Get thee to a wilderness!

Earlier this month, Mother LouAnn and I went to an Advent quiet day, and I had wilderness on my mind. Atop a credenza with a stack of books for our inspiration, I spied one called “Dakota: a Spiritual Geography.” It spoke to me of wilderness. So, in my time in the undistracted, mostly empty, tall-ceilinged sanctuary of St John the Baptist—my own few hours in the wilderness--I read that book. The author, Kathleen Norris, talks about moving to Plains country with her husband, a poet, way out to the western part of South Dakota, on the border of North Dakota, to take care of her grandmother’s home after she died. No one was going to buy it. It’s in one of the most desolate and most impoverished regions of the whole country. It always has been. During the great Western expansion, the native people were pushed off the land to make room for homesteaders in the 1890’s. But 80 percent of the homesteaders left within first 20 years of settlement. Another one-fifth of population of her county has left since 1980.  It is a wilderness.

            The Norrises came from New York City—a city bursting with culture, and the greatest achievements of artists, musicians, writers—to a barren landscape and villages with a few hundred people. The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. Nevertheless, Norris says, “the Plains have been essential not only for my growth as a writer, they have formed me spiritually. I would even say they have made me a human being.” It was in her time in this country that she encountered a Benedictine monastery and became an oblate (someone associated with a religious community but not bound by vows). “A monk isn’t supposed to need all kinds of flashy surroundings,” a monk tells her. “We’re supposed to have a beautiful inner landscape. Watching a storm pass from horizon to horizon fills your soul with reverence. It makes your soul expand to fill the sky.” Norris talks about the irony of seeking a desert within the desert.

Wilderness is all over our readings today. In Isaiah, we are called to the desert to prepare a highway. We are told to prepare for disruptive change:  Valleys will be lowered, mountains raised up. This is no small shit--like a new way to stream movies to your TV. This is like a new law of physics. A new reality where the first is last. The last is first. And death has no sting. So get ready. Everything is going to be different.

This is the message John the Baptist brings from the wilderness. As is often the case--disruptive messages come from the outside, from the fringe. The messengers who come have been away from the status quo, free from distraction and pressures of so-called civilization. Angel, by the way, is the same word in Greek as messenger. Like Gabriel, John the messenger comes out of nowhere.

We sometimes think of the wilderness as somewhere God-forsaken.  But God calls people to the wilderness. I think it gives God a blank canvas to work in us.

And here are some of the things Norris learned from the Plains people and monks out in the Dakota wilderness. The first is waiting. Waiting for rain in this wheat farming and ranching country is a constant pattern. They talk about living in “next-year country,” a metaphor for hope. Life in the slow lane, as she calls it, cultivates patience.  It causes you to partake of a more contemplative reality, to need instant information less, to trust that processes take time and emerge out  of the ground of experience.

Nothing much happens on the Plains, or in a monastery. So the gradual changes are blessings. The deprivation of the Plains life and the monastic life also sharpen the awareness of the small gifts as treasures.

St Gregory of Nyssa once said, “Sin is failure to grow.” When you can grow even in the wilderness, indeed when the wilderness helps you grow, you are preparing the way. You are changing the pattern. Norris writes about the loneliness of the prairie. She says, “I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.” As a raving extrovert and, as you may have noticed, a very verbal person, I know I would be tested by the quiet.  Perhaps like Norris, that would help me develop a keen appreciation for the gifts of both fast and feast.

The desert is testing. If you are low on gas and make the wrong bet about the wind or snow, you can die out there.  John the Baptist lived on locusts and wild honey. In these circumstances our dependence on God might be more clear to us. Fear is as good a place as any from which to start a spiritual journey, Norris says. If you know what makes you afraid, you can see more clearly that the way out is through the fear.   

The desert makes us aware of our limitations, our lack of control, the relative dearth of variety and stimulation. The silence allows us to hear the still small voice.  If we are continually open to conversion, then the need to change can come with a clarity. In the quiet, as our psalm says, we can listen to what Lord God is saying.

                                                                                   Grand River National Grassland, photo by Jennifer Suter, trover.com

 

God uses the wilderness. God sends Adam there for a timeout after he steps away from his calling in Paradise. God calls Moses there to behold the burning bush. God tests the Israelites in the wilderness on their many years of wandering. Jesus goes to the wilderness after his baptism, where he is tempted by the devil, and before he enters Jerusalem. There’s the expression that God comes to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. God seems to use the wilderness primarily to afflict the comfortable—to get their attention, to have some alone time with them. And so, God is calling us there as well. Far from being God-forsaken, going outside our comfortable boundaries is often where we meet God.

I think that’s because God wants us to be disoriented. What orients us is largely our human-created world, the institutions, buildings, and cultural experiments we have undertaken to put a wall between us and the wilderness. The maps of our lives: our neighborhood, where our friends live, where our children go to school, where we shop or play. At least in this part of the Western Hemisphere, we can harbor under the illusion that we have “tamed” the wilderness. We have made creation our servant:  scenery, natural resources, recreation space. Certainly for the Jews in the Roman Empire, the encroaching civilization was orienting them far, far away from their original instructions. Whether the Pharisees or Sadducees, they were trying to tweak the rules to be more pleasing to God, but John was saying—you have to get away from all that. Tweaking won’t cut it.  Start out here in the wilderness, with a clean slate, away from where you are invested in institutions that you think you depend on for your salvation, for your identity. All these have made you forget your dependence on God. So start out at the edge, and begin to reorder your world.

The wilderness does not have to be geographically disconnected. It just has to be somewhere where we are not in charge, where we don’t make the rules, that we don’t own, or order up; and where we are called to silence, where we set aside our dependencies on phones, or cars, or the Internet, and adopt discipline and obedience.  That’s why I found six hours of wilderness at the parish of St John the Baptist earlier this month. What is home to its parishioners was more unfamiliar terrain to me. From those locations where our routine is shifted, and we leave our everyday lives behind, we can ask ourselves, from what in my so-called civilized life do I need to repent?  Where is my comfort coming at a cost to those whom God calls me to serve? If some truth-teller from the fringes calls me to listen, how open is my heart?

John the Baptist had something of a cult following for a while.  People flocked to the desert for his message, and to be baptized. So much so that he realized that he had to make clear what had been revealed to him in the desert—that Jesus was the Savior and he was merely the one calling the people to prepare the way. And so a movement started and the Jesus followers became a force. At first, it was counter-cultural, disdaining rank and societal boundaries of slave and free, rich and poor, Jew or Gentile.  It was a radical message. Later, when Christianity was legalized by the Roman emperor in the 4^th century, some of the church fathers watched with disgust as Christians began to build big institutions, to acquire property, to set up a hierarchy of power.  So they became the desert fathers, establishing monasteries in the wilderness to seek God and calling out again a message of repentance and new life. 

And so, we too are called to continually to set aside what makes us too comfortable, too self-sufficient, too sure of ourselves. To de-center ourselves and prepare the way:  To lift the lowly and bring down the mighty, to put our trust in God and to actively wait, and work, for God’s kingdom on earth.

Get thee to a wilderness!! And prepare the way.   Amen.

Advent 2B Sermon -- December 12, 2017 -- St Gabriel Parish, Portland, OR

Leave the light on for God

Note:  St Gabriel is one of a small number of churches which is experimenting with Extended Advent--extending it by three weeks, beginning three weeks earlier, to give us more time to enjoy this time of self-examination and thoughtful preparation. It's designed to give us a little breathing space and help prevent Advent being really just the "pre-Christmas" season. 

It's interesting that the Irish church in the old days had the notion of Extended Advent in their "three Lents." The Lent of Jesus is the one we celebrate, but there was also the Lent of Elijah, in Ordinary Time, and the Lent of Moses, which was anticipating the incarnation. With its added three weeks, Extended Advent is effectively a 40-day journey of preparing and anticipating the light coming into the world. What is lovely is that our Extended Advent coordinated with the beginning of a three-week class on Celtic Spirituality, so we had a happy synchronicity with what the earlier church had set apart as the Lent of Moses.

However...we have continued the use of the lectionary in conjunction with the formal Church calendar--so our propers correspond with the very ending of Pentecost. 

What are we waiting for?” That’s the question the Rev. Dr. Bill Petersen asks in his book about Extended Advent, and that is the question we at St Gabriel agreed to take up when we decided to embark on our Extended Advent journey. And so we begin Advent, the first season of the church calendar, and we have given ourselves more time, and more space, to prepare, anticipate, wait, and watch for the coming of the light of Christ into the world.

And yet, as far as our lectionary is concerned, we are closing out the calendar year—we’re still finishing Pentecost. So we come to those readings, especially in Matthew’s gospel, and also in Paul’s letters, where the followers of Jesus are thinking about end times, not beginnings. They had known Jesus in his time on earth and looked for his return—which they believed was to happen any day. They too, are anticipating, and waiting, and watching--for the second coming of Christ. And they too wanted to know:  What exactly are we waiting for? And how do we prepare?

When Paul wrote his first letter to the Thessalonians--the very earliest, chronologically, of his letters in the Bible--he himself assumed that Christ’s return was imminent. He was learning of the Thessalonians’ anxiety by way of Timothy, along with their many questions, including what happened to people who died before Christ’s return. Had they missed the party?  Will they see them in heaven? Paul assures them that God has not forgotten them, that Jesus will bring them with him when he returns—and all God’s people will be brought together at that time. So yes, he says to them, in effect:  you may feel sad, but do not be anxious. Your grief may be tempered with hope, the hope of Christ’s return.

Hope is a frequent message in the apocalyptic texts. Like this letter, and like today’s Gospel, apocalyptics in both the Old and New Testament reveal what is to come. They tend to follow a pattern: Suffering will happen or is happening as a result of evil in the world. There will be a sorting, and much stress and strain over who stays and who goes. But God will prevail in the end, and so will those whom God favors. So wait, with hope, endure the suffering, for all shall be well in the end, because God is in charge. That’s the general message.

Today’s Gospel takes up that “sorting” question, but it’s a tough one for me. Among my questions:  How come the wise bridesmaids don’t help the foolish ones? Why do they get to the party, when they didn’t share their oil? And what’s with the shut door? Is this really Christ who will not let them in, after they’ve stumbled around in the dark?  Dylan Breuer, a priest whose blog I follow, says it sounds like a Jesus that Arnold Schwarzenegger would play:  The Christinator. “I’ll be back,” he says, “and some of you will get in and some of you won’t!!” As someone who can definitely identify with the foolish bridesmaids, the ones whose oil ran out and are running around looking for a 7-11 in the middle of the night, that’s not very encouraging.

The truth is, we don’t actually know what will happen at the end of days--we just know that we will be with Christ.  I don’t read the parable so much as speaking to the “who’s in/who’s out” formula. First of all, I think it’s more about what happens within us, more than it is about world events.  After all, Jesus tells the disciples--don't waste your time trying to figure out the day and the hour.  He wants us to live in the present.  And second, it's important to remember that this is still the Jesus of Nazareth we know—not the Christinator!  This is the Jesus who tells us that the kingdom of heaven is full of the ones who welcomed the least of us:  those who fed the poor, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, visited the sick and imprisoned.  Those who showed hospitality and love for others. And here’s the thing:  this message is true on earth--where the light has come into the world in the incarnation and remains with us in Spirit—as well as in heaven—the kingdom yet to come—the one that we, along with the Thessalonians and the Jesus-followers of Matthew’s day, still await.  

So for me, whether we celebrate the first coming, or anticipate the second one, it is about waiting well. Remaining alert to Christ’s presence in the world and preparing a place for it.

