will no longer let it go!” And based on that conviction, Bonhoeffer further wrote, “This is what we do with the world that inflicts such suffering on us. We do not abandon it; we do not repudiate, despise or condemn it. Instead we call it back to God, we give it hope, we lay our hand upon it [as God has done] and say: May God’s blessing come upon you, may God renew you; be blessed, world created by God, you who belong to your Creator and Redeemer.”
That’s what makes it worth fighting for justice and freedom. It’s what makes it worth bearing the pains and disappointments that come our way. All of it belongs to God.
So the Christmas message is a complete and glorious “Yes!” to our human nature. Not that it doesn’t need to be reformed, renewed, and forgiven (we don’t have to belabor that point!)—but through Jesus we now know that we are valued and loved by the Holy One whose mercy working through us, has the power to accomplish all those things. To repeat: Jesus is none other than God’s “Yes” to us, to the world, and to our future in it. Amen.

​12 December 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
III Advent
 
“God has lifted up the lowly, and filled the hungry with good things.” (Luke 1)
 
            When Thurgood Marshall was a justice on the United States Supreme Court, he often chided his colleagues for basing decisions on what he termed “wishful thinking.” In City of Richmond vs. Croson, for instance, a case heard in 1989, the court declared unconstitutional a municipal ordinance setting aside 30 percent of public contracting dollars for companies owned by blacks or members of other minorities.
            In his dissenting opinion, Justice Marshall said that in reaching that conclusion, "a majority of this Court signals that it regards racial discrimination as largely a phenomenon of the past, and that government bodies need no longer preoccupy themselves with rectifying racial injustice." He added: "I, however, do not believe this nation is anywhere close to eradicating racial discrimination or its vestiges. In constitutionalizing its wishful thinking [there’s the phrase], the majority today does a grave disservice …."
            Wishful thinking, of course, is a fault to which we all fall prey. The dictionary definition of it is “the attribution of reality to what one wishes to be true, when in fact it is not.” In other words, wishful thinking is choosing to believe what is pleasing and reassuring, over and against what is true and difficult. The underlying thought pattern is, “I want something to be true, and therefore it is true.” So, for example, I might say something like, “Today is my birthday, so the weather is will be beautiful.” Well, it might be. It might not be. But there is nothing in the premise to justify the conclusion. That’s just wishful thinking.
            From a philosophical point of view, we might say that the problem with wishful thinking is that “ought” becomes “is.” Because we think that something ought to be true, we conclude that it is true. But because wishful thinking is not grounded in reality, it can just as well be that the “ought, is not.”
            And here, I think, we as people of faith bump up against a real problem. At the beginning of this service, we heard Jesus say that above all, we are to love God, and to love our neighbor. And we Christians like to think that this “ought,” is an “is”—that the world actually runs according to this foundational principle. But in fact it manifestly does not. Just read the newspaper or watch the news if you need proof of that.
            So what are we to do? Is the core of what Jesus taught really only a bad case of wishful thinking?
            To wrestle that question, I think we have first to become a bit more nuanced in our thinking. Jesus knew full well the gap between what he taught, and the reality of how we actually behave. His teaching, then, might best be thought of as a prescription for what is possible, rather than a description of what is the case. The “ought,” in other words, becomes the “could be” rather than the “is.” It could be that we human beings will be able to love God and neighbor—we were created with that capacity—but it is hard to do and takes a lifetime of effort to do so. Yet we have evidence that it is indeed possible in some measure: that’s why we give the title “saint” to those who offer us a glimpse of what living for the other might look like: Francis of Assisi. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Brother Roger of Taizé. Oscar Romero of San Salvador.
            What each of these figures represents to us is someone who was intensely realistic about the world, and then went about trying to live in solidarity with those who suffer because of it. Or to put it another way, they did not give in to the seductions of wishful thinking, but put their mind and heart to changing the world as they found it.
I read in the paper this week a story about a certain Rabbi Elliot Kukla, who once described a woman with a brain injury who would sometimes fall to the floor because of her infirmity. People around her would rush to get her back on her feet right away, wishfully thinking that she was perfectly alright, even before she was quite ready to get up. The woman told the Rabbi, “I think people rush to help me up because they are so uncomfortable with seeing an adult lying on the floor. But what I really need is for someone to get down on the ground with me.”[*]
What if we put it this way: religious faith is about getting down on the ground to share someone else’s reality, even when it isn’t our own. Maybe it’s helping an aged neighbor with the effects of old age. Maybe it’s helping a child struggling to learn. Maybe it’s consoling a spouse who has lost a partner. Maybe it’s learning what it’s like to be of another race, or ethnicity, or physical ability.
That’s how you transpose the ought/is fallacy of wishful thinking, into the ought/could be promise of social solidarity. It causes us to cross from thinking that what I wish to be true, is true—to embracing the fact that what I wish to be true, will require my best effort and fullest engagement to make it so.
During Advent, we contemplate how God has gotten down on the floor with us. In Jesus, yes, but also through those countless women and men who have themselves directed their life toward embracing the other. Nowhere is there a more powerful example of that than in the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe—a story in which none other than the Queen of Heaven identifies herself with the poorest and most suffering people of the world, our own sorrows in these difficult days included.
And here’s the thing: from down on the ground, is where hope rises. There—here—on the ground is where there is a possibility of rising up, of regaining one’s footing, as we together help one another up. Ironically, wishful thinking leads to only cynicism—the kind of anger that is so pervasive right now—because its expectations are inevitably disappointed, being grounded only in a mirage. But facing the world truthfully and honestly, getting down on the ground, can give us hope because we can then begin to spot the places where change is possible, and where our involvement can help bring it about. It is there that the “ought” can be transformed into the more hopeful, “it could be.” Amen.


