We Are Carrying Love: Advent Reflections, Part 4

Here ends my advent reflections, serialized out a sermon I gave last week. Merry Christmas, everybody.

Gabriel goes on to make Mary a promise—really a series of promises that aren’t so much for her as they are for the world.

•Her son, to be called Jesus, will be great.
•Jesus will be called “Son of the Most High”—invested with the power we sing about from Sunday to Sunday.
•God will give Jesus the throne of David—the shoot from the stump that Isaiah tells us will bear fruit.
•Jesus will reign over God’s people forever; his kingdom will have no end.

Gabriel finishes his pitch with a reminder: Nothing is impossible with God. He cites Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, as evidence. So Mary is being given what Luke wishes for Theophilus and, really, all of us: the certainty of our faith.

This love that Mary is being given to carry will be a burden, no doubt, but unlike those other burdens—burdens of anxiety and shame, bitterness and pettiness, nastiness and busyness—the burden of love eventually results in the birth of love. And the birth of love, as we celebrate it at Christmas, eventually results in our deliverance, as we celebrate at Easter. And this kind of messianic love is self-propagating; Jesus didn’t merely come to earth to merely die for our sins; he came to recalibrate us not as people carrying grudges and secrets but as people who are carrying love—for ourselves, for our neighbors, for our world.

I have a friend who has given his life to carrying the love of God to all corners of the world. His organization sets up little communities in red light districts in Bangkok and outcast settlements in Mumbai and trash heaps in Latin America, and there they make new friends and explore ways of making life better. The love of God is being birthed in those places.

I have another friend who carries love back and forth to and from Haiti. In a country—a puddle-jump from Miami—where the average citizen lives on $2 a day, he’s teaching kids to read and building better schools so that those kids will be grow up with dignity and opportunity. He’s handing out some 30,000 Creole-language Bibles a year so that as folks learn to read they’re reading about this burden of God’s love that ultimately delivers.

I have another friend who decided that gay people and Christian people were talking at and past each other when they should be talking to, and listening to, the Jesus who was promised in this passage we’re reading today and who delivered on his promises in the passages we’ll read on Good Friday.

There’s no denying that these guys—all three of them—are carrying burdens. Some of them endure harsh critique for the way they’re carrying this love we’ve been given. Some of them live much less prosperous lives than they could because they’ve taken up their particular burden. All of them have a lot to juggle to make room for this burdensome love. But if you ask them why they do it—why they don’t just drop the whole thing and make their lives easier—they’ll tell you that it’s because a long time ago a modest little woman from a town of no repute was given the gift of a burdensome love. And that burdensome love gestated and grew and was born and made his way through life. And then he carried a burdensome cross to the outskirts of town, and then carried a world’s worth of shame and secrets and grudges and self-absorption to a place where it could no longer ruin us. And then he rose again to carry us through difficult days and years and centuries and millennia until ultimately he delivers us safely to a place of no tears and no shame. They do it because God is love, and carrying love, no matter how burdensome, is a gift.

All this stuff really happened, and it happened for God’s purposes, which emanate from his character, which is love. The Gospel as Luke here presents it is love throughout. Mary is given the privilege of carrying love, but in a sense so is Theophilus, and in a sense so are we.

We carry this conviction with us: that God knows what he’s doing.

We carry this confidence with us: that nothing is impossible with God.

We carry this assurance with us: that the faith we celebrate each Sunday played out in real time among real people some two thousand years ago.

We carry this promise with us: that the work God is doing among us and in us is not only for us but for the world through us.

We carry this certainty with us: that God is love, and that we are bearers of that love.

We carry this burden with us: that this love we carry is real and concrete and powerful and changes things when we give ourselves over to it.

This is the witness of Mary and the glory of Christmas. Every day, by the grace of God, we are carrying love. Imagine what we could do with it?

We Are Carrying Love: Advent Reflections, Part 3

This is the third of four excerpts from an Advent sermon I'm giving. Come back next week for the punchline.

