ThisWeeksSermon, 1st Sunday After Christmas, Dec. 30

"But the church knows and remembers that it was that particular newborn, the original Christmas gift, seemingly inappropriate, useless, and impractical, a “partridge in a pear tree”, born out of wedlock, born in a cow stall. It was that particular newborn who grew up and became a man who taught a revolutionary ethic."

“Perfume and roller skates for Grandma?”
The First Sunday After Christmas Day, December 30, 2007

May I speak only the truth, and may only the truth be heard by you. In the name of God our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier. Amen.

You cannot live in this culture without experiencing how the air is let out of the holiday balloon on December 26.
The wise men will not arrive in Bethlehem until January 6th, but for most, Christmas is over.
But we know that today, it’s really just the Sixth Day of Christmas.
Most of the rest of the world was half-way through Christmas by noon on Christmas Day, but we’re just half-way through Christmas today.
It won’t be the 12th day, the final day of Christmas, until Saturday.
And then it’s the Feast of the Epiphany on Sunday, And our parish gift exchange on that day.
The 12 days of Christmas
“The 12 Days of Christmas” is one of my favorite Christmas songs, a song you won’t find in our hymnal, though.
I understand “The 12 Days of Christmas” was recently voted one of the most irritating Christmas songs, surprising for a classic that’s been around so long.
The date of the song’s first performance is unknown, but we know it was used in Scandinavian traditions as early as the 16th century.
It’s actually a children’s rhyme, a memory game, a “cumulative song”, …four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, ending up every time with a partridge in a pear tree.
Each verse is built on top of the previous verses, each describing a gift given by “my true love”, on one of the 12 days of Christmas.
I love the tune.
Doesn’t matter who sings it.
Alvin and the Chipmunks, Bing Crosby, even the Hawaiian version that starts and ends with a mynah bird in a papaya tree.
I love the whacko lyrics!
I love the list of incongruous, ludicrious, totally silly gifts.
A partridge in a pear tree?
What would you do with that!
Four calling birds, two turtle doves, seven maids a-milking?
Makes no sense.
It’s laughable.
But Halford Luccock, a former professor of New Testament1 at the Yale Divinity School said this:
Those silly gifts are precisely the beauty of the song.
He points to a certain wisdom in giving completely inappropriate and useless gifts at Christmastime.
His advice would be to give your true love exactly that, an impractical gift.
Give grandma perfume, or roller skates, not woolen mittens.
Give your 17-year-old an album of antique phonograph records, not a Best Buy gift card.
Give your husband a footall, instead of a necktie, your wife a book of paper dolls instead of a kitchen appliance.
“The best gifts of love,” he wrote, “are those that show a lovely lack of common sense.”
He’s a New Testament scholar, and he is simply being faithful to the New Testament text.
The original Christmas gift, according to the New Testament stories, was certainly impractical.
It was a baby, a baby born in a cow stall.
What people wanted was a king like David, a king who would unify the nation, rally the troops, drive out the Roman occupation, and reestablish the monarchy.
That’s what a messiah was supposed to do.
Make things right by defeating the enemy, establish a new order of things based on real power.
Instead, the gift was a baby.
So when the gift was given, nobody much noticed.
An unwanted gift
God’s gift of love was not what people wanted then.
For that matter, it’s not really what people want now either, for that matter.
We live in a world of conflict spilling over everywhere.
Civilizations are clashing.
Competing ideas about who God is, and about what God wants, these things are cause for assasinations, and for suicide bombings, even for all-out war.
Competing ideas about The Truth are a cause for conflict and a cause for alienation and estrangement.
It’s more comfortable to deal with a God who confirms our own ideas, a God who puts our opponents “in their right place.”
But that original gift was a baby, a baby who grew into manhood, who became the one who continues to challenge the world to think differently about who God is, and what God really wants.
Christmastide
Almost anyone can be touched emotionally by the birth of a baby, especially a baby who’s close to you.
Personally, I’ve been overwhelmed by the extent to which I’ve been touched by the birth of my first grandchild this month.
By the way, they let Amelia Jane go home with her mom and dad on Christmas Day.
And on January 10th, four days after the Feast of the Epiphany, Rob and I, bearing gifts, will take on the roles of those traveling “astrologers”, magi making a trek from New York City to the San Francisco “manger” of Amelia Jane.
Touched by the birth of a baby
Almost anyone can be touched by the birth of a baby.
But the church knows and remembers that it was that particular newborn, the original Christmas gift, seemingly inappropriate, useless, and impractical, a “partridge in a pear tree”, born out of wedlock, born in a cow stall.
It was that particular newborn who grew up and became a man who taught a revolutionary ethic.
It was an ethic of unconditional love.
It was an ethic of practical forgiveness.
He overturned cultural convention by welcoming the marginalized, welcoming the excluded.
The church remembers that this baby grew up and got into trouble with the authorities, got in trouble for living out his notion of what God’s kingdom looks like, a new social arrangement without all the old barriers and boundaries, an arrangement in which all are loved and welcomed at the banquet table.
The church remembers that the baby grew up, and that the grown-up baby challenged social convention by forgiving enemies, turning the other cheek, responding to violence not with violence, but with love.
The birth of that baby is a sign, for us, that God is alive and at work in the world.
You cannot live in this culture without experiencing how the air is let out of the holiday balloon on December 26.
The culture may drop Christmas like a hot potato, but not us.
For people of faith, Christmas is a beginning, not an end.
Prayer
Let us pray.
Eternal God, the Great Mystery that is outside everything and yet at the same time inside, keep alive in each one of us the search for a faith that is real, a faith that helps us to live happier lives, a faith that gives us a fuller meaning to life and the events of life. Bring us to know the goodness that flows from the heart of the universe and may we be expanded in heart and soul by that goodness.
This is our prayer. Amen.
Jerry Brooks
Saturday, December 29, 2007

