This year Martha and I celebrated the arrival of two new grandchildren. Benigno, named for his paternal grandfather, was born to Will and Dana on September 14. And Nora was born to Angela and Doug on October 29.
Beny and Nora join their cousins Philip, 7, and Charlotte, 5, born to Lauren and Matt.
Naturally we grandparents think of these beautiful babies as royal scions. But in fact, they are luckier than that. All of them descend from the purest peasant stock. Their ancestors slashed sugarcane in Cuba or stepped warily between steaming cow pies in cold Celtic climes and broke stones in American mud. A peasant bloodline is the greatest advantage our grandchildren will have. To paraphrase Lincoln, God showed a special love for peasants by creating so many of them.
At this special time of year, as we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace in Royal David's city, our grandchildren remind us that all the major players in that nativity drama had no royal blood. They were peasants, and they thought and acted like peasants.
Because they were peasants, Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist and Mary the mother of Jesus had no reason at all to expect good fortune. But when it came, they had specially honed instincts to see it as God's special grace.
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed …” (Luke 1:29-48)
It requires a healthy portion of peasant stock to understand the joy these two women felt as soon as they understood that the Creator of the Universe had singled them out as special vessels to carry out God’s plans. Elizabeth, was a mature woman, while Mary was a child in early adolescence. Both women grew up being told they were worthless, mere females, property useful only as chattel and for the convenience and gratification of men.
Of course Mary and Elizabeth received news of their pregnancies with mixed feelings. Both would have been aware of the cruelties of the world into which they were bringing new life. Both would have observed the high mortality rate of the babies born to their neighbors, and both would have known that life is full of risks and persons born into this bronze age culture could not have expected to live to old age.
Indeed, one of the age-old questions people raise about God is why the creator allows life to be so capricious and cruel. Last week’s murder of two New York City cops by a vengeance seeking madman was another reminder that life is full of unbearable and unexplainable losses.
Mary and Elizabeth were two women in the long lineage of parents since the world began whose hearts were shattered by the fate of their children. Who among us could bear the pain if we knew what fate has in store for the children who are entrusted to our care and love?
Granted, when Elizabeth and Mary received word of their pregnancies, it came with angelic authority, so they had every reason to be optimistic about the outcome. Perhaps the angels may be faulted for not mentioning that the mothers’ souls would be pierced with swords, or for leaving out key details about the fate of their sons, including imprisonment, beheading, flogging, and crucifixion. But Elizabeth and Mary were peasant women. They knew that good and bad, joy and grief, were inevitable parts of life.
They may have also sensed, as vessels of God’s miracles, that their babies were being thrust into the world as weak, vulnerable human beings to make the point that God’s way is not the human way. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, most Jews in Palestine expected the Messiah to be a powerful military and political leader who would cast out the hated Roman occupation and grind the oppressors into dust.
Instead, God came into the world as a tiny baby boy devoid of superhuman qualities but possessed of a willingness to demonstrate that the greatest power in the universe is the love of God. And the way to unleash that power for the salvation of all people was to be the loving and sacrificing servant of all.
No doubt the shepherds and the magi who first beheld that tiny human baby had serious questions about who and what he was. And no doubt the shepherds, with their perfect peasant perception, saw it first. And they wondered:
Mewling and puking in his mother’s arms,
Is he more than he appears to be?
A tiny mouth twisting in sharp alarms
Of his improbable infancy?
And frosted streaks of merely human tears
Tracing the fullness of his brown face?
And black eyes snapping at age-old fears
That our own mother’s lips erased?
Can he be more than he appears to be?
A rooting drive for his mother’s breast,
A human ego driven again to flee
A hunger pang, to seek a human quest
For comfort, warmth, and soft caress
Of mother’s hands upon a moistened cheek.
Who, in human moments only himself would bless,
Caring not what all his race would seek.
Can he be more than he appears to be?
His swaddling clothes leak the same way
Yours did when you were young as he,
And he will not sleep without the sway
Of gentle rocking in his mother’s arms.
His infant eyes seem to mask glory:
But no more than yours when youthful charms
Wrote the first words of your life story.
Can he be more than he appears to be?
So tightly wrapped up in himself
That only his infant needs he’ll see.
Once you put all others on a shelf
Of insignificance while your needs
Were met. Did your infant eyes behold
The world’s suffering? Do his ears heed
The parables that must yet be told?
Can he be more than he appears to be?
And, if so, what sets him apart
From you, whose typical infancy
Was hardly humanity’s fresh start
Toward a lifestyle free from death’s decay?
You, too, had the chance but not the spark
To turn against your ingrained human way
Blindly groping through the godless dark.
Can he be more than he appears to be?
So humanly bound to sinful bone,
What is it his glistening eyes will see
That’s obvious to him alone?
That your humanity failed to receive?
What eternal riddle answers rise
In him that your soul does not perceive?
He is so much more than he appears to be.
Within this child, this mewling youth,
Still hidden by his skin’s transparency,
Is the full script of God’s eternal truth.
Now he weeps complaints about the pain
Of hunger, colic, and damp. But when
On you his full attentions rain,
Your rift with God begins to mend.
You will be more than you have ever been.
Mark 13:24-37
‘But in those days, after that suffering,
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
‘From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
‘But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.’
The Heinz family – that singular conglomeration of aristocratic noblesse oblige who gave us Senator John Heinz, Teresa Heinz Kerry and 57 combinations of condiments – didn’t get rich by underestimating the American people.
When they made their luxuriously thick ketchup, they realized they had a potential problem. The ketchup was so dense you could hold the bottle upside down for what seemed like hours before the first drop would dribble on to your cheeseburger. Almost no one in the United States has that kind of patience and the Heinz people feared millions would desert their delicious condiment in favor of Brand B, some thin, runny, but instantly available tomato liquid. Brand B offered lower satisfaction, perhaps, but instant gratification.
In 1979, with the aim of stemming the migration away from their viscous product, the Heinz people implemented a TV ad you may remember well. Two boys are shown patiently holding a Heinz ketchup bottle over their hamburgers as the first drops of red goo begin to form at the bottle’s mouth. In the background, Carly Simon sings: “Anticipation. Anticipation. It’s making me wait.” In the 32-second commercial, the boys have plenty of time to decide postponed gratification is good. As the scene closes, the words appear on the screen: “Heinz Ketchup. The taste that’s worth the wait.”
There you go. An Advent sermon in a single sentence. The taste that’s worth the wait.
This singular phrase, historic in the ad business, is a helpful clue as we parse the unexpected passage placed before us by the Revised Common Lectionary. This is not only the first Sunday in Advent, but the first Sunday of Year B, the year of Mark.
The passage, known to scholars as “The Little Apocalypse” because it quotes the adult Jesus’ prediction of the end times, is not very Christmassy. There is no babe in the manger poetry, no paeans to the Christ child, no glory to God in the highest, no peace on earth. Instead, we are warned that stars will be falling from heaven and we are advised to keep awake.
That’s not Silent Night. That’s the Ride of the Valkyries. Who knew we would begin this joyous season with dark warnings of the collapse of all we know? Where are the tidings of great joy?
Karoline Lewis, assistant professor of preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, thinks the rhetorical bombshell might be good for us. “There is a certain realness in this Gospel text to begin the Advent season,” she writes. “It cuts through any sentimentality and romanticism about Christmas and reminds us that incarnation is risky business.”
The passage in Mark, like its counterparts in the Revelation to John, is the basis for the expectation of the rapture, that at the end of time Jesus will appear in the clouds and send out his angels to collect his elect from the four winds.
Rapture theology can be distracting and even dangerous, as you may recall if you were watching for the end of the world on May 21 when Harold Camping said it would happen. Camping and his followers spent fortunes on bill boards and T shirts to alert people to the end of time, financed in part by many who sold everything they had to pay for the ad campaign.
Most Christian scholars said then that Mr. Camping was a tad eccentric. Even Al Mohler, the conservative president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary – whose statements about the National Council of Churches and its member communions have bordered on ignorant – spoke with wisdom on the Camping issue.
“Given the public controversy, many people are wondering how Christians should think about his claims,” Mohler wrote. “The Bible does not contain hidden codes that we are to find and decipher. While Christians are indeed to be looking for Christ to return and seeking to be found faithful when Christ comes, we are not to draw a line in history and set a date.”
In the first centuries after Jesus’ resurrection, persecuted Christians yearned for the return of Jesus and prayed daily for him to keep his promise. The Apostle Paul didn’t predict the date of Jesus’ return, but he thought it was imminent: “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (I Corinthians 15: 51-52). A couple millennia later we are still waiting, and many Christians have lowered their expectations.
I was in a workshop with Robert Schuler in January 1981 when he bet the millennialist Hal Lindsay a million dollars that Jesus would not return before the year 2000. Clearly Schuler’s ideas about the Second Coming of Jesus drifted leftward, but I was more impressed by the fact that he was a man who knew when a wager could not be lost. Lindsay, incidentally, declined.
It used to be that evangelicals tended to avoid actions against climate change on the grounds that eco-justice didn’t really matter because Jesus would return before the polar icecaps had fully melted. More recently, conservative theologians like Richard Cizik, formerly a leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, jumped into the eco-justice movement with both feet. As thousands of evangelicals followed in his wake, it was clear that most acknowledged the near unanimous verdict of scientists that global warming is caused by human abuse of the environment. It was also an indication that many evangelicals no longer plan their lives around the notion that Jesus will return before their mortgages are paid off.
The Second Coming of Jesus is a basic tenet of faith, appearing in the Nicene Creed, the Apostle’s Creed and in most Baptist affirmations. It’s something we should be eagerly anticipating. But our reaction to the “The Little Apocalypse” set aside for our first perusal of Advent suggests we find the idea a little scary. It’s no coincidence that most of the end-of-world movies are classified as horror, and even films with a rapture theme portray a vengeful Jesus in pursuit of terrified sinners.
That probably says more about us than it says about the films. Most of us live lives of reasonable contentment and we would prefer to indulge the non-threatening Yuletide trappings of tinsel and wassail than contemplate the stars falling from the sky.
The future, for many of us, is a very scary place because so little is known about it. No matter how hard we try to live virtuous lives, all of us have fallen far short of perfection – and the future, we fear, is where all our chickens come home to roost.
This month when we watch the inevitable rebroadcasts of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol (if you only have time for one, I recommend the 1992 Muppets version), the ghost of Christmas yet to come is the creepiest character of all – not because of his menacing cowl and skeletal fingers, but because he shows Scrooge his own just desserts, the righteous judgment on the grasping, self-obsessed life he has led. It is Scrooge, not the ghost, who is the chilling character in these scenes. Ebenezer’s life of depraved indifference to the poor leaves him no chance of heavenly reward, and he knows it. He fears the ghost of Christmas future most of all. He has no hope of relief, no promise of the joys of postponed gratification, so his anticipation of the ghost’s awful truth is agony for him.
“Anticipation. Anticipation. It’s making me wait.” And the anticipation is hell.
Most of us, perhaps, have less to worry about than Ebenezer Scrooge, but at Christmas time we’d still rather trill with Silver Bells than pulsate with apocalyptic cannonade.
Given all this, it will take a little discipline to remind ourselves: when we anticipate the coming of Jesus, there is no difference between welcoming him as an innocent child or as a rescuing savior.
Karoline Lewis offers reassuring words: “The darkening of the sun, the dimming of the moon's light, and the stars falling from heaven means the end of the world as we have known it. That death will be no more because God will die is something to anticipate during Advent. This is not to be a downer just when Bing really kicks into high gear with White Christmas. It’s to speak the truth, about ourselves and our unrealistic expectations; about God and how God exceeds them.”
Advent begins, and there will be many joys to share in the coming weeks: the Advent wreaths, the manger tableaus, the pageants, the lights, the presents, the family gatherings, and the familiar carols.
The Advent message, as always, is that the Creator of the Universe has taken on human flesh, coming to us in the form of a powerless, innocent infant.
And the message is also that God, through this child, has come to die on a cross, conquer death, and ultimately to return to gather those who have been redeemed in loving arms.
What does it matter if the stars fall from the sky if death has been defeated and a new, more perfect life begins?
The bottom line on the first Sunday in Advent is this: the coming of Jesus is good news.
And our Advent prayer is to savor the anticipation of the miracles yet to come.
Come, Lord Jesus.
Advent – the season we are called to wait patiently in the darkness for a great light – requires some mental and spiritual agility.
Theologically, Advent is a time of patient waiting.
Practically, Advent is also a time we dwell sadly on bygone holiday memories as we endure an uncertain present and entertain dubious promises of a happier future.
Faced with all these conflicting emotions, it’s no wonder Christmas is a stressful time of year.
The Sunday before Advent, four members of our family went Rome to celebrate my spouse’s birthday by basking in the city’s incomparable art, architecture, and antiquity.
Despite the effervescent Francisco Champaign that teases the hopeful these days, I kept seeing the ghost of an old, dead pope in Roma Aeterna.
This was the first trip to Rome for Martha, Katie, and Victoria, so each new sight was eagerly studied. Shortly after sunset on our first day, we walked briskly down the Via Leone IV until we stood awestruck in front of the ugly brown wall that surrounds Vatican City. Soon we found the Tuscan colonnades that expand four columns deep to encircle St. Peter’s Square. In the dark, a handful of pedestrians wandered around the square, and we stopped to stare respectfully at the most famous basilica in the world.
That was the beginning of a week that included two events starring Pope Francis: a Sunday mass to canonize six new saints, and a general papal audience Wednesday in the square.
In the latter pope sighting, the crowd huddled beneath umbrellas for three rainy hours until the Pontiff emerged amid rays of sun (a trick Barack Obama has not yet managed). The pontiff rode his pope-mobile up and down roped-off pathways. The crowd, focused on Papa Francisco, swayed, stretched and mounted rickety folding chairs to find a clear camera angle unblocked by large nuns straining at the ropes. A group of Mexican pilgrims in front of us waved an elegantly embroidered white sombrero they may have hoped to plop on Francisco’s head, but he drove quickly passed them with a fixed smile. (Victoria beat a Filipina nun to a perfect pope-photographing vantage point, which provided nice Facebook souvenirs.)