It’s hard to carry love, quite honestly—and if we’re more honest, we’ll recognize that it’s much easier to carry any number of other things. Sometimes it’s much easier to carry a grudge than it is to carry love, right? When someone’s wronged us, that grudge feels a lot lighter, a lot less burdensome, even a lot less painful than love. And so for a time that too often becomes a long time we put down a little love to make room for a little grudge.

Sometimes it’s easier to carry secrets, right? We do something we know we’ll get in trouble for, something we know the truth would hurt someone we love while also embarrassing us or making life more difficult for us, and so we make a little space in our hearts for a secret, and to do so we have to put down a little love.

Sometimes our secrets aren’t about the wrongs we have done, though; sometimes they’re about the wrongs done to us. We suddenly find ourselves loaded up with shame or bitterness or hurt, and we can’t imagine how to get rid of it. So if it’s permanent, we’ve got to make room for it, right? So we put down a little love and keep carrying our secret shame.

But more often than these big things are the little things that we don’t even notice we have, but as we make our way through our days love continues to be crowded out of our hearts by more pressing concerns: we’re being actively encouraged—particularly during Christmas but really all year round—to spend more, eat more, buy more, work more, hurry more, worry more, here a more, there a more . . .

We live in a time where love has been made particularly hard, and unattractive to carry. Love doesn’t seem like a gift, it seems like a burdensome luxury that we can no longer afford to indulge.

Luke is writing an orderly account of the foundations of the Christian faith, to ground the faith of Theophilus in concrete history, and so to assure him of the reasonableness of his faith. Why, then, does he so quickly proceed to such crazy stories? Luke moves immediately into the birth not of Jesus but of John the Baptist, a story that is marked throughout by marvel and miracle: an old woman, well past childbearing years, becomes pregnant in an answer to a lifelong prayer. An old man, elected for a time to be the voice of the people to God, is struck mute for his lack of faith. He won’t speak again until the birth of his son, at which time his voice is restored and he sings of “the tender mercy of our God.”

Luke moves quickly from this story to six months later, where we find Mary living in Nazareth, pledged to marry Joseph. Jesus’ own disciple Philip will one day openly mock Mary’s village: “Nazareth?!? Can anything good come out of there?!?” But here we are, in this town of no reputation, with a young virgin, the story tells us, about to marry into the line of King David—a once-great line that apparently has little remaining political clout.

But this detail tells Theophilus something: the messiah was promised through David’s line—Isaiah 11 promises the people of God that “a shoot will come out of the stump of Jesse” (Jesse the father of David; the stump a royal line that has since been diminished); “from his roots a branch will bear fruit.” By Mary marrying into David’s line, a prophecy was being fulfilled. God, it appears, knows what he’s doing.

“Greetings,” the angel Gabriel tells Mary.” He calls her “highly favored” and then tells her “The Lord is with you.” This troubles Mary, and perhaps it would trouble us as well, because if the Lord is with us, things necessarily change. If God is with us, as Paul tells us, “who can be against us?” And yet Mary was a subject of empire, a woman in a strongly patriarchal culture, a child (probably around thirteen) about to marry someone who was likely much older. When you have a lot going against you, you figure out a way to live within those constraints. People adapt to their circumstances, even if those circumstances are, or ought to be, untenable.

There are people today living in garbage dumps all over the world. There are children today growing up as sexual slaves. There are women who can’t show their face in public or they’ll be shunned, beaten or worse. There are people who endure petty acts of passive racism on a daily basis. There are people—maybe people we know—who suffer abuse or neglect at home or carry the burden of abuse or neglect in their history.

It’s people who carry these various burdens, who out of necessity adapt to entirely unacceptable circumstances, who have the most right to ask “Where is God?” And here the angel Gabriel presents Mary, who could very well speak on these people’s behalf, with an audacious claim: “The Lord is with you.” He doesn’t suggest that this is a change in Mary’s status: it’s not “The Lord is about to be with you” or “The Lord is now with you.” Gabriel is communicating reality to Mary, a reality that necessarily changes things.

