Word on the Street (John 1:1 - 14)

     The Word, the logos, became flesh—was enfleshed, as we sometimes say—and came to live around here. Right here, among us, the denizens of Greenhills, Ohio, USA, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the universe. But it wasn’t new to the universe, to the cosmos, not by a long shot. It was there all along, in the beginning, we just couldn’t see it. In fact, it was there in the beginning with God, and we all know that was a long, long time ago. What if our spirits were to take wing like time-traveling doves, and fly back through time to substantiate this claim, that the Logos was there in the beginning, maybe we stop at the rise of us, of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, we stop and look around with our spirit-sense, and yup! There it is, right there where John claims it is . . . and once again we take flight, slipping through the air, passing through time like smoke through leaves, and around us we catch fleeting glimpses, and everything of course is running backwards, a great cloud coalesces around a fiery point and a while-hot ball emerges out of the sea, and we come to realize we are looking at the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, and sure enough, there they are, thundering around the plains and through the jungles and seas . . . we alight for a moment, and dodging a Stegosaur, we determine the presence of the Word; and how are we doing that, you might ask, how are we so sure the Word is present wherever we alight? Well, I can only say that like pertains to like, that our spirits are of the same stuff—not matter, you understand, but the same . . . essence—as the Word, we vibrate on the same frequency, a frequency far too subtle to detect with any detector we’ve ever invented, and just as birds recognize other birds, trees detect other trees and rocks other rocks, our spirits, our divine sparks register the spark, in fact our spirits just barely resist dancing a little jig in its presence, like the one John the Baptist does in Elizabeth’ womb, when his spirit recognizes the incarnate Word.

Anyway. Our spirits flutter back through time, dodging flying reptiles, batting away giant mosquitos—wouldn’t you just know that they’d be able to see us?—and dive into a sea teeming with fish and then—as the age gets younger—no longer fish but arthropods, trilobites, then progressively simpler life forms, swimming in that primordial soup, until zap! a blinding light that would sear retinas, if our spirits had retinas, and behold! The first living thing, and our spirits immediately feel the Word, coiling around and within the organism like an all-pervading serpent, and once again our spirits are off, back through the eons, and though we are at a frequency much more subtle than the material world coming into being around us, we still dodge and metaphysically wince when volcanoes belch up underneath, or when continents crunch together like ponderous bumper cars. Our spirits know they cannot be harmed, but old habits die hard. And through it all, like a background weave, like a pulsing electric ligament, winds the Word.

We suppose, though our spirits’ adventures, that Paul was correct when he wrote that in Christ all things are held together, because our spirits—reporting back to our hearts—tell us that the Word, the one that was enfleshed, pervades everything, and as they keep voyaging back though time, things get more and more dodgy—thank God our flesh is not there—and they sense that the Word is in everything and everything is in the Word . . . and now the Earth is a fiery ball, we’ve seen it go from cool and green and ocean-covered to molten red, as if heated in a cosmic forge, and now it’s hurtling through space, racing around a sullen sun, and it comes apart before our spiritual eyes, back into its constituent pieces, the loose rock and space dust it was before centripetal force coalesced it, and still the Word is there, and it is becoming apparent that John was just a bit conservative, a bit off in his metaphor-shifting. He likened the Word to light, the light of the world, as a matter of fact, and it’s a metaphor that certainly had legs, it’s lasted to this day . . . light, that allows us to see, that illuminates dark corners, that becomes associated with truth, and those dark corners? Why they’re always associated with false, and everybody knows that false is wrong, it’s bad, and so things that are dark must be that way, no? The night—the life-giving darkness, when plants respire, when people are refreshed by sleep—the night must be bad . . . at night, with the glittery stars and garish, silver moon . . . the twinkling stars that were to the ancients holes in the firmament, or to the Aztecs, demons held back only by sacrifice . . . the poetry of John’s prolog didn’t create this false dualism, but it certainly helped it perpetuate . . .

But what if we think of this light as what physics has revealed it to be? What if we think of it as energy, as streams of photons . . . the light of the Word, the light that is the Word, powers the world, some—like theologian Father Bruno Barnhart—say it has powered the whole enterprise in the West, in Europe and the Americas, first the flowering of society and educational institutions under the church, and then as science and secular rationality, all powered by what Father Bruno calls the Christ Quantum, that bursting of energy and creativity release when the Word became flesh. And what do we know now about light? Is it not both wave and particle? Is not the metaphor John wrote even sharper, even more apt today? If light is both-and, so is the Word, who was both with God, separate from God, and at the same time, identical with God, the same as God . . . light from light, light as light: two natures, God and not-God, all at once.

But our wandering spirits are further back than that, by some 5 billion years or so, and the weight of the intervening millennia grows heavy, and now there is only our sun, which grows smaller and smaller even as we watch, until it is no more, and we are suspended in the void, and here’s the thing: it is a void, it is empty of matter, but not of the Word, not of the Christ . . . what? Christ Quantum as Father Bruno would say? Christ Omega, as Teilhard de Chardin would put it? Perhaps Word is the best we can do . . . but it’s not Word as we conceive of it today, not a static thing that lies there on the page, nor is it an assembly of characters that points to an object—or objects—in the so-called “real” world . . . it is a dynamic presence, always has been, always will be, always changing, always vital, always new.