Clearly Pope Francis is a charismatic figure and the crowds adore him.
So it seems strange, even to me, that the pope I kept seeing in my mind’s eye was a distinctly non-charismatic pope with heavy brows and dark, sad eyes.
Pope Paul VI, who was elected to the office in 1963, was still relatively fresh in the job in October 1967 when I visited Rome on a religious retreat sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. As one of the few non-Catholic members, I made it a point to attend all the churchy gatherings. As a result, I saw Pope Paul three times that week (which, as it turned out, was three times more than we saw the chaplain who arranged the events.)
Four popes have reigned since Paul died in 1978, and two of them – John Paul II and Francis – are beloved by the people and aggrandized by the media.
But as I walked around St. Peters with my family last week, it was the image of Pope Paul that kept coming to my mind. When I looked up to the windows outside the papal apartments, the memory of Paul was uncannily vivid.
Back then, we had waited for hours for Paul’s appearance, so the crowd cheered when the window finally opened and the red papal coat of arms was dramatically unfurled. When the tiny figure of the pope appeared at the window, the crowd exulted. A middle-aged woman in the crowd, sensing we Americans were had no idea what to do, urged us to hold up “something of value” so the pope would bless it. Hastily, we reached into our shirts and lifted our dog tags as far as their chains would permit. Some in the crowd may have though we were ritualistically sniffing them. But when the Pope intoned the magic words in his nasally voice, “in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” presto! Holy dog tags dangled in our youthful bosoms.
The Sunday Angelus is a ritual that has happened thousands of times since that morning in 1967, but when I returned to that special place 47 years later I seem to have wanted to believe nothing had changed. Maybe I wanted to be 21 again, filled with naïve wonder at the mysteries of the life, and maybe I wanted to see Giovanni Batista Montini – the pope of Rome when I was first there – living and breathing and lingering irrationally like the shades of my youth. (For more about my specious youth and the dour pope, see http://bit.ly/1hKdOHm).
Thus it happened that one of the more mystical moments last week (for me, anyway, not my traveling companions) was a quick visit to the polished tomb of Paul VI.
The simple marble plate was replaced recently to add the word “BEATUS” to note Paul’s recent promotion to “Blessed” status, a step just short of sainthood. As I understand it, Paul needs to produce one more miracle before he earns the final merit badge. The miracle credited to him took place inside human reproductive plumbing, which may be deemed appropriate for the author of HUMANAE VITAE, or perhaps is better categorized under the less said the better.
As I lingered briefly in front of Paul’s tomb (very briefly because our 30-person guided group had already sped by in search of more interesting relics), I felt a strange sense of simultaneity.
On the one hand, much of my visit to Rome last week had resurrected old but fresh memories of a particularly exciting time in ecumenical history. Paul met that week with Athenagoras I, the Ecumenical Patriarch, to heal a 1,200-year-old rift between the Eastern and Western Churches, and I witnessed the pope and the patriarch stand as brothers at the papal altar beneath Bernini’s bronze baldachin. The day before I saw Paul smiling and gesturing behind a window in a small courtyard where I was close enough to see laugh lines crinkle around his eyes and his gold pectoral cross sparkle in the sun. He was in the fourth year of his 15-year reign and he had every right to regard the future with hope and confidence. I was 21, and I claimed the same right.
Standing briefly in front of Paul’s tomb, I was reminded that he is gone and, judging by the indifference of other tourists, mostly forgotten.
Yet last week I envisioned Paul in all the ancient sites around St. Peters that pre-date us both by hundreds of years, and will certainly post-date us for hundreds more.
As I pause to reflect on this strange sense of the coexistence of distinctly different eras, I’m led to the conclusion that it is not strange at all.
I think it stems from a common, perhaps universal, human trait that enables us to sense God’s view of the mysteries of time.
As the Advent Season progresses, I dare say all of us will have a similar sense of living in two different times.
Christmas lights and colors will bring back memories of loved ones long gone, of old friends and neighbors and teachers no longer here, of houses and homes and apartments that no longer exist.
If I spent Advent remembering dear old folks and places that seem irretrievably gone, I would be in tears all month.
But God’s promise is that they are not gone. Not Mom. Not Dad. Not even Paul VI.
Our memories may be wistful but need not be sad. God – the Great I AM who dwells in our past and in our future as abundantly as in our present – assures us that no important person or event or era is gone forever.
Just as Advent is a time of patient waiting for a great joy, so our lives may be times of endurance and anticipation of God’s promises.
And the time we spend waiting is merely an illusion.
“But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day,” says the writer of 2 Peter 3:8-9. “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”
It may take more patience than we think we have to wait for all that is promised at Advent.
But while we wait, God provides us with glimpses of the good that is to come.
And God reassures us that in God’s good time, the good will come indeed.