What would happen if we greeted one another this way? Not “whazzzupp?!?” or “Howdy partner” or whatever, but “The Lord is with you”? We would be saying it not as a nicety but as a declaration of faith. God, who created us, isn’t aloof to our suffering, he isn’t ignorant or dismissive of our circumstances. God is Emmanuel—God is God with us. And in the moment we acknowledge that, we open ourselves to changes that God has in mind for us.

We Are Carrying Love: Advent Reflections, Part 2

The second of four excerpts from my Advent sermon. Pray for the people who have to endure the whole thing in one sitting.

The Orthodox Church refers to Mary, mother of Jesus, as Theotokos, "God-bearer," which is a pretty handy, efficient way of characterizing Mary’s unique ministry. She was, as the story tells us, impregnated with God. Jesus gestated in her womb, where his heart started beating and his spinal cord took shape and his limbs started flexing their fledgling muscles. Somewhere along the way, undoubtedly, Jesus kicked Mary, and she felt it not as an affront or a judgment—imagine being kicked by God?!?—but as good news: this child inside her was alive and kicking, and because of a conversation she had months previous she knew that this was God inside her, eager to get out and face the world he created, eager to be not only the Lord of Hosts but also Emmanuel, God with us.

Let’s take up the story from Luke 1.

Since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

We begin not with Mary but with Luke himself, who in this preamble indicates why he’s writing what he’s writing. What follows is an “orderly account,” thoroughly investigated, as a means of grounding the beliefs of Theophilus. His name means “Lover of God,” which may be a given name or may be a pseudonym Luke takes up for this book and takes up again in his second historical volume, the book of Acts. But the point is that what follows is orderly, carefully investigated, and intended to anchor the beliefs of the Christian church in a concrete history. These things, Luke is telling Theophilus and really all of us, really happened.

I heard a pastor once suggest that every time we see a manger scene we remind ourselves, “That really happened.” I thought that was cool, and so now every time I see one, that’s what I do. And if I happen to forget, a friend of mine at work reminds me. This is part of our ministry to one another, part of why Luke took it upon himself to help Theophilus to be certain of his faith. We are carrying love, and the love we carry is meant for one another.

So when you’re struggling to believe either the truth of what we celebrate every Sunday or struggling to trust that you’ll be able to make your mortgage next month, or struggling to see a future with your spouse or struggling to imagine a meaningful life without a spouse—keep in mind that there is someone near you who is carrying love for you. And not even only their own love for you; there are people near you who are carrying the love of God in trust for you. It’s right and proper for us to draw deeply from this love when we need it, just as it’s right and proper for us, as God-bearers of a kind, to be prepared to dispense this kind of love when we find a need for it: through acts of kindness, through words of encouragement, through any number of ways.

We Are Carrying Love: Advent Reflections, Part 1

This is from a sermon I prepared for the third week of Advent 2009. I thought I'd serialize it here.

Part of what’s so amazing about Christmas is its modesty. We sing songs about heaven and nature singing, about herald angels and jubilant shepherds, but we also sing songs about little towns and silent nights. So while any day of the week we could take to the streets singing loudly “How Great Is Our God” and “Holy Holy Holy Lord God Almighty,” and we would be perfectly justified in doing so, it's also important to notice the little things, the subtle movements of God that sound best when whispered: Emmanuel—God with us.

God’s ministry to and through Mary, the mother of Jesus, is not always whispered. Sometimes it’s shouted, trumpeted. A few years ago our neighbor church down the street erected a thirty-five foot metallic statue of Mary in their back yard. People would come from miles to venerate it, to pray together next to it, to drink juice and eat picnic lunches in its shadow. It’s called “Our Lady of the Millennium,” and it’s far from modest. It crisscrosses the country on the back of a flat-bed truck, making visitations, and it makes the papers wherever it goes.