[*] David Brooks, “What Do You Say to the Sufferer?” New York Times, 9 December 2021.

​5 December 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
2 Advent
 
Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight. (Luke 3)
 
            I would like to speak this morning on the topic of imagination.
            Now, imagination is a word that we often associate with something that is fanciful, or unreal. “She has quite an imagination,” we might say of a small child. Or we might speak of a child’s “imaginary friend.”
            And so we also associate imagination with creativity. We might for example say of an especially talented artist, “He does such imaginative work!”
            But despite all these associations between imagination and make believe on one hand, or artistic originality on the other, cognitively speaking imagination has a much more foundational function to fulfill in our lives.
            As David Brooks recently pointed out, it was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who thought that imagination is one of the foundations of all knowledge. Think of it this way: every waking second your brain is bombarded with a buzzing, blooming confusion of colors, shapes and movements. Imagination is the capacity to make associations among all these bits of information and to synthesize them into patterns and concepts. When you walk into church here, for instance, you hear music and see colored glass and see people moving in certain ways and making certain gestures—all of which your imaginative brain puts together into the unified concept of “church.” That is to say, your senses don’t just take in a world that is already presented to you as understandable. Rather, your brain takes in many bits of information that it has to interpret and synthesize into meaningful concepts. That’s the poetic function of imagination, without which the world would simply be an unintelligible barrage of sensations.
            So what, you may ask, has this to do with our reasons for being here in church this morning in the first place?
            Well, quite a lot, I think.
            Let’s go back to the two readings from scripture. In the first, we encountered Baruch, a scribe who worked with the prophet Jeremiah at a time when the people of Jerusalem had been taken into exile, and the city lay in ruins. Despite the hopelessness of the situation, Baruch is able to envision—dare I say, “imagine”?—a time when Jerusalem will put off its garments of sorrow and affliction, and put on instead the robes of righteousness and splendor that come only from God. Baruch takes what he sees, the devastation of Jerusalem, and puts it together in his mind with what he knows, the promises of God, and imagines a new and different future.
            Then in Luke, we have John the Baptist, preaching at a similarly desperate moment in Jerusalem’s history. Rather than its people being in exile, the city is now occupied, but its fortunes are just as low. And this time it is John who takes the reality of what he sees, and puts it together (using Baruch’s own words) with the promises of God to imaginatively foretell a coming salvation.
            In each of these cases—Baruch and John—imagination is the engine of hope, taking the hard facts of current reality and mixing them with the larger truths of God’s promised mercy and restoration to create a new vision and understanding for what the future will be.
            Wasn’t it Bobby Kennedy, who in that awful year of 1968 said, “Some [people] see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.” You might have heard the same words from either Baruch or John!
            Which brings us back to church here today. I want to suggest, that coming to church also requires an act of imagination. Sure, we can come into this place and appreciate what we see and hear; we can be comforted by the repetition of familiar words and phrases.
            But if we are to leave with any renewed sense of hope—and hope is what is most scarce in the clogged up supply chain right now—then we have to engage our imaginations to weave together an alternative vision. We have, in other words, to interrogate what we do here in church to put it all together, just as our brains have to make imaginative sense of every new sensation or experience.
            For example, one might ask, Why are we singing this song, and not another?
            Or, Why are we saying these words, instead of some others?
            How is today different from every other Sunday? What is it trying to say?
            And where is today’s service leading me?
            Or perhaps most importantly: How is what we do here today intended to feed my imagination?
            Do you know the Anne of Green Gables stories by Lucy Maud Montgomery? Anne was an orphan girl on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, who spent her whole life imagining things. She used her vivid imagination not only for the pleasure it gave her, but also as a tool to liberate her mind and heart, equipping her with the power to transform any situation or predicament in which she found herself into something positive, by imagining its potential.
            In one of her disquisitions on the importance of imagination, Anne enthusiastically says, “Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive—it's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination then, would there?”
            Well, our religious life is a place where there is plenty of scope for imagination—in fact without imagination, we would have no real religious life. Because religion is about using our mind to put together the things of this world—in all its beauty, but also in all its pain and disappointment—with a vision that all of this belongs at the same time to a larger reality, which is God. Everything we do and say here in church, especially in this season of Advent, hints at that larger reality, and it does so in a myriad of ways that is self-consciously not predictable or rote, but creatively intended to feed our imagination by its shades of variation.
            Strangely enough, the physicist Albert Einstein was a great enthusiast of the imagination. It was, after all, his imagining himself riding on a beam of light that led to his theory of relativity. So let me end by sharing with you several things he said about imagination:
            “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Einstein wrote, “for knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.”
            Or again, “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
            And finally, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” Baruch and John could not have agreed more. Amen.