Monday, December 24, 2018

How the revolution comes






CHRISTMAS EVE: Grace Embodied, Part 5. (Go here for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)


There’s an old Jewish saying, “God couldn’t be everywhere, so God created mothers.”   I’m sure some of our mothers would balk at this while others might embrace it.  But it touches on something that is true, which is, we can’t experience love without someone to love us and someone to love.  And God, who is a relationship of love, came into this world as a human baby, to be loved by a human mother.

 When Mary said yes to the angel, this was scary and exciting and real and also little bit hypothetical. Sharing it with Elizabeth and Zechariah made it more real – joy needs to be shared. Remember how they all had a turn announcing the good news
It was cosmic good news – tyrants pulled from thrones, poor lifted up and rich sent away, ancient promises fulfilled, a mighty savior rescuing from enemies, a kingdom without end, light to all those in darkness, and guiding us into peace.  Heady stuff. Grand and marvelous stuff.  This is where her head was then.

And this is where the shepherds who come bursting into their little scene are too.  Their celestial vocalists gave them the vast view- Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace!  
She remembers this view. She was on board with this plan.

But now she is holding this tiny infant, her son. Now she is not the servant of the Lord joining in God’s plan for us all, she is this one baby’s mother. She has fed him from her body, she has stroked his soft cheek and looked into his eyes that look like her own mother’s eyes.  

And she loves him. Now she loves him. Now love has pulled her into this thing so deeply that she’s in over her head in love. She is inside the Trinity; between the Father and the Son stands only her.  And to know such love, to feel herself lost to such love, changes everything.  She didn’t know.  How could she know?  That she would want nothing more in the world than to protect this little one from pain and suffering? 

Just moments before, the transformation was complete that took her from enthusiastic teenager, swept up in the excitement of this cosmic revolution, to fierce mother, willing to do anything to protect her son from the darkness.

Only, he’s here to go into the darkness. He’s here to go right toward the pain and the suffering and bear it for us all. That is why he has come. And she agreed to this. She agreed but maybe didn’t know what it would mean, or chose not to think about that in these first maternal moments.

Until the shepherds remind her.  Until the little family’s reverie is shattered by their boisterous excitement with a clear message.  He’s for us all. He’s here to turn the world on end. He IS the light that no darkness can put out! 

God’s whole plan is so ludicrous. So dependent on weak people who are swayed by emotion, to follow through and do their part.  God’s whole plan is so ingenious, so dependent on people born from love and returning to love, to come back to love and participate in the salvation of all creation through love.  

Mary ponders these things. She treasures the words of the eager shepherds, who sound like how she felt not too long ago. She believes in this hope, with all her heart she did. Now her heart belongs to this baby.

They all thought God would come in with power and might, through strength and force. But God came with love.  Through love.  Weak and vulnerable, needy and dependent, tiny and helpless, and bound heart and soul to his mother. God came into the love of a mother for her baby. 

This is what the angels sing about. This is what we misunderstand. 
This is how the revolution comes.  In hidden and gentle ways and very tangible ways.  
There is nothing stronger than this.  No army can defeat a mother’s love for her child. No technology or weapon is stronger than the bond between true friends.  There is no Tsunami or demagogue or suffering of any kind that can stop love.  All over the world, through next door neighbors, and kindergarten teachers, and great uncles and little sisters, and strangers reaching out to help each other, the transformative power of love leaks between the cracks and spills over the edges and rises up between us with healing and tenderness, and even in the midst of terrible bondage, it sets us free.  Anyone who has lost a loved one can tell you not even death itself ends love. 

While nations rage and powers shake, in every place at every moment, love is breaking through, people are sitting with one another in their suffering, celebrating with each other in joy, listening, seeing, sacrificing, embracing, joining God right where God already is. God’s love is embodied. 
We are part of that love. This is God’s way.  This is how God came.  

God loves us beyond measure or comprehension. From love we came and to love we will return. Darkness doesn’t stand a chance.
This doesn’t make it feel any less like darkness.  But in that darkness, the light shines.  Because into that darkness God comes.

The carols we sing tonight are mostly triumphant and hopeful; they’re the infectious joy of the shepherds like new grandparents in the grocery line, telling all who will listen about the cosmic good news and how God is redeeming the world.  Tonight we are singing with the angels the hopeful big picture part of the story. And that part is real and true.