ThisWeeksSermon, Christmas Eve, December 24th

“It’s Christmas, all over again.”
The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, December 25, 2007

May I speak only the truth, and may only the truth be heard by you. In the name of God our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier. Amen.

I bought a Christmas music CD last week.
The CD is called “It’s Christmas, of Course.” 
Twelve songs by Darlene Love.
She’s a couple of years younger than I am.
She’s been singing most of her life.
Began singing in churches out in California, I think.
And she’s closely associated with Christmas in New York City.
She does a Christmas show here every year.
She’s also been an annual guest on David Letterman’s program at Christmas as well.
The album I got is pretty cool!
Not the usual Christmas jingles.
This music has an intimate, live-blues-club feel.
Darlene Love’s voice is smooth and comes from a place deep inside.
There’s a spirituality that comes through.
She sings about war. She sings about peace. She sings about the true meaning of Christmas, about dreams coming true, about the way things ought to be. She sings about the manger, and the Prince of Peace. She sings her thanks for Christmas and for the love she feels. She sings the message: “Christmas Is the Time to Say ‘I Love you’.”
My favorite track is “It’s Christmas All Over Again.”
It’s upbeat. The music is catchy. And it captures a certain truth about this celebration that comes around every year, on the almost darkest night of the year, just when we need it most.
Christmas all over, again
It’s Christmas, all over again.
It comes earlier and earlier every year, it seems.
Even before Halloween we were seeing red and green M&M’s and cardboard Santa displays at the drug store.
We love Christmas.
We can’t wait for it to get here.
So we start early.
There’s something transformational about giving, about giving of ourselves and giving gifts.
For me, it actually changes the way I feel about myself.
The mid-November “Scrooge” that I always become transforms into a December 24th, generous “Santa Claus.”
It’s the decorations and the bright lights, and the Christmas tale of a magical birth, a wandering star, shepherds, angels splitting open the night skies to sing, and the birth of a “god-king” in a primitive stable.
It’s magical.
What about that miraculous birth?
The story we tell tonight, of Jesus’ miraculous birth, was one among many similar stories floating around in the ancient Mediterranean world that Jesus was born into.
There are stories in the Old Testament of unexpected births, births by women long long after years of infertility.
Outside the Bible, legendary heros and even actual kings have been frequently portrayed as the offspring of gods.
Greek mythology was full of such stories of miraculous births.
Romulus, the traditional founder of Rome, for example, was said to have had a divine father and a mortal mother.
Perseus was said to have been fathered by Zeus, the supreme god of Greek mythology.
In that world, it was how you explained an extraordinary individual’s exceptional impact in the world.
Suggest an extraordinary, exceptional birth.
It’s interesting to note that the apostle Paul, the earliest writer of our Christian scriptures, however, never even hinted at a miraculous birth tradition.
He never mentioned Jesus’ family of origin, except to say that like every other human being, Jesus was “born of a woman and descended from the house of David.”
Mark, the writer of the earliest of the gospels, begins his story of Jesus with Jesus’ baptism.
Doesn’t mention the birth at all.
The earliest telling of the tale didn’t show up in print for the first time, as one of our gospels, until 40 years after Jesus had lived among us.
According to Matthew, who wrote one of the two Christmas stories, Mary and Joseph were already living in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’ birth.
They later moved to Nazareth.
According to Luke, who wrote the other biblical Christmas story, Joseph and a very-pregnant Mary traveled 90 miles from their residence in Nazareth to get to Bethlehem, to be counted in the census.
John, writing much later, left the story of Jesus’ birth out entirely.
It wasn’t important.
On two occasions John simply refers to Jesus as “the son of Joseph.”
He apparently had little use for virgin birth tales.
He probably regarded them as pagan, which they were.
In spite of its less than unanimous acceptance, however, the Christmas nativity story caught on.
It’s captivating.
It’s so captivating that it has not only survived over the centuries, it has been embellished.
The camels in the nativity scene?
You won’t find any camels in the biblical stories of the wise men.
You won’t find a stable or any stable animals either.
The stories, simply, are beautiful, written “portraits”, portraits painted with words, painted with imagination by first century Jewish “artists.”
The Word of God?
As I was preparing this sermon, I was thinking about the folks who would be siting in our pews tonight, some of whom maybe only attend church once or twice a year, some of whom maybe have been staying away precisely because incredible stories like tonight’s have been presented as history, presented by preachers and teachers who lump together the myth with the history, the fantasy with the fact, the poetry with the honest Truth.
It’s all been lumped together and called “The Word of God” for a long time.
The narrative describing Jesus birth is simply this:
It’s an uplifting, inspirational, heartwarming tale of a homeless couple with a new baby, a story of shepherds and angels and wise men recognizing that a far-away God of the Universe had actually come among us.
The point of the Christmas story
The God who had previously only been experienced as holy and “out there somewhere”, intervening from time to time, now was revealed to be present in the heart of human life.
That’s why they said that angels sang.
That’s why the said a star appeared in an eastern sky as a sign of that birth.
That’s why wise men and shepherds were said to have journeyed from near and far to worship this moment of revelation.
The birth was a sign that the infinite could be known in the finite.
The birth was a sign that the eternal could be met in that which is transitory.
It was a sign that the divine and human could not be separated.
Christmas raises our consciousness about war, against the backdrop of a Prince of Peace.
It raises our consciousness about the way things ought to be.
Christmas is a manger.
Christmas is about dreams coming true.
Christmas is the time to say “I love you.”
It’s Christmas, all over again.
Comes around every year, on the almost darkest night of the year, just when we need it most.
Christmas is the moment of light that can shine in our darkness, a light can still call us all, searchers, seekers, holy people everywhere, a light that can call us all to Itself.
Prayer
Let us pray.
Eternal God, the Great Mystery that is outside everything and yet at the same time inside, keep alive in each one of us the search for a faith that is real, a faith that helps us to live happier lives, a faith that gives us a fuller meaning to life and the events of life. Bring us to know the goodness that flows from the heart of the universe and may we be expanded in heart and soul by that goodness.
This is our prayer. Amen.

Jerry Brooks

Christmas Eve, 2007

ThisWeeksSermon December 23d, the 4th Sunday in Advent

“A place where we are known by what we do, not by what we say.”
The 4th Sunday of Advent, December 23, 2007



