First Advent, II

There is a lot of wonderful material out there reflecting on these passages and the ideas of Jesus' second coming. As I read more and more, I am struck by the passages and commentators stress on the fact that the center of these stories is not fear and trembling in the face of judgement, but the certainty of God coming to redeem the world. We're not to hide and cringe, as did Adam and Eve when faced with God's judgement in the garden, but to lift up our heads. The emphasis is not on us at all, but on the faithfulness of God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflected on Advent as being like a prison cell: help comes from outside to open the door.
Then there's this wonderful story I have heard many times and choose to believe really happened. Over 200 years ago, the Connecticut House of Representatives was meeting one May morning when suddenly everything got very dark (an eclipse of the sun). Some of the men (and they were all men) started racing around, panicked, calling for prayer, believing this was the end of time. The very wise Speaker of the House, however, is quoted as saying something like this. "Either the Day of the Lord is approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause to adjourn. If it is, I, for one, choose to be found doing my duty. I therefore ask for candles to be brought."

First Advent, December 3

Jeremiah 33:14-16, Luke 21:25-36

Today's passages take us into the realm of apocalyptic literature, as the lectionary always does on the first Sunday in Advent. It's a reminder that what we are about to celebrate in Christmas has larger implications for the earth and for history than we usually capture in our cultural celebrations of this holiday. It's also a reminder that the one who came to us in Bethlehem promised to return. In the wake of the popularity of the Left Behind books, some reflections on this type of literature in the Bible might be helpful.
The first thing to say about this literature is that it is almost always written in the midst of times of fear and upheaval. Luke wrote his gospel after the Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans and persecutions of both Jews and Christians were common (be sure to read the entirety of chapter 21 for the full context as today's lesson begins a reading midstream in a longer discussion by Jesus). Ditto for the Book of Revelation. Jeremiah wrote when Jerusalem had been under siege by Babylon and was close to falling; many people were already in exile.
The second thing is that it is important to understand that in the Biblical context, "prophecy" does not equal "predicting the future." Jesus is not doing a Nostradamus act here. Apocalyptic prophecy is meant to be a timely warning, a call to pay attention to one's own life, the life of the society and God's activity in the midst of both. That's why Luke spends important time at the end of this section of his gospel with repeated warnings to keep your head up and pay attention. As the Lutheran Biblical scholar Barbara Rossing writes, "When biblical prophets preached destruction, the purpose of their threats was almost always to warn of the consequences of destructive behaviour, not to furish play-by-play information about events in the future. The prophet's goal is to wake people up." (The Rapture Exposed, 2004, p. 89)
In short, don't waste time taking this passage in Luke and trying to line up the events detailed in it with events happening in our time to get a timeline to the end of the world. People have been doing that for centuries, and they have always turned out to be wrong. That kind of thinking puts people into a fear and defense mode. But for both Luke and Jeremiah, the point of all this is to hope in the grace of God. Eschatological (or "end times") thinking is not about fear, but about hope. When we read the signs of trees blooming and know summer is at hand, that is good news, as is the hope that the kingdom of God might be near. We are called to pay attention to how we are living our lives because we need a strong connection with God in order to meet any calamity the world may throw our direction. We are called to pay attention because when we do we are given strength of purpose to be as countercultural as we need to be to be faithful. We are called to pay attention because God does indeed judge our words and actions and calls us to account for them. We are called to pay attention because if we do not, we might miss the activity of God in our midst and therefore miss our chance to join God in new and exciting ways.
I'd be interested in your reflections and questions on this passage. Shelly

November 19, B

Hannah's act of giving Samuel here has larger dimensions than even she could fathom. What makes her one of the more remarkable characters in the Bible is that somehow she knows that. Imagine this woman who had yearned for years for a child, who miraculously gets pregnant and gives birth to a son, who then freely gives this child to God's service before he is a teenager! The longed for gift she now gives away. She understands on some level that the gift of this child was not just to make her content and ease her pain, but rather to help change the society in which she lived, a society clearly in danger of ruin. Hannah could see the big picture here and so not cling to Samuel as we would clearly have expected her to do!

Patrick Miller writes that giving thanks reminds us that "we are not autonomous and self-sufficient." Hannah, in her song, understands that she did not cause this child to be created and born; Samuel's conception and birth came about by divine intervention. Her recognition of that makes her gift of Samuel a natural act of faith. Sometimes, often, "it's not about us." When we give thanks as she did, we realize that so much of what is good in our lives did not come about because of our work or our merit. Her prayer recognizes the one who is ultimately the Giver of all Gifts, even if those gifts seem delayed as did her child.

In the years that I struggled with infertility, Hannah's story and her prayer helped me, not because I believed God would miraculously intervene to put a child in my womb. I understood that God needed Hannah's child for a purpose, and that perhaps no child of my womb was so needed. She also helped me understand that there is a bigger picture than just my family in God's world. And that, as I discovered three adoptions later, good things do come to those who wait by the power of a loving God.

November 19

I Samuel 2: 1-10
Hannah's Song

Hannah lived in the time before there were kings in Israel. The last line of the book of Judges notes that the system of having Judges who helped mediate disputes and organize community was falling apart. We know from the first chapters of I Samuel that the religious establishment was also in trouble. Israel needed new leadership, new intervention from God.
Into the midst of this comes a very human story of the family of Elkanah, a common man from the hill country of Ephraim, and his wives Hannah and Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had been unable to conceive (the word used at the time was "barren"). In any context, that physical reality would be difficult, but in her context it might have meant her being cast out of her home and divorced. But we are told that Elkanah loved her deeply; he comforted her and made sure she was well-cared for. Nevertheless, Hannah suffered, and apparently Peninnah didn't make it any easier.
So Hannah went to pray at the Temple. Chapter 1 tells us the wonderful story of the priest misinterpreting her fervent prayer as drunkenness, but then blessing her with the hope that her prayers are fulfilled. And they are. She gives birth soon after to her son, Samuel. She has promised God that the first child she bears will be dedicated to God's service, so when Samuel is weaned, she takes him to the same priest, Eli, to give him as a servant in the Temple. Eli receives him, and Hannah leaves. Instead of weeping for the loss of her son's companionship at that point, she sings the song which is our text for this day.
(Before we discuss the text, it is important to note that Samuel grows up to be a great reformer in the religious life of Israel, and he also anoints the first two kings of Israel, Saul and David. Hannah goes on to have five more children.)
Hannah's Song is one of the classic doxologies (songs of praise and thanksgiving) in the Bible. Those of us who are Christian are perhaps more familiar with Mary's song in the first chapter of Luke which gets its form and some of its content from Hannah's song and others like it. The Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls these songs "songs of impossibility," for they note that "conventional definitions of reality do not contain or define what God will yet do." Hannah sings about things that have not yet come to pass (the poor sitting with princes? the hungry full?), just as Mary does, but she sings about them in the present and not the future tense. Her personal experience of God acting beyond what seemed possible enables her to proclaim that God acts that way not only for her, but for the whole world. It is thanks both for the "now" and for the "not yet" which she confidently expects to happen. The scholar Patrick Miller comments that doxologies are "fundamental indicators that wonders have not ceased, that possibilities not yet dreamt of will happen, and that hope is an authentic stance." More on doxology tomorrow!

November 12

Ruth 1:1-18, Mark 14:3-9

Those of you who follow the lectionary will see that this week I am not doing so. Actually the Ruth was the reading for last week, but I have paired it with the story of another extravagant act by a woman for stewardship Sunday this week. So that's the reason for the odd readings.

This Ruth reading is rich enough for many sermons, and I highly recommend you read the whole book of Ruth to get the rest of the story. The book was probably written with a single agenda in mind: to deal with the prejudice against foriegners at a specific time in the life of the nation of Israel (the period of Nehemiah). When Israel was rebuilding after exile, the leadership under Nehemiah did many great acts, but they also thought the only way to become "pure" again in God's eyes was to cast out all the foriegners among them, including the wives and children and husbands who had come from the land of exile. This story, with the ending noting that Ruth was an ancestor of David who was welcomed, though a foriegner (and a Moabite which was a hated foreigner) into the city of Bethlehem and united with an important man of Bethlehem, thus becoming great great great (etc) grandmother of the great King David.

The central thematic word of the book of Ruth, however, is "hesed," the Hebrew word which is variously translated as loving-kindness, faithfulness, compassion, loyalty and is related to the word used to describe the love of a mother for the child in her womb. The word is used repeatedly throughout the book, beginning with the blessing Naomi gives Orpah and Ruth as she prepares to leave them. In this story, the character Ruth becomes the embodiment of hesed. Her commitment to Naomi is absolutely as extravagant and impractical as the gift the woman with the alabaster jar made to Jesus in anointing him.

Just a word about the poem "where you go...." This is so often read at weddings, and I think it is critical to recover the fact that it is spoken from one woman to another, indeed from a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law, a relationship often fraught with complication. This is not about romantic love, but about commitment and covenant, and if it is read at weddings, that should be what we talk about. More tomorrow. Shelly