I have offered music posts most every Advent that I have been writing, so I thought I would keep up the tradition here in the middle of the season. These are not Christmas songs, or specifically Advent songs, but they are songs that speak to me in these days, songs that offer cold comfort. Most of them are new to me, since I went looking for them rather than counting on old favorites. The one exception is the first one, “That Kind of Love” by Pierce Pettis.
love rejected and ignored held in chains, behind closed doors stuff of legend and of songs and deep down everybody longs for that kind of love oh, that kind of love
some people never know that kind of love though it only takes a child to show that kind of love widows smile and strong men weep, and little ones play at its feet the deaf can hear and the blind can see that kind of love
Most all of these songs talk about what love looks like, or what it takes to love. Any Gullahorn titled his song, “If You Want to Love Someone” and he says,
in every heart there is a hollow locked against the pain if there’s a key the key is sorrow only a trusted hand can hold
if you wanna love someone search their soul for where it’s broken find the cracks and pour your heart in if you wanna love someone
Ilse DeLange is a new name to me. She puts hands and feet to love in “I’ll Hold On,” her way of saying what love looks like.
on and on, I go down the beaten path with all the things I know and all the things I have
I’m walking, always walking back to you, my friend with a song inside and them tears to hide I’m on my way again I’ll hold on I’ll hold on
Glen Hansard has a habit of intertwining hope and heartache in his songs. “Cold Comfort” is a wonderful example; it also supplied the title for this collection.
the streets are quiet but for the sound of birdsong there’s no rush upon us now well, it’s slow going and it’s slower still here but we’ll get through if we pull together now
and it’s little comfort, I know but it’s raining down on everybody now and the worst is over and it’s little comfort, I know but it’s raining all over the world right now and it’s little comfort, I know but the worst will soon be over
Tyrone Wells is going to close out the post with his song “And the Birds Sing,” a song that will worm its way into your heart and your ear, reminding you that love lifts us all.
the poor man and the millionaire both sharing the oak tree shade not stressing over money made
the preacher and the atheist both jumping in the ocean waves today they both feel saved
say what you gonna do when the clouds come you gonna hold your head high say what you gonna do when the storms come keep your eyes to the sky, and I’ll tell you why
cause one day… the sunshine will shine again shine all over the world on every man, woman, boy and girl
These days are still growing shorter and colder, but listen for the birds and remember we’ll get through if we pull together.
For about twenty-five Advent seasons, I opened the services at our church (whichever church that was) with “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” from Godspell. That tradition didn’t make the move to Guilford, but the song is tattooed on my heart. The scripture passage for my sermon today alludes to Isaiah’s words, and it connected me with my youth in Kenya. (And yes, the video of the song is at the end of the sermon.)
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As I told you last week, I grew up in Africa. Part of that time, I lived in Nairobi, Kenya. I think about living there often, for different reasons. This week my memories were sparked by Luke quoting Isaiah’s words about mountains being leveled and valleys being filled in because one of the great geological sights in Kenya is the Great Rift Valley. Actually, it runs from the Red Sea down into Malawi.
The sides of the valley are steep because it was caused by a fault, so it looks like the whole middle section just dropped hundreds of feet. As I read more about it, I learned the term Great Rift Valley is used to refer to a series of contiguous rifts that connect from Lebanon to Mozambique, one of which includes the Jordan River, which means the valley I saw in Africa was connected to the valley where Isaiah and John the Baptist both stood.
Listen to our passage from Luke 3:1-6.
In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, Philip his brother tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene. In those days, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the Word of God came to John, ben-Zechariah, in the desert. John went through the entire region of the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as is written in the words of Isaiah, the prophet:
“A herald’s voice in the desert, crying, ‘Make ready the way of our God; clear a straight path. Every valley will be filled, and every mountain and hill will be leveled. The twisted paths will be made straight, and the rough road smooth— and all humankind will see the salvation of God.’”
We read this passage during Advent because it talks about John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus. If you know the musical Godspell, you know the musical opens with John the Baptist singing, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” For many years in the churches where my wife served, I sang that song to open our Advent services. But John never says or sings that. In fact, if we look closely at the passage, all Luke says about John is that he was preaching a gospel of repentance and forgiveness. The rest of the verses talk about who was in power at the time and then he quotes Isaiah—well, sort of quotes him.
I spent some time thinking about road work this week and then it struck me that Luke starts off by listing all the people in power, both politically and religiously and ends up focusing on a prophet ranting in the wilderness–a voice on the margins calling people to repentance and forgiveness. He says that John’s presence reminded people of a passage from Isaiah that people were used to hearing at the synagogue.
