How Beautiful upon the Mountains - Christmas Day, Isa 52:7-10, Jn 1:1-14

Christmas Day - B
Isaiah 52.7-10
John 1.1-14
December 25, 2011

How Beautiful upon the Mountains

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Here are two lessons that we don’t get to hear very often. They come around every year, but Christmas only falls on a Sunday once every seven years on the average, so like I say, we don’t hear them very often. We’re not like Lutherans who go to church on Christmas Day whether it falls on a Sunday or not. We’re Methodists so, well, all right, since Christmas falls on a Sunday, we’ll come to church, but when church is done, we’re gone. In fact, I heard of a colleague of mine who canceled church on a Christmas Sunday, since, he reasoned, Christmas is basically a family holiday. And anyway, he thought that attendance would be pretty sparse. He got to explain his reasoning to the bishop who was, as I understand it, less than receptive, but those were stricter times.

Anyway, here we are, and today we have these passages in front of us for the last time until Christmas of 2016. And, I have to say, they’re a little strange. There is no manger, no baby Jesus, no Joseph and Mary, no Bethlehem, not even any of the magi, those strange figures from far away.

In the reading from Isaiah, we have lovely poetic language: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’” It’s lovely, but not very “Christmas-y”.

The words are from the figure we know as II Isaiah, who lived later than the historical Isaiah, in the time when part of the exiled community of Judah was preparing to come home from Babylon. Exile had been a hard experience as exile always is. It wasn’t because they suffered materially. The Judean community prospered in Babylon. In fact there was a thriving Jewish community in Babylon for the next thousand years or more. No, their suffering had been emotional and spiritual.

At the heart of their experience was the question, “Where is God?” When they had lived in Jerusalem, often called Zion, they knew the answer to that question. God was in Zion. But then the Babylonians came and hauled them away in chains. Where was God then? Did God stay behind in Zion and let Judah go off alone into exile? Or had God abandoned the covenant people all together leaving them to their own devices, perhaps choosing some other people or perhaps even getting out of the covenant God business completely. Or had God in some strange way gone with them, away from Zion, into the very heart of the city of their oppressors? They had no answers to their question.

Now they were being permitted to return to Zion. Where would God be then? The prophet spoke into that situation and that question with his poetry.

John’s gospel came much later, but oddly, the situation that his community faced was remarkably like the situation of his spiritual ancestors in Babylon. John’s community had either just been expelled or were in the process of being expelled from their broader community because they were Jesus-followers. The separation was painful, as anyone who has gone through a church split knows. They needed reassurances. Was God with them or not?

John wrote into that situation and that question with philosophical theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That sort of language fills the early part of the first chapter of John, interrupted by some stuff about John the Baptist and then resuming with the words that closed our reading this morning: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

We have all sorts of questions about these words. What is “the Word” anyway? What does it mean to say that “the Word” was “in the beginning”? The beginning of what? And—“the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” How are we supposed to take that? What could it possibly mean?

And then there are questions that we should have but don’t because of the decisions that were made about the translation. When John says, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us,” “lived” translates a Greek word that means “to pitch tents” or “to encamp.” The Word pitched its tent among us. When we read on a little it becomes clear that for John’s gospel Jesus of Nazareth is a “tenting” among us of the Word (whatever that is!) that is somehow closely related to God’s very being. But that tenting among us suggests that this whole arrangement is very mobile, which, I guess, makes sense, given the amount of territory that Jesus covered.

God comes to John’s community prepared to travel, willing to go where they go and live where they live. If they are being expelled from their community it will certainly be painful, but God will go with them. God is willing and able to do that.

Which, making allowances for the differences, is precisely what II Isaiah wants his community to know. Yes, it was wrenching to have to leave Zion and it will be wrenching to have to leave Babylon to return to Zion. But God has gone ahead of them. God has already announced peace to Zion. God has already shown Zion that its safety and security will lie in God’s hands. God will be there for them.

We’re gathered on Christmas morning. You are pretty much by definition the hard-core Christ-followers. You remember that one of the things that Jesus is called is Immanuel—God with us.

No, we don’t have the baby Jesus or Bethlehem in our readings today, but we do have “God with us.” God goes with us. God will be with us. God will be there for us.

We don’t know what will happen in the next year. There are worrisome signs on the financial horizon as Europe struggles with its crisis and political parties cannot agree on how to respond to our own lingering difficulties. We don’t know how these stories will end. Whether they turn out well for the world as a whole, some of us may suffer reversals in the coming year that we cannot see today. It is II Isaiah’s testimony and it is John’s testimony that God will go with us no matter where we go.

Some of us are young and growing and getting stronger all the time. Some of us are living in bodies that seem frail. Some of us are struggling with long-term illnesses or conditions that weigh us down and keep us from the life that we would like to live. None of us knows just what the next year will bring. II Isaiah and of John tell us that God will be there, no matter what happens to us.

Most of us, I suspect, plan to be here next year. I certainly do. Some, perhaps, have plans to move away and pursue their lives in another place. Where we stay here or go somewhere else, II Isaiah and John both tell us that God will go with us.

If it helps us to hear that news in poetic language, it’s there in Isaiah. If it helps us to hear that news in the technical language of philosophical theology, it’s there in John. However we need to hear it, the message is the same: God is with us and will go with us and will be for us. Wherever we are: Immanuel. Whatever we do: Immanuel. Wherever we go: Immanuel. That’s our word for the day, our word for the year, our word for all time: Immanuel.

That does sound “Christmas-y” after all.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

To Us a Child Is Born - Christmas Eve, Isaiah 9:2-7

Christmas Eve - B
Isaiah 9:2-7
December 24, 2011

To Us a Child Is Born

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I am tired of politics.

The last few months have been full of it. Political activity goes on all the time, of course. Democrats and Republicans maneuver for advantage. They each try to make the other look bad. They throw up roadblocks in the way of their opponents getting anything done. If one says the the sky is blue the other will reply that anyone can see that it is chartreuse and that the attempt to convince people that the sky is blue will ruin the country. They only say it’s blue because they secretly hate America.

It reminds me of someone who said that the Scots would have become an important European power if they had not been engaged in a constant struggle with their ancient and implacable enemies: the Scots.

The political world would be funnier if there were not real problems needing real solutions. I understand fighting for principles and ideals. But I get impatient with fighting for the sake of winning. I’ve been impatient a lot lately.

Added to that, we are in the final stages of a primary race. Any candidate for President is throwing every dollar they can get their hands on into advertising. Anyone who watches television at all knows it isn’t pretty. Fortunately for us a brief respite is in sight. We only have to last until January 3 and the crowd will move on to New Hampshire and South Carolina. Iowa will be a distant memory for winner and loser alike. In the meantime they’re going at it hammer and tong. My thumb hurts from pressing the mute button.

But tonight we get a break. We leave that world behind and gather in this place of light and warmth and quiet. We take refuge from a world of smoke and mirrors and political noise. We can listen to the old story about the angels and the baby Jesus (isn’t he sweet?) and mystified shepherds. We can sing the familiar hymns of the season and maybe learn a new one. We can renew old acquaintance with long-absent friends who have joined us tonight.

Ready or not, it’s Christmas. The gifts are wrapped (or they aren’t going to get wrapped). The cookies are baked. Our homes are decorated. We’re looking forward to the look on the face of someone we love as we open gifts and they get that special one, the one we put so much care into.

Ah, no politics!

And then we are met with these readings.

The reading from Isaiah comes from the early ministry of the actual Isaiah, the one for whom the book is named, when Ahaz was king of Judah. The Assyrian Empire was having a growth spurt. The little kingdoms of Syria and Israel had decided to join forces to resist Assyria. They had decided to overthrow Ahaz of Judah and install a puppet king who would join their alliance. Ahaz was caught between a rock and a hard place. Realistically, his only choice was to appeal to the king of Assyria for protection, even if it meant becoming his vassal and having to come up with the gold to send to Nineveh as tribute. It was the smart thing to do, even if it came at a high price.

It might have been smart, but Isaiah the prophet saw it as faithless. It betrayed a lack of trust in the power and faithfulness of Yahweh, Judah’s covenant God. Isaiah challenged Ahaz to name a sign, to ask for some event that would show that God was serious about protecting Judah. When Ahaz refused, Isaiah told him that a sign-child would be born as God’s sign to Ahaz. “The young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel,” Isaiah told him.

In our text for tonight we have God’s promise, given through Isaiah, that this child would become a king who would usher in a new golden age for Judah. The threat of the alliance of Syria and Israel, even the threat of Assyria itself, would pass. Judah would be revealed as God’s favored nation and enjoy peace and prosperity. The king who would follow would be described as, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Perhaps that was a little over the top, but prophets are given to exaggeration. It helps create the desired effect. Strip away the fancy language and this amounts to foreign policy advice: regional politics.

The passage from Luke has lots of the stuff we’re looking for: shepherds and angels, Mary and the sweet baby Jesus. But it’s also set against an imperial background. The emperor known officially as Gaius Julius Caesar, the name of his adopted father, but who was born Octavius and known to us as Caesar Augustus, was engaged in consolidating his rule over what he was fashioning into the Roman Empire. As part of his strategy, so the author of Luke tells us, he ordered a count of all the people living inside the empire, so that he could design more efficient ways of taxing the people. Accordingly Jesus’ mother and her fiancé went to Bethlehem because Joseph was descended from King David. This was when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. When Jesus was born angels proclaimed him Messiah, the anointed ruler of God’s people. Emperors, governors, kings and messiahs, foreign policy and tax codes—these texts are relentlessly political.

And here we thought we could get away from politics. And not just politics. We come to Christmas hoping for a break from our cares and anxieties. We want to set aside our worries about our jobs and our family finances. We don’t want to have to worry about an uncle’s poor health or a cousin’s heavy drinking. If we are parents we want our children to stop squabbling. If we are children we want our parents to give us a break. We may even hear ourselves saying, “Just sit there and be happy; it’s Christmas!”

If we don’t say it out loud we may say it to ourselves and wonder why it is that everyone else is happy and enjoying the season and we are not.

We’d like to get away from our messy world for a while. But as our readings have shown us, the messy world that we live in has followed us in the door.

While we’re trying to get away, though, God is moving in the other direction. Jesus wasn’t born to privilege, you know. He wasn’t one of the one percent. He and his parents were subject to the whims of far away rulers whose decrees could send a pregnant woman who deserved to give birth at home among her friends and relatives to a strange town far away to give birth among the horses, donkeys and cattle. It was, of course, better than the crowded common room of the inn where travelers normally slept, but, still, it wasn’t where she wanted to be.

Jesus’ parents were of peasant stock, but they were not even peasants, since they had lost their land somewhere along the line. Joseph was a carpenter, an artisan, which placed them below peasants on the social scale. Jesus’ parents knew anxiety and want. They worried about having enough to eat. They lived with the threat of violence from the Romans.

It was into this messy world that Jesus was born, this world of political intrigue and in-fighting, of financial struggle, of health problems and squabbling siblings. We may long to be away from the mess, but God does not. God embraces it. God has decided to love this messy world until it is mended and whole.

And for proof this, God has given us, like ancient Ahaz, a sign-child, wrapped tightly in blankets and lying in a feed trough, a makeshift cradle. God gave us a sign-child and the angels sang. God gave us a sign-child and he will be called, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Jubilee! - 3rd Advent, Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

3rd Sunday in Advent - B
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
December 11, 2011

Jubilee!

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Jubilee. There is a good Christian word that we don’t use nearly often enough. In fact, we might not even recognize the word, or, if we do, we may think that it’s a flaming dessert made with cherries.

Jubilee can mean many things. I went to Wikipedia—which I use, but skeptically—to see some of the ways that it can be used. Special anniversaries, especially of the reign of a monarch, are called jubilees.

There are two movies called Jubilee, one a 1977 cult film by Derek Jarman, the other a 2000 comedy by Michael Hurst. There is a novel by Margaret Walker, a Marvel comics character, and a collection of short stories by Jack Dann, all with the name Jubilee.

There is an indie rock band from California called Jubilee that released two singles in 2008 from a “forthcoming” album that never actually came forth.

We also have a musical, a play, and a Vegas burlesque show called, respectively, “Jubilee”, “Jubilee”, and “Jubilee!” (Did you catch the exclamation mark on the last one?)

There is a line of the London subway called the Jubilee line. Operation Jubilee was an Allied raid on the French port of Dieppe in 1942.

There is also, finally, a fascinating event that happens sometimes called the Mobile Bay Jubilee. Crab, shrimp and fish leave the deeper waters of the bay and mass at the surface near the shore, making for an easy catch of abundant seafood.

None of those things has much to do with the Jubilee I’m talking about this morning. To learn what Jubilee is about in our context, we need to turn to the book of Leviticus. Admittedly Leviticus is not light reading, even in the Common English Bible translation, because it is mostly a legal text. There are strange things in Leviticus. Some of these are strange because they seem odd, like laws forbidding the wearing of clothing made from blended fibers.

Others are strange because they are so far from our way of thinking that they are simply amazing. The laws of Jubilee in Leviticus 25 and 27 are among these. Jubilee is practice that is is related to the laws about rest, about sabbath. We know that one day each week was set aside for rest in the covenant community of Israel. Everyone was to rest: Dad, Mom, the kids, but also any servants or slaves. Even the animals were entitled to rest. The rest was for the whole community, not had by some at the expense of others. That’s the part of the sabbath that we probably already know about.

The rest of it, though, is that every seven years the land rests. Nothing is planted. The land itself is part of the covenant and it has covenant privileges. It is not to be worked to death, but allowed to recover for a year. Incidentally, this is the source of the word and the idea of the sabbatical. So there is a sabbath day each week and a sabbath year every seven years.

One of the things that we take for granted is that in any economic system some people do well and others do not. We take for granted that there will be rich people and poor people and people in between. We may think this is a good thing or we may not, but most of us believe that it is normal and natural and, really, inevitable.

It certainly happened in ancient Israel. Some people would prosper. Others would not. In fact, some people were impoverished to the point that they needed to sell their ancestral land or even to sell themselves into slavery just to survive. If this happened, the covenant required that their near relatives make every effort to buy back the land or their family members, but if the whole clan were impoverished this would not be possible.

The solution was Jubilee. Every fifty years there was Jubilee. When Jubilee was proclaimed the land was released and returned to its original owners. Slaves were freed. Families could be reunited on the land to which they had ancient rights. Freedom, release and return were the themes of Jubilee.

To be sure there is some question about whether Jubilee was ever actually practiced in ancient Israel. If it ever was we can imagine that the one percent did everything they could to put a stop to it. But, even if was never practiced and was only ever simply an ideal, I still have to say that this is pretty remarkable. Here was an ancient people who were convinced that too great a difference between the wealthy and the poor is bad for the community. Here was an ancient people who at least imagined periodically pressing the “reset” button and returning everyone to having an equal share in the wealth of the community.

Does this sound strange, perhaps un-American? Well, it’s certainly strange, but I’m not sure it’s so un-American.

At least consider this: in Philadelphia there is a large bell on display. It is no longer rung because it is badly cracked. It is seen by over two million visitors each year. On this bell is an inscription that reads, “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”¹ It comes from Leviticus 25:10 which reads in full, “You will make the fiftieth year holy, proclaiming freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee year for you: each of you must return to your family property and to your extended family.”²

Abolitionists gave the Liberty Bell its name and adopted it as their symbol. They seemed to think that the idea of Jubilee should become a living reality in their day and that all slaves should be freed. Sounds pretty American to me. But, American or not, it’s a biblical notion.

It’s also the notion that lies behind the reading from Isaiah, even if the word Jubilee doesn’t appear there. Listen again, to these words of the prophet:

1 The Lord GOD’s spirit is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim release for captives, and liberation for prisoners; ² to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor, and the day of vindication for our God; to comfort all who mourn; ³ to provide for Zion’s mourners, to give them a crown in place of ashes, oil of joy in place of mourning, a mantle of praise in place of discouragement. They will be called Oaks of Righteousness, planted by the LORD to glorify himself. ⁴ They will rebuild the ancient ruins, they will restore formerly deserted places; they will renew ruined cities, places deserted in generations past.³

Jubilee may never have been practiced in ancient Israel, but it has fired the imagination of this prophet and I have to say it has me pretty fired up, too. Jubilee speaks to me.

Jubilee says, You can go home again.

Jubilee says, You can have a fresh start in a good place.

Jubilee says, God’s love won’t ever let you go.

Even if you’ve messed up so badly you can’t imagine that your family and friends will ever forgive you, Jubilee says, you are still loved.

The talking heads tell us we can’t afford to feed and educate all our children, but Jubilee says, God has the last word and God’s last word is always, Yes!

There is a voice abroad in our land that sneers at human suffering and blames the poor for their poverty, but Jubilee says, The hope of the poor will not always be forgotten.

Jubilee says, The way it’s always been is not the way it has to be.

Jubilee says, Freedom is coming.

Jubilee says, It’s time to go home.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Independence National Historical Park, http://www.nps.gov/inde/liberty-bell-center.htm, accessed: December 9, 2011.

2Leviticus 25:10, CEB.

3Isaiah 61:1-4, CEB.

Time to Come Home - 2nd Advent, Isaiah 40:1-11

2nd Advent B
Isaiah 40:1-11
December 4, 2011

Time to Come Home

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The Bible is a book that is grounded in a crisis that has left its trace on every verse. In the year 586 Before the Common Era, the city of Jerusalem fell to the armies of Babylon. The gates of the city were destroyed. The Temple was burned. The implements of the Temple were seized and melted down for their gold and silver. The social elite of the city was deported in chains. They were war trophies taken home to the city of Babylon to be put on display. This was also shrewd policy designed to deprive the people who remained behind of their leaders and to keep those leaders where the Empire could keep its eye on them.

For the exiles, the fall of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon that followed were a military, political, social and above all a religious and spiritual disaster. The God of the covenant who had brought the people of Israel out of Egypt and into a good land had not protected them when they most needed protection. God had failed the people of Judah. Could they go on? If so, how? And would they have to do it alone? Had God forsaken them forever? If not, how would the relationship with God be fashioned once more?

In some ways it was like a marriage after an affair: trust had been shattered. There was no way to wave a magic wand and to pretend that things were the way they had been. If there was a way to put the pain and rage and despair behind them, it could only be by going right through the heart of the disaster and hoping to come out on the other side. There was no going around it.

It was during the awful decades of exile that the Bible began to take its final shape. There were new writings. But there was also a great deal of reworking, editing and revising of old writings. Everything in the Bible, whether written before, during or after the exile, was filtered through this shattering experience. The Bible as a book is about a crisis, the particular crisis of exile. The Bible is a collection of testimonies from exile.

Exile happens anytime we are forced to live in a place that we cannot call home. For some exiles that experience is quite literal. One is an Iranian novelist who flees her country when a fundamentalist regime comes to power and decides that her work is subversive. Another is a Salvadoran campesino who flees with his family across the border into Honduras to escape the death squads who came in the night to massacre his village. A third is family chased out of the 9^th Ward in New Orleans by the rising waters of a storm surge that has breeched the levees.

Exiles begin as refugees. Some find a way to return to their homes and take up the tattered threads of their lives once more. Others cannot and are forced to settle permanently somewhere else. They find a way to earn a living. They learn the local language and customs. They may even become citizens of a new place. But for some part of the hearts it will never really be home. Home will always be somewhere else.

The United Nations keeps track of these refugees. It numbers them and tries to see to it that they have the material aid that they need for survival. But there are exiles whom the United Nations cannot track or count. How, for example, do we count the number of young people who grow up here, whose families live here, who cannot find employment that uses their God-given gifts and so must go somewhere else, perhaps in the Upper Midwest but perhaps not. They are a Decoran diaspora, seeds scattered across our region, nation and world. Their children will grow up at home in Madison or St. Paul or Oregon or New Zealand, but for the exiles themselves there will always be a part of their hearts for which home will always be Decorah.

Or maybe the grew up in Norway and when it was no longer possible to earn a decent living on the land they heard about a place in the United States, in northeast Iowa, where there was good land and enough Norwegian expatriates to make the transition easier. And they came here and life was good, but they missed the mountains and the fjords and the sea. Their children were Iowans, but a part of them never stopped calling Norway home.

But some exiles never move anywhere at all, so it’s harder to tell by looking just what they are. It’s not necessary for us to leave home to become an exile; sometimes home leaves us. Think of all the social changes that have happened in this country since the middle of the last century. The Civil Rights movement won all sorts of advances in the legal status of African Americans at the expense of white privilege. Feminism won entry for women into roles and jobs and freedom at the expense of male power. A promise of ever-increasing comfort and convenience has been replaced with forty years of stagnant wages and uncertain futures. Straight white men woke up one day and discovered that we were no longer privileged, no longer given a place just because of who we were, no longer economically secure. This has given birth to a variety of responses, some of which I disagree with vehemently. But the pain of exile is real, no matter to what politics it might give rise.

Or we grew up in a normal family living an outwardly normal childhood. We might have suspected that something in us was not quite in sync with the hopes and dreams that our families held for us. We start to figure it out in adolescence as we discover that we keep falling in love with others of our own gender. And then we have to figure out how to navigate in a straight world as a gay man or a lesbian. Nothing is changed but everything is different and it will be a very long time until we can be at home again.

Or our doctor tells us that he’s found a lump and that “we really ought to have it biopsied.” Suddenly the landscape of our own body becomes foreign territory and we find ourselves living as an exile in our own skin.

Or the person we’ve shared our lives with through a long and amazing pilgrimage dies and our half-filled bed becomes a place of exile. We find ourselves far from home even while living in the house that we had shared for half a century.

Or maybe we are all exiles simply by virtue of having been born out of a womb that was warm and close and safe into a world of harsh lights and sounds, cold air that we have to breathe for ourselves, and the isolation of a separate existence. Maybe the cries of the newborn are the laments of the exiled. Maybe so.

The Bible is a book born out of the pain and struggle of exile. It offers hope to exiles, but not the sort of hope that brushes aside the anger and the pain and the struggle. The Bible wasn’t written by polite people living quiet lives. It was written by people who have “been there,” by people who found out the hard way how to live in exile as God’s people.

Here is some of what they learned:

First, when the terror and the rage that are the first part of exile had passed, the people of Judah discovered that, although they were far from home, they were not alone. The God who had allowed them to be sent into exile (or perhaps had even done the sending) had gone with them. If the people of God must go into exile, God goes with them. The covenant may have been battered but God and God’s people are bound together with ties that neither can break.

Second, life in exile is both necessary and possible. Judah had lost its place in the world, its independence as a people, its Temple, and the rhythms of its life. Instead, it was forced to live at the center of the Empire that had conquered it. It was surrounded by shrines to gods it did not and would not worship. It lived according to someone else’s calendar. These were all painful things. Still, none of that meant that the exiles could simply stop living. They were not allowed to surrender to despair. They were not allowed to melt into the population. They were called to live, to maintain their identity as God’s people.

Third, without the institutions of national life to support them, they discovered that their main resources were memory and imagination. They remembered and told the stories of God’s way with them. They sang the songs they had brought with them. They composed more. They sang their grief and their anger and their hope. They imagined the world as God wanted it to be. They prayed for it. They told the future against the present. Between engaging the past in memory and engaging the future in imagination they opened a space for their life as God’s people to continue.

Finally, when they had endured longer than they could endure, when they had lasted longer than they could last, when they came to the end and kept going, incredibly and past all hoping, they heard God’s voice calling them to come home:

A voice is crying out:“Clear the Lord’s way in the desert!Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God!”

It is time for God’s people to come home, home from Babylon, home from exile. But a strange thing has happened. The home to which they were returning was not the home that they had left. Memory and imagination had done their work. Memory was shaped by imagination to become in Walter Brueggemann’s words, “a subversive memory of the future.” Or to steal a phrase from John Denver, home had become “a place they’d never been before.”

They had been transformed by exile, transformed by memory, transformed by imagination. They had become a new people. They had sung the old songs they had brought with them until they had become a new song. They had recited the past until it became a map for the future.

Advent is a time for us exiles, a time for us exiles to remember that we are not at home. Advent is a time for singing the songs that remember the homes we have never had. Advent is a time for hearing the voice of God calling all of us to come home at last to the home we have never known but have longed for all along in the deepest part of our hearts. At last, it is time to come home. At last, at long last.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Tear Open the Heavens - 1st Sunday of Advent - Isaiah 64:1-9

1st Sunday of Advent - B
Isaiah 64:1-9
November 27, 2011

Tear Open the Heavens

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Something is seriously out of joint. And, I think, it has something to do with time. Time goes on in the regular way, sixty seconds each minute, sixty minutes each hour, twenty-four hours each day. Time seems to pass more slowly the closer we get to December 25th. I’m told that time is regular and only seems to go slower or faster, but we’ll never convince kids that time itself isn’t slowing to a crawl.

Time passes regularly say that scientists and I’ll trust them. But we don’t observe time regularly. We don’t just mark the time; we observe times. We mark time with seasons.
We’ve just begun a very important season in our particular culture: the holiday shopping season. We hear news stories about how important this time of year is to retailers. We hear news stories about how important consumer spending is for growing the economy. (And of course, the economy must grow!) We hear advertisements telling us how to make this year’s holiday better than last year. (And, of course, it would be bad if this year were only just as good as last year!)

Friday was one of two days that frame the ends of the holiday retail season. It’s called Black Friday because that is the day that retailers hope to show a profit for the year—their accounts move out of the red into the black. December 26th marks the other end of the season. It doesn’t have a name, but it’s the day for returns and using gift cards.

I’ve called it the holiday shopping season, rather than Christmas, for a reason. The holiday shopping season isn’t about Christmas and it certainly has nothing to do with Jesus; it’s about celebrating our identities as consumers, as people who are defined by what they can afford to buy. The fact that we are buying things for someone else doesn’t change this in the least. It only helps cultivate that good feeling that helps us spend more. That good feeling won’t encourage us to stop and ask whether spending more will be bad or even ruinous for us. When it comes to the holiday retail season, it’s all about the spending. That is the deeper meaning of the season.

Against the background of our culture’s annual orgy of consumption, the Church observes another set of seasons: the seasons of Advent and Christmas. We’ve been marking these seasons for a thousand years or more.

Christmas has marked the birth of Jesus, and not because we regarded babies as sweet and cute and their births as a reason to celebrate. For almost all of human history, the birth of a baby was an event hedged about with fear and anxiety. Half of all babies died. And it wasn’t just the babies. In the ancient world pregnancy and childbirth were more dangerous for a woman than fighting in a war was for a man. We didn’t start celebrating babies as sweet and cute until the late 1800s. The birth of Jesus was not celebrated because he was sweet and cute, but because his birth changed our world.

And even at that Christmas was a less important festival than Easter. Consider this: Christmas falls on one day of the year and is a season of twelve days. Easter is a season of fifty days and falls on one day each week. Christmas took off in the Western church, the church that used to speak Latin, in the late 1800s because it got wrapped up in the Victorian Cult of the Child. We see Christmas through Victorian eyes and for that reason, Christmas makes a certain amount of sense to us.