What spoke to me in the parable of the bridesmaid were the many allusions to a hospitality of spirit:  mindful waiting, and welcoming. In ancient Jewish marriage tradition, the bridegroom prepares a place for the bride, literally in his father’s house, and cannot return for her until his father is satisfied with what his son has made. When the bridegroom is asked, “when you are coming?” he answers, “Only my father knows.” And when the room is finally ready, and it’s time to get his bride, she is warned only by the distant noise of the crowd and a shofar blown to signal his coming. Whatever the day or hour, she must have everything ready to make her new life with him. Then, after he is welcomed into her household, she, along with her bridesmaids and family, goes with him to his house for the consummation of the marriage, and literally a solid week of partying. She knows neither the hour nor the day he will come, and she has to be ok with that. She and her party must wait with patience and faith, and be prepared to welcome the bridegroom, and also to be welcomed into his household.

And so, we too wait, and do what we need to do to prepare a room in our hearts and wait for the light to come.

Painting by Carol Aust

 This idea of patient waiting, of making a place for others, fits so well with our foray into Celtic spirituality in our Advent series, because hospitality is a deep Celtic value. The Celtics are pilgrims, rooted on the land on the one hand, but always on a journey.  The Gaelic phrase, Céad míle fáilte --a hundred thousand welcomes--reflects this emphasis on hospitality to the traveler. There’s an old legend that a warrior--one of the “bad guys” in Celtic myth--is made king, and he quickly becomes renowned for his stinginess. The bards complained that visitors to his house could count on leaving with no smell of beer on their breath!  He was A Very Bad King.

My story of Celtic hospitality came on a visit to Scotland with my cousin. We were on an island, trying to make the last ferry to the next island, where our bed and breakfast was. The roads were literally one lane, with little passing places, and the going was slower than we thought. We were running out of petrol, but also, we were running out of time. We made the ferry with five minutes to spare, only to learn that the petrol station by the landing would be closed by the time we docked.

The folks who ran the ferry told us to drive to a huge construction site nearby – it ran 24/7, they said, and they’d have plenty. But first, we called our bed and breakfast and said, we might be late. We might run out of gas!! “Don’t worry,” we heard, in their soothing Scottish brogue. “However late you are, we’ll be here, and we’ll come get you if it comes to that.” Then, they welcomed us warmly into the construction trailer—we, the hapless American tourists--but it was a diesel-only site. No petrol. Then they thought of a worker who had a can of petrol in his pickup, and went and got him. He not only gave us some petrol from his can, but he followed us to the station up the road to make sure we were safe.  He wouldn’t let us pay him. He wouldn’t let us buy him a beer.  So we hugged him.  Ha ha!! He tolerated it—he was a good sport. We were a good two hours later than we had promised, but our hosts at the bed and breakfast were waiting for us. The lamps were lit, the door was opened, the party began. We were in Scottish heaven.

Our hosts had anticipated our every need. They had prepared a place for us. And so we too must prepare a place for God in our hearts. Like good hosts, we set aside what is convenient for us, and let go of our own expectations.  Seeing how Christ is working around us and in us requires a patient attentiveness and watchfulness. Like the wise bridesmaids, we must learn holy waiting, and we must keep our lamps lit.

In the secular world, waiting is disparaged. It is a waste of time. A long wait time is a sign of bad customer service. But the Dutch priest and writer Henri Nouwen (quoting Simone Weil) wrote that waiting is the foundation of a spiritual life. The vigil of waiting and watching is deeply embedded in the Christian mystical tradition. As we say in Compline:  “Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.”

Good waiting is hospitable. It is to live as though each moment is full, not empty. It requires us to give up our attempts to control the world and to be willing to see where God’s hand is at work. Rather than wishing for it to be a particular way, we learn simply to rest in hope. Nouwen wrote,“we experience more rather than less of what God has for us if we cast aside our useless wishes, and instead, hope in God’s promises.”  

He goes on:  When we pray the Lord’s prayer, we say, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Why shouldn’t we expect the power of God to enter the moments and circumstances of our ordinary days on earth?  God is always coming to us, but rarely on our terms, according to our calendar, or in line with our expectations.  

And so, let us strive to wait well. To prepare our hearts to be welcome, for whatever the hour or whatever the day the light comes to us, and joins with the little flame we have kindled and nurtured in our own hearts to greet it. 

Amen.

Preached at St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR, Nov. 12, 2017