If we go back to the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah calls people to make a highway for God. The image is one of serious road construction, which often means the topography has to be changed to make the road viable.
One time Ginger and I were in the car together and we survived the slow snake of trafficcaused by highway construction. When we saw the “End Road Work” sign that set us free I remarked, “I think that ought to be a protest sign.”
We all want better highways and bridges, but if you have ever been stuck on I-95 because they are working on it, you know that any improvements in our infrastructure will come at a cost. Building and rebuilding are time consuming and inconvenient. Often to build means first something has to be torn down or torn out to prepare for what is to come, and then, as I said, it takes time to build the new thing.
The visual Isaiah created makes it sound like the world God wants looks a lot like West Texas, which is not appealing to me. West Texas looks like land that inspired people to build things like tables and countertops. It is flat and flat and endless and flat. The stars at night look big and bright because there is nothing else to see. Can you tell it’s not my favorite place.
But Luke isn’t just quoting Isaiah, he is paraphrasing him. Where the ancient prophet talked about a highway, Luke talked about a path when he said John was embodying Isaiah’s words. But I don’t think Luke intended for his readers to get caught up in trying to picture the epic landscaping project Isaiah proclaims. John wasn’t quoting Isaiah either. Isaiah is mentioned because Luke wanted us to get a picture of what it felt like when people living in Palestine under the mountain of oppression brought on by the names listed wandered to the outskirts of town and found John the Baptist in all his strangeness.
Luke says, when they saw John they thought, “Hey, this is like that verse about a voice crying in the wilderness.” They heard the passage often in the synagogue, but they had not imagined the live action version of it–except John wasn’t saying anything about mountains or valleys. He was preaching was repentance and forgiveness. If what prophets were supposed to talk about was the mountains coming down and the valleys being filled in, John was calling people to do it with a shovel, not large earth moving equipment.
Hold that thought and let’s go back to the Great Rift Valley because sometimes words build bridges that help us get from one place to another. As I was reading about it, I came across this sentence:
“While the name continues in some usages, it is rarely used in geology as it is considered an imprecise merging of separate though related rift and fault systems.”
Rifts and faults—words we use to talk about broken relationships. And the brought me back to the one sentence Luke says about John:
John went through the entire region of the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins . . .
In a world where those in power used their privilege to oppress others, in a world where prophets had been crying out for centuries for people to trust that God could change the landscape if they would listen, in a world where people were just trying to figure out how to get through a day, John wandered the country preaching about repentance and forgiveness.
The word we translate as repentance has a stronger meaning, more along the lines of conversion–a turning, a new direction. It is deeper than changing our minds or feeling regret over something we have done. It is choosing to go in a new direction, to do things differently, to tear down what is there and build something new.
The Greek word we translate as forgiveness can also mean being freed from bondage, which is interesting to me when I think about the power of both asking for and offering forgiveness.
Both words call us to profound change. Perhaps knocking down a mountain is not a bad metaphor, and it’s an even better when we are willing to consider the rifts and faults in our own hearts. We can profoundly alter the landscape of our lives if we are willing to risk repentance and forgiveness. The straightest path from one heart to another, from one person to another, is the most direct one.
When we choose to trust one another with difficult conversations rather than gossip or talk around one another, we prepare the way of the Lord. When we choose to assume positive intent when someone does something that angers or hurts us rather than reacting without offering room for conversation, we prepare the way of the Lord. When we choose to forgive rather than allow resentment to build a mountain in our hearts, we prepare the way of the Lord.
Isaiah had been dead a long time when John showed up. His transformative words had become familiar things that you heard in synagogue. John the Baptist has been dead a long time, too, and we mostly think about him during Advent as we talk about preparing for the birth of Jesus. Their words, however, are more than decorations. They show us how to love one another.
Prepare the way of the Lord. John may not have ever said those words, but it is exactly what he called us to do. Amen.
Stephen Sondheim died last week, as you probably know.
His death last week affected me in several ways, not the least of which was taking me back to an afternoon in the Spring of 1988 when my friend Billy Crockett and I wandered up to the TKTS booth in Times Square and scored two half-price tickets to Into the Woods. I will confess I knew very little about Sondheim and nothing about that particular show. Billy was the one who suggested it. I can out of the theater changed by that one evening. From there, I began to learn more about Sondheim and his amazing body of work.
What I learned this morning, thanks to this article in the New York Times, was that for all of his composing and lyric writing, he spent a great deal of time encouraging: showing up for other people’s shows, and then writing notes of support afterwards. Laura Collins-Hughes writes,
To a legion of fans Sondheim was and is the be-all and end-all. But his own horizons as a theatergoer were significantly broader than that. In an art form that is so much about being present for the unrepeatable moment, he not only showed up, but he also often did so to experience work that was offbeat and obscure, challenging conventions just as his own work did.
