Guide Us Waking

Guide Us Waking

Mtr. Nora Johnson

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The hymns we sing in Advent are particularly haunting and beautiful, not least because they interrupt the relentless Christmas music we hear on television and in big box stores and at Christmas festivities. You will likely recognize the lyrics to Advent hymn: 

“Sleepers, wake!” A voice astounds us,
the shout of rampart-guards surrounds us:
“Awake, Jerusalem, arise!”
Midnight’s peace their cry has broken,
their urgent summons clearly spoken:
“The time has come, O maidens wise!
Rise up, and give us light;
the Bridegroom is in sight. Alleluia!
Your lamps prepare and hasten there, 
that you the wedding feast may share.”

“Sleepers, wake!” we sing, and the majesty of the hymn carries us into the prophetic joy of this Advent season. We are shaken awake like the bridesmaids in that parable about the wise and foolish virgins. The Bridegroom is at hand and we must go witness and share the wedding feast. An “urgent summons”: God is at hand. Jesus is born, Jesus is with us now, Jesus is coming again. Be ready!

John the Baptist has been calling out to us in a similar voice in the Gospels we’ve heard this Advent. “Repent,” he says, “for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near!” “The axe,” he tells us, “is already at the root of the trees!” And indeed, if we look around at our world, the need to awaken and repent is strong with us. It’s obvious. We must awaken to the coming of Jesus among us. Urgently. For the sake of the world and for our own salvation. We get it. Advent. All about waking up.

How strange, then, that an angel appears to Joseph in this morning’s Gospel while he is fast asleep. This isn’t our typical story of Advent awakening. Sleepers wake? Joseph meets his angel in a deep, dark, slumber. Joseph would appear to have been unprepared for the coming of Jesus. We don’t hear anything about Joseph waiting in prayer for his Messiah, the way Simeon and Anna are waiting in the Temple in Luke’s Gospel, at the Presentation. Joseph isn’t a prophet like that. We only know that he is a man of the House of David, who plans to marry a woman. He is preparing for a wedding feast, sure, but it’s not the great feast of the coming of our Lord. Joseph just wants a wedding. And when his betrothed turns up pregnant, Joseph is ready to cancel, not to announce that the kingdom of God is at hand. Joseph doesn’t want any announcements. He wants a quiet divorce and a conventional life with a woman who won’t make him feel displaced and foolish.

This year, this Advent, when I’ve been pinching myself daily and saying “Wake up! Do something about the state of the world!” it haunts me that an angel comes to Joseph in a dream when all Joseph wants is the conventional life he thought he was supposed to have. It gives me great hope, and it fills me with gratitude. It reminds me that God is God, and that God does not need my skill at awakening in order to move powerfully to save the world. At some deep level, I am powerless to awaken myself.

Prophets may come to us in the wilderness, when we are ready for a challenge, but sometimes angels come to us too, and sometimes they come when we are most unprepared. When we are groggy and worn down. When our world stops making sense. When we can hardly sort out the story we are in. That’s how it was for Joseph. What a deep and weary sleep he must have fallen into that night before the angel appeared. What a surrender that must have been to the darkness and the discouragement and the sharp loneliness of losing Mary. What an insult that she is pregnant.

Joseph follows the instructions the angel gives him, and he takes Mary home to be his wife. But angels will come to him again in his sleep. In the second chapter of Matthew an angel will tell Joseph in a dream that he must take Mary and her child to Egypt because a great slaughtering of children will take place in Bethlehem at the orders of the tyrant Herod. And then an angel will come again, in another dream, to tell him when it is safe to return. But then he will be warned again in a dream that Herod’s son is reigning in Judea, so he will take his family to live in Nazareth of Galilee. “Sleepers wake!” we sing, but Joseph moves through the coming of the kingdom as an exhausted refugee, barely able to comprehend what takes place around him. He is visited not by prophets who challenge him but by gentle messengers from his God, who nudge him forward through a world of death and danger.