But how this happens in the world, and how it is real and true in our lives, is more often the small, close-up picture that’s messier, deeper and often hidden.   It’s in all the small acts of giving and receiving of love, the daily losing and the finding of ourselves, the coming in alongside someone like God did with us, it's how God does with us.  It’s when we’re pulled in over our head to something that doesn’t make sense, but is more real than everything else, a belonging to eternity and to other people, to ourselves, and to God.
It mostly feels more like the wordless part of the story, fit for treasuring and pondering but hard to put into words because it begins before words exist.  

God’s heart belongs to us. 
God came into this life to love and be loved. 
Our hearts belong to God. We exist to love and be loved.  
This is the light that no darkness can extinguish. 
May it shine through us.
Amen.

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Dying to Labels, Rising to Love

St. Joseph & Baby Jesus, by Jason Jenicke
ADVENT 4: Love (Grace Embodied, Part 4. Go here for Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3)


Our text says Joseph is a good man. A righteous man.  He has an impressive pedigree and follows God’s ways. On paper, he seems like a solid choice to be the father of God incarnate.

This is comforting right off the bat, because we like to know who are the good people, and who are the bad ones. These are really helpful categories in our world. Knowing what makes people good and what makes them bad helps us aspire to be good people, and also  to know who the bad people are upfront so we can reject them in good conscience.  
It really messes with us when those we thought were good turn out to be bad, or those we thought were bad do something good. 
We like our categories clean. We like our aspirations clear.

But in the bible, when we start out thinking people are good, we often discover they’re not.  And more often, the people God chooses don’t even start out good to begin with – consider Adam and Eve, Sarai and Abram and Hagar, Solomon and David, the judges, kings, and prophets, and every one of the disciples.  "Good" is not something the biblical narrative is concerned with upholding.  In fact, it seems eager to tear it down.  Perhaps because if God chose the good people, the always upright, clearly worthy and obviously noble people, we might assume that their goodness is the reason they are included in God’s plan.  And while we often tell the story of our faith that way, that is not at all how the scriptures themselves tell it.

If God cared about upholding some standard of goodness God could easily have waited a few months until Mary and Joseph were properly married.  Nothing unsavory or disreputable, no need to put Joseph in such a conundrum or make things awkward and potentially life-threatening for Mary – who could legally be stoned for being pregnant by someone other than her husband.

But God is out to shatter our belief in what is right and true, what is earned and lost, important and marginal, and pull us instead into a different reality, one of wonder and mercy and trust, where God sets the terms, not us. We are creature; God is creator. We are made to receive ministry and share it with others, by a God who ministers to us in our need. We are not made to earn, or prove, or uphold something on our own.

God moves in impossibility, and not through our credentials or categories, or whatever ever false gods or measures - whether outside or inside religion – that we have erected to judge ourselves and separate ourselves. 

To participate in God’s backwards and upside down reality, we have to shed the upright and clear-cut ideas we’ve put our trust in, the ones that tell us who we are and how we should be, and whether we are good or bad. In order to be ministers, we have to release what we thought we were or should be. We have to face and let go our false selves, in order to find our true selves loved by the source of all Love.  

Our good-personness must die, and we must be resurrected into the grace of God who claims us, not because we are good, but because God is love. 

Joseph starts out this story a good person. And then he becomes a good person in an impossible situation.  His contracted fiancĂ© is pregnant. It is not his child. He prays and frets and grieves and then he resolves to do the only good thing, the right thing in the eyes of God: to dismiss her quietly.  Dissolving their marriage contract will cause her as little risk or embarrassment as possible, and it will preserve his own dignity, honor and reputation as a good and righteous man before God.  This is what God would want him to do.

Nope. The angel tells him. It’s not. God wants you to do something else entirely.
God redefines "faithful" for Joseph. It doesn’t mean good. It means coming-alongside.  Getting your hands and your reputation dirty. It means living in impossibility.  
This is not your child.  And yet he will be.  You are to name him and raise him and love him.  And you will walk in the shadow of the whispers your whole life.  Up against your doubt, inside of this foolishness, you will live, right there against your own fear and questions and inability to even to control your own life or narrative, you will be asked to be faithful.  To accept what God is giving you and follow where God is leading you.  And you will take on guilt. You will appear to be something that you are not – this child’s father, and in so doing, you will become his father after all.  
Joseph goes from upstanding, ethical guy, good person, to one who must constantly trust up against his doubt. He must trust again and again that there is more going on than we can see, and must be willing to live into the unknown where the rules that made sense yesterday no longer hold sway. He will let go of who he thought he was to become who he is meant to be.

But it’s not just his understanding of himself that must change. It’s also his understanding of God.  Before he proceeds, he needs to decide who will be God- the god who he thought god was?  The one that called him to be a decent human being, a good person who minds his own business and is worthy of admiration and respect, in a world of competition and scarcity and judgment and fear and earning God and human favor, where women get stoned for adultery and the “right” thing to do is to dismiss her quietly and go about your business? 

Or the God who comes to him in angel and dream telling him that there is something beyond what we can see and hear and touch that is impossible but real? The  God who invites him to step into a different reality from here on out, one defined by love and standing-with-you-ness, and grace unearned and forgiveness unmerited, where everybody has enough and nobody is dismissed, quietly or otherwise? The God inviting him into a future that is unfolding right before him in foolish and backwards and extraordinary ways?

When he gets up from that dream, and does what the angel tells him to do, he enters into a conspiracy with God that undermines the whole system by which the world operates, and so he will forever be outside it, judged and misunderstood, but he will also be set free.  

The old way is dead for Joseph. And he has no choice about that.  The new way opens up before him and he gets to say yes to that.  He will join Mary and Elizabeth and Zechariah, in bearing this secret, this absurd glory, that nothing is impossible with God, that the creator of the universe is coming into this world, alongside us. 

And you, Joseph! You will be the first to hold him in your arms! You will give him your parentage and so also your lineage- through you he will be in the line of David as prophesied of the Messiah.  
And it will be your job to name him “God with us,” and raise him, not as a good person who is respected in society and honored in the community, but as a vagabond and a subversive, who dines with outcasts and sinners and operates by a different playbook. He’ll live and preach not good and bad, but grace and redemption, forgiveness and freedom, connection to God and each other, abundance, gift and shalom-wholeness for all.  

So do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.  Love her. 
Name the child Jesus.  Love him.  That is your calling.  

And so Joseph wakes in the world a different person than he lies down to sleep.  His old life dead. He rises to into a life defined by love.

God’s love is where it all begins and where it all ends. A force so great it has no opposite, love made us, claims us, and draws us in share it with each other and find our true selves in that sharing.  Love is the reason God created, the reason God came in. That nothing might keep us from this love.  Not even our efforts to be good, and worthy of such love.  

To participate in the way of Christ is not to seek to be good and avoid the bad, but to be faithful, that is, broken, honest and real, to trust up right up against our doubt. It's learning to trust again and again that there is more going on than we can see, and being willing to live into the unknown, letting go of who we thought we were to become who we are meant to be.  It's lonelier and more uncomfortable than just going along with the clear-cut labels and aspirational categories the world provides.

But it’s also what sets us free to truly receive the vast and bottomless love of God, the love that comes spilling out in forgiveness and mercy and peace, hope, and joy, and moves through us into the world. 

Tonight we lit an Advent candle for Love.  Come and find yourself held in that love.

Saturday, December 8, 2018

God and the slave-girl


ADVENT 2: PEACE (Grace Embodied, Part 2. Go here for Part 1.)


The Hebrew word for Peace, Shalom, means “fullness” or “completion.”  Saying Shalom as a greeting is to say, “May you be completed.”

Peace is not an ethereal idea. It’s an actual thing.
Conflict and division – they are real, heavy and dark and sharp, crushing and weighty things. Peace is not just taking that away, leaving nothing but a vacuum, shallow emptiness where squashed-down discord smolders or discontent breeds like mildew.
Peace is not an empty space of enforced silence between otherwise foes.  No. Peace has substance and girth. It exists in the world. It is something you can hold and touch and smell; Peace is tangible and real wholeness.  
It’s what God’s kind of life tastes like and feels like in your hands. 

We know the feel of peace.
It’s that thing that happens between people when forgiveness is slowly labored into,
and when love is discovered and shared. 
It’s when, drifting along untethered, someone sees you and values you.
To the drug-addled mind and listless soul, peace is clarity and grounding.
To the fearful and lonely person, peace is belonging and trust.
To the frenzied and chaotic life, peace is order and settled calm.
To the lost and abandoned person, peace is home and safety.
To the heartbroken and despairing ones, peace is solidarity and hope.
Between warring factions, peace is not just taking away weapons or working out a tenuous agreement to not set each other off.  It’s the building of bridges, the joining together, the solidarity of shared humanity.  It is whole instead of shattered. Harmony instead of discord.  Peace is fullness of life. Jesus said I came that you may life, and have it abundantly. Shalom.

Last week we said that the first grace the human ever knows is our creatureliness itself, our embodied, fragile, mortality.  We are creatures connected to the earth, living inside bodies that are trapped inside the confines of time and space. And it is from within these vulnerable bodies, from within these confines of time and space, that God’s grace encounters us.  We were made for this conversation, a dialogue with the speaking, living God and with one another.  God ministers to us, and we, made in God’s image are made to minister to each other. To live Shalom, peace.

Now, all this talk of peace, and creatureliness gives us the perfect backdrop against which to hear again the story of Hagar, which at first glance is perhaps the strangest text ever paired with the second week of Advent. 

But, Abram and Sarai are a perfect case in point that, as we saw last week with Adam and Eve, as soon as we try to transcend our creatureliness, we run into problems. Whenever we reach for God’s role, when we deny our vulnerability, disregard our interdependence, and ignore our need for a minister, we’ve stepped outside of the grace of our creaturliness – we’ve stepped away from God and out of peace.

Decades earlier, God had given Abram a promise – that his descendants would number the stars, and through his line the whole world would be blessed. This is God’s grace.  God promised this; God will do it.
Only, a long time has gone by, and it’s not happening.  And the two of them begin looking at each other and thinking that between their lack of youth and utter barrenness, they don’t seem to be doing a very good job of fulfilling this promise.  After so very long of waiting, they’ve forgotten that it’s God’s job to fulfill God’s promises and not ours.  
So Sarai hatches a plan.

Take the slave girl- she says to Abram. Have a baby by her and the promise will be fulfilled.
There are lots of red flags here, friends, lots of signs they are most assuredly notliving in the grace and peace of their creaturliness before God, not least of which is that Hagar is simply a means to an end, and object, and not a human being at all. They are seeking to transcend their own creatureliness, their own embodiment, by using herbody to do God’s work for God. They don’t even call her by her name – neither of them, throughout this whole narrative. They call her ‘the slave girl.’  She is her place, her station, her role that is subservient and disposable; she is a thing. 

So they do this.  And then, predictably, things between them get really tricky. 
Hagar conceives.  Presumably she will have no say over this child; it will be raised by Abram and Sarai, designated to be the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abram. She was just a vessel. Except no human is that.  We belong to each other; we share humanity in common. So when her pregnancy begins to show, when the reality of bearing new life comes over her, Sarai sees it, and it’s suddenly not like placing an order from an online shopping site. It’s a young, fertile woman living in her house, walking around carrying her husband’s child inside her. Even before the child is delivered Hagar is giving him what Sarai never could. 
How can Abram not be dizzy with the promise of a coming child? 
How can Hagar, drawn into this thing against her will, not deeply resent and hate Sarai?  
And how can Sarai not be filled with rage and shame? 
Her plan - which seemed so perfect when she thought it up – turns out to be a poison to her, body and soul it does nothing but drain her of peace and fill her with nearly unbearable pain, regret and hopelessness. 

She lashes out at Abram and blames him. The slave-girl you knocked up looks at me with contempt and sees me as worthless now! (Now Abram comes across as the weakest of characters in this trio, and not just in this story, but throughout his whole life story, he doesn’t do a very good job of seeming worthy of the faith God puts in him, and frequently forgets to put his faith in God.  But again, God’s promises and God’s work are about God’s ability and God’s strength, not ours).  

Don’t blame me, woman! Abram shoots back, in his own shame and confusion at what has happened to them, I don’t care about the slave girl; do whatever you want with her!  So Sarai turns her humiliation and anger onto Hagar and “humbles her, forcing her to submit.”   She abuses Hagar so badly that Hagar flees to the wilderness.