I mention this not to poke fun at people’s tendencies toward bombast, but as a caveat to my own comments. While the Mary we remember here we’ll remember as modest, she’s also unusually strong and resilient, like steel; she’s remarkably larger than life and casts a long shadow on the church, for very good reasons; she conducts herself, in any estimation but especially given her historical context, in ways that can best be described as heroic. And so this Mary we remember here as quiet and modest we should also remember as one of the greats in our Christian history; as we consider what it means to be a Christian today, we would do well to read up on Mary and consider how we might be like her.

I’d argue, in fact, that in many ways contemporary Christians are like Mary, most notably in this: as people who have embraced the call of the gospel, who have heard the message of love and justice and reconciliation that God offers us and have moved toward it, have surrendered ourselves to it, we are carrying love.

The apostle John makes it explicit to us that when we’re talking about God, we’re talking about love. If someone asks you to describe God, you could do worse than simply quoting John: “God is love.” Often we think of God and other qualities come to mind: severity and judgment when we’re feeling guilty, perhaps, or benign and disinterested, when we find ourselves disinterested in God. But John tells us what the entirety of the Bible shows us: God may show himself to be many things, but at the heart of it, God is love. And we can take comfort in that.

Altercation at the Overnight Shelter

It's worth mentioning from the start that I've been going, two or three times a month, to the local overnight shelter to serve breakfast, clean up and commiserate with local homeless folks, for the past couple of years. And I'm known, by and large, as a pretty friendly guy. I mention all this not to toot my own horn (although it's pretty clever how I managed to do that anyway, if I do say so myself). No, I mention this upfront because in that time I've had multiple heated arguments with friends, family members, coworkers, fellow churchgoers, telemarketers and business owners. And through all those heated arguments with people close and near to me, I never witnessed any significant relational volatility among the guests at the shelter until yesterday morning.

Don't get me wrong. Some of these folks strike an awfully intimidating pose, and while I can bring myself to be nice to them, I generally steer clear of them in conversation, favoring the more welcoming glances of other guests. I also know that while I've not personally witnessed a fight at the shelter till yesterday, other volunteers at other shifts have seen people go a little nuts. And I'm worldly wise enough to presume that even the nice folks with the welcoming glances, being human beings under pressure, most likely lose their cool every now and then. So I'm not suggesting that the homeless people in the western suburbs of Chicago are magically serene. I'm only observing that they're human beings living in a civil society, and they know how to conduct themselves as such. And every once in a while something gets on their nerves enough to raise their hackles and cause a scene.

That's what happened yesterday morning. Addy, notorious for oversleeping and waking up grumpy, was exceptionally tired and uncompromising. Fifty-plus people had been handed plates of eggs and toast while she slept on. Fifty-plus people--including several little kids--had bathed, dressed and packed for the day while she slept on. An entire infrastructure of mattresses and modular walls had been disassembled all around her while she slept on. Gentle nudges and whispered "Wake up, Addy" wasn't doing it today. So another guest, exasperated by the stress Addy had apparently created in the dumbstruck volunteers working quietly around her, took it on himself to show Addy a little tough love.

He yelled at her to get up. He yanked the blanket off her. He pulled the pillow out from under her head. And when she started protesting, he grabbed the mattress and started pulling. I'm pretty sure my mom and dad and scout master woke me up the same way on more than one occasion. Addy finally surrendered the mattress, but she was ticked off to no end, so while the guest triumphantly folded up her blanket and added her pillow to the pillow cart, Addy stormed over to the breakfast buffet and poured a cup of coffee. Then she marched back to him and threw it at him.

"Oh, now, that's assault," he responded. "Ma'am," he said loudly and repeatedly to our shift supervisor, "could you call the police?" She ignored him and went to talk to Addy, so he shrugged and called the police himself.

Our shift supervisor didn't know what to do. Neither did I; neither did the other volunteers. Most of the guests minded their own business, but the conversation that ensued revealed some important details: Addy did this all the time; complaints to the volunteer staff never resulted in any discipline taken against Addy; complaints to the shelter administration never resulted in anything. Addy hadn't just been chronically oversleeping, she'd been systematically alienating the community that she traveled with by default. I could almost hear the chorus: "How do you solve a problem like Addy?"