The phrase in the middle of the paragraph is what caught my eye:
In an art form that is so much about being present for the unrepeatable moment . . .
She was talking about theater, but I read her words and thought, “That’s life: being present for the unrepeatable moment,” because we live days filled with them, rolling by one after another. Much like an actor who must inhabit a character to be convincing, we are called to be awake and aware in our existence because so much of it is made up of you-had-to-be-there moments. Even the things we repeat day after day are not the same from one day to the next. Perhaps the biggest difference between a life and a theatrical production is that life offers no chance to rehearse. We can remember, regret, redo, or even repent, but there is no practice life; this is it.
If we are not intentional, all that I just said can lead us to think the point is our performance. We are better at life when we remember that’s not the only point. Back to Sondheim:
It was part of Sondheim’s gift to understand not only the encompassing job description of great artist but also his singular effect on his colleagues—how even a few words of appreciation, or moments of attention, could prove enduring sustenance over the long slog of a career in an often pitiless field.
It was unglamorous work, and Sondheim did it exquisitely.
My father carried a story with him from his days as president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. After one of the conventions, he received a letter from a young pastor who said he had tried to engage Dad after one of the sessions and really needed to talk to him, but just as he got my father’s attention someone Dad knew better came up and my father turned away and never turned back to the man. “I needed your help that day,” the man wrote, “and you turned away because someone you knew better or who mattered more got your attention. I am writing in hopes that my letter will help you do differently next time.”
What the young pastor didn’t know about my father was that they shared an inferiority complex. For all of the things my father did, he never felt worthy. He thought he had to prove himself everyday–mostly to himself. The letter stung him. He didn’t forget. I can’t say he never was distracted by attention again, but the story stayed fresh, and he encouraged a lot of people.
Beyond the importance of backing one another up, as I wrote last night, and being aware of unexpected opportunities to affirm one another, as my father learned, what I see in Sondheim is someone who intentionally inserted himself to put himself in a position to encourage and affirm. He didn’t wait for people to come to him.
One of the people Sondheim touched with his encouragement was Jonathan Larson, the man who created RENT. The new Netflix movie Tic Tic Boom tells the story of Larson finding his way in New York, and Sondheim plays a critical role, simply because he reaches out and offers support.
One of my favorite poems, Zen of Tipping by Jan Beatty comes to mind:
My friend Lou used to walk up to strangers and tip them—no, really— he’d cruise the South Side, pick out the businessman on his way to lunch, the slacker hanging by the Beehive, the young girl walking her dog, and he’d go up, pull out a dollar and say, Here’s a tip for you. I think you’re doing a really good job today. Then Lou would walk away as the tipee stood in mystified silence. Sometimes he would cut it short with, Keep up the fine work. People thought Lou was weird, but he wasn’t. He didn’t have much, worked as a waiter. I don’t know why he did it. But I know it wasn’t about the magnanimous gesture, an easy way to feel important, it wasn’t interrupting the impenetrable edge of the individual—you’d have to ask Lou—maybe it was about being awake, hand-to-hand sweetness, a chain of kindnesses, or fun—the tenderness we forget in each other.
Because I love to cook and I’m pretty good at it, people are sometimes afraid to cook for me, as though I will come to the table as a critic rather than a guest. But eating other people’s food is also one of my favorite things. I know what it takes to prepare a meal, I am happy to honor the offering. I also know what it feels like to have people love your food; I am happy to share that feeling as well.
Life may be a team sport, but it is not a competition. No one wins when we get our affirmation at the expense of someone else. Life is hard. May we remember what Sondheim knew well–that a few words of appreciation or moments of attention can be enduring sustenance to those around us.
We will all be remembered more for our affections and affirmations than our accomplishments.
I can tell by watching the clip that it happened a long time ago–1996 to be exact–but I saw it for the first time this week: Patti LaBelle singing “This Christmas” at the National Christmas Tree Lighting and getting to the part where the background singers are supposed to sing, “This Christmas,” but nobody sings. She looks around and then says, “Where are my background singers?”
She has to ask the question several times, along with imploring the cue card person to keep up. Don’t take my word for it. Watch.
Most of us haven’t stood on a national stage, but I’m pretty sure we all have had moments that give us a glimpse of what she was feeling. We know what it’s like to wonder what happened to our backup.
Because we only get to see the world through our eyes, our overarching perspective is that we are the lead singer, if you will; we are singing our song. However, if we all look at life that way, or if that is the only way we look at life, we miss the best part of the song.
One of my favorite documentaries is Twenty Feet from Stardom, which tells the story of the background singers who were responsible for the Motown sound and a lot of the memorable moments in the rock and roll I grew up with. For the most part, they never stepped up to the front mic. A couple of them made it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but the names of most of them live on in liner notes (remember those?) and their voices are indelibly imprinted in our hearts.
Even though we can only see the world through our eyes, we can choose to be a background singer in someone else’s band. In fact, I think that is what most of life is about: answering someone else’s call for backup, for harmony, for support. Maybe the better question is, “Who needs a background singer?”
Back in the days of television variety shows, I remember seeing one where the Pips performed–without Gladys Knight–and all the did was sing the harmony parts and the choreography. Picture “Midnight Train to Georgia,” but with only the, “leavin’ on the midnight train . . . woo woo” and no melody. No Gladys. I knew every word because the background makes the song.(And thanks to my friend Paul, I found the clip from the Richard Pryor Show.)
The world is full of melodies, full of people stepping up for their moment, from baristas to barristers, politicians to public school teachers, trash collectors, postal workers, cooks and cabinet makers. And most of them are wondering, “Where are my background singers?”
Look for them. Listen for them. And step up. Sing along.
One of the comments on the YouTube page go the Patti LaBelle video is, “She sang the hell out of that tragedy.” Isn’t that what we are all trying to do in some sense? We all need background singers. Perhaps the secret is to look for ways to be one, rather than wondering what happened to ours.
On this last day of November, the only leaves on the trees belong to the evergreens. A post about what I learned from the autumn leaves is woefully late, especially in a culture that puts out Halloween calendar in mid-August, but such is the nature of my life in these days.
One of those who wrote with the season was Maria Popova on her wonderful site, The Marginalian, where she wrote about the magic of cholophyll:
But autumn is also the season of revelation, for the seeming loss unveils a larger reality: Chlorophyll is a life-force but it is also a cloak, and when trees shed it from their leaves, nature’s true colors are revealed.
Photosynthesis is nature’s way of making life from light. Chlorophyll allows a tree to capture photons, extracting a portion of their energy to make the sugars that make it a tree — the raw material for leaves and bark and roots and branches — then releasing the photons at lower wavelengths back into the atmosphere. A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air.
Joseph Bienaimé Caventou and Pierre Joseph Pelletier were the two men who identified chlorophyll in 1817. I say identified rather than discovered because that was the way they talked about what they had found.
We have no right to name a substance long-known, and to the story of which we have added only a few facts; however, we will propose, without granting it any importance, the name chlorophyll, from chloros, color, and φυλλον, leaf: a name that would indicate the role it plays in nature.
The described what they saw rather than try to take credit for it. Chlorophyll: the color of leaves. In the last hundred years, we have learned that more is going on in the leaves of autumn.
But chlorophyll, which is yet to be fully understood, is not the only pigment in trees. Throughout a leaf’s life, four primary pigments course through its cells: the green of chlorophyll, but also the yellow of xanthophyll, the orange of carotenoids, and the reds and purples of anthocyanins.
In spring and summer, when the days grow long and bright, chlorophyll saturates leaves as the tree busies itself converting photons into the sweetness of new growth.
As daylight begins fading in autumn and the air cools, deciduous trees prepare for wintering and stop making food — an energy expenditure too metabolically expensive in the dearth of sunlight. Enzymes begin breaking down the decommissioned chlorophyll, allowing the other pigments that had been there invisibly all along to come aflame. And because we humans so readily see in trees metaphors for our emotional lives, how can this not be a living reminder that every loss reveals what we are made of — an affirmation of the value of a breakdown?
I will go ahead and say right now that a post on “the value of a breakdown” is in my future, but what caught me in Popova’s words was “every loss reveals what we are made of.” Cue Cyndi Lauper:
I see your true colors shining through I see your true colors and that’s why I love you so don’t be afraid to let them show your true colors are beautiful like the rainbow
Only the human species absents itself from the agreed-on pattern [in nature] and the general dance of life and death. . . . Necessary suffering goes on every day, seemingly without question. . . . Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and sort life spans as the price of it all. Feeling that sadness, even its full absurdity, ironically puts us into the general dance, the unified field, an ironic and deep gratitude for what is given–with no necessity and so gratuitously. All beauty is gratuitous. So whom can we blame when it seems to be taken away? Grace seems to be at the foundation of everything.
There is no good reason for beauty, just as, I suppose we could say there is no good reason for suffering. It’s all grace and gravity, or, perhaps, grace and gratitude.
When I worked as a hospital chaplain, I read an article that talked about helping people move from asking, “Why is this happening to me?” (a question with no good answers) to “What does this mean for my life?” The difference between the two questions has been helpful over the years in looking at ways to make meaning out of what happens to us. Rohr gave me a deeper insight into the second question in my reading this morning.