But Advent makes no sense at all. We try to squeeze it into our cultural frame by describing it as a season of preparation and usually as a preparation for Christmas. But I think that, given what has happened to Christmas over the years, it might be better to uncouple Advent from Christmas altogether and think of Advent as a response to the whole church year instead of a preparation for the next season.

The Church year unfolds for us the story of the love affair between God and God’s people. Through the ministry of Jesus we have had a glimpse of God’s dream for us and for our world. It is a good dream. It is a dream of a covenant that binds us in neighborly relationship with each other, with God, with each living creature, and with the planet that we share. It is a dream that all our relationships will be characterized by peaceful justice. It is a dream for our well-being. We’ve seen that dream revealed in Jesus’ words and in his actions. We’ve been called together as the church to embody that dream in our shared life here and in the life that we share in the world at large. It is a good dream.

We can’t listen to this good and peaceful and just dream for forty-eight weeks without our hearts being touched. To one degree or another we are won over to the dream. We want it. We can even see that the world needs it. But it remains just beyond our grasp. We stand in reality and strain toward the dream. We live in tension. We wait with unfulfilled longing.

This is not an easy way to live. The very idea of “waiting with unfulfilled longing” is heresy to a consumer culture, especially during its high holy days. What else is credit for, anyway, but for fulfilling longings so we don’t have to wait? Our culture has not prepared us for waiting. When the Church year asks us to be aware of our waiting, we get impatient pretty quickly.

But that’s not the hardest part of it. Waiting for anything is hard. Just ask the kids; they’ll tell us how hard it is. But waiting for the fulfillment of God’s dream for us is excruciating. It is at one time the most important waiting we can do and the hardest.

We pray every week for God’s will to “be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We recognize that there is a gap between the way God’s will looks when it is fully done, that is, as it is done in heaven, and the reality that we know, where God’s will isn’t done that way. There is a gap and we pray for that gap to be closed. We try not to notice that we have been praying for this for a long time. We haven’t gotten an answer yet, at least not a full answer, but we won’t give up praying for one.

Sometimes the tension becomes too great to bear: Why shouldn’t people in Egypt have the freedom they long for? Why should there be hungry people in the country that feeds the world? Why should the people we love suffer and even die? Why can’t our government seem to make any decisions? Why isn’t the work that we do respected? Why, why, why? We have a question and a longing for justice for every place where God’s name is not yet hallowed, God’s kingdom not yet come and God’s will not yet fully done.

If we stay inside those questions, if we sit within that longing, if we host that dream for long enough they will lead us to prayer, but it won’t be the polite prayer that we were taught in Sunday School. It will instead be prayer that is raw and ragged. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!” The heavens, you may recall, refers to the sky that seemed to the ancients to be a hard shell. One of the first acts of creation was to fix the firmaments above and below the earth. The prophet’s prayer would have God undo the firmament that keeps us safe on one side and God safe on the other. It is a dangerous wish, but deliverance only happens when dangerous wishes come to pass.
The prophet prays for the mountains that God had made firm would be set to quaking. This is a prayer for the undoing of the world so that a new act of creation may take place. And the prayer recognizes that, whatever is wrong with our world, the recreation of the world must begin with us. We are clay that God can take and reshape and the prophet prays for precisely this to take place. “We are the work of your hand. We are all your people.” You have fashioned us. Refashion us so that we, too, may hallow your name and do your will. Remake us to be places through which your reign bursts into our world.

Yes, something is seriously out of joint. The world around us celebrates its high holy days of consumption. We have a foot in that world. At the same time we have a foot in God’s peaceful dream of justice for us and our world. We live as consumers competing for the few bargains given out so that we may be taken in. At the same time we are covenant members of the community of peace and justice. We live in an inescapable tension, a tension that will—if we pay too much attention to it—lead us to cry out for God to “tear open the heavens and come down.”
The season calls us and I call us to pay attention to that tension, to live in it consciously as long as we can, for in that longing lies our deepest vocation as the people of God.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.