The Biggest Challenge

 At a parish church where I was celebrating the Holy Eucharist and preaching this week I had a conversation between liturgies with a church member in a position of leadership.  The conversation was kicked up by his response to my sermon.  I had entitled it “Lifesaving Skills,” and had based it upon a passage from the Letter to the Ephesians in which the writer asserts that Jesus broke down the “dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile by reconciling both in his body through the cross.  The part of it that seemed to hook my interlocutor was an old metaphor that I used that not so subtly describes the church as a lifesaving station that devolved into a series of exclusive clubs along a perilous seashore.  Theodore O. Wedel wrote a piece in 1953 in which he developed that rather elaborate metaphor.  Howard Clinebell used it in his first chapter in a book read by generations of seminarians, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling.  In describing a lifesaving station that metamorphoses from a crude but effective response organism into a club that ultimately disavows the purpose of its existence—saving lives—Wedel’s metaphor stings anyone who is the least bit aware of the Church’s perennial tendency to forsake its mission in favor of turning itself into a cozy but largely irrelevant in-group unconcerned with others besides itself. 

The point of my sermon was to awaken (perhaps, I hoped) my hearers to a fresh awareness that the purpose of the Church is actually to create a humanity modeled on who Jesus was (or is, if you believe he lives) and what Jesus did, namely obliterate the divisions of all sorts with which human beings seem enchanted.  Now that I find myself not in the same congregation week after week but rather in a series of different places—maybe a dozen or more different congregations in a year’s time—I notice a recurrent theme in my thought and preaching. It is the incarnational notion that God actually makes a dwelling in human beings.  In a very real sense, human beings are just one of the myriad phenomena on earth or indeed in the universe, each and all of which are manifestations of that great creative force that brings all things into being and makes itself known in every atom and molecule, string and quark that inhabits space.  The thing about us humans that makes us special, if anything does, is that our peculiar brand of consciousness (if we can call ourselves a conscious species) is the universe reflecting on itself.  I don’t know, of course, whether we are the only instance of such reflection in all the galaxies.  I suspect not: we might in fact not be special at all.  But in our limited earthly experience it appears that we alone among creatures have evolved to reflect. Hence the quintessential thing that humans have developed is the art of storytelling in its multifarious forms as a means of transmitting survival information.  We humans tell and share stories in word, art, music, games, play, and so on, as our way of reflecting on the reality—ourselves and our context—that we are constantly perceiving. 

The conversation got me thinking more about the gap between my vision and the reality of the church I see.  In the first place, I don’t see the church as having an answer or an approach or a template for living in the world that is superior to anybody else’s.  The question for me is not whether it is superior or whether it is unique, but whether the fundamental core of the Christian reality works at all.  If Chesterton was right in his quip that the Christian vision has not been tried and found wanting but rather has been found difficult and never tried, then it follows that we don’t actually know whether it works or not. I’m not talking about whether some things that Christians believe and practice work for them.  I’m talking about whether this notion of being a new humanity embodying a reconciling love is something that can really be done, and, if done, effective in making this a better world at the very least—possibly even transforming it radically. 

St. Francis of Assisi: 
the most admired and least emulated
of them all

On my more hopeful days I ponder the story of great examples of Christian faith, such as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Columba, St. Cuthbert, Mother Teresa, the Little Sisters of the Poor, Desmond Tutu, Oscar Romero, St. Xenia of Petersburg, and I see a cloud of witnesses that together say, “Yes!  It can be done.  It works.” On other days I wonder why I can come up with relatively few people who seem actually to have followed Jesus in his radical renunciation of tribalism, in criticizing his own tradition, in growing personally to the point of seeing that there need be no barrier between Jew and Gentile, male and female, barbarian or Greek, but that all are children of the Parent of the Universe. 