While imprisoned by Herod, John sent his friends to ask
Jesus the ultimate question: “Are you the One?”
Are you the Messiah?, the one we’ve all been waiting for?
Jesus answered them by saying this:
Go and report to John what you hear and see:
The blind are able to see. The lame are able to walk. Lepers are cleansed. The deaf can hear. The dead are raised up. The poor are having some good news preached to them. The deeds of a person, they were told, speak more about that person than his or her words ever could.  That was Jesus’ answer, according to Matthew’s telling of the gospel. The deeds of a person speak more about that person than his or her words could ever speak.
Our deeds speak louder than our words.
I want to tell you, right about now, I am so incredibly proud to be a member of The Episcopal Church in Marlboro. It’s because of our deeds. We’re not just a religious cloister here, selling hats to on another, serving one another. We’re not detached from the world out there, introverted and self-absorbed. This little church is not an “island” here in the mid-Hudson region of New York State.
The outreach of this congregation is truly amazing. Every month we send a contribution to the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley. Our monthly contribution provides about $700 worth of food to alleviate the pain of hunger and to prevent food waste. This year we’re providing Christmas to two needy families in our community. We just offered our second annual nondenominational Taizé service to our community. We’re a part of Episcobuild, the Episcopal Habitat for Humanity effort in Newburgh. Our members are jumping at the chance to send AIDS orphans in Africa off to school, with breakfast, uniforms, and books, through the diocesan Carpenter’s Kids program. Right now we’re cooking dinner for Carrie Ross’s family here in Marlboro, until she gets back on her feet. Here’s what Carrie had to say in eMail she sent me last week:
I have to tell you this—my family has been humbled and totally overwhelmed every time we open the door and a package of food is being handed to us. And not just any old cans of beans either—people cook chickens, roasts, meatloaf, salad (with dressing!), lasagnas, chili etc. and often even include breads and homemade baked goods! One parishioner of yours even downloaded an article about my disease. Often the Lanzettas even thoughtfully include a vegetarian dish for me- waaaaaaaay above and beyond anything I would ever consider asking for. 
Rather than the junk that my kids have been eating since early summer, when I started feeling ill, they get to eat real food every night. Every night! And we always have leftovers as well. My husband [Jon] initially felt awkward and uncomfortable about accepting it—he is a giver and has never been good at receiving. But even he acknowledges that without this outpouring of generosity and kindness his children would be eating garbage. After the Lanzettas hand us a box of food, Jon and I just stare at each other, slack-jawed, smiling uncomfortably. What can I do to thank you guys? Should I write something? [She’s a reporter for the Post Pioneer, you know.] Can I donate something? What can I do to give back? I think people should know how special and incredible your congregation is. Thank you so much for this. We are so grateful. Thank you so much.
The deeds of a people speak louder than the people’s words, don’t they!
Getting ready for the annual “commitment Sunday”
We’re in the process of preparing the parish budget for 2008. We pretty much know how to anticipate normal expenses. The missing piece is the income number. This morning we’ll distribute some statistical information along with pledge cards. It’s the annual opportunity for each of us to express our commitment, to one another, to our neighbors on this planet, both near and far, and to express our commitment to our God, the Ultimate Meaning we find in our lives.
