don't eat alone

I preached from both Isaiah 40:1-8 and Mark 1:1-8 because the latter echoes the former.

________________________

Friday morning I got a text from my cousin who is still in ICU with COVID pneumonia. “Today is the first day I don’t feel like doing this,” she wrote. “I’m beat. Three weeks is too long.”

The night before, I wrote this poem at the end of a long day. It’s called “tired words.”

the word exhaust
means to empty
but I feel full of tired
and grief weighed
down with weary
don’t you

that’s not intended
to be a question
I know you do
I see the loss in
your eyes the bend
in your back

I don’t have much
to offer tonight
except to say
tired is not
the last word
neither is grief

but whatever the
last word is
I’m not even sure
we’re even close
to starting the
sentence

let us sleep
even if it’s not rest
I need to sleep
don’t you
if you dream
remember to tell me

These exhausting days offer us a new connection with our texts this morning. Isaiah spoke after seventy years of Babylonian exile. John the Baptist showed up after a hundred years of Roman occupation, and Mark wrote his gospel another seventy or eighty years after that–and the Romans were still there. Our scripture passages for today were written and spoken for and by tired people.

Isaiah starts with God saying, “Comfort my people,” and then moves on to say words that are echoed in Mark, as a setup for John the Baptist:

“A voice cries out, ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

When Isaiah spoke those words, he wasn’t predicting the future. He was talking in real time to people coming back to a land where there was nothing to come back to. Most everything felt like wilderness, I imagine, and in the middle of their exhaustion, the prophet said, “Get ready for God; start building a way for God to do something.”

In the next section, a voice tells the prophet to cry out. When Isaiah asks what to say, the voice says, “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass.” It sounds like the voice knew the people were tired and felt blown about.

These are days when we feel about as permanent as the flowers that mostly passed with autumn. The colors have changed from pinks and blues and greens to the oranges, reds, and yellows of fall to the greys and browns of the coming winter. I spent part of one afternoon this week spreading dead leaves to cover our mostly dormant vegetable beds, stepping between the skeletons of marigolds and wilted kale. I understand when the voice says we are like flowers and grass. And the reason I was spreading leaves is that it helps get the ground ready for new life next spring.

In that same spirit, the voice didn’t stop with the withering grass. “God is coming,” she says, “to gather us up into God’s arms.”

John was in the wilderness calling people to repentance in the face of oppression and despair. He wanted them to see a change in themselves as the beginning of a change in the world. They couldn’t control the Romans, but they could control how they treated each other. It was another way to say, “God is coming.”

We are living in tough days. We may not be at the hands of a foreign oppressor, but we have much to remind us we are in need of words of both comfort and repentance. We are unsettled, exhausted, grieving; maybe even angry and confused. And, as Advent pulls us towards Christmas, we are called once more to prepare away in our present wilderness because God is coming.

How do we do that when we cannot be physically together? How do we do that when we are a country that feels at war with itself? How do keep going when we feel so tired?

In 1849, Edmund Sears was a pastor in Wayland, Massachusetts. He suffered personally from melancholy, or what we would call depression. The nation had just come out of a brutal war with Mexico and was beginning to manifest deeper and deeper divisions over slavery. Europe was in upheaval. A fellow pastor from Quincy asked him to write a carol. What he wrote is perhaps my favorite: “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” One of the verses rarely shows up in our hymnals, but it speaks to the same sort of circumstances we are enduring:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

It’s not exactly “Joy to the World,” is it? But he follows it with a verse that is the reason I love the carol so much:

And you, beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing.
O rest beside the weary road,
And hear the angels sing!

I don’t know if the glad and golden hours are going to come swiftly, but I do know we are feeling the crushing load of life and we long for a song of peace and comfort. I know we are ready for things to be different. We can’t change most of our circumstances. We can change how we respond to them. We can commit ourselves to sharing the crushing load with one another, step by step along the weary road.

And so today we have lighted the candles of hope and peace, even as we bear the weight of life. We hear the call of the prophets to comfort one another and to repent—to look for ways we can change in words and actions to help change the world around us. Weariness and wonder are not mutually exclusive. These are heavy days, and they are hopeful days. Maybe that is what Paul meant when he talked to the Philippians about a peace that passes all understanding. Rest, repent, get ready for God. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

For many years I have written daily during Advent. For the first time in a long time I will be preaching through Advent as well. My sermon for this first Sunday is “We Will Get Through This,” drawing from Isaiah 64:1-9.

______________________________

Somehow it is the first Sunday in Advent and we are on the cusp of December. I know we all find some solace in knowing that 2020 only has one more month left, and yet it is hard to find much indication that 2021 is going to give us much of a respite—at least it feels that way to me. It takes me back to my high school drama class and Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, which is a play about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, who are waiting for someone who never shows up. At one point, Vladimir says, “I can’t go on like this,” and Estragon replies, “That’s what you think.”

We are going on. Day by day.

I don’t know how it felt at your house, but Thanksgiving was a mixed meal of gratitude and grief at ours. For one thing, my cousin (I only have two) is in the ICU in Houston with COVID pneumonia. Like many of you, we were also distanced from loved ones who are usually around our table. That said, we had a good day even as we were aware and even talked about all we have missed or lost this year, and how we now get to look forward to a Christmas that may be much the same.

