Peace, Impossibility, and the space we hold

Luke 1:(5-25), 57-80

A few weeks ago I accidentally went on a silent retreat.  The retreat part was on purpose. The silent part was the surprise.  If I had known it would be silent, I would not have gone. And I wasn’t really ready for it.

I mean, if I had known it would be silent, (and had not canceled) I would have prepared. I would have finished up the emails I had to send and the phone calls I had to return, and the last minute reminders to my husband and kids back home. I would have told my sister, who I talk to every single day, that she shouldn’t expect to hear from me from three days, instead of getting a text the third day that said, “Are you still alive?” 

I would have done all sorts of things to feel ready. But I didn’t know. 
Instead I drove onto the property in the middle of nowhere Kentucky and my phone suddenly stopped working. T-mobile. No phone. No internet. No talking allowed except in designated “visiting” rooms and the benches on the far side of the lawn, past the parking lot.

Welcome. Settle in.  It’s going to be a quiet ride.

The monks that live in this monastery are silent all the time, except when they pray. Nearly every day of their adult lives.  Not accomplishing anything that the outside world would deem terribly valuable or clearly marketable, they devote their lives to silence and prayer, out there in the hills of Kentucky.

And now here I was, with them.

Putting down all my productivity, and getting down to silent business.

Mine was just three days.

And it turned out I even got to speak at dinner with my friends- in the “talking dining room” for an hour each night.

Zechariah’s was nine months.

And there was no talking dining room with friends for him.

If he had known, would he have bowed out?

If he had known, how might he have prepared?

But by the grace of God, Zechariah didn’t know.

He went into the holy of holies to do his priestly duty, to light the incense and get out, but instead, when he brought the prayer and longing of all the people to God, “Oh Lord! Hear these prayers!” An angel showed up and said, “Hey Zechariah! God has heard your prayer!” And then announced – and of all things he was praying, this was most certainly did not make the list – that his elderly wife was going to have a baby. 

God, you’re about 65 years too late on that prayer…maybe you didn’t hear me right?  I was praying for the salvation of Israel. I was praying that all our brokenness would be healed. I was praying that you would restore us to right relationship with you and each other. I wasn’t praying for myself, I was praying for my people. Your people.

But it turned out, that his own long dead prayer, the one put to rest when it became impossible to fulfill - the prayer to be a father, to have a child - this prayer was resurrected in God’s answer to the longing of the people, and the angel said,

 You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord… He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God...to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

But then the little ego tussle with the angel and Zechariah came out of that place with his mouth zipped shut, no chance to explain what had happened, what was going to happen.  Just a sea of faces, waiting, ready for a blessing he was unable to deliver. Instead he brought them his befuddled silence, and, I imagine, was escorted out amidst confusion and disarray.

His last words to his wife when he left the house – what were they? They would be his last words he spoke to her for ¾ of a year.  Hope they were good ones. What errands were left hanging? What commerce came to an abrupt halt when he was sidelined by silence? Sorry, I can’t bring the lawnmower in for a tune up or run those checks to the bank. Someone else is going to have to deal with the cable guy.  Someone else is going to have to do the priest things for a while too.

God has a thing about impossibility. It’s God’s jam. Barren wombs, inappropriate people and dead dreams are God’s medium.  Hopelessness, pointlessness, things just not making sense – God loves that stuff.  Death? For God, that’s often just the beginning.

How can this be, since we are both old and my wife is barren? 

How can this be, since I am a virgin?

How can this be, since things are so broken?

How can this be, when it all looks hopeless?

How can this be? This cannot be.  It is not possible. 

This is the week in Advent where we hold up the thing that sometimes doesn’t feel possible, the thing that - though we wildly differ in strategy to seek after it - if we are honest, most of us most wish for, all of us, deep inside, PEACE. 

Peace is not just an end to conflict. Not a blank space where violence used to be – but something more powerful, more tangible, more real even than division, hatred, strife.

Peace is things as they were meant to be.
Fullness, wholeness, connected to God and others, the whole earth and all its inhabitants living out their authentic purpose alongside all else doing the same. A sense of well-being, and safety, and harmony, and enough, for all creation.

Peace is the substance, the stuff, of the Kingdom of God, which is to say, it’s the sound, and taste, and feel, of belonging to God and belong to each other, uncompromisingly and completely.

“Blessed are the peace-makers”, the grown up Jesus later said, “for they will be called children of God." (Mt. 5:9) In other words, Blessed are those who contribute to wholeness and fullness in others and the world; they are living in the real reality.