Talking about money in church ruffles the feathers of some. It’s pretty much a hot button. Personally, I don’t quite get it. In our denomination, there’s no pressure. We only pass the plate once on a Sunday, never twice. Opportunities for reaching out come up from time to time, but responding to those opportunities is purely voluntary. It’s just this once a year that we ask for evidence of a commitment, a number we can use for budgeting purposes, a number we can use for planning programs and activities and education and outreach, a number to show to people in other churches around the diocese who support us financially, to demonstrate that we’re doing our part. Every other nonprofit organization has to do this very same thing, ask for money. Only most of them are doing it year-around. We do it just once a year.
I’m talking about money in church today because I want to, because I think it’s important, and because I’m supposed to. When you all filled out the questionnaire this past year, the questionnaire that came from the Congregational Support Plan, the people who continue to help us pay our bills, you were asked a number of questions. One of them was “Has the concept of proportional giving been mentioned in church?”, something they consider to be essential. Many of you answered, “Yes”, that “proportional giving” had been mentioned in church. But it hasn’t! At least not by me. I’ve never mentioned it. But get ready. I’m making up for that omission. I’m going to mention it now.
Proportional giving
The idea of proportional giving is this.
The Bible states a specific obligation to “tithe”, to give back to God one-tenth of what we have received from God. One-tenth! Ten percent! The Biblical tradition set the bar very high, too high for most of us to think about. When considering how much to pledge, however, I would encourage you not to think first about an amount you will commit to the life and work of your parish, but instead to think about what percentage of your income you will commit to the life and work of your parish.
Consider promising to give two percent each year, or maybe three. The average pledge to churches nationally is 2.6 percent of income, and maybe that's a good place to start.
The important thing is that the Biblical notion of proportionality is the ultimately fair way of giving.
You commit and give in proportion to what you have or what you make. There's no hidden standard. There’s no "dues" structure. A senior citizen living on a fixed, modest income who gives 5% is a way more faithful giver than the rich man who dashes off a check for $10,000. Sound familiar? Of course it does. It sounds just like Jesus. In the 21st chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus looks up and sees rich people dropping offerings in the collection plate. Then he sees a poor widow put in two pennies. “The plain truth”, he says, “is that this widow has given by far the largest offering. All these others made offerings that they’ll never miss. She gave extravagantly what she couldn’t afford.” Jesus was suggesting proportional giving.
Who we are
At this church, Everyone is important. Absolutely everyone. It doesn’t matter how much work you do around here. It doesn’t matter how much you contribute financially. Everyone is included. Absolutely everyone. It’s a core value of ours. It’s a guiding principle of our congregation. It’s maybe the most fundamental reason for our existence. We wish that everyone might know the peace that we know, feel accepted as we feel accepted, and experience a spiritual wholeness and oneness with the Universe.
Our ambitious, long-term plan, if you’ll allow me to articulate it, would be for us to become the “gem of Marlboro”, a stunning, elegant place, a place that reflects God’s beauty, in its buildings, and in its membership, a place and a people that reflect God’s creativity, a place that is known by what is done here rather than by what is said.
While imprisoned by Herod, John sent his friends to ask Jesus the ultimate question: “Are you the One?” Jesus didn’t answer with a “yes” or a “no.” He answered by saying, The deeds of a person speak more about that person than his or her words ever could.
Jerry Brooks
The 4th Sunday of Advent, December 23, 2007

