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advent journal: poetic license

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

poetic license

I feel like a metaphor
staring at a white screen
not knowing what to write
a week before Christmas

or saying I spent the day
driving through driving rain
and wind that wreaked havoc
and never turned to snow

but it’s not the whole story
I met a friend for lunch at
a Mexican place in Middletown
in the middle of the storm

we share history that goes
back to high school in Kenya
and the present in Connecticut
we never imagined in Nairobi

fallen trees and power lines
meant I took the long way home
to help pack and post boxes
for friends who are far afield

but a metaphor compares
unlike things and I am no
different than the details
of my driving and dining

my day was a storm
my night sparse of ideas
ending with an attempt
to make poetry of it all

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: fierce joy

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I preached about joy this week, which helped me as we get closer to the solstice and the daylight drips down to its shortest appearance. Joy is easier to recognize or feel than it is to preach about, but I gave it a good shot.

_________________________

I amused myself as I worked on the sermon this week because I realized that I began the first week of Advent by saying that hope was a difficult word to define, and then last week I said a definition of peace didn’t come so easily. I was amused because I had the same thought about joy as I began to write. So let me also jump ahead a week and say that a definition of love isn’t that simple either.

None of the definitions comes easily, yet we thrive on these things—hope, peace, joy, and love; we know they matter. We recognize them when we see them, when we feel them, yet they can’t be described as easily as they can be experienced.

As far as dictionary definitions go, joy can mean “pleasure,” “delight, or “gladness,” to name a few, though none of those paints the full picture. Joy also carries notes of appreciation and belonging, as well as a sense of wonder and trust and some gratitude mixed in.

When Jesus told his disciples not to worry, for instance—when he told them to look at the beauty of the lilies who didn’t worry about a thing and just bloomed extravagantly each spring like nothing else mattered—he was painting a picture of joy.

This morning we lit the candle of “fierce joy.” The word fierce can mean “wild,” or “intense,” or “powerful”—or all of those things. We talk about someone being a fierce competitor or having a fierce determination. In Texas, people say things like, “She went after him somethin’ fierce,” which generally means the person being pursued didn’t stand a chance.

The two words together lead us to things like a sense of wonder that runs wild, intense delight, or formidable trust. And we are still playing with words and not really getting to the joy.

Maybe joy is like a joke: if you have to explain it, it’s not funny. And here I am trying to explain it.

Isaiah was trying to describe it as well in the verses we read this morning:

God’s spirit is upon me,
because God has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim release for captives,
and liberation for prisoners,
to proclaim the year of Divine favor

Those words were the text for Jesus’ first sermon, which comprised of his reading the passage, setting the scroll on the altar, and saying, “Today these words have come alive in front of you.”

Neither Jesus nor Isaiah was speaking euphemistically. They meant that God had called them to take care of the poor (as in work to get people out of poverty), comfort those who were brokenhearted (as in get involved in their lives), liberate the captives and incarcerated (as in really get people out of prison), and proclaim God’s love for the world as though it really made a difference.

All of those actions pull us outside of ourselves, outside of our comfort zones, into places where the ferocity of joy can take us, as poet David Whyte says, over “the edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.” He says joy is, “practiced generosity. . . . To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; . . . to have walked through the doorway of fear, . . . the claiming of our place in the living conversation,” to say, “I was here and you were here and together we made a world.”

Practicing the generosity of joy means looking for ways to get outside of ourselves and feel connected to that living conversation, whether that means learning to pay attention to a sunset, or learn the names of the checkers at the supermarket, or surprise a loved one with a gift that makes them feel known the way you did when you gave me those hippos in my office.

Isaiah was talking to a country full of people who felt oppressed and despairing when he talked about liberation. He acted like they had the ability to change lives with their actions, even though they thought of themselves as the ones in bondage.

Jesus read the same verses and then invited the crowd in the synagogue to risk taking him seriously. He, too, was speaking to people who thought of themselves as the ones being oppressed rather than those who could set someone else free, and he invited them to be a part of a conversation that was about more than fear and survival—to trust that things could be different.

Mary—a teenage girl—had her life turned upside down by the words of an angel and responded by saying, “Let it happen just like you said.” The hymn we are going to sing in a moment puts her words to the tune of an Irish folk melody.