A world of death and danger, and also a world of miraculous birth and redemption. All of it over Joseph’s head. All of it determined by forces beyond his control. All of it sounding, I guess, like a story he would scarcely believe in his waking hours. When we read Matthew’s Gospel we get all the answers Joseph doesn’t get. We are told explicitly that his unconventional marriage is a fulfillment of a prophecy from Isaiah, that a virgin will bear a child and they will call him Immanuel, God with us. All Joseph knows is that he is to marry a woman whose child was conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit. How he would know what that meant I cannot begin to tell you. When angels direct him to travel to Egypt and back, we are told that he is fulfilling the word of the prophet Hosea, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1). But Joseph doesn’t know that. Joseph makes the trip in fear because Herod’s murderous forces are on the march. Joseph doesn’t know it, but when goes down to Egypt he is recalling for us another Joseph, the dreamer with the coat of many colors, the son of Jacob in the book of Genesis. But what could that parallel have meant to him at the time? Even living in Nazareth is a fulfillment of an Old Testament pattern, because the word “nazareth” means “branch,” as in the prophet Isaiah we are told that a branch will spring from the roots of the tree of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1). But why would Joseph appreciate the significance of living in a town called “Branch?”

Joseph lives in a world rich with God’s purposes but what he knows is displacement and fear and confusion. Joseph learns from the angels to be willing to give up his fantasy of a normal life, and thus to become a true husband to a woman whose love for God has born incomprehensible fruit.

And as for us: what angel will come to us? What or whom are we to espouse unexpectedly? Whom shall we embrace in spite of the fear of looking foolish or disgraced? What homes are we to leave? Where are we to go? What forces are arrayed to our detriment? And what blessings are waiting to be born? What sleep are we in, exactly? What purposes of God are our lives fulfilling? And beyond all these questions: can we desire the coming of this messiah? The one who comes to us in upheaval and confusion?

It seems that awakening to the coming of the kingdom of Jesus can take many forms. Joseph’s is a true awakening, though it often looks like sleep. When the angel comes to him, he listens, and his footsteps follow the path of God’s inspiration. There may be times in which surrender to God demands not only vigilance but also acceptance that the story we are in is too large for us to comprehend fully. Maybe sometimes we are in the grip of a deeper sleep. Maybe sometimes the sleep and the waking are happening at a level deeper than our full human will can reach. Perhaps there are times when deeper trust is called for, and resting in the arms of God can be a step in the larger process of conscious commitment. Maybe there are times when, even as we prepare to take action in accordance with God’s will, we must also rest in Christ’s peace if we are to function at all as the body of Christ. Can we trust God enough to accept this difficult birth?

Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.

Preached by Mtr. Nora Johnson

18 December 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Pudding's Proof

The Pudding's Proof

Mtr. Erika Takacs

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When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he found himself starting to wonder. He was, if you’ll pardon the expression, a little on the fence, even as he sat behind bars. Was this really the Messiah? How could he know? How could he see the truth if he couldn’t see the man with his own two eyes? He sat in his cell, doing a bit of mental to-ing and fro-ing until he came up with a brilliant idea. He would send his disciples to ask the man directly, Are you the one we’ve been waiting for or not? It was, if you’ll pardon the expression, a light-bulb moment. He would just get the answer straight from the horse’s mouth.

When Jesus saw John’s disciples heading towards him, the determination he saw in their faces made their purpose crystal clear. They were clearly men on a mission, looking for answers, and when they opened their mouths they immediately laid it on the line. They didn’t beat around the bush or pull any punches. Are you the one we’ve been waiting for? And so Jesus tells it to them straight. Look at me, he says. Look at all that I have done and said. Don’t you see? The proof, if you’ll pardon the expression, is in the pudding.   