ThisWeeksSermon December 9 The 2nd Sunday in Advent

“Peace in a world of war.”
The 2nd Sunday of Advent, December 9, 2007

Let us pray.
May I speak only the truth, and may only the truth be heard by you. In the name of God our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier. Amen.

Christmas at war
My earliest Christmas memories are actually from a time of war, the Second World War.
I must’ve been about three years old when the United States entered that war.
I remember ration books and ration stamps and little reddish-orange ration “tokens.”
Those stamps and tokens were used to control the purchase of food and other necessities that were in short supply:
sugar, butter and meat, rubber tires and gasoline, and just about anything made of steel.
Mostly what I remember is Christmas with cardboard toys.
Previously, most toys had been made from metal.
Plastic hadn’t been invented, I don’t think, and all metal was being diverted from nonessential uses.
Metal was being diverted to the “war effort.”
On one of those wartime Christmases, I was given a cardboard gas station with wooden cars that had wooden wheels.
On another cardboard Christmas, it was a cardboard circus tableau.
Cardboard circus tents, and cardboard animals that stood on wooden bases.
In later years, I learned about the painstaking ordeal it had been to assemble “the cardboard circus.”
I learned that my parents stayed up most of the night on that Christmas Eve.
So my earliest Christmas memories were of Christmas during wartime, the Second World War.
A few years later, 1950 to 1953, it was Christmas during The Korean War, then the Lebanon crisis in 1958, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the Dominican Intervention in 1965
and the unending Vietnam War, 1965 to 1974.
Then, on to Grenada, Beirut, Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Liberia, and now Iraq, another seemingly unending war.

A world at war.
Always, from the beginnings of history, a world at war.
The prophet Isaiah
This morning’s words from the prophet Isaiah are so welcome.
Seems even more so these days, when the world and the climate and the economy seem to be especially out of control.
Isaiah had made a prediction.
Another king would be on his way, a king who’s smart and understanding, a king who will stick up for the poor and the meek, and rid the world of evil.
The king will be righteous and faithful.
And not only that:
The wolf will live with the lamb.
The leopard will lie down with the goat.
The calf and the lion together.
The cow and the bear grazing, their young lying down together.
It’s a remarkable vision of a peaceful world, a just world, over which this Messiah king would reign.
It’s not like weather forecasting
Prophesying is nothing like predicting the weather.
Accu-Weather it’s not.
There’s no such thing as “Accu-Prophesying.”
And if Jesus truly was the hoped-for Messiah, then Isaiah got it all wrong, his vision of a return to a Garden of Eden and a world of peace and justice has not come true.
Personally, I do think of Jesus as the hoped-for Messiah, and I love the images presented by Isaiah, but that peace that the messiah offers, I believe, is a different kind of peace on earth.
A different kind of peace
Following that first Easter, after Jesus’ gruesome execution, his friends knew he had died, but they also knew that somehow he was still with them.
Somehow, Jesus had strangely fulfilled that remarkable vision of a peaceful and a just world.
Early Christian writers looked back at the life of Jesus.
They recalled what he had said.
They remembered what he had done.
They remembered how he had lived out his life.
Jesus had offfered, Jesus had shown, a new Way of Living in this world, in a different dimension.
Jesus offered the possibility of life in a heavenly dimension of peace and justice.
Jesus offered a peace that comes within the souls of people when they realize their oneness with the Universe.
It’s a state of consciousness in which everything is the same, life is the same as death, land is the same as the sea, day is the same as night.
To achieve that state of consciousness, what you have to do is let go of your Self, forget all your troubles.
Think of yourself as nothing, and totally forget yourself as you pray, or meditate, or simply sit in silence.
Just remember that you are hoping to experience the Divine Presence.
Sometimes that state of consciousness just “happens”, all on its own, the experience of disappearing into a Universe of Peace.
But it can also happen unexpectedly.
It can happen in a moment of grief.
It can happen in the midst of a wedding, when married couples are asked to remember the vows they made to one another at their own weddings.
It can even happen at an emotional moment during a movie in a darkened theater, or even in your own living room.
It can happen at the birth of a child.