Fleeing to the wilderness doesn’t mean she went on a spiritual walkabout or ran away to start a new life in a nearby city. It’s more like heading into nothingness, into non-being.  There are no roadside food stands or mile marker gas stations. It’s the wild – wild animals, the elements, at the mercy of the untamed.  It’s where the Holy Spirit, centuries later, drives Jesus, right after he is baptized.  Barren, desolate and dangerous.  At that time deities were always attached to people and places, so to head out to nowhere was to go literally into godforsakenness, to go where the gods don’t even go. She is fleeing to most certainly die.

All the things that happen in our lives happen in a place and at a time.  And any stories we tell about those things, begin with – or at least eventually mention – these elements, “This one time, at band camp…” 
Hagar has left her home, her life, her identity and role; she’s exchanged all that to be nothing, nowhere.  Except she isn’t. We’re told exactly where she is. “God found her by a spring of water in the wilderness- the one on the way to Shur.” 
God found her because God was looking for her. God looks for us. God goes where no decent God goes, to the wilderness, into the nothingness to seek Hagar. Here her life begins again.  In this place, at this time, God calls her by name.  For the first time in the story, she is called by name.  Hagar, God says, slave girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?

Theologian Andy Root points out the God who speaks speaks to Hagar first with a question, then a command, and finally and most fully, with a promise. 
Here’s the question:  Where have you come from and where are you going?  This is like God’s words last week to Adam and Eve, when they were hiding behind a tree from the Creator of the world – Where are you? God doesn’t ask these questions because God doesn’t know the answer. God asks because answering God is part of the conversation we earth creatures are in with the Transcendent One.  We have to have a chance to tell our story, to claim our reality, to place ourselves in time and space. We have to confess our creatureliness if we are to receive the grace God has for us.

God signals in the question that God knows what’s up with Hagar; God knows who she has been, who she was seen as, this thing that was done to her, Hagar, slave girl of Sarai,God says. She’s first called by her name, her true self, and then invited to tell what it was like to be the object.  She’s invited to share her death experience with the living God.
 “I am running away,” Hagar answers God. 

In order for God to give us a new story, we have to own and inhabit the old one. We have to speak it, to give words to it, to say how it has shaped us so that it can be stripped of its power to continue to do so.  

God is a God who speaks our name, who seeks us out where gods don’t go, who invites us to share our story, to be known, to be vulnerable. Because remember? God is first minister. It is how God relates to us.  God cares for us in our real selves in our real circumstances. God arrives into our experiences and bears them with us in order to heal us, to bring us to peace – to our fullness, our place as ministers made in the image of the Divine minister.

So after God hears Hagar’s story, God gives her a command. 
Go back. Go back – not to a place, but to a person.  
Go back to Sarai. Humbly submit to her.  This is the same verb that drove Hagar away; but it’s the opposite action.  Instead of Sarai forcing her slave girl to submit to her, Hagar is coming to Sarai in freedom and choice, and offering herself to care for Sarai.  It’s Jesus’ Turn the other cheek– It’s a self-empting action that requires that you see me as a person, a person with agency, and I am choosing to use that agency to serve you, another person, powerfully humbling both.  Sarai is forced to see Hagar as a person. And in order to do this, Hagar must also see Sarai as a person, not an oppressive force, an object of hatred, an enemy.  A person trapped in grief and shame and rage, Sarai is in her own kind of wilderness.  So God tells Hagar to go and seek Sarai in her despair and nothingness; to go back and minister to her in that place as God has ministered to Hagar.

Question, command, and now promise. The longest part.
You have a future, God says to her. Your child will have a future. This promise is greater than the wrong that was done to you, it will shape you far beyond the things that were taken from you. Your story is not over, in fact, it will live beyond you in generations too numerous to count – a promise we’ve heard before. The self-emptying God who speaks, who seeks us, who ministers to us, makes promises and keeps them. God pulls us out of nothingness into the future God is bringing into the world.

Then God gives Hagar the name for her son, and the child who not yet born is swaddled in promise as well. The name means “God listens.”  This name will define him; it will follow him and go ahead of him. God saw him before he was born, heard him then, heard his mother when she was lost, sought and found her and made her a minister. Ishmael’s very identity will always reflect this story and truth: God listens.

Then something quite marvelous happens. Hagar returns the favor. Hagar names God.  She is the first person in scripture with the chutzpah to name God. She calls God, “The God of seeing” because God came looking for her, God saw her true personhood beneath the story she had been living in, God found her.  God sees her, and she sees God, and names the Source of all life, The God who sees us.

So Hagar returns to Sarai. And she ministers to her in her despair. She shares the story of being found by God; she comes bearing faith in the promises of a God who sees us.  And when Ishmael is born, Abram – who has heard God himself in the past, respects Hagar’s encounter with God and he names the child Ishmael, God listens.  

Fourteen years later Sarah will conceive, her Advent waiting will end, and the promised blessing will be fulfilled through the impossibility of a barren womb, because impossibility is how God does things. And when it is, Sarai, whose name meant ‘Princess’ becomes Sarah, ‘Mother of Nations.’

And Hagar becomes the matriarch of peace-makers, the mother of ministers. Having being seen by God, she can see others. Sharing in God’s fullness, she contributes to others’ fullness. Making peace is a form of active, humble submitting, as Hagar does; it’s being surrendered to God, who surrenders to us, and then surrendering to each other, to come alongside each other as God comes alongside us. It’s seeing one another in our shared creatureliness.  Peace-making is what ethicist Glen Stassen describes as “abandon[ing] the effort to get our needs met through the destruction of enemies. God comes to us in Christ to make peace with us; and we participate in God's grace as we go to our enemies to make peace.”  Blessed are the peace-makers, Jesus’ says, centuries later.  Blessed are the fullness-seekers, the ministers.

One day there will be no more darkness, but for now, we are found in the darkness by the light of the world that no darkness can put out. Advent is our invitation to be vulnerable creatures who speak of the darkness in which we find ourselves, to the God who speaks, listens, sees us, calls us by name, draws us by grace into God’s fullness, and sends us to each other to seek fullness for one another. 
We are promised peace; God will do this.  In hope we will trust that peace will be so, by joining in its coming.  

Come and let the God of grace meet you here and send you out in peace.
Amen.


Sunday, December 2, 2018

In our humanness, Hope.




ADVENT 1 (Grace Embodied, Part 1)

Genesis 1:26-2:9, 2:15-25, (and some of Genesis 3)

There are things we can’t control.  Like this crappy weather.  Or the calendar.  We are carried along on the current of life and here we are, once again bumping up against the time of year most fraught with expectations, and staring down the last page of 2018 with all the millions of things that get jammed into December.

It’s Advent.  Advent is the beginning of the church year, and the church version of the countdown to Christmas.  As the world around us comes to the end of a year, we have come to the beginning.  We’re returning to the silence, the darkness over the face of the deep before the Creator says “Let there be Light” and life begins.
  
Every year the Church cycles through this pattern of seasons of worship that help us understand our story inside God’s story. In Advent we use the color deep blue to signify the darkest night just before the dawn starts breaking in, and we see it as a time of hushed waiting, of longing for God inside the promise of Christmas, that God is with us.  
Come, Lord Jesus.

This first week of Advent the theme is Hope.  Hope is anticipation. Hope trusts that it will be so: the promise will be fulfilled. All wrongs will be made right. There is something beyond us that is pulling us forward into a new thing, and it cannot be stopped. This is the message of hope.

Before God spoke life into being, there was nothingness, and the Spirit hovered over the waters of the deep. And there was hope.

Because first there was God. God is a relationship of giving and receiving, one in three persons in freedom bound to each other in generosity and self-emptying love.
And because our scriptures hold two different stories of the beginning, we know some very important things about God. The first is that God is a speaking God. God speaks from nothing and something comes to be. God declares and it is so. And then God calls it good.  
This is a God who brings forth life with a word. Then God rests.
Just before God rests, God makes human beings, male and female in God’s image, and God tells them to take care of the world, and brings them into relationship and rest with God. Connected uniquely to God in all creation, they are invited into dialogue with God, drawn into a conversation already taking place within the Trinity.  That’s the first Creation story.  From nothingness to being, from speaking, creation, culminating in human relationship with the God who speaks, creates and rests.

The second story of the beginning is a love story, intimate and risky.  In it God is vulnerable, by choice.  Humans don’t come last in this story, they come before everything else, held in God’s hands and breathed into life by God’s own breath.  Made from the dust of the earth, Adamah, is this creature of the earth, Adam.  When the earth creature, the Adam awakens, all that is true is what is true – being completely known and loved by God, the source of being, the source of all life. Fully known. Fully loved. Fully in dialogue with God, connected and whole, Created and cared for. This is reality and it has never yet been otherwise.

And this creature gets to witness and share in God’s act of creation. God opens the process to this special creature, inviting the human creature also to speak, to name the other creatures.  And whatever the earth creature calls them, that is what they are. 

We’ve been talking this year about grace and the first grace the human ever knows is to be embodied. It is our creatureliness itself. It is that we need God, we are made by and cared for by God.  We are not God, we are not God’s equal, we are not angels or transcendent beings. We are, literally, earth creatures. Creatures connected to, from and returning to, the earth, living inside bodies that are trapped inside the confines of time and space.
We are embodied, and we meet God’s grace from within these earthly bodies.

Let us consider for a moment our bodies -  our persistently beating hearts and insatiably curious and malleable minds, our limbs that work in coordination with each other most of the time, and our senses designed to help us most fully experience and interact this world from within this body we are given, with all its limits and all its possibilities – that we could mix and heat things from the earth and create and taste such things as curry and caramel and coffee! That we could run races! And build airplanes! And teach other humans how to walk and talk! Our bodies are astounding and marvelous.  They are also limited. 

We are made of the stuff of dust, the stuff of stars, yes, but the stuff of dust too.  We stink.  And we get sick. And we get tired. And have allergies, and parts of our bodies that don’t work like they should.  And we get old.  And we start out super weak and dependent – we are really only mostly able-bodied for a very short time of our time here on earth, actually, always coming into and out of different abilities.  We are not invincible, and not unlimited; each of us comes with an expiration date. 
Human beings are finite, dependent creatures. 
And this is grace.  
We need God.  
And so God ministers to us. God provides for us. God loves and cares for us, and we are designed to receive that. To be loved. To trust our maker.  To know our place alongside other earth creatures. To care for the other creatures upon it that we are so bound to on this earth we can’t escape. To live on it, and in it, and from inside our own creatureliness, to  speak and listen to God.

But we can’t do this alone. We are not alone, solo, individual creatures.  For just a short time God tried this out, and it didn’t work.  To be made in the image of a relational God, whose love Father, Son and Spirit spilled out into creation to be shared and spread, the human needs also to be in relationship, we need also to belong to other than just ourselves, and even other than just God.  The conversation requires discussion partners.

So God makes the first earth creature sleep, and takes from it bodily tissue with which to fashion a corresponding partner – a helper, which is the same Hebrew word used for God as our Helper, a rescuer.  And when this earth creature awakens and sees one like itself but different, it is rescued from what it was to now be what it is meant to be.  Once there is female, now there is for the first time male, once there is an other, a you, there is now also a self, a me, and now the image of God can be reflected in a relationship of dialogue, a vulnerability of knowing and being known, a mutual conversation, a community. 

Now there is belonging. Belonging to God is complete even as we belong to each other. Belonging to each other is part of our belonging to God. And they walked in the cool of the garden and conversed with God, and it was good.  And this too is grace.
  
But to be so creaturely! How risky and weak it feels!  How strong and safe it must feel to be God! Not to be bound by the constraints of time and space, or life and death, or bodies and needs! To know all; to be invulnerable!  
So they eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the one boundary God set up and said, Do not do this, is the thing they do.  And when they cross this boundary their eyes are opened, and they see they are naked and are ashamed.  Their vulnerability becomes a deficit, a danger; their nakedness transparency. Self-protection, competition and blame roar up within them and between them, and they hide from God.

We earth creatures try to be more than we are, to transcend our limits. 
We now know what is happening at every moment in virtually every corner of the earth.  
We extend our reach to digitally become enemies with those we don’t know and friends with those we’ve never met. 
We keep the lights on and the screens lit to work around the clock, always available and always responsive. 
We eat everything we feel like, and drink till we stop feeling. 
We hold in front of ourselves false images of fake bodies and then contort ourselves around diets and drugs and gurus and equipment to become something we are not. 
We ignore our responsibility for the earth, and its creatures, pursuing our own invincibility instead. We resent and punish others human beings for their weakness or need.  
We, in so very many ways, suppress our creatureliness, ignore our vulnerability, disregard our interdependence, and deny our need for a minister, (that is, for others to care for us).  And so we become disconnected. We disintegrate.  We lose our very selves, our primary identity and belonging, and we hide.   We hide from ourselves, from others, and most futilely, from God.

This conversation God has begun, this dialogue, this relationship, means God, in freedom, has chosen to be bound to this creature, has chosen to love, and therefore also to have the possibility of being rejected.  To give this creature a Yes means it might also say No.  To give it capacity to speak means it might also be silent. Or use words to hurt. To love this creature means God might also be scorned by it. 

My beloved creatures, where are you?  God asks, coming to the conversation and finding nothingness, as though they have uncreated themselves. Why are you hiding from me?
At first they don’t answer, they are hiding behind leaves from the Source of all life. 
Because now shame feels more powerful than trust, and weakness seems more dangerous than disconnection.  
So when God’s voice speaks to them they do not answer back.

But God’s love comes first and last and all throughout. No matter what and always they, and we, belong to God. So when God finds them, and they confess their nakedness, their shame, their weakness, God sees their agony and clothes them, not because they need clothes, but because they need a minister.  Human beings need a minister, even when we think we don’t – maybe especially then - and God will always minister to us. When we turn our backs on God, God will drape over us a warm, protective garment, and help us face our own humanity.

At the very most core of us we are from God, and for God, and the parts deep beneath our knowing know - body, heart, mind and soul - what it is to be known and loved by God.  
And at the core everything, before and after and apart from and throughout the cosmos, is this God who is love, who gives God’s very self for us. 
This is grace. God’s self-emptying, self-giving, ministering love that doesn’t need to, but does it all anyway. 
This relationship is not up for grabs.

But here’s how this works- we are creature, and God is creator. 
We are human and God is divine. 
We are dependent, and God is independent, but chooses out of love and grace to share God’s own self with the world.  God decides to get tangled up in this conversation with us from here on out. 
In fact, in a few weeks, we are going to celebrate that God forfeits independence and invincibility and becomes dependent too – taking on the earth creatureliness that we are bound in, and becoming bound to us and alive alongside us.  Christmas is God taking on the limits of a human body with an expiration date, to keep this conversation going.

My beloved ones, where are you? God asks, as we hide in shame and see our vulnerable,  
soft bodies and tender hearts and questioning minds as ugly, weak, shameful and in need of changing.

But Advent is about noticing and trusting and watching for God.  
So let's begin Advent in the grace of our own creatureliness. 
Let’s feel our moving bodies and our aching hearts and our messy thoughts and gross humanity. 
Let’s take in the smells around us, and wiggle our fingers and toes, and gaze on something or someone lovely and complex. 
Let’s listen to music and words, and feel how we need other people to know us and we need to know ourselves alongside them, and notice how if we’re honest we crave something a little bit more perfect than we ever actually experience. 
Let’s observe our limits, witness our new abilities and new disabilities - the ones we’ve made peace with and the ones we’re just uncovering.  
Let’s recognize our dependence on each other and God, and respond to our needs, like sleep when we are tired, food when are hungry, tears when we are sad, laughter when we’re happy, and connection for the continually reloading need for listening, speaking, touching. 

We are not God. We don’t have unlimited power. We can’t know the divine mystery, but neither can we screw up the divine plan. So this Advent, from our embodied place as creatures, let’s look to our Creator.  Let’s enter into the ongoing conversation with the limitless, transcendent God, who improbably answers our vulnerability and need by coming vulnerable and needy.
Let’s listen to the God who speaks, and see the world as God sees it – deeply interconnected, beautiful and complex, and call it good. 
Let’s see ourselves as God sees us – part of the glorious whole, each one gorgeous and intricate, each one not meant to be isolated and alone.  
No matter what we do or don't do, we can’t stop ourselves from dying. But neither can we stop love from redeeming the whole world. 

Inside our creatureliness, inside our inability to be more than we are, there is our grace. It is the place God speaks to us. It is where the conversation happens.  It’s where hope begins.

Amen.

How to Repent (It's not how you think)

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