I suppose we all know someone like Addy, and I suspect, the way I've told this story, that our sympathies lie with her. If someone wants to sleep a little late, the logic in my head goes, let her. The worst thing that happens is she misses breakfast and doesn't shower, and the people charged with cleaning up the shelter add a minute or two to their schedule. Big deal.

But I find my sympathies drifting to the other guests. Addy was being a glaring fly in a delicate ointment. Addy was a visual reminder that the rules of homelessness, as designed and enforced by people who are not homeless, can be nearly as arbitrary as they are draconian. One evening someone might be turned away for showing up late; the next morning someone else might be allowed to sleep late and even have a special breakfast prepared for her because she missed the main course.

Meanwhile, volunteers such as myself don't notice when we're slipping into a way of interacting with guests that's patronizing and demeaning. Our shift leader chided the guests: "If you have a problem with someone, you need to tell us"--as though "we" the volunteers had any idea what to do. When the guests protested that they complain about Addy all the time, with no discernible response from the powers that be, our shift leader responded, "It's like the older brother beating up the younger brother with you guys." The complaining guests were, it seems, one complaint away from a time out, two away from a spanking. Meanwhile, the call to the police led, in true suburban form, to a four-car intervention. As I was leaving for work, several police officers were crossing the church parking lot to keep the peace.

I'm not dogging the cops. I don't know what it's like to be an officer of the peace, and I didn't hear the guest's complaint, the content of which may have called for a strong response. As I drove to work, however, it struck me that an argument like the one I'd witnessed would never have resulted in a raid like that. It would have been handled internally, because it was essentially an in-house argument. The coffee throw was a bit extreme, but Addy was far enough away from the other guest that she never would have hit more than his jeans and his shoes. It was a symbolic gesture, not really assault. The entire interchange was evidence that the system needed attention, that the rules needed to be restated more clearly and applied more consistently. And the community--guests and volunteers alike--needed a reminder that we had cast our lots together, at least for overnight, and we each had responsibility to the others.

Because this is a community, temporary as it is: always the same people, with occasional new faces, coming together regularly, eating and sleeping and working and commiserating together, observing and addressing the problem of homelessness together. We're all in over our heads because we're each complex individuals involved in a complex community, a collision of private interests, a congregation united by a common messiness. Throw in all the washing of clothes, mattresses, tables and bodies, and the breaking of bread and pouring of beverages, and the homeless shelter becomes almost sacramental.

I left for work--earlier than I needed to, I can admit from a day's distance. That whole altercation made me nervous: I didn't know who to side with or how to resolve it. I don't like conflict, and frankly, some homeless people scare me. People like Addy, with her wild hair and her otherworldly eyes. That's my confession for today. I ask all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.

Dr. Seuss and Other Gateway Drugs

Mary Doria Russell, author of several books including the sci-fi duo The Sparrow and Children of God, was in Lombard this weekend to receive a key to the village (insert colloquial joke here), speak with local high school students about writing, and sell some books. I got to attend her presentation at the Helen Plum Memorial Library, where she worked as a page while growing up, and get her to sign some books for my parents. I've read The Sparrow and am reading Children of God; I wanted to meet this woman who has done the seemingly impossible: written two novels that both my parents would read and enjoy.

The pitch for The Sparrow is brilliantly simple: "Missionaries in Space." Intelligent life is discovered in another solar system; the Jesuits lay down enough money to fund a mission. Calamity ensues. It's a sad and very human portrayal of what happens when worlds collide, when inadvertent error and mixed motives overshadow the better angels of our nature. Mom and Dad loved it; I loved it; my boss loved it; one of the authors I edit loved it. Who knows? Maybe you'd love it.