Frankly, what I find thoroughly disturbing is that, for the most part, the Church in America, while certainly praiseworthy for a number of things, seems so timid and tepid when it comes to confronting issues that really matter.  Most of the time when somebody makes an assertion like that it seems to me that they think there is a serious shortage in works of justice.  I would agree.  But I think that there are other equally serious ways in which the churches constantly back away from addressing the real stuff of people’s lives. Whether we do what we can or not about it, we’ll talk forever about economic justice, racial justice, doing away with gender discrimination and homophobia.  But when it comes to talking about our bodies, especially our sexual lives, the Church blushes, stammers, and runs the other way.  We stick a naked man on a cross in front of congregations implicitly suggesting that he in that state is the central image of humanity in its most godly form, and yet we get hysterical if somebody is sunbathing at a nude beach a few miles away.  And now we have an even less tenable situation with a host of “Christian” people supporting policies that are rife with corruption, packaged in lies, and unabashedly designed to oppress the most vulnerable among us.  White evangelicals are at latest count in support of Trump administration policies to the tune of 80% in some cases.  And the narrative that people are using to justify themselves is that Trump is delivering on appointing anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court.  For the record, I find abortion as a form of birth control a horrendous choice, but that is not the point. When did we ever move so far into moral idolatry that a position against aborting fetuses overrides common human decency to  children who happen through no fault of their own to show up in America with their parents in many cases fleeing the economic oppression that US companies have been instrumental in creating and perpetuating?Apparently no amount of raising that issue is sufficient to dislodge white evangelicals from their support of a President who professedly and openly spurns the very core tenets of personal morality that they themselves espouse and teach. 

I could go on, working myself into yet another round of head-scratching impatience and depressive exasperation.  But to come back to the central point, there is nothing about Jesus that suggests support for hostility towards the poor, the wretched, the vulnerable. Nor is there a whit of evidence that he himself bedded down with political regimes of any sort. 

On a purely personal level, I continue to believe, or maybe it’s more that I continue to hope, that the Christian vision of a new humanity might actually catch on.  Surely there are people who are in perhaps increasing numbers signing on to that hope, sharing that dream.  At the end of the day I’m left with just myself.  I don’t know that I can give any account of myself at all, or whether I could pass even my low-bar test of Christian authenticity.  I surely don’t see myself as a model, an exemplar of the very thing I believe.  I share St. Francis’s name, but there the similarity ends, I fear. The small piece of transformation that I’ve claimed as mine to hold on to is a re-visioning of the place of the body in the scheme of redemption.  I think there is no place at all where God is not, and that includes everything on, in, or pertaining to the human body.  And as for being alone at the end of the day, that is only true in one sense.  I know that I am a part of all I have met and that all and sundry in the universe is a part of me. 

Reconciling enemies, creating a new humanity

Maybe the thing that really hooks me into the vision of a new humanity is that the Love of God, the love of neighbor, and the love of self are all part and parcel of the one love that sustains everything.  Thus, connected, I can enter into solitude knowing that solitude is only a different mode, a less obvious mode, of community.  Everything is connected.  And so everything is to be loved and accepted, even the people and the things that we find most repellent.

Even Trump and his followers.

Even Putin and his country’s efforts to sabatoge American democracy.

This thing of being a new humanity is more challenging than I’d bargained for.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018

A Facebook Post During a Very Dark Time

I've all but stopped posting on Facebook. It really has little to do with the privacy and security issues, though those were serious enough. Nor does it have anything to do with those of you whom Facebook algorithms deem connectable with me. I haven't done much cooking lately, though I hope to restart that soon, so I've had few photos of cookies or cakes or pies to post. I don't have a dog or cat, so no cute photos or snappy little tidbits about pets.

It really has to do with my growing sense of the futility of posting politically charged items, which seem to me to get relatively little response and probably account for the disenfranchisement (also known as "unfriending") that Facebook politics is wont to produce.

I do like the venue for posting links to serious writing that I do, and am ever grateful for those of my Facebook friends who read and comment on them. I likewise appreciate others of you who share things of importance to you.

And all of the above is prelude for my once more abrogating my resolve to shut my mouth about stuff that I am unable to stop, also known as Trump.

And it really is not about Trump that I compose this comment. I direct it to that great and self-important slice of the universe known familiarly as "America," or more formally as the United States of America. Somewhat like a crazy family member that one loves out of a sense of duty and for the sake of old and good memories, but whom one hates to see coming yet again for a visit, the United States I find difficult to disentangle from. I've never known anything else. I remember in Mrs. Lemmon's third grade class at Conway Elementary School hearing my teacher read Edward Everette Hale's "The Man Without a Country." It stuck with me. I could barely conceive of renouncing one's country, certainly not without dire consequences. Especially could I not conceive of renouncing a nation that was as great, as splendid, as noble as my own.

I am just a hair's breadth away from feeling totally fed up with Uncle Sam. I simply don't understand a nation in which a large swath of people, if not a majority, make peace or at least refuse to raise hell with an ignorant Congress that year after year does nothing about gun violence. I don't understand how people can settle for a country where a school full of little children gets blasted to smithereens and then has to put up with people who have the audacity to claim that it was fake news and the product of a liberal conspiracy. I don't have the stomach for an administration that tears families apart and then justifies it because "the base" loves hating all who differ from them. Or has the temerity to chalk off its heinous, inhumane, immoral, and even criminal behavior to some bullshit about the Bible countenancing it if not demanding it. I do not understand what is gained by living in a democracy that has never really been democratic for the original inhabitants of this land nor for those descended from persons captured and enslaved here generations ago.

Tell me to vote. I do. Tell me to wait. I have. Tell me to cool it. I've tried. Tell me that I'm blind to all the good in the US. I've searched for it, found it, applauded it. Tell me that it is all about the Republican party or Donald Trump. And tell me "Just you wait" until the mid-terms. I've lived too long to put any stock in any of that. I've thought one too many times that we'd turned a corner only to find that both parties are owned by the same interests, largely controlled by white, monied, powerful men generally oblivious to the plight of those who differ from them in color, station, gender, or need. I have little hope that "midterms" are going to change anything, certainly not the culture that has produced the system we now have. I have not forgotten that any system, including the United States, is designed to produce exactly the results it is getting.

We are seeing the wrecking ball bashing into democratic institutions while huge numbers of people consistently applaud the devastation of the social system and yet believe that somehow America is becoming "great again," without ever having said when it was great before.

I listen not only to the sobs of children separated from their parents. I hear the desperation of parents who, even when reunited with their children, are destined by the same evil government to live in prisons or pens indefinitely. I remember once having feared that in a St. Patrick's Day mob in New York City for a block or two I'd perhaps lost one of my own. The metallic taste of fear rising to my tongue much like blood from my guts is not unlike what I imagine it would be to have braved the long trip to America only to have the family one is trying to save from annihilation or starvation summarily destroyed by the great hope of all the earth, the United States Government. I add my hoarse cry to those who have dared to say, "Shame. Shame. Shame on the United States! No better than the flag-waving Nazis that glorify the military but spurn what the military itself has fought and bled to protect. Shame on a nation that believes it is the apple of God's eye. Shame on me, on you, on us all who continue to pay for this insidious system that is becoming more demonstrably evil by the day.

I no longer blame Donald Trump nor his infernal toadies and minions and apologists. I blame a country that colludes with their lies and deceit. I blame myself for growing slack and lame at opposing cruelty and heartlessness made more diabolical because it has the audacity to excuse itself.

Always the optimist, the hopeful, the joyful, I sorrowfully embrace words that slipped out of public vocabulary long ago: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us."

Jesus and Foreigners

I suspect it won’t come as a surprise to any of you that a sermon about Jesus and foreigners would emphasize Our Lord’s compassion for any and all people of all nationalities and ethnic groups. Surely this is what we believe Jesus to have exemplified and the gospel to teach.

It might be more of a stretch to begin to understand that Jesus might not always have been quite so open to non-Jews. The story we have in the gospel reading for today [Matthew 15:21-28] is, I believe, one of the most significant in the entire gospel record, although I suspect that if we were to give a little test to even the most biblically literate Christians, few would point to it as being anything other than one of the many healing stories.

We find versions of the story in both Matthew and Mark. Mark’s is a good deal briefer and lacks certain details such as the presence of the annoyed disciples. Both contain the puzzling comment of Jesus about how children’s bread ought not to be thrown to the dogs. Matthew adds another comment that sheds light on the story. Matthew’s Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.” This is definitely a story about Jesus encountering a foreigner. And as it unfolds, before its happy ending, the picture is not a very pretty one.

First, Jesus was born into a culture that drew very sharp lines—one might say walls—between the children of Israel and non-Jews—gentiles. It was not always so. Many are the stories in the Old Testament of foreigners and Jews dwelling together and even intermarrying. Ruth, a Moabite woman who married an Israelite man, Boaz, became the great-grandmother of King David. But this tradition went underground as a result of the conquest of Israel by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE. After a generation in exile, Israelites returned to their homeland and rebuilt their society, largely on the cornerstone of ethnic separatism. Their understanding of the disastrous defeat and consequent exile rested on the belief that they had polluted the worshiping community by intermarrying and above all by failing to keep their worship of the One True God (as they saw it) pure from secularizing influences and from contamination by other (that is, false) gods. A whole tradition grew up in support of keeping Israelites—Jews—not only from intermarrying but indeed from associating with foreigners if they weren’t themselves Jewish.

Let me hasten to add here an important caution. While it is true that this tradition of separatism is still alive in some parts of the Jewish community, don’t make the mistake that I often made out of ignorance in my childhood, namely assuming that Jewish tradition had remained largely unchanged since Jesus’ time. In fact, Judaism is markedly different in many ways today. Today’s Jewish community should not be misunderstood as necessarily hostile to the teaching of Jesus, no matter how much emphasis the New Testament puts on the divide between Jesus and the religious authorities of his own day.

Jesus no doubt to a large extent bought into the mindset of the culture in which he was raised. An important feature of that was the wholesale dismissal of non-Jews as simply racially and religiously inferior to Jews. When we trace the journeys and encounters of Jesus is the earliest gospel traditions, we see that, although he ventured into gentile territory, he made no overtures to gentiles to follow him. His mission, as reflected in this story, was directed to the House of Israel.

The Canaanite woman implores the help of Jesus to heal her daughter

All the more strange then that, on the heels of a controversy with religious leaders among the Jews that Jesus would strike out for the Mediterranean coast, an area that had long been thick with non-Jewish people and culture. It was a veritable hodgepodge of ethnic groups and had been for centuries. It is there, near Tyre and Sidon, that this gospel story opens. Matthew tells us that Jesus “withdrew” there, suggesting that he was literally on retreat from the thick of controversy with his religious opponents. Mark mentions that he entered a house, perhaps that of a friend or sympathizer, and did not want it known that he was there, though he couldn’t very well hide. Enter this woman, identified by Mark as a Greek Syro-Phoenician, and thus a Gentile, and by Matthew as a Canaanite, and thus one of the ancient enemies of Jesus’ people who resided in the land long before the Israelites invaded them. The woman is desperate. Her daughter has a severe case of demon possession, a general term that encompassed everything from literal possession to disorders like epilepsy to general mental illness.

Jesus’ behavior towards the woman is totally out of character even in the context of the gospel record, not to mention what we have come to believe about Jesus. Why? Why when encountered by a mother desperate for her seriously ill daughter’s healing would Jesus not so much as answer her a word? He seems to agree with his disciples who apparently are most disturbed because of the woman’s persistent pleas. But neither Jesus’ refusal to accede to her requests nor the disciples’ scorn deter the woman. When he answers her by saying, in effect, that she and her kin are but dogs compared to the children of God known as Israel, she soldiers on. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Those are pretty much her words in both versions of the story, so it is quite likely that they contain the point of the matter. It is indeed for this “saying” of hers, according to Mark, that Jesus then addresses her with a term of deep respect, “O woman, great is your faith!”

So the question shifts from why Jesus initially behaved as he did towards the woman to why the sudden change. Clearly he was impressed, moved even. Maybe it was the woman’s chutzpah in persisting until she got what she wanted. Maybe it was her willingness to humble herself. Perhaps it was that here was a socially powerless woman of no account by Jewish standards confronting a Jewish healer, courageously breaking through the barriers between them. Whatever it was, it seems to have been a moment of profound change in Jesus’ understanding of his own mission. If we follow Mark’s geography, the very next place that Jesus goes after this visit to the coast is well over to the east, into gentile territory. The next healing story that we have from Mark is the healing of a gentile deaf man with a speech impediment. In a very real way, that man is the very picture of what one of the psalms says about the gods of the gentiles, and about the gentiles themselves.

            Our God is in heaven;

  whatever he wills to do he does.

           

            Their idols are silver and gold,

              the work of human hands.

            They have mouths, but they cannot speak;

              eyes have they, but they cannot see;

            They have ears, but they cannot hear;

               noses, but they cannot smell;

           

            They have hands, but they cannot feel;

             feet, but they cannot walk;            

               they make no sound with their throat.

            Those who make them are like them,

               and so are all who put their trust in them.[1]

Jesus heals a deaf man with a speech impediment

So there you have it.  The difference between the children, made in God’s image, and the dogs, just like their gods. And that is the point at which Jesus seems to have had a conversion experience. We can but wonder what had preceded it; but chances are all those nights in prayer, the forty days in the wilderness, all that struggling, the continual turning over and over in his mind the question of how to re-write the inherited script of Messiah—all of these must have paved the way for the major shift which awaited a lone woman, a foreigner, a descendent of Israel’s enemies, to effect in Jesus’ own self-understanding. What is certain is that from this point on, he opens himself to all comers, Jew and gentile alike.

Charlottesville, August 13, 2017.  Hate groups display their colors.

Do you see anything in this week’s headlines to which this even remotely relates? I doubt that you can miss it. I will tell you now that this sermon is not about Donald Trump. It is about you and me, and how one of our biggest challenges is to insist on the authenticity of Jesus’ message of inclusion. If he whom we call Son of God can change his mind and focus, this must say something about the necessity of human beings doing so as well. But the people I’m concerned about right now, this very minute, are not the haters in Charlottesville last week, but rather the good Christians gathered here today. Don’t let our faith be hijacked by those who eagerly turn it into an apology for narrowness and exclusion. Don’t sit idly by while the forces of evil burn crosses and wave flags intimidating the vulnerable. Stand up and make your witness. If you can do so without succumbing to the force of hate, more power to you. If you can find the begging Canaanite in your neighborhood and open your heart to her in the name of Christ, go to it. And even more, if you can see, as I can, the residue of race pride or gender pride or traces of fear and distrust of fellow human beings in yourself, recall the example of him who once upon a time abandoned the notion of a limited mission and became open to any and all who cried to him for help. What he did and who he was is our mission and our call. Nothing more.
And certainly nothing less.

At the scene where hatred was fierce:  Charlottesville, 2017

A sermon based upon Matthew 15:21-28.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017

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[1] Psalm 115:3-8, The Book of Common Prayer.

Advent and the End Time

For over four decades I did my best to rescue Advent from total irrelevance. Squeezed by the pressures of the planet-wide bash called Christmas, the message of Advent has been effectively obliterated, co-opted by the glitz, gluttony, and sentimentality that passes for a celebration of Jesus’ birth. I have no axe to grind about Christmas, which I’ve often pointed out is what it is because it is filling a social and psychological need clearly felt by a huge number of people. The cultural Christmas, replete with concerts, plays, and parties; the commercial Christmas that we’ve made essential to a consumerist economy; the family Christmas with some overlap with both culture and commerce and a good deal of pressures of its own to reaffirm kinship and friendship ties: all of these eclipse the religious celebration, which itself is a paltry and vapid substitution of kitsch in lieu of a profound pondering of the best possible Good News, namely that divinity and humanity are not a pair of polar opposites but rather an existential marriage that is explosively transforming.