My soul cries out with a joyful shout
That the God of my heart is great
And my spirit sings of the wondrous things
That you bring to the ones who wait
You fixed your sight on your servant’s plight
And my weakness you did not spurn
So from east to west shall my name be blest
Could the world be about to turn?

My heart shall sing of the day you bring
Let the fires of your justice burn
Wipe away all tears for the dawn draws near
And the world is about to turn.

During this Advent season, we have talked about shocking hope, just peace, and now fierce joy. Shocking hope helped us name that we can thrive and flourish when we embrace uncertainty: the hope that anything could happen. In our conversation about just peace, we talked about following our broken hearts as a way of healing the world. Fierce joy—wild, intense, powerful joy—calls us to engage the fleeting nature of our existence with tenacious generosity and hopeful abandon; to live with a sense of impending joy rather than impending doom; to hear that the world is about to turn and trust that that’s a good thing.

Jesus read the scripture and then said, “I am here and you are here and together we can build a world.” Mary listened to all Gabriel said was going to happen to her and said, “Let it happen just like you said,” and then sang a song of joy so strong that she thought it could open hearts and topple governments.

None of them had an easy life. None of them was praying for God to make things go their way. All of them were praying for fierce joy, for the ability to see how the Spirit of God connects us all even when we feel isolated. All of them trusted that life was too short for anything but joy and too hard for anything but gratitude and generosity.

Poet Mary Oliver wrote,

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

That last line: Joy is not made to be a crumb.

We are all in this thing called life together and we’re not here long. May we live what days we have as those who trust God’s abundance, those who host banquets instead of settling for crumbs. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

PS–here’s the song.

advent journal: marshmallow farm

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

A little whimsy for a December evening . . .

marshmallow farm

here’s the thing
many of us live near
marshmallow farms
without knowing

they are rarities
events rather than
ongoing projects
farms of fancy

marshmallows mature
stealthily hidden in
fields of hay and
are flash harvested

to find them whole
before they are cut
into jet-puffed pieces
is a gift of imagination

graham crackers
as big as barn doors
milk chocolate bars
hauled on hay wagons

wooden carts that
held marshmallows
were set on fire to
to melt and char

then folks assembled
the s’more on a flatbed
cracker chocolate
marshmallow cracker

on the town green
where people came
to melt together in
fun and friendship

that hasn’t happened
for a good while
but I still stop when
I see a farm appear

in hopes I will not
be the only one
who has dreams
that still smolder

Peace,
Milton

 

advent journal: the squash of friendship

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

My birthday gift this year was Burt Burleson, my most enduring friend whom I have known for almost fifty years. As a third-culture kid who moved around most of my life, I lost track of those I knew in my childhood and adolescence. Burt and I met in the fall of 1976. I can remember calling him in the fall of 1986 to say he was the first friend I had had in my life that I had known for ten years and known where they were all ten of those years.

He and Ginger hatched a plan that gave Burt and I the better part of a week together (hence why I haven’t kept up my Advent Journal the last few nights) and the time was filled with good things. I took him to the airport in Hartford early this morning and came home to find that he had left a leather box for me–one I recognized because I left it at his house when I was there a couple of years ago. Inside was a dehydrated summer squash, a tradition we began quite by accident several decades ago.

It was the perfect parting gift. My thank you note to Burt is this poem.

the squash of friendship

if you asked for a list
of all the metaphors
that might carry the
meaning of friendship
a dried summer squash
would not rank highly
if at all, were it not

for the time I snuck
a squash into your
suitcase at the close
of a visit and then
found it tucked in mine
the next time I came
to see you; without

knowing much about
how to dry a vegetable
we kept that same one
around for a decade
until it got lost like
luggage at LaGuardia

so when I got back from
taking you to the airport
after your surprise visit
and saw the squash I left
at your house two years ago
I felt nourished and loved

the wrinkled remains of
a fairly standard squash
that dried out instead of
spoil is a strong symbol of
friendship particularly
when housed in a fancy
leather fountain pen box

mostly because friendship
is not valuable because
it produces or accomplishes
anything; it offers no
guaranteed return on
investment; it matters
more than measurement

thank you my summer squash
friend for a love for no
reason, a story without
a moral, a scavenger hunt
of hope that have kept me
alive; in a world that wants
answers we have a squash

Peace,
Milton

 

advent journal: just peace

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

The emphasis for the second Sunday of Advent is peace, or in our version, just peace—not in the sense of only peace but of peace informed by justice. The scripture passage was from Mark 1 and described the appearance of John the Baptist.