I have spent the last nine months trying to remember what day of the week it is as though time was sort of standing still, on the one hand, and then being caught by surprise by how quickly the months have passed on the other.

Since I’ve already started talking about theater, I’ll keep going. One of my favorite musicals is Fiddler on the Roof. In the scene where the Jewish villagers are being evicted by the Russian Cossacks from Anatevka, the town that had been their home for generations, one of them turns to the rabbi and says, “Wouldn’t this be a good time for the messiah to come?”

Yes. Yes, it would.

It is fitting then, for us to begin Advent, our season of waiting for Christ to be born again in our time and in our circumstance, with a prayer of lament from Isaiah. These words came towards the end of the Hebrew people being exiled—being prisoners of war—in Babylon for seventy years. I think of what it has been like to feel isolated for nine months—how disorienting and depressing and disruptive it has been—and I can’t imagine how people stayed hopeful when it went on for generations.

Isaiah starts his prayer begging for divine intervention: why don’t you just tear open the heavens and come down here in the middle of everybody and show them Who’s Who? Do one of those big God-like things you used to do when you sent floods and fires and all the other big special effects into the lives of our ancestors. No one had ever seen anything like it—and you did it because they were your people. They trusted you because they knew you would come through.

It’s that last line that tips the prophet’s hand and shows his insecurity. The stories that had been handed down were told in a way that said God did big things for us because God loves us. When things get tough, it gets easy to think, well, if God isn’t doing big things now does that mean God doesn’t love us as much anymore?

Where is God in the middle of our isolation anyway? How do we find God when we feel abandoned?

As he continues to pray, Isaiah answers his own question by swinging back and forth between saying, “It’s because we keep sinning, isn’t it?” and “No one expects you to show up because you’ve been gone so long.” I love the honesty in his words. He talks to God as if God can take it.

And then he seems to go pretty hard at God: “We are just clay, and You are the potter.
We are the product of Your creative action, shaped and formed into something of worth,” as if to say, we are worth something because you made us.

I wonder who he was trying to convince—God or himself.

What does it mean to pray in these days? Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says,

There are simply too many cases of prayers being answered for us to deny that it makes a difference to our fate. It does. I once heard the following story. A man in a Nazi concentration camp lost the will to live – and in the death camps, if you lost the will to live, you died. That night he poured out his heart in prayer. The next morning, he was transferred to work in the camp kitchen. There he was able, when the guards were not looking, to steal some potato peelings. It was these peelings that kept him alive. I heard this story from his son.

Perhaps each of us has some such story. In times of crisis we cry out from the depths of our soul, and something happens. Sometimes we only realize it later, looking back. Prayer makes a difference to the world–but how it does so is mysterious.

I was getting ready to record the worship service for this week when my phone rang. It was my cousin calling from an ICU in Houston with COVID pneumonia. She has been there for most of the week; she is improving, but, as she said, she is not out of the woods. She had called earlier in the day, which was the first time I had heard her voice in almost a week. She was short of breath and couldn’t talk long. When the phone rang the second time, she said, “Will you read me a story? Not something sad. You know, something once upon a time.”

I was sitting at my laptop, so I typed in once upon a time, and then children’s stories, until I stumbled upon Peter Rabbit. So I read Peter Rabbit to her. It felt as insignificant as those potato peelings, yet when I finished she said, “Thanks for helping me not feel alone.” I didn’t make her better. She is still in ICU. But it was a way to say, “I love you.”

In our own way, my cousin and I played our own version of Vladimir and Estragon’s brief exchange:

“I can’t get through this.”
“That’s what you think.”

Getting through things is kind of what it means to be human. Getting through things is what hope is all about, I think, because the choice we have, almost daily, is how we will get through it. We can get through by blaming others, or God, for our circumstances. We can get through by lashing out at those around us, or those who disagree with us. Or we can get through by realizing we are all in this together, even when we have to live at a physical distance. We can get through it trusting that nothing can separate us from the love of God, even when we don’t feel a sense of God’s presence.

Several years ago I stood with a friend at his father’s graveside service and heard an elderly country preacher read Paul’s words from Romans with a Southern lilt—which I will not try to imitate. “Shall anything separate us from the love of God? “NO,” he said with such confidence and conviction standing over that coffin that I have not read or heard those words the same way since.

Our season of Advent is one of the ways we say, “Wouldn’t this be a good time for the messiah to come?” Meister Eckhart, a thirteenth century mystic sort of reframed the question in a way that calls us into the middle of it all, “What good is it to me for Mary to give birth to God’s son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?”

When Joseph laid in bed wondering how he was going to get through Mary’s pregnancy, the angel told him the messiah was coming and to name the child Emmanuel: God with us—with being the operative word.

God is with us. Nothing can separate us. We will get through this and whatever comes after this by telling stories of potato peelings and Peter Rabbit and a pregnant Judean teenager to remind us our story is not yet over.

We will get through this. That is what I think. Amen.

Peace,
Milton