But in all this, Advent itself is far and away the big loser. For few people know and even fewer believe that Advent is essentially not about Christmas the feast but about preparing for the End Time. To be sure, that is not all that Advent is. Nor is that in itself something quite separate from the heart of Christmas. But about the last thing on anyone’s Christmas wish list is a serious desire for any kind of cosmic or historical showdown.

I suggest that one way of understanding Advent is that it has now been going on for years, decades, centuries. And we have finally reached the point where what has been ignored is coming up to be reckoned with.

Let me be clear about “End Time.” Like lots of things in the trunk of Christian imagery and lore, “End Time” or “Last Days” or “Apocalypse” or “End of the World” has itself been thoroughly distorted, used for purposes of scaring the hell out of people, and establishing a false sense of security on the part of a religious elite who imagine themselves to be immune to the suffering implied by if not promised for the last things and last events. I don’t think “End Time” has to do with any of that at all, despite the fact that you can go to the New Testament and quote long passages “proving” me wrong. What I do believe is true is what a great many traditions have long imagined: that there is a future crisis—a Day of Yahweh or a Day of Judgment—in the making for the human species, and possibly for the entire planet. Indeed the imagery often associated with that crisis has involved a cataclysm that is cosmic, in which planets, stars, everything will pass away. All of that really is just imagery, but the imagery points to the gravity of a situation that can only be painted in extreme terms.

“End Time.” Nobody knows very much about what actually is in store for the planet, despite our best predictors. We can say with some assurance that the human species is quite disposable, as much as the dinosaurs were, whereas the earth that supports and suffers us is quite stable and is likely to continue far beyond anything that we can imagine. We now have a growing number of people on the planet (I think the number is growing) who seem intent on bringing on the End Time, many in the belief that such is the divine will. I remember a man whom I had recently met at the time of the buildup to the Iraq invasion. Many, including me, were arguing that rather than go to war we ought to give time for the UN inspectors looking for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction to do their work. His response to me was that he supported war. He was a Bible-believing Christian who thought that war would be the perfect way to usher in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, thus fulfilling the prophecies in the Book of Revelation. That is crazy, but it passes for orthodox Christianity in many circles. It yet might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Any time things get really bad in the external world, stock goes up in Apocalypse. Read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and you’ll see the way his own thinking was colored by a sense of historical showdown, a period when the judgments of the Lord, which are “true and righteous altogether” show up unmistakably in the historical fabric of human affairs. Indeed there are few better examples of social and political anxiety being translated into apocalyptic language than The Battle Hymn of the Republic. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” That is what the cataclysm called the Civil War produced in the mind and words of Julia Ward Howe, and not in hers alone.

The present hour is such a time. I suspect that transcends both the political left and the political right, who simply have different notions of what the present hour portends. But for either camp it is a sea change, because that is exactly what is coming. Indeed it has arrived. Just as surely as the national sense of security was shaken fifteen years ago on September 11, 2001, the national sense of unassailable American democracy is cracking before our eyes. We now have a President-elect who, no matter what you might think of him, brags about his smartness exceeding any need he might have to become better informed than he thinks he already is about national security issues and developments. If that is not a recipe for disaster, even according to his own party who see mounting threats to American security, I don’t know what is. We now have a government not only on the federal level but in many states that is run by people who viscerally hate government, or see it only as a means to advance their own interests, all of which amount to amassing even more wealth and more power for the already wealthy and powerful. If Trump’s cabinet selections are confirmed, most if not every government department will be headed by someone on record as believing in its essential uselessness. You may argue that they are right. I think it is fair to say that no thought whatsoever has been given to what happens when block by major block of the government is dismantled or destroyed and all those who have depended on that for livelihood, not to mention those who have depended on services and support and social organization, suddenly have no place to turn and nothing to do. That might not be Armageddon, but it certainly portends a major crisis for millions.