For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the “enchanting” ourselves. This leaves us alone, confused, and doubtful. There is no meaning already in place for our discovery and enjoyment. We have to create all meaning by ourselves in such an inert and empty world, and most of us do not seem to succeed very well. This is the burden of living in our heady and lonely time, when we think it is all up to us.
But there’s more to the story, he says.
The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years. The universe really is “inspired matter,” we now know, and is not merely inert. . . . God seems to have created things that continue to create and recreate themselves from the inside out.
That last sentence includes us as well. We continue to create and recreate ourselves, or at least that is the invitation from the leaves and most everything else around us.
If I were to go back through my photos, I could probably find a dozen pictures like the one at the top of this post. Though they would all look alike, they each mark a moment when I was not who I am and where I am right now. To borrow from Stanley Kunitz, “I am not yet done with my changes.” I feel like the leaves I watched all fall, finding new colors, new beauty, even as I struggle with life on a day to day basis. In the middle of it all, ironically, I am grateful. Morning by morning, new mercies I see.
So, I’m late with my autumn reflection. I’m talking about leaves and the trees have turned to sleeping stick figures. That doesn’t mean I can’t still see their colors, or that it is too late for me to learn and grow about what fills them and you and me.
He had Thanksgiving dinner with friends and died on Friday, unexpectedly it seems.
Looking back through my texts, I heard about his death around six on Friday, because that is when I wrote a friend with whom I share a love of Sondheim and his songs. I was in the kitchen making a Thanksgiving Leftover Pie, something new to me, but now something that will become a part of all our Thanksgivings going forward. (My version is at the end of this post.)
I’m sure Sondheim knew better, though. He never believed in simple happy endings, but he knew exactly how to take advantage of his audience’s yearning for them. In Into the Woods, for which he wrote the music and lyrics, the characters end Act I singing the jaunty “Ever After,” blissfully unsuspecting of the complications that await them in the second act.
and
Before Company, Sondheim said in the 2004 documentary, musicals “would always lead to the so-called happy ending. We were saying something ambiguous, which is ‘Actually, there are no endings’; it keeps going on is what, really, Company’s about.”
Even though neither Sondheim nor the writer of the piece used the word, I thought, “They’re talking about leftovers.”
Leftovers are the things you make into a meal after the meal. They are what you do after the happy ending, if you will. After the big gathering around the table we have all anticipated, after we have stuffed ourselves and then had pie, after we have napped and walked and talked, we come back to the fridge and pull out the leftovers to see what we can make of them, whether it’s a sandwich, a soup, or a pie.
Leftovers make pretty good metaphors as well. If Sondheim is right–and I think he is–life gets lived in the ever afters, in the stuff that happens after the endings. In the leftovers. The longer we live, the more bits and pieces we are left with to see what we can make of them. Wounds can become weapons or windows. Memories season our days in ways both sweet and savory, I suppose, though some we have to choose to no longer digest. The tables to which we return, whether the annual gatherings for holidays or the daily seats we take for breakfast and dinner, are never completely absent of what has been shared there already.
Life offers none of us a clean slate. We’re all dealing with leftover lives.
That’s good news, I think. At least that’s what I learned (again) from the Thanksgiving Pie. After we cut it open and ate it, I said, “I think I would make the whole meal again just so I could wait a day and make this.” Everything in the pie had already been on the table. All of the dishes are things i have made over and over. There were no surprises. And yet, when I layered them inside the pastry and baked them into a loaf pie that looked worthy of being cut open on The Great British Baking Show, it felt (and tasted) like I had done a new thing. And I had–with the leftovers.
One of the ways I am approaching Advent this year is thinking about it as a leftover story, not only as I read the story again in scripture, but also as I think about how we retell it in our time. Jesus was born in the middle of a colonized nation, as a part of an oppressed people, and to a family that was confused and frightened by much of what happened. No one was expecting an ever after, much less a happy one. And Jesus’ birth did not bring one. Nothing was solved in Bethlehem. The angels may have sung, but it was not a big finale. Love came down at Christmas and God has been making stuff out of the leftovers ever since.
Enjoy the recipe. Fill it with whatever you have.
Peace,
Milton
Thanksgiving Leftover Pie
Ingredients
For the hot water pastry:
4 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup water
8 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick) or lard
For the filling:
dressing or stuffing
turkey, diced
vegetables
gravy
sweet potatoes or mashed potatoes
For the egg wash:
1 large egg yolk beaten with 1 tablespoon water
For the pastry:
Whisk together the flour and salt in a large bowl and make a well in the center.
Bring the water and fat to a boil in a large saucepan; stir as you go to melt the fat.
Pour the liquid into the well in the flour mixture and stir it until everything is evenly moistened and cool enough to handle comfortably. Once the liquid is incorporated, I use my hands to mix the dough. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it a few times. Cut off a third of the dough for the top and set it aside to keep warm. (I wrap mine in a towel.) Roll the remaining dough into a 16” long and 12” wide rectangle. Press it into a 9” x 5” loaf pan so the edges hang over the sides about a half an inch. Press the bottom down a bit to make sure it fits.
To assemble the pie:
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Spread all the filling ingredients (except the cranberry sauce) on top of one another in even layers. Each layer will be about 1/2 inch thick. I put the dressing on the bottom almost like a bed for the other stuff. I also finished with the sweet potatoes to create a kind of lid. Fill the pan full, so it even domes a little.
Roll the remaining dough into rectangle that fits the loaf pan. Place on top and then fold the overhanging edges of the bottom crust over and crimp the dough to seal it. Cut several slits in the top to vent it.
Brush the top of the pie with the egg wash. Place on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake for 45 to 55 minutes, until you see liquid bubbling through the vents and the top crust is golden brown. Remove the pie from the oven and let it rest for at least fifteen minutes before slicing. It tastes good hot, at room temperature, and cold from the fridge.
I began serving as the bridge interim pastor at Westbrook Congregational Church UCC in Westbrook, Connecticut this morning. I will be there until the Sunday after Easter while they complete their search for a settled pastor. My post to begin my Advent Journal for this year is the manuscript of my sermon. It is specific to their congregation in several spots, but sometime the particular is the best way to get to the larger truth, so I decided to share it here as well.
One of the effects of the pandemic seems to be that Christmas stuff has shown up earlier and earlier. Last year, because most of us didn’t feel safe to go in stores, our shopping moved online. Instead of Black Friday deals where you had to be in the store on a particular day, the deals stretched out over weeks. Separate of shopping, a lot of folks put up decorations early because, like the song says, we needed a little Christmas right that very minute. We wanted some relief, some reason to celebrate.
This year, even though we feel a little freer to move about, those trends have continued. If you are Hallmark Christmas movie watchers like we are at our house, you know they started showing them before Halloween. About the same time, a lot of places started decorating and playing Christmas music. Thanksgiving sort of got lost in the shuffle. These are difficult days, so why not stretch Christmas out as long as we can? It feels like the opposite of the line I remember from the Chronicles of Narnia where it was “always winter and never Christmas.” We appear to wish for it to be Christmas and never winter. We just want to feel better right now.
In all of the churches I have been a part of, one consistent question comes every Advent: are we going to sing Christmas carols before Christmas?
The thoughts and feelings behind the question are more nuanced that simply saying we want it to be Christmas already. Music is at the heart of Christmas and, well, I would guess there aren’t many of us who have favorite Advent songs. Still, the question calls us into the creative tension that comes with learning how to wait. Waiting is good practice.
The oldest roots of the word wait mean “to watch with hostile intent, to be on guard, to defend.” Over time, the word came to mean “to be awake, to sit in expectation.” The word has grown from fear to anticipation. One of the songs of my youth that has stayed in my mental jukebox is Carly Simon’s song titled “Anticipation.” The opening lines say,
we can never know about the days to come but we think about them anyway . . .
That’s pretty good theology. Part of what we do most any day is wonder what’s coming next. As the season of Advent became part of the church calendar over centuries, it has been seen as a season of preparation. The word advent means “to arrive at, come to, to approach.” It differs from the waiting we do in life because we do know what–or who–is coming. We are preparing for the birth of Jesus.
This year, our traditional season of waiting parallels what you are going through as a congregation: you are in an advent season as you prepare for an arrival: the arrival of your new settled pastor. The difference is you don’t know who will come, and you must wait and prepare for them anyway. At the same time, somewhere someone is preparing for you, even though they don’t know that yet. As you prepare to embrace the Christ child, pray daily for the one who will come to embrace you. Make room in your heart for hope.
Our passage for today is from Paul’s letter to the church at Thessalonica, a small congregation in a Greek port city in the north of the country that Paul had helped to start, but then he had to leave. They, too, didn’t know what was coming next.