As I said in the sermon, talking about peace feels even more difficult this year with all that is happening in Israel and Gaza, along with Ukraine and other places. Even so, we are called to be peacemakers.

__________________________

One of the reasons I chose the particular translation we are using this morning is because the translators caught something that most have not, and that is that the opening words of Mark are the title of the book rather than the first sentence:

The beginning of the gospel—the good news—of Jesus Christ.

Then Mark moves to quote from the prophet Isaiah about preparing the way of the Lord and ends up focusing on John the Baptist, giving us a picture of an odd man dressed in camel hide and eating locusts and wild honey. John chose a remote part of the Jordan River, many miles from Jerusalem, to issue his call for repentance. Still, people came to be baptized.

But the words we read are not the beginning of the good news of Jesus. They are the opening scene; the whole book is the beginning. Jesus’ life is the beginning of the gospel; we are still telling the story. It has lots of chapters. We are reading these introductory words on this Sunday as we talk about peace—just peace—even though the word is not mentioned in the passage.

Last week, we talked about how difficult it is to define the word hope; I’m not sure peace is much easier. The root meaning of the word in English carries the notion of binding together, to make a promise as a way to end conflict. Then it came to mean friendly relationships with others. The word also carries the idea of inner calm and quiet, as in peace of mind. Peace has a lot of angles to consider.

When I was in seminary, I made plans to get my doctorate. I actually completed a year of study and then I met Ginger—a turn in my life I was not expecting. That one year was all I did. That’s the way life goes sometimes.

One of the requirements for admission was I had to pass a French test so I could read European theologians. One of the ways we studied for the test was translating from a French New Testament. We were working on the Beatitudes and found that the French version of “blessed are the peacemakers” translated to “blessed are those who make peace around them.”

Philosopher Cornell West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” To talk, then, about just peace is to talk about binding ourselves together in love—and by ourselves we mean all of those around us, both near and far.

How do we make peace around us?

That’s a difficult question under any circumstances, but it is even harder in these days when we are inundated by news of what is happening in Gaza and Israel, as well as in Ukraine. And those are only two of the thirty-plus wars going on in the world right now. The wars make the question difficult not only because people are dying, but also because we are a long way from those wars and there’s not much we can do about them, or at least that is how it feels.

When we say, “make peace around us,” how far out do we draw the circle?

I want to add three other questions, added layers to what it means to make peace around us. They come from writer Judith Baker in an essay titled, “Violence, Mourning, and Politics:”

Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, what makes for a grievable life?

Yesterday several of us participated in a Service of Remembrance that we hosted here working with the folks from Beecher and Bennett Funeral Home. The heart of the service was the reading of the names of those who died this past year. As the names were read, family and friends put an ornament on a tree we had down front and then lit a candle. Every name recalled a grievable life, someone who was missed and longed for.

By contrast, I read an article this week about the ongoing civil war in Sudan—a war that rarely makes the news here. They commented that five thousand civilians have been killed there in the last six months. In the war we do hear about, fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7 when twelve hundred Israelis were killed in an attack by Hamas.

In most all the reporting I have seen, no names were mentioned; how can those lives be grieved when we don’t know who they are? But the impact of these wars hits closer to home.

Judith Butler says mourning means agreeing to be transformed by our sadness without knowing where those changes will take us. John the Baptist invited people to repent, which meant more than just feeling sorry; it meant turning your life in a new direction. That is what it takes to make peace around us.

I have a friend who is a Methodist minister. His name is Eric Folkerth. He says people are not changed by following their passions, they are changed when they follow their broken hearts. If you want to live your life to its fullest, then work to heal what breaks your heart. That’s another way of saying make peace around you.

As the war in Israel and Gaza has escalated, I watched Ginger’s heart break for the situation at large, but also for the rabbi nearest us who lost friends in the Hamas attack and also feared reprisals from people here who see the situation as a chance to lash out in hatred. She knew she couldn’t change much in Gaza, but she organized a group of us to go one Friday evening as the temple was gathering for shabbat services. We stood silently with candles as people arrived. Some thanked us. Some even wept. We did not stop the war, but we made peace.

We are not going to stop wars with our efforts, regardless of what we do. We can, however, widen the circle of those for whom we grieve. We can learn names. We can ask questions. We can let our hearts be broken and then see where that takes us.

As we prepare for the election year that is just around the corner—which is going to feel like a war—we can let our hearts break for those with whom we disagree. I don’t mean feel sorry for them because they’re wrong. I mean allow them to become grievable lives to us: people we know and care about. We can practice that right here in this room. We have no better place to begin to live like peacemakers; then we, too, can see where it takes us.

The world will not be changed by opinions or by outrage. The world will be changed by those who make peace around them—those who look at others as grievable, as loveable; those who learn names and have conversations; those who are willing to follow their broken hearts.

And by the world, I mean us. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: this tadpole life

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

A quick note: I am playing a bit of catch up with my Advent Journal because I picked up some malware that was sending people spam messages when they tried to get to the site. That is all corrected now, thanks to the good folks at Dreamhost, but it has kept my quiet for a few days.

_____________________________

This is my second Advent season since I left my job as an editor.

It was not a pleasant parting. Thanks to my having turned sixty-five, I could retire instead of just quit to get out from under the misery of the situation aimed at pushing me out. In my exit interview I said, “One of the things I have learned is that our Human Resources department is called that because the company sees human as resources, not that you are offering resources to humans.

I left the job feeling like I had failed.

I loved editing manuscripts and working with authors. I loved my colleagues (most of whom were also pushed out by the new administration). I felt good about the work I did and the relationships I built. I thought I would work there for another ten years. And then I wasn’t able to do that anymore; I felt like I had failed. (I realize I’ve already said that once; it was a strong feeling.)

Part of the reason I felt that way is almost every morning after I announced my retirement I got an email from my new boss telling me I was a failure in so many words. Those missives took their toll. Those feelings surfaced again this week as I read Joe Moran’s words in If You Should Fail:

This is meritocracy’s fatal flaw: not that it sets up people to fail but that it defines so meanly what success is.

Later in the same chapter, he went on to talk about “the tadpole philosophy,” a phrase coined by the writer R. H. Tawney. He said it was how unequal societies (and companies?) justified their inequity–by convincing the tadpoles they would be successful only if they became frogs. Only a few actually make the transition and then “croak addresses to their former friends on the virtues by means of which tadpoles of character and capacity can rise to be frogs.”

But whether or not a tadpole becomes a frog has very little to do with how smart they are, what choices they make, or how hard they try. Moran says,

A tadpole has a right to its blameless, vegetarian, tadpole’s life, the same right to be on the earth as any other living thing. That life may be brief and cosmically insignificant, but so, in the deep time of the universe, is the life of a frog, or a human.

No matter our age, we spend a lot of time and energy in this country trying to prove that we are successes, that we are ready to move to the next stage, while living with the impending sense that we are not going to measure up. The anxiety that inflicts so many of our young people lets us know we have passed that value on to them as well.

Our church sponsors a community-wide youth group that takes an annual service trip to Appalachia or the like. The week is rich and meaningful for the high schoolers who go each year. I heard one of the adults recount talking to a parent of a kid who had not gone and saying, “I told them she should go on the trip because it is a great way to boost their resumé for college.”

I knew the adult didn’t hear the implications of what they were saying, and I prayed that no one had repeated that logic to the high schooler. I didn’t want them to pick up the message, intended or not.

Life is a competition only if we make it so, and too much of the time we do, setting up an seemingly endless string of necessary achievements for a person to feel successful and none of them is ever enough–at least, not for long.

What a tadpole needs to become a frog is in its DNA. At some point, and for a variety of reasons that the tadpole doesn’t control, those cells start to grow, much like a child goes through puberty, I suppose. (Remember, I am not a biologist; I’m talking metaphor here.) The best thing a tadpole can be is a tadpole, rather than a frog-in-waiting. They, like us, are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.

My boss was right about one thing: I couldn’t do the job they way wanted me to–in large part because the job was set up so I couldn’t do the job they way they wanted me to. It was, to use Moran’s words, a mean definition of success. Where they were wrong about me and my colleagues is we are more than resources to be used up. We, like the tadpoles, are good just like we are.

That goes for you, too. And for my old boss, if they were willing to see it.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: nourishment

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

nourishment

over lunch I looked back
at my marginalia from
my morning’s reading

we must align our functioning
with those we depend on
for life to be sustainable

weighty words for one
sitting at the bar at doody’s
waiting on a wedge salad

when I gave my order
as she filled my water glass
the bartender said,

“I should have remembered,
but you’re not sitting
in your usual place”

I’ve only been there three times
and she had saved my seat
like I belonged at the bar

she knew nothing of my book
or how I long to be a regular
most any time I sit down

she just knew how to
notice who comes in
and who comes in again

and I understood what it
means to align our functioning
in a way that sustained me

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: carapace

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I love learning new words, so today was a good day.

I began reading If You Should Fail: Why Success Eludes Us and Why It Doesn’t Matter by Joe Moran, who is one of my favorite writers. He also authored my favorite book on writing, First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing . . . and Life.

The book opens with a description of the “rough sleeper” who inhabits the doorway across the street from his university office. Moran notices, among other things, that the man reads even as he lives on the street, which gives him a sense of connection with this one experiencing homelessness, and makes him realize only a few circumstances separate one life situation from the other. Then, on Page 3, this sentence–and the new word:

Watching that rough sleeper, it struck me how flimsy the carapace of competence that makes us feel like paid-up members of the human race.

I have a habit of writing in the margins of books I read, so I was quick to underline and then rewrite “carapace of competence,” first because of the rhythm and alliteration when I both read them and then said them out loud. One of the reasons I love reading Moran is the musicality of his prose. He knows how to craft a melody with words. Actually, what I first wrote in the margin was “carapace of confidence,” but I’ll come back to that.

Our friend Mandy was visiting this weekend and she was sitting on the couch reading her own book. I read the sentences to her and we both admitted we didn’t know what a carapace was, so she looked it up.

car·a·pace
/ˈkerəˌpās/

noun
noun: carapace; plural noun: carapaces

the hard upper shell of a turtle, crustacean, or arachnid.
“the study found oil in the carapace of twenty-nine sea turtles that returned to feed in the spill area”

something regarded as a protective or defensive covering.
“under her carapace of self-confidence she was very sensitive to criticism”

I listened to the definition and then went back to Moran to read the sentence again, which was when I realized I had read confidence instead of competence. What I heard in his use of the word was the shell we think will protect us is not quite as reliable as we think it is, which made me think that was true for both competence and confidence.

I have a document where I keep a list of phrases I have heard that are evocative, much like “carapace of competence.” One of them is “delusions of adequacy.” The two phrases make decent companions. For a good many of us, competence has a veneer-like quality. I don’t mean we aren’t skilled or that we aren’t telling the truth. I mean, like Moran, when it comes to seeing those whose shells have been stripped away, we must face the reality that both the competence and the confidence that keep us from sharing their plight are like a lobster shell and less like Batman’s shields.

What Moran is talking about is more layered than having a bed to sleep in and a door to lock. A couple of pages later he talks about the “human hunger for stories, the need to turn life into allegory,” and goes on to say, “Behind this fallacy . . . lies the illusion of control. We need to feel that we have some say over the unseeable course of our lives.”

The carapace of control is not all it’s cracked up to be either.

An allegory, as you know, is a story with a lesson, a moral–tortoise and hare kind of stuff. When the stories of our lives get distilled into such tales, we quit telling the truth. To look back and say, “If I had not persevered when that (bad) thing hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be in this (good) position today,” or, “I worked hard in the face of adversity and I was rewarded for my efforts,” doesn’t mean God or anyone else was rewarding our competence or confidence. We are not masters of our own destiny, we are people doing the best we can with what we have–or at least trying to do so.

Perhaps I am illustrating the point that the stories that make up our lives, both big and small, don’t necessarily come to a conclusion with a lesson to learn by getting to the end of this post and not having a strong finishing statement. What I mostly wanted to say was I learned a new word today and it made me think about life, stories, vocabulary, and all the things that draw us together and also tear us apart as I meandered through the details of my day wishing I could tell someone what I had learned.

Thanks for being here.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: shocking hope

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

For thirty years or so I have written every day during Advent (or tried to) as a way of focusing my heart and mind on the season. For the last fifteen or sixteen years, those musings have found their place here on the blog. This year marks my first Advent with the good people at Mount Carmel Congregational Church, so my first entry in my journal is my sermon for today, “Shocking Hope.”

In a way, the adjective is redundant. Hope is a shocking thing, a disruptive grace that peppers our lives with a sacred tenacity. I hope you find words here that speak to you. I look forward to the journey together.

________________________

Advent begins each year as we light the candle of hope.

Hope is a difficult word to define.

We live and speak like we know what it means—and in some sense we do—but an actual definition is not easy to give. We say things like, “I hope you win,” which sound like hoping and wishing are synonyms, but hope is stronger than that. Hope is also different than optimism; it’s more layered than simply trusting things will get better. One of my favorite writers, Rebecca Solnit, says hope thrives in uncertainty when anything can happen then, well, anything can happen; thus, we have reason to hope.

As Nancy said in the introduction to our reading, Isaiah’s words are part of a longer lament for the way life had become. A lament is more than simply decrying or complaining about the state of things. It is an expression of sorrow, of grief for the way things have gone, perhaps even an admission of fault, and it is a statement of hope that things will not always be the way they are—that the uncertainty created possibility.

Despair takes hold when we convince ourselves that nothing can change. Certainty and cynicism are cousins. Isaiah cried out for God not to give up on people, even when they couldn’t get out of their own way. He trusted that anything could happen even though things looked bleak and he felt deserted by God. Still, he prayed, “You are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

I got to be a potter once. Well, for a few minutes. Ginger and I were in Turkey as a part of a sabbatical grant she received, and we had toured a small pottery factory in Istanbul to see how they made the beautiful pieces they had in their shop. They asked if anyone wanted to try their hand at the potter’s wheel and, being the extrovert I am, I volunteered. They gave me this enormous pair of colorful balloon pants to put on over my trousers and a smock to go over my shirt and then seated me behind a big flat wheel with a foot pedal on one side. They put some clay in the middle and then gave me instructions on how to make the wheel turn so I could begin to fashion a bowl out of the figureless lump of clay in front of me.

There were so many things to keep in mind. I had to keep my hands wet and not let the wheel move too slowly or too quickly. I had to learn how much pressure to apply so the clay would begin to take shape. I managed to make a thing that looked something like a bowl; mostly I learned to appreciate the artistry and skill required to make some of our most basic things: plates, bowls, pitchers, cookware.

Other than becoming more motorized, the art of making pottery has not changed that much since Isaiah used the metaphor. To say God is the potter and we are the clay that gets shaped into meaning is, for one thing, to say that God keeps up with a lot of details—with all of the details—of creation. Just as the potter has to attend to the speed of the wheel and the consistency of the clay and the moisture that makes it pliable and the amount of pressure it takes to shape it into something, God sees all the variables at play in our lives.

That is not to say God controls them or dictates what happens; that’s one place the potter metaphor breaks down. In fact, at the heart of the metaphor is what can’t be controlled. No matter how artful the potter, how deft they are at shaping the clay, they are at the mercy of the ovens—the kiln.

The pottery has to be fired at two points in the process. First, it has to be dried after it is shaped to pull the moisture out and solidify the object. Second, it has to be fired after it has been painted or glazed to seal the clay so it can be used. Often times, at either stage, the pottery cracks in the kiln, often not because of anyone’s mistake, but because that’s how it goes sometimes.

Yes, we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved—we are God’s pottery—and sometimes we are broken and cracked by things we cannot control. And here’s the other place the metaphor breaks down.

In actual pottery-making, the pots that crack and break in the kiln are thrown away. The clay cannot be melted and reused. The cracks can never be adequately repaired. A broken pot is a useless one, regardless of how it gets broken.

God’s artistry tells a different story: anything can happen. Just as we can be wounded and broken by life, we can be reshaped and healed by grace. That was the hope that Isaiah expressed when he prayed, “Don’t give up on us.” He trusted God was still at work in the middle of all the broken pieces.

That same trust lies at the heart of the shocking hope of Advent. All is not lost. Even though life is difficult, it is not futile. All the crumbled bits of clay of our circumstances hold the possibility of new creation, of something unexpected—of hope, not because everything will work out in the end but because anything can happen; we can be shaped and restored by God’s love right here in the middle of the mess.

And so we circle around to tell that story during Advent every year to shape our faith once again, much like the potter spins the wheel to shape the pot. The quote at the end of the candle lighting says it well:

What good is it to us that Mary gave birth to the son of God two thousand years ago, and we do not also give birth to the Son of God in our time and in our culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.

I know I am mixing metaphors, switching from pottery to pregnancy, but both are talking about hope, about trusting what we don’t completely understand.