Amelia Jane is born
Yesterday morning I went to my computer at about 7 o’clock to check my eMail.
Found a message from José, my son-in-law, sent half an hour earlier.
The subject line was this:
Jenn is delivering the baby.
The message simply read:
Will call you once all is done.
Got the call one hour and two minutes later, 8:02 a.m.
Amelia Jane Quiñonez Brooks had let out her first yelp.
She’s breathing on her own, in spite of the fact that she’s five weeks early.
She weighs 3 pounds and 12 ounces, and she’s 17 inches tall.
I went right out to Hannaford and bought her a birthday card, on the day of her birth, of course.
“It’s a Miracle” is what the card said on the outside.
Inside, I wrote a note welcoming her to “our world.”
Signed it from the two “grandpa’s.”
Handed it to the mailman, explaining how important that piece of mail was.
He agreed to give it special consideration.
As I was talking with that mailman, tears flooded my eyes.
Believe me, I know the peace that Isaiah was describing.

A different kind of peace.
Yesterday, the wolf was lying with the lamb.
The warring goes on and on out there, but in here, in my heart, it’s a Garden of Eden, a peaceful world of justice, in which everything is the same, life is the same as death, land is the same as the sea, day is the same as night, oneness with the Universe, not a “cardboard Christmas” by any means.

Prayer

Let us pray.
Eternal God, the Great Mystery that is outside everything and yet at the same time inside, keep alive in each one of us the search for a faith that is real, a faith that helps us to live happier lives, a faith that gives us a fuller meaning to life and the events of life. Bring us to know the goodness that flows from the heart of the universe and may we be expanded in heart and soul by that goodness.
This is our prayer. Amen.

Jerry Brooks
The 1st Sunday of Advent, December 2, 2007

AUDIOVERSION: http://www.episcopalmarlboro.org/Uploads/20071209ThisWeeksSermon.mov