Just as it is on most any Sunday, our scripture reading only tells part of the story. It is a snapshot, not a movie. The verses we read this morning are filled with words like hope, joy, love, and gratitude. It all sounds warm and inviting. We can hear Paul’s affection for the Thessalonian church, and there is more to the story. Paul had been run out of town for starting the church there. The Roman government didn’t want it; many of the Greeks were against the new religion. Paul fled the city and the small congregation kept meeting despite the hardship. Even though things were tough, they kept going–they kept their promises to God and to one another. Paul wasn’t talking about joy and hope and love because everything was warm and fuzzy. He was grateful for their commitment to God and to one another in the middle of extremely difficult circumstances.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have had a chance to meet with some of you as I have prepared to become your bridge pastor. One of the recurring themes I have heard in what you have said to me and to one another is how you are working to take care of one another. The pandemic has been hard on all congregations. Not everyone feels comfortable coming back in person. Even when we are here, we need to be masked and we can’t hang around and talk over coffee like we used to. Zoom and texts and e-mail messages are great, but they are not the same as being in person. Layer the losses that come with life on top of all of that, and it feels overwhelming. It feels like the relief we are waiting for is never going to come.
In the middle of all of that, we lit the candle of hope this morning.
Hope is more than thinking things are going to get better. Hope runs deeper than wishing for a brighter tomorrow. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians from prison and talked about hope because of the love they shared for one another. Even as we wait for Christmas, we are mindful that the birth of Jesus didn’t change much of anything. Yes, we know about shepherds and magi, but Jesus was born and life went on being difficult. What changed was God joined us in our humanity. Jesus showed us how to love one another, which is another name for hope.
Meister Eckhardt was a mystic in the twelfth century. He said something I come back to every Advent:
What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.
It isn’t always Christmas. Life is more than one season, and the season you are going through may not match the one on the calendar. Whatever season is in your heart or mine, we are in this together. Just as Paul told the Thessalonians, the best work we can do is to love one another in Jesus’ name, preparing our hearts for God to be born anew in our time, in our place, in these days. Amen.
One of the memories that has stayed with me from my preaching class in seminary is one of a student questioning our professor about how to be original. A knowing smile came across the professor’s face and he said, “Originality is knowing how to hide your sources”—another way of echoing what the writer of Ecclesiastes said: there is nothing new under the sun.
I am going to be clear about my source. Peter Palumbo and I were having coffee yesterday and talking about life and he said, “It’s like that old nursery rhyme, ‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.’” And I remembered that nursery rhyme came from the seventeenth century plague in Great Britain that killed fifteen percent of the population. People carried sachets of posies to combat the stench; and “we all fall down” was another way of saying it felt like everyone was going to die.
Life hurts. On lots of levels. Each of us have pain that feels unique to us, and we all have shared pain, or perhaps I would do better to say we have pain we can choose to share—burdens we can bear collectively. The two categories are not mutually exclusive. As I have said before, life and faith are team sports. What we do as individuals ripples out in ways both seen and unseen.
The last six and a half weeks of my life have been focused on recuperating from a total knee replacement. Most every aspect of the process has involved pain of some sort. In the months before my surgery, when the pain I lived with was because my knee was deteriorating, the common wisdom offered me was to put it off as long as I could. I began to question that logic because I thought that the surgery offered me a new lease on life and putting it off just delayed that. So, I scheduled the surgery because the pain of recovery was more attractive than the pain of postponement.
Since my surgery, I have followed the common wisdom that the biggest key to my healing is my commitment to physical therapy. That wisdom is proving true—and it hurts. Healing hurts. One of the things I have learned in the process is how to differentiate between pain that heals and pain that indicates I am hurting myself. My therapist continues to remind me that there is a difference between PT and exercising. The point is not adding more weight at every session or doing more than I did before. The point is to help my knee understand that it is getting better, and I will not always hurt this way.
As much as I would like to mine what I have just told you for metaphors, that last part is where it all breaks down. Our lives are made up of both the pain that heals and the pain that damages, but we don’t necessarily have the choice to avoid the damaging stuff or postpone it. Life not only hurts, it often wounds us. I don’t want to be so flippant as to suggest that all we have to do is keep doing our exercises and things will get better. They might and they might not—which is the point Jesus was making with his disciples in the verses we just read.
Jesus and his disciples were leaving the Temple in Jerusalem, a magnificent building that represented the presence of God to the people who lived there. Even under the oppression of Rome the Temple was a tangible assurance that God was with them. The disciples were awestruck. Perhaps you know the feeling. Can you think of a building where you have stood that took your breath away? Trinity Episcopal Church in Copley Square, Boston is one of those for me. Let yourself go to that place as you hear Jesus’ words in response to their awe:
“See these great buildings? Not a single stone will be left on another. Everything will be torn down.”
A little later, Jesus was with four of them—two sets of brothers: Peter and Andrew, James and John—and they asked not so much for clarification, but for a warning: “What are the signs that this is going to happen?” Are we going to be able to see this coming?