We’ve all heard the Christmas story. We know the characters. We have layers and layers of years and tradition that we have received and continue to pass down. Those are good things, and in this season we need to be about more than simply repeating ourselves if the story is going to shape us in fresh ways.

It takes both imagination and courage to choose hope as our way of looking at the world, to imagine ourselves as vessels shaped by God, or as those giving birth to God’s presence in our time. The truth is the world is a broken and beautiful, vicious and engaging, mutilated and loving, a terrible and wonderful place.

Having the courage and imagination—the hope—to hold both of those truths is what it means to hope. Hope knows things aren’t just going to work out. Hope understands that we don’t always know the consequences of our actions, though often we can make a pretty good guess. To live hopefully is to live as though every word and every action has an impact, a consequence, to live like we are all connected, to live as though love is what matters most, to live as though all of these motions we are going through, from lighting candles to singing hymns to sharing Communion are crucial acts of imagination and intention—of hope.

We can’t see what is coming, but we are here in these days to give birth to Christ in our time. We are here to see what God can shape out of the shards of our lives.

Leonard Cohen wrote,

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

We are here to foster hope in one another, no matter what happens. And we hope when we trust that anything can happen. God has not given up on us; let us live with hope and not give up on us either. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

living tradition

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I know. The picture with this post makes it looks as though it is going to include a recipe, but it is a story about a recipe. If you want the recipe, give me a call. When you read the sermon, you’ll understand.

______________________________

One the times I miss my mother most is when I am cooking for Thanksgiving, and one of the reasons I miss her then is because of a tradition we shared that came about without much forethought.

When I worked as a youth and college minister in Fort Worth, Texas, I found out that several students didn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving, so I decided to host them, which meant I didn’t go to my parents’ house in Houston. As I was preparing the meal, I called my mother to ask for her cornbread dressing recipe, which was the dish I liked the best. It’s not a complicated recipe, but it was the one I wanted.

My dinner for the students was a success, so I did it again the next year and the year after that. Each year, as I would realize I had not kept the dressing recipe, so I would call my mom and she would read it to me over the phone–along with side comments, because how it was written down was not exactly the way she made it.

I think it was after the third or fourth year she said, “Promise me you won’t ever write the recipe down so you have to call me every year. This has become one of my favorite things about Thanksgiving.”

I promised, and I called her every Thanksgiving until she died in January, 2015. And I also wrote it down.

When it came to that first Thanksgiving without her, I felt her absence in particular because I couldn’t call her. Then my phone rang and I heard the voice of my niece-in-law, Marissa, say, “Uncle Milton, I don’t have a good stuffing recipe. Do you have one you could share with me?”

She knew the story about my mother and me. I teared up and told her I did. I read her the recipe, told her how much the call meant to me, and then said, “Please don’t write this down and call me every year, “ which she does. She called on Thursday.

Because one of the traditions we choose is the liturgical calendar, today is the last Sunday of the church year. Advent begins a new year next Sunday. If you aren’t sure what the liturgical year—or the church year—is, it is a way of using the passing of time to tell the story of our faith. Its roots go back to the fourth century. Neither Jesus nor any of his followers knew anything about Advent or Lent or the Revised Common Lectionary.

Over centuries, as the world changed along with our theology and our circumstances, some of those traditions have continued, some have faded away, and others have been added. Some stay full of meaning and others become motions we go through because we have forgotten to tell the stories of why they matter. Others change—or need to—as our language or circumstances change.

As you can see on the cover of our order of service, this last Sunday of the church year is called “The Reign of Christ Sunday,” or “Christ the King Sunday” in its oldest forms, but it is not that old. Though it sounds like it goes back to early Christianity, Pope Pius XI established Christ the King Sunday in 1925 because he thought the world was out of control: Stalin had taken over in Russia, Mussolini’s fascist government was ruling Italy where the pope was, and Hitler was on the rise in Germany. He was trying to do something to remind people that God was more powerful than all of those things.

His edict is new, by historical standards, but it just sounds old because the desire for Jesus to be a ruler who will finally take charge and make things go more smoothly—to make things feel like we are finally going to get to be on the winning team—is an old desire. But our scripture for this morning, which was written when Rome ruled the western world, has themes that run deeper than mere power.

Listen to our reading for this morning from Ephesians 1:15-23:

I pray that the eyes of your heart will have enough light to see what is the hope of God’s call, what is the richness of God’s glorious inheritance among believers, since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, this is the reason that I don’t stop giving thanks to God for you when I remember you in my prayers. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, will give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation that makes God known to you. and what is the overwhelming greatness of God’s power that is working among us believers. This power is conferred by the energy of God’s powerful strength. God’s power was at work in Christ when God raised him from the dead and sat him at God’s right side in the heavens, far above every ruler and authority and power and angelic power, any power that might be named not only now but in the future. God put everything under Christ’s feet and made him head of everything in the church, which is his body. His body, the church, is the fullness of Christ, who fills everything in every way.

We can hear that Paul is trying to comfort and encourage people in a dangerous world. He repeats words like power, authority, and strength and talks about God putting everything under Christ’s feet. Paul’s world was as overcome by oppressive governments as Pope Pius’, but though Paul used the ruling metaphor, he didn’t simply picture Christ as the Greatest Emperor of Them All. He saw Jesus as the one who could teach us how to love each other. That’s a different kind of power; it’s relational power—and it is a more lasting power. Which view we take—whether we expect Christ to be King or Connector—has a huge impact on what God can do in and through us, as well as what kind of people we choose to be in the world.

In his book How to Know a Person, which is a book about the power of relationships, David Brooks looks how we what we mean when we say a person had good character, and then he presents two contrasting traditions about how that character develops that helped me think about our passage today.

The first perspective he calls the warrior/statesman model, which he says has come down through centuries, where a person of character looks like the ancient heroes from history—kings and generals and political leaders. This model says we show moral character by our self-mastery, by the way we use our will power to control our passions, by the way we master our virtues: honesty, courage, determination, humility. It is also an individualistic model: we can build our character on our own.

The second perspective Brooks calls “the illuminator,” and it begins with the understanding that we, as people, need recognition from one another to survive. “People,” he says, long for someone to look into their eyes with loving acceptance. Therefore, morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says, ‘I respect you,’ the question that says, ‘I’m curious about you,’ the conversation that says, ‘We’re in this together.”

Character building happens as we get better the daily tasks of attending to one another. What matters most is not how strong our willpower is but how deeply invested we are in our relationships.

When I read Brooks’ words I thought, “That’s what Paul was saying!” It’s not about Christ being king—as in a king who is going to win all the battles, keep us safe, and put us in charge. It’s about the presence of Christ in our lives having the power to create unity and foster love where it might otherwise not seem possible.

Misguided power and oppression are not going to be overcome by larger shows of force. Violence is not a viable solution to violence, whether we are talking wars between nations or quarrels between ourselves. The real power is love—love that thrives in the details of our dealings with one another.

How do we recognize the gifts other people have to offer the world? How do we affirm and support them? How do we learn from them?

Our verses this morning came from the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. In Chapter Three he offers a prayer that illuminates what we are talking about. Listen:

When I think of the greatness of this great plan I fall on my knees before God (from whom every group of people, earthly or heavenly, derives its name), and I pray that out of the glorious richness of God’s resources God will enable you to know the strength of the spirit’s inner reinforcement—that Christ may actually live in your hearts by your faith. And I pray that you, firmly fixed in love yourselves, may be able to grasp (with all Christians) how wide and deep and long and high is the love of Christ—and to know for yourselves that love so far beyond our comprehension. May you be filled though all your being with God!

Paul’s image of Christ is not so much one who was in charge of the world as much as one who was in love with it. And that is our call as well—which takes me back to my mother’s dressing recipe.

Even though I copied down what she told me each year, I never made it exactly as she did. I use chicken stock where she used hot water. I leave the onions out because of Ginger’s allergy. I added bacon. After I read the recipe to Marissa, she sent a text to say she had a favorite cornbread mix she was going to use for the base of the recipe. I am not a fan of mixes, but that is not essential to the tradition. What matters are the relationships that have been nurtured and fed by our years of phone calls.

We come back to our traditions to remind ourselves what matters and to ask if those traditions still do that. Tradition is not just repeating ourselves. It is using words and actions that hold meaning to keep our faith alive, to remember what matters, and adapting our recipe to feed our moment in time.

What matters is that we are created to love one another. We are created to live together: to attend to one another, to love like it’s our job, to dig into the details of one another’s lives and share the load. We belong to a God who became human to show us what love looks like—to show us how to be human and to humanize one another. May we be among those who trust that God’s boundless love is worth our lives, and who find ways to show that love to all those around us in small and powerful ways. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

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