Russell has written a couple of other novels since these two; not being much for fiction, I'm frankly unlikely to read them. But I did enjoy her presentation. She waxed nostalgic about growing up as a reader, exploiting the addictive quality of reading. She characterized Dr. Seuss books as "a gateway drug" and Nancy Drew as "the tobacco of books": "You look like a smart little girl; I'll bet you'd like Nancy Drew. It'll make you look more mature--it has chapters." And on and on until Russell hit age forty-two and "started cooking up my own crystal meth," switching irrevocably from writing journal articles in her field of anthropology to writing deeply human novels. She says that they're in a second or third round of discussion for a film version of The Sparrow, and--news flash--Brad Pitt is doing a treatment in the hopes that the film will be his Hollywood swan song. Well, well, well . . .

Russell grew up Roman Catholic, attending mass at the church just down the street from the library. "I switched from Catholicism," she told us, "to anthropology, quite frankly," when she was fifteen--a kind of protest against trends she observed in Vatican II, which seems to amount to her preference for old hymns and Latin masses. She didn't go into detail, but she alluded as much. When she became a mother at age thirty-five, however, "cultural relativism became not terribly helpful." By then the notion of the incarnation--God taking on flesh and dwelling among his people (in other words, the divinity of Jesus)--was untenable to her, but Catholicism became a springboard to its own roots for her. "I went deeper, to the faith Jesus practiced." In Judaism she found a faith system that satisfied her intellectually and gave her an ethical foothold for making her way in the world as a woman, a mother, a whatever: "At the heart of Judaism is the question, How do we raise children who want to be good?"

That's a good question. Doesn't do much for me, as an adult with no children, but underneath it is the idea that we live and move and have our being in a real world that extends both before and after us, and the prime directive for us as a species, particularly if we're wired to self-propagate, is to trick our self-interest into being constrained by a moral and ethical compass. I'd argue that with the incarnation Christianity does that more completely: Whereas the Old Testament tells us of the good life, the life lived under God, the New Testament shows it to us, while simultaneously showing us that we are undergirded with a divine love practiced in defiance of our own fickleness. The God who dictates morality and ethics to us also loves us at the cost of his own comfort, his own existence. In the incarnation Jesus shows us that we are rooted and established in love--which is a pretty good first lesson in raising children to want to be good.

The incarnation is what we commemorate with Christmas, what we anticipate with Advent. We're a little early to start talking about that now--not that you'd know from the displays at the megastores--but it's on my mind, thanks to this wry and sassy, deeply human author. You might consider The Sparrow and Children of God as Christmas presents for the thinking reader in your life this year; they're not simple, but they're pretty brilliant.

All This Has Happened Before and Will Happen Again

Here's an odd convergence of readings. First, from the prophet Haggai:

The word of the LORD came to Haggai a second time on the twenty-fourth day of the month: "Tell Zerubbabel governor of Judah that I will shake the heavens and the earth. I will overturn royal thrones and shatter the power of the foreign kingdoms. I will overthrow chariots and their drivers; horses and their riders will fall, each by the sword of his brother.

" 'On that day,' declares the LORD Almighty, 'I will take you, my servant Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel,' declares the LORD, 'and I will make you like my signet ring, for I have chosen you,' declares the LORD Almighty."

And from the poet T. S. Eliot, in his play "Murder in the Cathedral":

You are the Archbishop who was made by the King; whom he
set in your place to carry out his command.
You are his servant, his tool, and his jack,
You wore his favours on your back,
You had your honours all from his hand; from him you had the
power, the seal and the ring.

Two signet rings--one from the king, given to the archbishop; the other from God, given to the governor. But they signify very different things: the ring of God is a reminder of his earlier covenant promise, a reminder that God yet abides with this people. The ring of the king, Eliot reveals, is an act of tyranny, a power play asserting the primacy of the king over the church. God tells his people earlier in Haggai "In this place I will grant peace" (Haggai 2:9); Archbishop Thomas effectively labels the behavior of the king as a way of the world: "Petty politicians in your endless adventure!"