But can we pause here for a moment and acknowledge that of all the idioms I just threw at you, “the proof is in the pudding” is one that makes absolutely no sense? It’s as ridiculous a phrase as “you’ve got another think coming.” The proof is in the pudding? It sounds as if you might find a revolver with Colonel Mustard’s fingerprints on it if you dig around long enough in a bowl full of Jell-O. But do a little investigative googling, and you too can discover the sense in “the proof is in the pudding.” The original idiom was first recorded in the Middle Ages, not as the proof is in the pudding but as the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Now we’re getting somewhere. Of course, it helps to know that “proof” here has the older meaning of a test or a trial, not of as a synonym for the word evidence. The proof is a test, so the testing of the pudding is in the eating. This is beginning to make sense. And it will make even more sense when we realize that the pudding in question is not a chocolatey, creamy, dessert but rather a pudding in the old-fashioned, British sense of the word – a chunky, meaty sausage, which may or may not have been cooked all the way through, which leads us back to why the proofing is so darned important. It seems to have been Americans in the 1920’s who shortened the phrase to the proof is in the pudding. Apparently the stresses of Prohibition caused the populace not only to shorten their patience with return on investments and the length of their skirts but also their idioms, sometimes beyond all comprehension.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. In other words, you have to test the product – or the person – to see if it’s true, if it’s good for you, if it will nourish and sustain you or cause upset and dis-ease. Which is exactly what John’s disciples are up to here. They want more than just a verbal confirmation that Jesus is Messiah. They’ve heard that line before; heck, they’ve even spoken that line before. They heard John the Baptist talk about Jesus’ baptism, about the voice that spoke from the heavens, calling Jesus Beloved Son. They’ve listened to John’s words about repentance and the kingdom that is coming, and they’ve seen him cast his steely eyes upon Jesus as he did so. The kingdom is coming, they’ve heard him say, and the start of it is standing over there in those sandals, the latch of which I am unworthy to stoop down and tie up.

John’s disciples already knew what had been said about Jesus. They knew what they had heard, but now they wanted more – they wanted proofing. Had Jesus simply said to them, why, yes, I am the Messiah, please go tell John the good news, they would have gone home slightly, but not entirely, reassured. But Jesus offers them more than just a verbal confirmation. Jesus offers proof. Test me, he tells John’s disciples. Test me and then see how you feel. Look and listen, and tell John what you hear and see. The blind see. The lame walk. Lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear. People are raised from the dead, and the poor lay joyful claim to the Gospel. The proof of the Messiah is in the seeing, in the noticing of the miraculous things that that Messiah does, not just in the word that he is. A pudding can look like a pudding but still not be good for eating; if a Messiah claims the name but does nothing with it, he is as good as a pudding half-baked.

The proof of the Messiah is in the seeing, which leads me to this tricky question. What have you seen? If the disciples of John came to you and asked you this one simple question – Is Jesus the one we have been waiting for? – what would you say? If Jesus were to say to you, Go and tell all that you have seen and heard…what would all that you had seen and heard be? Would you have a story to share, of the lame leaping or the speechless singing for joy? Would you tell of a moment you felt God’s hand reach out and still your anxious heart? Would you tell of a time when you saw a relationship mended, an old wound bound up and anointed with holy balm? Would you tell of a job found, a need filled, a belly fed? Would you tell of a time that you heard No and thought that it would be the end of you, but then found that No opened up an entirely new set of Yeses in your life? Would you tell of a physical healing, a prayer answered, a broken body made whole? Would you tell of a holy death, a hopeful passing that made real for you the truth of the resurrection? What would you say?

I know what I would say – that I have known God in the touch of a stranger, that I have heard God’s answers to me in profound and unexpected and sometimes frankly hilarious ways, that I have felt God listening when I sang Kyrie eleison, that I have known God by the gifts of people brought into my life. That’s what I would say. I don’t know what you would say, but I hope you do. I hope that if someone asked you – Is Jesus the one we’ve been waiting for? – you would have the most marvelous proof for your pudding. I hope that you would say, look and see all that the Lord has done for me! Please, let me tell you of all the ways I have been wondrously and miraculously fed.

And if you don’t know what your proof would be, well then welcome to Advent. What better time than Advent to do some thinking and praying about what your pudding’s proof? What better time to ask yourself your own simple questions… like, what is it about Jesus Christ that brings you here? What is it about Jesus Christ that brings you joy? What is it about Jesus Christ that brings you comfort, or conviction, or that calls you to do something more than you ever thought possible? What is about Jesus Christ that makes this season a time of truly happy expectation?