These days it’s easy to feel afraid, it takes almost nothing to get there. When we’re afraid, we put ourselves right alongside all of these people in these ancient stories, who found themselves in circumstances they didn’t choose or understand, and who, in the midst of whatever that looked like for them, all heard, every last one of them, the repeated refrain, Do not be afraid! Mary, Zechariah, Joseph, Shepherds, Magi –each of you, all of you, Do not be afraid!

Lift your eyes from what you see right here in front of you, from the things that seem to threaten security and safety, that bring distress and sorrow, that harm and destroy and whisper that this is the whole story, the end, the final word.  Lift your eyes to a farther horizon, and see beyond, future and past colliding, right now, God is breaking in. 

And we know that because God is ALWAYS breaking in, right now, in the midst of whatever impossibility we are facing, or anticipating, or fearing. There is no life, no moment, no violence or horror, no despair or disappointment, no stuckness or impossibility that God is not breaking into, not right alongside, not underneath and within.  
That’s what Jesus is, what Jesus does. 
Emmanuel is God-with-us.

When we say we are a congregation that practices Sabbath, we are saying we worship a God who deals in impossibility, and who is always, already breaking in.  And by stopping and taking ourselves out of the drivers’ seat, or the worry seat, off the device and away from the screen and out of the noise and away from the argument, on purpose and regularly, we look up to a further horizon, we’re drawn back for the bigger picture, we notice our fear instead of being swallowed by it. We feel the aching longing for wholeness, the hunger for the end of division, for peace, and that yearning puts us back in tune with the utter beauty of the peace we were made for and the One from whom it comes.

Sometimes we choose it, and that’s wonderful.

But sometimes we get there by accident or by default, or by design that is not our own.

On my accidentally silent retreat, when I had I rattled around my own brain until finally my inner voice calmed down, when I had spent hours tromping through the woods with stick in hand under shifting clouds and held by soft wind, with scurrying squirrels and singing birds around me, and more than one deer stopping and staring before bounding gracefully away, and a flock of wild turkeys yelling at me that I had gotten too close, when I had slept enough and read a little, and thought a lot, and prayed some, and watched some more, and settled a bit, and just barely begun to make friends with silence, I glimpsed that peace.

That place of openness, where God can meet you. 
This place where you get out of the way, your job and your ego, your duties and your worries, your roles and your responsibilities, gone.  Like silent Zechariah, you’re helpless. It’s impossible to contribute a thing, direct a thing, coordinate or oversee or explain or meddle. You are simply to take it all in. To absorb the wonder and never ever to forget that it came from God.

During his nine months of compulsory silence, as he watched is old wife’s belly swell, every day, Zechariah woke up and when he was unable, yet again today, to speak a word, it came back to him God is here. And God is coming, and I get to be part of it.   

And in the involuntary hush that drew him into this new and extraordinary role as watchful accomplice, wonder absorber, mystery sharer, Zechariah returned to the deepest part of him, his home in God, soaking in that place where trust is born and hope grows and peace is practiced.

Our theme this Advent is Still… as in, Be still and know that I am God.

And the words of trust, Even if, But still…

Still, God is God. There’s still more to the story.

And as in the stillness in the dark before the first light of dawn.

Most of us hardly ever choose stillness, let alone to be thrust into a position of waiting or silence, vulnerability, or trust.  We can never be prepared and ready to go looking for it. We will always find something else that needs to be done first.  We will always find something productive, important, urgent, and we’ll avoid the deep stillness.  But when it happens, it is a gift. Because it draws us back to the real reality. 

Don’t be afraid. God is here. God is coming. And you are going to be part of it.

Zechariah should be the patron saint of surprise vulnerability. Or of prayers answered not how you meant.  Of watching God breaking in right in front of you and bearing witness to it all. 

And when that little baby arrived, that impossible baby, and he held that impossible little baby in his old and wrinkled hands, his silence ended and his mouth was opened and he said, His name is John – which means his name is “God is gracious.  God is merciful, God gives us more than we could ever even know to long for”- that is his name. 

And then he sang.

Look at this child! he sang, sang out, to his neighbors and friends, Look at how God’s promise to our ancestors is coming to fruition! we are part of it! I am holding it. Oh yes, it is coming! There is no doubt that God’s salvation of us all is coming!  And for a moment, not a person in the room could doubt it either.

And then he turned and looked into the brand new blurry eyes of this utterly impossible child in his first minutes on this earth and continued his song,

 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people
  

 by the forgiveness of their sins.

This song, Zechariah’s words, are the words the monks who are otherwise silent sing every morning at six am. Thousands of years later, Zechariah’s words begin for them the light of day, every day.

His song ends,

By the tender mercy of our God,
   

the dawn from on high will break upon us,

 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,

 to guide our feet into the way of peace.’

The monks spend their whole lives in silence, except for one day a year, and except for the 5 times a day they pray through chant and song and spoken word and psalms.  And on the one hand, one could say that this is a complete waste of life.  These perfectly able-bodied men locked away here, away from society, day after day, praying and working and being quiet alongside each other. 
Until they die.

But a Franciscan mother superior once told me, “We in the monastic life hold onto things on behalf of the rest of culture that the rest of culture has forgotten…” And these monks, these men, hold silence for the rest of us. They hold trust and turning to God on behalf of the world that has lost its mind, and will lose it again tomorrow.

They know something we forget – about God and peace and the future and our lives.  

And for Zechariah, his little nine month monastic stint allowed him to hold onto reality in a different way, on behalf of the world.

This thing that is about to happen – God entering in, sending out a prophet to prepare the way, the world turned upside down – it requires reverence, and someone, even one person, who can hold, for the rest of us, the magnitude of what is transpiring. It requires even one person who will watch it and bear it and hold it up to God, who will, in silence and stillness, trust that God is here, that God is doing something right here.

When we stop, when we step out of the chaos and noise, we take up the ministry of Zechariah, the carrying it all alongside others ministry, the quiet yourself and get out of the way ministry. The listen well and don’t interrupt with your own opinions or interpretation ministry. We hold space for others, for God, and we learn to trust that God is here, and God is coming, and we get to be part of it.

Amen.

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Today we baptize Laurel Anne, coming alongside her, holding space for her, for God. And we will tell her that a mystery holds her that, for a while, wont make any sense to her, but it holds her nonetheless. We will do this strange thing that seems not to produce a darn thing, not to contribute to society in any way - we will do this powerful, impossible thing, where we give her over to death and new life, and mark her with the promise of the presence of God in all things, and we will say, Don’t be afraid! Little one, you will be a watchful accomplice, a wonder absorber, a mystery sharer, a peace-maker.  In Jesus Christ, God is here, and God is coming, and you, Laurel Anne, get to be part of it.

 That is holy work. It lifts our eyes to a farther horizon, and see beyond, and practice trusting in the real reality. And we will go from here held in God’s promise of wholeness, God’s peace, and holding onto it into a world that forgets, as we wait for God’s fullness to come.

Witness of Wonder

These videos taken together make up Luke 1:5-25, 57-80.   From Alt Advent, by Jon Birch.

Luke 1:1-4 says,

"Since many people have already applied themselves to the task of compiling an account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, using what the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed down to us, I too, after having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, have decided to write a carefully ordered account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so that you may have confidence in the soundness of the instruction you have received."

In other words, Here is where the story of God coming to be with us begins, lover of God.

There once was this old priest in the hill country…

Zechariah.  He doesn’t show up on Christmas eve.  He barely makes an appearance every three years or so in our Advent texts.  You and I would most likely agree that he’s not really central to the story.

But Luke begins with him. Luke starts the whole story of Jesus, and salvation, and what it is that God is doing in the world, of God coming in, with an old priest in the hill country.

Even having seen his story today, we might still say, that’s nice and all, but clearly it could happen without him, he’s not really that important. He doesn’t even say or do anything through most of it, for crying out loud.

And yet, in his rounds of delivering messages from God, the angel Gabriel came to Zechariah first.

He seems marginal – but then we see they’re all marginal, really, a random Galilean carpenter, a young girl not yet married, rural shepherds in a field, foreign scholars far away.  This story is loaded with bit characters. Not a box office draw leading lady or man among them.

So why begin with him?  Zechariah’s life was humming along on a trajectory, fulfilling what purpose he understood and contributing in all the ways a life does, there was no indication of, or even great desire for, change.  He was a fairly unremarkable, decent human being and that was that.  Until God decided to invade the ordinary.  And Luke tells us: here is where it begins.

That’s not where everyone else starts the story of God coming in.

In fact, nobody else does. But neither do they start it the same way as each other.

Matthew begins with Jesus’ genealogy –all those so and so was the father of so and so, a lineage, a long line of people whose lives led to this moment, a heritage and pedigree and journey. Here is where it begins, says Matthew.

Mark begins with grown up John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness- Prepare the way of the Lord! For Mark the whole story starts with this invitation, this proclamation, Jesus is here, Jesus is coming, God is bringing something new! And he’s off and running, not even bothering to circle back at all to anything that happened in Jesus’ early years.

John begins a little farther back - at the very beginning of time and space itself. The vast cosmos and the spoken word that brings life into being. In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God and the word was God.

And Luke begins with Zechariah.  Many have endeavored to put together an orderly account, most excellent lover of God, so here is my attempt. And here is where it all begins.

There once was this old priest...

The strange stirrings, the opening of heaven and earth, the moment God started in motion the irreversible plan to come and be not just God but God with us, was when this priest of the hill country went to do his duty in the most holy sanctuary, and an angel intruded.

This week we spent some time at my preacher’s round up talking about the contrast between Zechariah’s response to the angel Gabriel’s pronouncement and Mary’s response a few months later – as in, he missed the mark and got shushed for it, but she got it right. But really, it’s not they who differ in these interactions but Gabriel the angel.  

Zechariah says, “How can this be, since I am old and my wife is barren?” Mary says, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”

And Gabriel explains to her how it will happen, and she responds with her, let it be to me according to your word. 

But Zechariah doesn’t get a chance to come around. He doesn’t get an explanation, or even a pause. Instead, he gets a grumpy angel retort, Excuse me! I am Gabriel! I stand at the foot of the throne of God and you question me?

You’re going to be unable to speak now, until the time of his birth.

And unlike Mary, or Joseph, even, Zechariah’s response to the whole thing becomes irrelevant.

God is doing this, and that is that.

This story leaves so much to wonder. It doesn’t explain much, doesn’t give whys or wherefores, It just tells a story: it all began this way…

What if Zechariah’s encounter with Gabriel prepares Gabriel for Mary’s own how can this be?  What if the angel is more ready to handle human questions with human understandings of the limitations of things, like time, and space, and age, and barrenness, and virginity, and impossibility.  Maybe it’s a little cherubic wake-up call to how differently human beings perceive what can or can’t happen than those beings who live in the presence and awareness of God at all times, who are used to the ways of God instead of the limits of human reality.

But my favorite part of this whole thing, the thing that keeps it most fascinating, and curious for me, is Zechariah’s long silence.

Why the silence?

  

Maybe silence was really what Zechariah needed throughout this experience, to come to some sort of trust.

Or what if, in fact, what the moment itself needed most was silence - a silent, observant witness to watch, and listen, and take in the enormity of this reality, when, for all those living in it normally, it might begin to feel normal.

Five months into his silence, five months of waking up each morning unable to talk and remembering immediately that something spectacular is afoot, and rolling over to see his elderly wife’s gradually swelling belly,

five months of going about town unable to answer the questioning glances, and the whispered rumors, the rumblings about what happened when God met him in the temple,

five months along in his quiet seclusion of prenatal privacy, alongside his pregnant, secluded wife, out of the blue Elizabeth’s young relative Mary blows into their lives.

And her arrival brings Elizabeth out of hiding, and brings Mary the solidarity and strength she needs to embrace this reality unfolding in her own body and through her own upended story.

And Zechariah the Silent opens his home to these astonishing things, and watches these women help each other into this reality with love and grace. He bears all these things inside himself, unable to speak of them, to contribute his opinion or observations, his conclusions or his questions.

Just watching and listening and holding it all with honor and awe.

This is how God being with us begins, Luke says.

This old priest from the hill country.

This blessed old man whose was given holy task of watching what God was doing. Shut up and pay attention. That’s your whole job.

God comes. It begins right here.

The beauty of Luke’s choice, and Matthew’s and John’s and Mark’s, to tell the story as they do, begin it where they do, is that we now know you could say that just about anywhere: Here is where it begins. 

A friend noted this week all the many people for whom it began:

“He is Risen!”

Who is risen?

Jesus of Nazareth!

Who is that?

Oh! Let me tell you about Jesus…

Or, those for whom God with us begins when he lays his hands on you and heals you, or looks up and meets you gaze and you feel seen, or you hear in the crowd his words of freedom and forgiveness for the first time and they penetrate your soul.

Or, it begins when you happen to glimpse your grandfather praying on his knees by his bedside. Or you gasp your first sight of the Grand Canyon at sunrise and the artist who designed them suddenly seems electrically nearby.  Or, you weep at the bedside of your departed mother and feel the presence of peace itself. Or it begins with the question your son asks that stops you in your tracks, or the kindness someone extends that softens your defiance. The story of God being with us begins wherever it is entered. 

It can be entered anywhere.

One word of observation, however, most often it does not begin in the strong center of town, the seat of power, the fortress of flawless success, most often it doesn’t start where a story is typically meant to be set.  God’s story is always on the outskirts working inward, on the margins, in the desert and the wilderness, the barren wombs, the youngest, overlooked sons, the slaves and the dreamers. In God’s infinite creativity and wisdom, God begins with children and old people, and people with speech impediments and murder raps, and strangers from a strange land wandering in unexpectedly. 

So it is not about being perfect and prepared, pre-certified saintly, or impressive in any way, it’s more often about being powerless or awkward, messy and a little confused but deeply human.

God does it how God does it.

This fourth Sunday of Advent is the week of love. 

It’s love that comes to us when we least expect it. Love that chooses us for no good reason. When we’re unprepared, humming along a trajectory, love inserts itself and invites us to wake up and see this person, these people around us, to give ourselves to them, and receive them into our own hearts making us wide open and new.

It’s love that binds us to God and to one another, that defines us, beautiful, precious, delight of my heart, and gives us that maddening view of others as well that keeps us from selfish isolation and forces us to engage the world, Precious, that one! Child of God, person alongside my person, worthy of honor and attention.

And that story begins all over the place.

You can enter it at any moment.

After nine months Elizabeth gives birth to John, and Zechariah is still standing by, witnessing the wonder, when the attention shifts to him, (and the neighbors and friends ridiculously motion to the man who can’t talk but can hear just fine), What do you say, Zechariah?

And when he answers on a tablet the same words Elizabeth had just spoken to them, “His name is John,” his gestation is complete and his silence breaks open. 

And all that has simmered inside him these nine months – seasoned with the faithfulness of God in his own long life and the history of God’s relationship with his people from the very beginning – gets stirred up by the Holy Spirit, and spills out of him.

And with utter joy and complete confidence he opens his mouth and proclaims,

‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,

   for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.

He has raised up a mighty savior for us

   in the house of his servant David,

as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,

that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.

Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,

   and has remembered his holy covenant,

the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,

   to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies,

might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness

   before him all our days.

And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;

   for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,

to give knowledge of salvation to his people

   by the forgiveness of their sins.

By the tender mercy of our God,

   the dawn from on high will break upon us,

to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,

   to guide our feet into the way of peace.’

And now Zechariah the Silent becomes Zechariah, Parent to the Prophet of the Most High. Here is where it begins.

Depending on where you come from, and what you carry, and who’s doing the telling, the story of Jesus the Messiah, God with us, love alive and alongside, begins all over the place. 

It can be entered anywhere.

Today I kind of like beginning with dear Zechariah. With his silent witness, his holy task, his righteous Shut up and Pay attention.

That seems to me today like a pretty good place to begin.

Amen.

Peace Not Possible

Luke 1:57-79

Zechariah was old, and Elizabeth was old. 

This is another one of those impossible stories, where God comes through barren wombs and to people who had long given up expecting it.  

Elizabeth bore this secret for five months and shared it with Mary when she visited in her six month and the baby John leapt in her womb at the sound of Mary’s voice.  

And Zechariah was struck completely dumb for the duration of Elizabeth’s pregnancy because he had outright questioned the angel when the news was announced to him.  How can this be?  This thing you say is coming, is not possible. 

But here it is.  The time has now come. The baby is arriving.

And Zechariah has had a long, quiet nine months to ponder these things, an enforced peace if you will, with plenty of space for internal dialogue and personal thought and prayer. 

What does all of this mean? could have been his constant companion.

If hope is somehow trusting in the promise that wrongs will be made right, that life will be as it was meant to be, that wholeness and harmony will be restored, then peace is what we hope for. Peace is things as they were meant to be. 

Peace is harmony and wholeness, instead of division and striving.  

It is right relationship with God and one another – the whole world and all its inhabitants is connection, interdependence, fully and trustingly living out their authentic purpose alongside all else doing the same. 

Hope points us to God’s future. Peace IS God’s future.

Hope is what propels us forward; Peace is where we arrive.  

Hope is maybe temporary, maybe a vehicle from here to there, maybe what gets us there but then is no longer needed when the kingdom of God comes in all its fullness.  

Peace is the kingdom of God in all its fullness.

This baby gave Zechariah hope. 

It gave him the vision to see the future that God was calling him, calling the world, into.  It woke up what was dead in him, and called forth his own participation in that which he had so longed for but knew was impossible. Knew could never be.  Both for him and his wife, but also for the whole of Israel and all of creation.

How can this be, since we are both old and my wife is barren? 

How can this be, since I am a virgin?

How can this be? This cannot be.  It is not possible. 

But Peace does not come from what is possible. 

It is not produced from our own virility, or created from our own capacity to plan it or earn it or work hard enough to manufacture it. 

Peace comes from God, maker of heaven and earth, who designed the whole thing and knows how it works. Who made us for relationship with God and each other and knows what that should be like.  Who balanced the seas and the mountains, the insects and birds, species of all creatures who live in woods and desserts, glacial ice caps and tropical rainforests, who knows how much oxygen and carbon dioxide and minerals and particles and mysteries infinitely great and infinitely small are the right amount for equilibrium, and wove them all and us too into one another in everything’s uniqueness and brilliance and inter-reliance, and who holds it all - the whys and hows we haven’t even gotten around to asking yet in this vast world that we could never ever capture the whole of and also the beating of one tiny human heart and soul cradled in your arms and breaking you open with love – peace is all of this in God, and God, in all of this, working in harmony and joy. 

We do not make peace. 

But boy, can we recognize it. 

We know what it tastes and smells like. 

We know what it feels like deep inside of us, or in between you and me. 

And if we can recognize it, we can also celebrate it.  

We can talk about what we see and lift up what we feel and let it give us hope, and others hope as well.  And if we can celebrate it, we can look for it more, in all the nooks and crannies of our own lives, the surprising places peace might hunker and bloom in our neighborhoods and communities and woah, maybe in our institutions, even, and places of power, perhaps, even there, here and there, in small resilient streaks. 

And when we start looking for it, we might start stepping into it, a little at a time, and seeing what living in more peace might feel like.  What would it feel like to rest when we’re tired? To reach out to someone instead of letting conflict fester and grow? What would it be like to speak up for someone else, not even for your sake, but for theirs, or because it’s begun to dawn on you that theirs and yours are not maybe as real of distinctions as you once thought them to be? What would it look like to forgive and let go of some hurt or anger, even if it was justified and you were in the right?  Or to put everything down and shut everything off and find stillness, real and quiet stillness, where you can see stars and feel gentle wind on your cheeks? 

And if we can step into it here and there, we can begin to practice letting it live in us, this peace of God, and even guide us a little bit.  Maybe stopping us now and then before we speak, or prompting us in unexpected ways to do something, say something, give something, expecting nothing in return. 

Maybe helping us even take who we are as a gift, in ourselves and for the world, and watch love begin to be set free a bit more within us where gratitude and joy and generosity swirl together in sometimes indistinguishable output and we find ourselves, even for a moment, embracing others and ourselves as children of God, precious and holy.

And if we can begin to practice letting God’s peace live in us, it might make us begin dreaming.  It might awaken that hope thing we’ve talked about, that trust that there is more –more harmony, more chances for people to be fully, wholly human and completely loved and forgiven and fed and connected and needed, more peace.  And we might begin to live as the people of God-  the dreamers and the prophets, the hope shouters and justice seekers and peace lovers and people who seem utterly crazy and disconnected from reality, only somehow more deeply and profoundly aware of reality than the rest of us, because they live from the impossible that is also coming.

This – I wonder, if this is part of what Zechariah had a chance to ponder during his nine months of silence, as he watched is old wife’s belly swell.  
He might have started somehow trusting hope, and believing that peace is real. 
And that it’s coming.  And that he was part of it. 

And when that little baby arrived, that impossible baby, and he held that impossible little baby in his old and wrinkled hands, there was not a doubt in his mind, and his mouth was opened when he said, His name is John - his name is “God is gracious.  God is merciful, God gives us more than we could ever even know to long for”- that is his name. 

Look at this child! he sang, sang out!, to his neighbors and friends. Look at how God’s promise to our ancestors is coming to fruition, we are part of it! I am holding it.  Oh yes, it is coming! There is no doubt that God’s salvation of us all is coming.  

And for a moment, not a person in the room could doubt it either.

And then he turned and looked into the brand new blurry eyes of this utterly impossible child in his first minutes on this earth and he said,

 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people
 by the forgiveness of their sins.

By the tender mercy of our God,
 the dawn from on high will break upon us, 

 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, 

to guide our feet into the way of peace.’

Amen.

See for yourself... and for the world too

John 1:29-42

I guess I've always thought of the disciples as always knowing Jesus somehow. Or someone knowing him, anyway.  That he’d just always had followers, believers, as though the Church always just was.  Like your parents or grandparents, the stories you usually hear are from them already being together, stories of after the relationship began.

But the really intriguing stories are the ones about when they met.  Before they knew each other. When she saw him across the dance floor for the first time, when his friend introduced her at a church picnic, when her blind date entered the restaurant or he laid eyes on his sister’s college roommate.  How did their story start?  When did they recognize that this was the One?

Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the story of Jesus in a certain way, they tell about his birth, and then his baptism and then the calling of the disciples, very orderly and matter of fact.  And the prophets foretold his coming, or his genealogy is there and somehow, in their versions of the story, it’s easier to assume everyone always just knew each other, the world and Jesus, that is.

 

But John does his own thing.  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God… and the light shines in the darkness… and he came to what was his own but they did not know him… the whole cosmos which he had a hand in creating didn’t recognize that this was the One.

And the baptism story in John is not actually the baptism, it’s John the Baptist telling about the baptism.  Because that is what John does in the gospel of John (different John), he doesn’t actually baptize, that is, he is not “John the Baptist”, he tells about it, he testifies, he’s “John the Witness,” the seer, the teller, the one who makes known, and who points always, in all things, to Jesus.  

So John tells about how he didn’t know Jesus, and once he was baptized the Spirit came upon him and John suddenly recognized him, and now he can testify that this is indeed the Son of God! 

But being his cousin and all, John surely knew who Jesus was; they’d grown up together, right? Or at least seen one another from time to time!  "But I myself did not know him!," he says. Twice.  I didn’t see!  he cries. I talked about him and anticipated him and prepared the way for him but it wasn’t until God pointed him out to me that I SAW, this is the ONE, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

He was among his own, and yet his own did not recognize him.

"I once was blind, and didn’t recognize the light of the world, John reports, but now I see!"  And we plunge deeper into Epiphany, or rather, epiphany plunges deeper into us.  And the world and her people get acquainted with their creator.

So a couple of people are chatting with John, and they overhear John him say about Jesus as he is walking by, “That’s the one I’ve been telling you about!”  So they shadow Jesus.  This scene cracks me up.  Because following someone without being invited is always, without exception, awkward.  Like the time a friend and I were getting in our car in a mall parking lot in L.A. and she swore she saw George Clooney just pulling out, so we tailed him obnoxiously until he lost us at a stoplight.  Or when I stood next to Jack Black in the subway in New York, and my sister in law and I giggled and pointed under our breath, and pretended we weren’t staring at him so much that he got off at the next stop. 

They just followed him.  Intrigued enough to tail him, not quite sure what they’d say if he ever saw them, no plan after that, just following. Turning corners when he did, slowing down to keep the pace.  Finally, I can see Jesus sigh, and stop and turn around.  And they’re caught.  He sees them.  They see him. They see him seeing them.  “What are you looking for?” he asks, What do you want to see?

That’s a question, right there.  What are you looking for? Really?  In all the world, what do you most wish to find?  When you are looking, which isn’t all the time, for most of us, it’s not even much of the time, but when it does happen that you are really looking, what is it you are hoping, truly longing, to see?

Well his question caught them short.  Perhaps they weren’t really sure what they were looking for. They weren’t even sure what they were looking at.  They were just curious, interested, and that was about all.  So, perhaps to avoid seeming rude or maybe because they don’t know what else to say but they want the conversation to continue somehow, they ask him, “Teacher, where are you staying?”

And he answers, “Come and see.”

But he says See.  Not “look”, like a surface kind of noticing, like, I’ll show you the address and you’ll see it and be on your way.  But SEE, in the deeper knowing, recognizing, experiencing sense of the word.  In the sense of what happened to John when he baptized his cousin, and what is about to happen in the coming chapters to Philip, and Nathaniel, and the Samaritan woman at the well, and a whole bunch of other unsuspecting people who haven’t yet been looking but end up seeing as this story unfolds.  “Jesus is calling these disciples to the kind of seeing that opens a door, a seeing that draws us into a journey that will change us in ways we cannot know or imagine at the outset.” one writer[1] describes.

Come and see. Experience.

So they do.  They spend the day with him; they hang out, they abide, they loiter with no agenda in particular, with no goal, or obligation, or project.  Just being with one another. Listening, talking, sharing food, hearing and seeing.  It becomes an encounter of mutual finding – they find him and when they do, he finds them.  And they go from not knowing, not recognizing that this is the One, to seeing, witnessing, and the next day they tell a couple others, we have seen, you should come and see too!

The light is in the world and the world does not know him, yet. He comes to his own and they don’t recognize him, yet.  Until they hang out with him a little bit, and then they see.  And the whole world changes view. The light that is in it illuminates it all.   Because if you see that God is in the world, how can the world ever look the same?

Come and see! Come and see what God is up to! Come and see what God has done! Come and see where Jesus is staying next! Come and hang out with the one who walks among us hidden.

I’ve been pondering the paintings hanging in our Artspace, or rather, the painter, Annie Young, who lost her sight as an adult and began painting these vibrant and amazing things as her eyesight faded and her vision disappeared altogether.  She titled this exhibit, “Blessed Beyond Belief, an exploration” and writes, of her work, “I seek to nudge your heart, your mind...my work may bring to you a smile, peace or a yearning to take action. I create the images that hold my mind's eye hostage, make my fingers itch...it is my never-ending hope that you see what I feel.”

And it occurs to me that while she cannot see what she has painted, her painting is witnessing to what she Sees, she is testifying to what she recognizes, inviting us to come and see what she can feel, the presence of God, the experience, to see with our eyes, what she sees with her soul. Her paint is her witness; her art is her testimony.

The Church is the witness, we’re like John, the seer and teller. We are the community who sees.  And not all of us see all the time; in fact, most of us don’t see much of the time. But we keep inviting each other, Come and See! God is at work! Jesus is here!  

Sometimes we need others to see for us, and sometimes we can see where others can’t.  And we tell our stories of how we ourselves missed Jesus in front of our eyes, how we didn’t recognize that God was there until suddenly we did.  And our story helps another come and see for themselves.  And before long, we are a whole people with the eyes to see that redemption is happening all around us, all throughout the world while we’re not looking, and so we start looking.

Today we join our own journeys together with some more witnesses, more seers, more people whose eyes and souls scan the landscape, the nooks and crannies, for the light of the world.  More people who recognize Jesus in places we might miss, who have their own abiding experience quite different from each of ours, who have their own personal encounters with the Messiah who moves among us. 

And they bring their own vision, their own unique ways of noticing and witnessing to who God is and what God is doing. Their lives reflect the presence of God in ways yours might not and mine never could. And by coming together, we get new lives and stories to see into, and we get a new set of eyes on our own lives, as together we seek to recognize where Jesus is and what God is up to in all of this.  And side by side, this community witnesses – looks into the world and sees Jesus, points to where he is, follows him there, and tells others what we ourselves see.

What a crazy week it has been in the world.  Politically, meteorologically, historically… Epic floods and mudslides, enormous blizzards and ice storms, countries defining themselves in historic elections and bloody coups, and in our nation finger-pointing and grieving and reeling from terrible violence and divisive rhetoric and the world continues on. 

A couple of nights ago, at the dinner table, Owen, thinking, of something he had learned in school that day, asked me if I had ever heard this song, and then raised his sweet high voice and began to sing out, “We shall overcome, we shall overcome… Oh deep in my heart, I do believe, We shall overcome someday.” And I heard the words, in all these contexts simultaneously.  Martin Luther King Day tomorrow, remembering and commemorating that incredible struggle for freedom, but I also heard it against the backdrop of the people in Haiti still pulling bodies from rubble a year later while their friends and loved ones die of cholera. 

And when he sang, “We’ll walk hand in hand…” I heard the words with the news on the TV in the background going over again the aftermath of the shooting in Tucson and the partisan arguments and blaming even while a nine year old was being buried.

And as they talked about the right to carry hidden guns and being more suspicious of troubled people Owen sang, “We are not afraid…” 

And by the time he sang, “We are not alone…” I was weeping. 

Oh deep in my heart, I do believe. 

I see it. I recognize.  The light has come into the darkness and as dark as the darkness gets it cannot overcome the light; the creator has joined creation and our story is now one story.  And even when we forget to look or it's hard to notice, the Word is here in the flesh and I touched him! John says, I dipped him under the water and I saw the Spirit come on him and I KNEW, and before I didn’t know but now I know, and I can testify to it, it happened to me, I was there.

Come and see.  Come see.  Hang out a while.  He’s up to something.  I’ll help you look.  You help me recognize.  We’ll walk hand in hand.  And then we’ll tell each other about it.  We’ll tell the world what we see.

---

[1] Jan Richardson, at The Painted Prayerbook