Jesus doubles down with words that read like a Cormac McCarthy novel in many ways, particularly to our American ears so tuned to fear and distrust. But through the whole chapter Jesus keeps saying things like, “Don’t be alarmed when . . . ,” or “Things like this will happen” before he lists some sort of cataclysmic sequence. Wars. Rumors of Wars. Earthquakes. He makes it sound like Chicken Little was right, but then he says–in most translations–“Things like this must happen, but the end is still to come,” which, for those of us who have seen too many disaster movies sounds like an ominous statement. But a better translation would be, “But it is not yet the end,” or “The end is not yet,” which is to say all these horrible things are not the end of the story. God’s story all along has been a story of love. In the end, love wins. Therefore, as we often say, if love has not yet won, it is not the end.
Then he closes with an image that made me chuckle when I thought about it. Jesus was sitting in private with James and John, and Peter and Andrew. To that small circle of men he says, “This is only the beginning of the labor pains,” which is a wonderful metaphorical way to say that God makes meaning out of our suffering on the one hand, but I think it’s funny that he used a metaphor none of them could know experientially. I also find it hopeful. I trust that you can understand my knee replacement metaphorically without having to have one.
The pain we experience in life, whether hurtful or healing, is not a sign that pain is all that there is. When things fall apart, something else follows. Something new. More importantly, God shows up in new ways. Just because the symbols of God’s presence that we have counted on are temporary does not mean that the presence of God is temporary.
Mark 13, from which our passage is taken, is often labeled as “The Little Apocalypse.” Our modern understanding of the word is some sort of disaster–the end of the world–as if the world is going to end in the same violence we appear to be quite adept at perpetuating. But that is not what the word means at its root. It means an uncovering, a disclosure, a revelation, as if to say, “So that is what all of this means.”
Right after we married in 1990, Ginger and I moved from Texas to the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston. Everything felt ancient compared to Texas. The next year we had a chance to go to Paris and we went to Notre Dame, another building intended to symbolize the presence of God. We listened to a tour guide at Notre Dame describe the “new” rose window that was put in the 1500s and smiled at all the things we thought were so old in New England. It felt like that cathedral had and would last forever. It didn’t–at least, not in its original form.
The Temple Jesus was talking about was destroyed in the year 70. It has yet to be rebuilt.
We have gathered in this building this morning, which was also built a symbol of God’s presence. We are still tentative in our gathering because of the pandemic and the questions it has raised about how we can be together without endangering one another, so we gather, but it doesn’t feel like the room we have always known. Just as the disciples had a hard time imagining how they would know where God was if the Temple were destroyed, we are having a hard time figuring out how to be the church when we can’t do it the way we are used to, or when circumstances make it feel like we might not get that chance again.
Some of us miss the fellowship. Some of us miss the singing. Some of us worry that we won’t have enough money to pay the bills. Some of wonder if our kids will keep things going after we are gone. We aren’t having the Harvest Fair this year. By the time we get back to coffee hour, the kids are all going to be two years older than the last time they ran around with fistfuls of cookies. None of us know what lies ahead—and I’m not just talking about church when I say that. We are frightened, anxious, angry, frustrated, depressed. In our uncertainty, the symbols of God that are most attractive are those that offer comfort. Yet, what Jesus offers instead is hope, which is not always comfortable.
Though the pain of my surgery and my recovery in no way compare to what I imagine it feels like to be in labor, the clearest answer I can give to someone when they ask me how things are going is that I am doing well and it all hurts. The only way to continue to improve is to keep hurting. I hurt before the surgery as well, but that bone-on-bone pain that wouldn’t go away was replaced by a pain that offers me hope of being more agile and involved in life. I won’t describe exactly what they did to my knee but suffice it to say they destroyed it and rebuilt it. I am a construction project. I couldn’t stay the way I was and keep walking, so I let them replace my knee, a rather gruesome process that offers me hope.
Our experience of the pandemic over the last twenty months has made obvious what was already true. Things do not stay the same. Life hurts. In many ways, big and small, the walls we thought were solid have fallen down. It feels as though all the stones of our security have been scattered. But none of those things are signs that destruction is the last word, or that the best we can do is hunker down and take care of our own.
The source of our hope in Christ is more profound than perpetuating the things that make us feel safe. The building is not the church. We are the church, the living, breathing Body of Christ, the incarnate love of God alive and hopeful in a world far too easily convinced that pain is the last word. Rather than allow ourselves to be swept up in outrage or cynicism or fear, rather than read the signs of the times as a call to safety, let us choose to remind one another that love is the last word. Instead of joining the chorus that thinks we are doomed, let us be midwives for one another, helping to birth love and hope in each other’s lives.
These walls will fall down. We will all fall down. And love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Amen.