We can look back at the period from roughly 1800 to 1860 and see that the Civil War was not only inevitable, but was made inevitable by the way the entire national debate was framed. In short, people kept dodging the hard issue through means like “compromise.” Not until some South Carolinians opened fire on a federal fort did war break out. But events had been trending towards war for a long time before that April. Advent had been going on since the first African slave appeared in the New World. The End Time really is the ending of Advent, usually temporary. It is when we get what we have paid for. It is when we reap what we have sown. It is when what goes around comes around. It is when the false face is pulled off the Joker and the reality of evil is exposed. It is when the Emperor, riding naked through town, is finally called out by the only one in the crowd who will speak the obvious truth.

I can imagine, if you have read this far, that you might be wondering what all this has to do with Advent really and truly. What about all that fruitcake stuff that we thought was the real thing stirred up in the weeks preceding Christmas? Go back and read the scriptural and liturgical texts of Advent. For starters, try the Collect for the First Sunday of Advent:

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

This, of course, can be read as the “end of the world.” But it can also be read as an eternal reality, ever present as a possibility in human events and our response to them. The “life immortal” is not something that one enters the moment one dies, but a whole New Age that has been inaugurated by the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus. We participate in it “now in the time of this mortal life” by living out our baptism, or, if you’re not Christian, by choosing to live according to the Light, which in effect means all those things that make for the Shalom of God, the peace and wholeness of God’s Reign. The “works of darkness” are precisely those things that divide and enslave and demean human beings, that denigrate the weak and vulnerable, that use the structures of the world for greed and personal gain, that generate and spread lies, and that justify injustice. It might be that Jesus will in fact come again with banners flying and trumpets sounding and the whole works, with a divine broom that will sweep the world clean. But it is true that Jesus is already here, in the world, in the community called “Christ’s Body,” and on the altar in the form of Bread and Wine. By all of these means he is already present, really present in “his glorious majesty,” which is ironically the humble garb of a man who steadfastly refuses to arrogate power to himself, no matter how frequently he is despised, rejected, discounted, and insulted.

Be not deceived, however. God is not mocked: not Father, not Son, not Holy Spirit. There will come a day of reckoning, a “doomsday,” people used to call it. Already you can look on the horizon and see the clouds gathering. The harbingers of war, a war no one much wants except of course those who will profit from it, are clearer and clearer with every new tweet. The handwriting is on the wall, and it says what it has said before: “you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” But Advent does not stop with the alarm. “Wakened by the solemn warning,” runs an Advent hymn, “from earth’s bondage, let us rise; Christ our Sun, all sloth dispelling shines upon the morning skies.” The Lamb so long expected has come with pardon. He bids us return to the center. That is what confession is. It is the healing that we and the world deeply need.

Advent, if it happened at any other time of year, would likely not get all mixed up with ornaments and wrappings and pageants and posadas and the like. But I’ll bet it would still be ignored. Who wants judgment, real judgment? I’ll tell you who. Those who pray night and day for some redress of wrongs, some relief from suffering, some hearing of their grievances, some sympathetic intervention on behalf of balancing the scales. Most of the time, the ones in charge of Advent are the very forces that have a vested interest in taking attention away from the issues and substituting trivia and frivolity, or sometimes violence and discord, anything to keep the poor poor and the powerful powerful. But the stinking truth about Truth is that it will always find a way out. It can only be ignored for so long, and then like a little seedling that has lain for many a season under the weight of a log, will eventually find its way to the light.

That is why the last word about Advent is a word of hope. The Omega is who the Alpha is. The end is as promising as the beginning, because it is in the hands of the one who flung the stars into space and called the dry land to appear out of the deep salt sea. Advent may take awhile to run its course, but it always ends not just in a death but in a birth, sometimes the two being indistinguishable. That is worth keeping in mind as not only the days grow shorter and the darkness thickens, but as the world hurtles toward destruction with its drivers laughing all the way.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016