December 2 - ThisWeeksSermon

“It’s about not knowing.”
The 1st Sunday of Advent, December 2, 2007
AUDIOVERSION:http://www.episcopalmarlboro.org/Uploads/20071202ThisWeeksSermon.mov
My daughter has been in the hospital, you know.
Watching and waiting for the baby, waiting for obstetricians to declare that the optimal moment has finally arrived for bringing our immediate family’s first grandchild into the world.
I told Jennifer that I rather enjoyed at least one thing about all this waiting:
At least when I call her, she’s there.
She answers.
That’s quite a new experience for me.
She’s always in a meeting, or on the road, or on the phone.
I leave a message, and she calls back when she gets time.
But now that she’s “tethered” to her bed, so to speak, I call and I get an answer, usually.
Tuesday morning I called Jennifer from Grand Central Station.
No answer.
Figured she was in the bathroom or something.
Tuesday afternoon, from Grand Central Station, I called again.
No answer.
Couldn’t imagine what was going on.
Again, I told myself it was just a coincidence that she’s in the bathroom every time I call.
When I got home, I called again.
Still no answer.
Then I called José, my son-in-law.
He hadn’t been able to reach her either.
First time he called, he said, the line was busy.
Later, there was no answer.
He said he’d track her down for me, for us!
I sat next to the phone, watching and waiting.
Imagining all sorts of things, imagining an emergency, imagining it was such an emergency that she’d been rushed from her room so quickly that no one had time even to call José.
What could be going on, I wondered, as more and more anxiety welled up inside me.
All was well
Of course all was well.
Not long after talking with José, Jennifer called me, herself.
She had been “entertaining” a string of visitors that afternoon, and she thought it would be rude to take phone calls while they were there, so she was ignoring the phone, ignoring me.
(I don’t think she’ll do that again.)
As I speak here this morning, Jennifer’s undoubtedly sitting there in her hospital bed, at the Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley California, still watching and waiting.
There’s a little test they can do to determine how developed the baby’s lungs are.
They ran that test Thursday.
The baby wasn’t ready.
They’ll test again tomorrow.
Meanwhile, we’re all “watching and waiting.”
The beginning of advent
Seems appropriate on this first Sunday in Advent.
It’s what the experience of Advent is supposed to be about.
“Watching and waiting.”
In Advent, we’re expected to re-experience the anticipation that something wonderful is about to happen.
we’re not sure exactly what will happen, or exactly when it will happen, or exactly how it will happen, but in the season of Advent, we are to know, somehow, that something wonderful is just beyond, readying itself for a miraculous entry into our world.
The Church’s New Year’s Day
Today’s not only the first Sunday in Advent.
It’s also the first day of the new year for the Church.
Every year at this time, everything starts over.
We just finished Year C in the lectionary cycle.
Today is the first Sunday following the lectionary for Year A, where we’ll be reading primarily from Matthew’s version of the gospel story.
And today it was a strange prediction of a time when Christ would come to establish a reign of God in the world, a prediction of a day when, apparently, not every person, but every other person, would be unexpectedly “taken.”
Two men will be working in the field—one will be taken, one left behind; two women will be grinding at the mill—one will be taken, one left behind.
Unexpectedly.
No warning.
Some people read this prediction and take it quite literally.
You’ve probably seen a bumper sticker or two:
Warning. In case of rapture this car will be unmanned.
It’s a warning to nonbelievers.
Or this:
After the rapture, can I have your car?
A response to that warning by those who don’t take the prediction literally.
I don’t it literally either.
I don’t think there will be any kind of “second coming” resembling the scene described by Matthew.
Scholars will tell you that these warnings are not thought to be words of Jesus, although attributed to him.
It was out of poverty and hopelessness that the Jews began to dream of God’s restoration, and envision exactly what might take place at the end of history when God’s kingdom would finally be established.
It was poverty and hopelessness that fed the yearning for a messiah who would come, reestablish a Jewish nation, restore a Jewish throne, and usher in a new Kingdom of God.
They found comfort and hope in apocalyptic fantasies that anticipated the end of the world.
The promised one, they said, would descend out of the sky at the end of time, and usher in a new age of peace.
Many definitions of the messiah floated around in Jewish circles.
He would be the son of David and heir to David’s throne, some said.
He could be the new Moses or the new Elijah, others guessed.
He would be the “Son of Man”, even the Son of God.
All of the apocalyptic language is mythological language, language expressing hope not bound by the pain of this world.
It was never meant to be literalized.
Literalizing those myths has actually falsified the Christ experience so extensively that it’s actually difficult for many, many contemporary people to relate to Christianity at all, difficult for many even to call themselves “Christian.”
The end of the world?
When will the world end?
When will God-in-Christ return?
When will God act?
What will happen in the future?
No one can know the answer to these questions.
More than anything else, this passage from Matthew is not about knowing.
It’s about not knowing.
Theologian Paul Tillich said that the most painful human reality is that we don’t know.
Yet, at the same time, we must choose.
And our most informed choice is never more than an educated guess.
The future remains mystery until it’s happened.
The experience of Advent
This is what the experience of Advent is supposed to be about.
“Watching and waiting.”
Hoping without knowing.
Anticipation that something wonderful is about to happen.
We’re not sure exactly what will happen, or exactly when it will happen, or exactly how it will happen, but something wonderful is beyond, readying itself, maybe it’s just a baby, readying itself for a miraculous entry into our world.
What will happen in the future?
More than anything else, probably, this morning’s passage from Matthew’s gospel is about not knowing, about trusting, about simply watching and waiting.
Jerry Brooks
The 1st Sunday of Advent, December 2, 2007