Our world needs your answers. The broken and wounded and afraid and cynical and beat-up and above-it-all are out there, waiting to hear what you have to say, waiting to hear what you have seen and heard, waiting, whether they know it or not, for the gift you have to give them. So tell them. This is the proof in your pudding. For the proof of the Christian is in the bearing witness. They will know we are Christians by our love, ‘tis true, but not just by our love but by our love in Jesus’ name. This is how we keep the Christ in the Christian – by bearing witness to all that our Lord Jesus Christ has done for us, to the ways we have seen him be Messiah in our lives. We must be both energetically explicit and honestly humble about this. The world has had enough of Messiahs in word only, who, once tasted, are full of bitter judgment and nauseating exclusions. And the world had enough of Messiahs in word barely, who, once tasted, leave the stomach empty and grumbling for more. We have more to offer – a real witness to a real Christ, really present in this wine and this bread, really present in the people in these pews, really coming at Christmas. We have more to offer than, as one contemporary theologian puts it, “ignorance on fire or intellect on ice.”* We have real food, meat indeed, saving sustenance that delights both the heart and the belly. We have real food, and the world is starving.

So stir up your stories, you faithful. Stir up your souls and rejoice. Stir up your witness to all that you have seen and heard. Stir up your proofs of the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Savior, in this world and in the next. Stir up your pudding, and let the proof be in the eating.

*Brian McLaren, taken from his latest book The Great Spiritual Migration

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

11 December 2016, The Third Sunday of Advent

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Seventh of December

The Seventh of December

Fr. Sean Mullen

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From a single point in heaven all sevenths
of December can bee seen; as if,
observing from his glass, the Lord can pinpoint
one or another, on the map of time
laid out before him in order, from left to right,
or right to left, depending; as though it matters
to him who made all time, and views it all
simultaneously.

There’s Ambrose in his cradle: a swarm of bees
alights, and buzzes round the child’s head;
a drop of honey left behind to tell
of sweetness yet to come. 

And there’s the blue
Pacific sky abuzz with aircraft pollinating
war.  The bluer ocean claims her dead,
entombs the Arizona, a tomb herself,
and marks this day with infamy.

                                                            And there
on Morningside Heights is me, amid the soaring
stone, assured that I’ll soar too when hands
are laid on me, to tell the Spirit where
to land.

          From heaven, to one and all the angels
bring their messages; the old angelic subject
line: “Fear not!”  To Ambrose’s dad, to sailors
as they drown.  When my peculiar angel
speaks, I look at him, and say, “Of course,
for what have I to fear?”  To which, replies
the angel, “Only your own foolishness,
which, on its own, may not amount to sin,
but that, of course, depends on you, you see.”

“Be dressed for action,” the angel said.  “And hear
the call of Christ to go where he directs
you.  Remember, your first pilgrimage
will be to go between the altar and
God’s people in the world.  Return again
as often as required, inscribing in your
heart the route from there to there.  When you
must speak be sure to speak of Jesus, who may
return at any time, sit down to eat.  And who
will serve the Lord?  Will you be up?  Will you
pay heed, and go, unlock the door, warm up
the basin, wash his feet?  Will you attend
his call, and still attend the call anon;
the timeless call you know,  ‘Come, labor on.’”?

Where did that angel go?  What words has he
for me, for you, all these years on?  He bids
us to the vineyard day by day.  And then
he whispers in my ear (and yours): give thanks,
give thanks.  All other gifts, it seems, will flow
from this thanksgiving theme, inscribed a bit
more deeply now than twenty years ago.

This seventh of December, then, from here
looks like a day of thanks for me, amid
a world that buzzes still with fear
and promise, too.  The bees have never swarmed
my head, and yet I pray that all the same
they’ve left a drop or two of honey here
for me and you.  Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
7 December 2016
On the twentieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood