December 25, 2006 by djackson.

. . . because there was no room for them in the inn . . . . for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior . . .

Yesterday our pastor preached a powerful sermon from Luke’s account of the Christmas story.  Poetry does not abbreviate well, but in essence the message rested on two points.  First, he emphasized the need to make room for Jesus who, in our day as in that day, comes to us in unrecognizable forms.  Second, he did a word study on the term “today’ in the Third Evangelist, pointing out that Luke brings Christ before us as a sale-ends-today, one-time-offer kind of opportunity.  The upshot:  make room for the unlikely Advent today; you won’t get the same chance again.  Other chances, perhaps, but this opportunity to love our Lord won’t come around a second time.

Several thoughts stirred in my mind as I listened and, later, as I meditated on the sermon.  First, there is the privilege of loving Jesus in the Unlikely Other.  If Jesus came to us as he did to John on Patmos, certainly we would fall at his feet in adoration.  (Well, some of us would; others would rush to churn out pulp fiction pot-boilers for big bucks, but that’s a blog for another day.)  When Jesus comes in the person of the outcast, love becomes a choice.  Catherine of Siena, in her “Dialogue,” hears Christ say to us,

I charge you to love me in the same love that I have loved you.  You cannot do this for me, because I have loved you without being loved.  Every love that you have for me is a love that comes from duty and not from graciousness, because you ought to do it.  I love you from graciousness and not from duty.  This is why you cannot give me the love that I am requesting of you.  And therefore I have put you in the midst of your neighbor, so that you can do for him what you cannot do for me, that is, to love him without any self-interest from graciousness and without looking for any benefit.  And what you do for him I consider as done for me.

A second thought that struck me was the repeated theme of the unexpected Christ which spills over from Scripture into Christian literature and ministry.  In his short story “Where Love Is, God Is,” Leo Tolstoy tells the tail of Martin Avdéitch, a devout tradesman who hears Christ say to him, “Martin, Martin! Look out into the street to-morrow, for I shall come.”  The next day, Martin posts a sharp lookout as he plies his trade, but instead of the risen Lord he sees a succession of pitiful and poverty-stricken denizens of his neighborhood, each of whom he helps as he is able.  As he lays down to sleep he complains to Jesus about being a no-show, only to hear a voice ask, “Don’t you know me?”  One by one the images of those he has befriended step from the shadows and whisper, “It is I.”  The story continues,

And Martin’s soul grew glad. He crossed himself put on his spectacles, and began reading the Gospel just where it had opened; and at the top of the page he read

“I was a hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in.”

And at the bottom of the page he read:

“Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren even these least, ye did it unto me.” And Martin understood that his dream had come true; and that the Savior had really come to him that day, and he had welcomed him.

Then there is the story told by Mother Teresa about an upper-class novice sent for the first time to tend the animate corpses in the house of the dying destitute in Calcutta.  Jesus, Teresa promises the young woman, will be there “in a distressing disguise.”  The neophyte returns from three hours of cleaning the body of a man covered in maggots and scum.  “For three hours,” she exults, “I have been touching the body of Christ!”

My third notion was that this was the second time in twelve hours that I’d heard the same sermon from the same source.  The night before, my pastor and I had foregathered for coffee at a favorite downtown hangout.  We parted, heading into the howling winter storm to our cars, paralleled adjacent to one another on the street.  As my pastor crossed the sidewalk, a homeless man approached him for a handout, which he immediately received.  Grover gave to the one who asked of him, he loved Jesus in that distressing disguise, and he did it “today,” on a Saturday sidewalk, because if he’d waited for a Sunday pulpit it would have been too late.  The vignette reminded me of a scene from War and Peace.  Kutuzov, the Russian commander, has just ordered a desperate rear-guard action which will cost the lives of most of the soldiers sent into battle, but will buy the main army time to retreat and regroup in the struggle to save Holy Mother Russia from Napolean’s invasion.  The aid who must carry the order is Prince Andrew.  Tolstoy writes,

Prince Andrew glanced at Kutuzov’s face only a foot distant from him and involuntarily noticed the carefully washed seams of the scar near his temple, where an Ismail bullet had pierced his skull, and the empty eye socket. “Yes, he has a right to speak so calmly of those men’s death,” thought Bolkonski.

I sat in my pew and looked at my pastor and thought, “Yes, he has the right to preach that sermon.”  And then I thought of another General, one whose hands, feet and sides keep eternally the scars received when he obeyed orders and took Skull Hill in a suicidal charge.  That one may meet me “today” and order me into dangerous places of suffering and death.  The “death” in question may be big or small, temporary or permanent, but either way I won’t like it.  But I gaze on “those wounds yet visible above/In beauty glorified,” and I say, “Yes, he has the right to speak so calmly of my death.”

For a month we’ve awaited the Advent of Christ.  Once again, we celebrate the fact that he has come.  But he has absconded from our cuddly creches and gone forth into the world to don distressing disguises.  May God give us discernment enough to know him when we see him and to do “today” what will not be possible tomorrow.

(This devotional will remain in place throughout the Feast of Christmas until the celebrations of Epiphany Sunday on January 7 and Our Lord’s Baptism on January 8 mark the beginning of Ordinary Time.)

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December 24, 2006 by djackson.

Advent Readings:  Isaiah 42.1-12, Ephesians 6.10-20, John 3.16-21

On December 30, 1816, John Keats and Leigh Hunt concocted a bar-bet over who could write the best sonnet on the theme of “The Grasshopper and the Cricket.”  Each poet dashed off a rhyme in a quarter hour.  Keats’ thoughts turned to the dark and cold of an English winter when the grasshopper’s summer song becomes only a faded memory.  His poem concludes:

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,

And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

Isaiah prophesied in Judah’s socio-economic summer of the eighth century before Christ, when God’s people played the grasshopper in the famous parable, a luxurious and lazy nation that assumed that the sun would shine on her civilization forever.  Isaiah warned, ant-like, of the coming nuclear winter of God’s righteous wrath.  He urged them to stockpile the sustenance of good deeds against the onslaught ahead.  When they ignored him he began to lay in provisions of his own, prophecies of the coming of Christ that would feed Israel’s ice-bound soul during the long night of judgment and exile.  Night would fall but a solstice would come when darkness reached its nadir.  Messiah would then appear, singing as softly as a cricket on the hearth, restoring the summer of God’s favor.  The very heat of judgment would ignite the song of joy.

We have reached the depth of Advent’s darkness.  This time has reminded us that though Christ has come, we need for him to come again.  “If we take light seriously,” wrote Helmut Thielicke, “we have also to reckon with the fact that there is a night in which it shines.”  For a month now, we have reckoned with this night.  In this solstice of our souls, when the frost of our sin has wrought a silence, we have had no choice but to sit still.  In this moment of meditation we can finally hear the soft singing of the Savior.  His medley of hope renews our faith that we will one day hear the saints and angels sing back-up vocals as he thunders his final anthem of victory.

Even so, Lord Jesus, come.

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December 23, 2006 by djackson.

Advent Readings:  Isaiah 10.20-27, Jude 17-25, Luke 3.15-20

If the holiday hassle has hustled you to a frazzle and your nerves suffer from split-ends, take some Christmas comfort from a fourteenth century Dominican mystic with the unlikely moniker of Meister Eckhart.  In his “Sermon 86″ (catchy title, huh?) he offers a unique take on the ancient celebrity death match between Martha Stewart of Bethany and her baby sister Mary.  You know the story from Luke 10.  Martha multi-tasks about the house while Mary sits at Jesus’ feet.  When big sis protests to Jesus that her sibling’s lotus position hardly helps get dinner on, the Master replies that Mary has chosen “the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

Sounds nice, but then who’s going to wrap all these presents, bake for the homeless, and rehearse the Christmas music for the candle light service tomorrow night?

And Eckhart responds that Martha will.  Furthermore, so will Mary, eventually.  See, old M.E. puts a slightly different spin on the standard reading of this text.  He sees Martha as a spiritual graduate student who has learned to go from enjoying Jesus to serving him, and who can do this while still in sufficiently intimate contact with the Lord to permit taking freely with him.  Her concern for Mary is not about needing an extra hand in the kitchen, but that she will never learn to love her Lord until she leaves his side in order to serve.  What is Mary’s Christianity worth when put to the test in the toil of broiling and baking?  Jesus’ calm and (Eckhhart believes) humorous reply assures Martha that Mary wants maturity, and that he himself will see that she gets it.  Her own dark night will come; she’ll stand KP when Christ knows she can handle it.

Brother Lawrence knew he’d attained a meaningful Christian maturity when he no longer relied on retreats but could instead write that,

For me the time of business does not differ from the time of prayer. And in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, I possess God in the same great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament.

Jude sees the saint’s calling more along the lines of “Rescue Me” than “The Monastery.”  His vivid language speaks of cutting-out expeditions, of saving souls by launching ourselves into fearful conditions which require a double-checking of our asbestos spirituality to make sure our own bunkers will not be breeched.  Do I walk deeply enough with Christ that I can touch the sooted and soiled souls of slipping saints without blackening my own heart?  One way to find out, Mary:  leave Jesus’ feet and wear out your own by working for him.

So in the two days that remain before we celebrate again the coming of our Savior, and our faith in the coming-again of that same Savior, rejoice even in the busyness.  Just don’t forget to offer your festination to the Lord whose birth it celebrates.  And if others seem to sit too still for their own spiritual good, leave them to Jesus.  He knows who can handle what, and he knows when.

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December 22, 2006 by djackson.

Advent Readings:  Isaiah 10.5-19, 2 Peter 2.17-22, Matthew 11.2-15

Joshua Bush definitely took part in an attempted robbery on a used car lot in Port Arthur, Texas, last July.  He may have taken a shot at the owner.  Only the slug burried in his forehead knows for sure, and it isn’t talking; not yet, anyway.

When the cops busted several of Bush’s homies and charged them with the attempted heist, they fingered him as the shooter.  Cops interviewed him and couldn’t help noticing the knot in his forehead.  He claimed he’d caught a stray round while sitting in his home, a scenario which, in Bush’s neighborhood, is credible.  A judge issued a search warrant for Bush’s forehead but his attorney says digging into the kid’s head violates his civil rights.  Meanwhile, Joshua Bush has a bullet in his brain.  It probably hurts to keep it there, but he fears it will hurt worse to let it go.

Isaiah rebuked the Assyrians, not for their actions, but for their motivations.  It was, after all, God who sent them to do the dirty work of judgment.  But the nation “does not so intend, nor does it plan so in its heart.”  The Lord, who needs no warrant to search out the thoughts and intentions of the heart, peeked inside their heads and found the spent shell of their own ambition.

Advent reminds us that we all do God’s work in the end.  Caesar thought the purpose of the census was to fill imperial coffers when it was in fact to fulfill ancient prophecy.  Joseph thought his journey south was an act of involuntary submission to tyranny when it was instead an act of invaluable submission to divine sovereignty.  What we do will glorify God; why we do it will determine our own blessing.

As the days count down to Christ’s birth and his return draws ever closer, let’s remember to invite God’s Spirit inside our heads and hearts.  The concealed guilt hurts, and his love forgives once the sin comes to light.  The ambivalent motives void our blessings, but his power changes our intentions.

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December 21, 2006 by djackson.

Advent Readings:  Isaiah  9.18-10.4, 2 Peter 2.10-16, Matthew 3.1-1

Two thousand magicians materialized in Stockholm, Sweden, last August for the World Championship in Magic.  Of these, 156 performed their best tricks, hoping to win a gold medal, a trophy, and contracts for big-money gigs in Vegas, Paris, and Monaco.  One conjurer admitted, however, that there really is nothing new under the silk handkerchief.  “It is all based on the same secret,” said Dirk Losander.  “It is like there are only seven notes (in music), but you can arrange them in different ways.”

John the Baptist warned the religious elite that his prophet’s eye was quicker than their righteous slight-of-hand.  Rule-book morality was a trick with only so many variations, and he was onto them all.  His magical preaching, by contrast, turned Sadducees to snakes and stones to sons of Abraham.  In fact, like all good preaching, his rhetoric dis-illusioned:  it only revealed what was there all along. 

John warned Pharisaic prestidigitators that the light of God pierces all smoke and mirrors.  Messiah comes as a maniacal lumberjack who clear-cuts old-growth forrest.  His slash-and-burn agriculture reduces chaff to charcoal and fertilizes the field with the offal of unproductive plants.  Nothing up anyone’s sleeve, no secret pockets:  the soul laid bare by blazing truth.

Christ is coming to debunk our illusions, even those tricks - especially those tricks - by which we fool ourselves.  Let’s turn loose of our stacked decks and let him release us from unreality. 

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