Problem is, we often do not conceive of it that way, everybody kmows what the word of God is, it’s this book right here, written down anywhere from two to three thousand years ago, argued about by Roman Catholics and then Protestants and Catholics, finally settled as to its contents by 70 CE in the former case and 1500 CE in the latter, and here it is, you can hold it in your hand, see? Certainly not a part of us, certainly not dynamic in any way, and if it was made flesh, as our passage would have it, it certainly isn’t that way now . . .

And our spirits have accelerated in their flight . . . ten billion years ago, twelve . . . we see the accretion and scattering of whole constellations under gravity’s inexorable weight, and still there is the Word, wound through and around everything, all the nascent stars and wobbly solar systems . . . and are there other life-systems to which this Christ-Principle, this powering and empowering evolutionary engine is central? It is not for us to know at this time, but someday perhaps we will . . .

Fifteen billion years ago, sixteen . . . things are getting packed, now, much more compact, and we are swept along toward a discernible center, and galaxies and interstellar dust are zooming at super-hyper-dooper-sonic speeds towards that center, and right before the crash we close our metaphysical eyes, and . . . we are back in the present: I suppose there are some places—or rather, some times—even our spirit selves cannot penetrate, and if ever there was such a space-time, the Big Bang would be it. But John assures us—and I have to take his Word for it—that the Word was there in the beginning, and that implies even before the Bang, and that everything was created through the Word, everything was created in the Word, and that Word was there when it all happened, in the beginning, and that means before the Big Bang when literally God only knows what was there, or even if there was a there.

The Cosmos burst into being with a Bang . . . all of a sudden there was space, all of a sudden there was time, and seventeen-odd-billion years later, here we are, like all created matter, trapped in space, bound up in time. Except . . . except that part of us that is divine, the divine spark, as I call it. In our journey through time, we discovered that John wasn’t exaggerating when he says things are created in and through the Word. Paul wasn’t whistling Dixie when he says in this Word all things—all things!—hold together. And today, do you want to see this Word? Do you want to feel it? Hold out your hand and touch the back of the pew in front of you. Run up to a tree, rub your hands over the bark. Heck, plant your feet in the Greenhills streets, ‘cause the Word isn’t just on the street, it’s in it as well.

And one more thing: if you want to experience the dynamic Word, the ever-changing, ever lively Word, you don’t have to sit with 2000-year-old writings and wait for the Spirit to make them come to life—although that’s not a bad thing to do, everything has its place. But all you have to do is look at your neighbors and family and friends, and really be present, really listen to them, and you’ll see the Word shine through in everything they do. Amen.

The Forerunner (Luke 3:1 - 18, Advent 2C)

When I was an undergraduate, there was a campus preacher named Hubert Lindsey, but everybody called him “Holy Hubert.” He got his start at Berkley in the 60s, and got beat up over 150 times, most notably by the leadership of the Black Panthers. Nevertheless, he was responsible for bringing a lot of young people, a lot of “hippies,” as denizens of the counterculture were called in those days, to Christianity. He had a knack of showing up at protests and turning the talk toward Christ; then-governor Ronald Reagan quipped that the State of California owed him millions in crowd control and, of course, he was darkly accused of being a tool of the State because of it. And though he was seen by students as something of a joke, he nevertheless is considered to be one of the fathers of the West Coast Jesus movement.

I saw him on the campus of the University of Washington in the early 70s. He’d stand in front of the Husky Union Building—the HUB—and draw big crowds of students, who would joyfully heckle him as he preached. I say “joyfully” because there was no malice in it, from either side, really. He would say outrageous things—“bless your dirty little hearts!” and “everything about you is evil, everything about you is defiled”—and the students would eat it up, they’d laugh and throw verbal jabs back at him, attempting to best him in debate, which, of course, they never could. But there was no animosity in it, and if you go back and look at some of the videos—YouTube has some, just search under “Holy Hubert”—you can see the compassion underneath all the fire.

I think of Holy Hubert every time I read about John the Baptist—it’s almost like, in my mind, he’s a spiritual descendent. Every time I read John’s taunt—you brood of vipers!—I think back to Hubert calling the students “You little devils!” And predicting hellfire for each and every one. The difference is, of course, that John was the forerunner, he was heralding the coming of Jesus into the world, and Hubert was an evangelist, trying to save souls after the fact, more akin to John the Gospel-writer than John the Baptist.

But stylistically, at least, they have something in common. Like Hubert, who preached up and down the West Coast, John preached up and down the Jordan. Like Hubert, John minced no words: “You brood of vipers!” he’d spit, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?“ Like Hubert, he preached of repentance, urging his listeners to turn away from their sins. And I wonder—if you were to get into a time machine—maybe H.G. Wells’, I hear it’s not being used at the moment—if you were to get into a time machine and go back to watch John the Baptist there on the rocky Jordan banks, what would you see? Did the locals taunt the hair-shirted prophet? Did they fling jibes and insults at him like the modern kids did Hubert? Did the Jordan prophet fling ‘em right back, did he seem to enjoy the game as much as 70s preacher?

One thing I’m sure of is that underneath any playfulness he might have had, underneath any compassion he might have shown, there was the same resolve, the same overwhelming sense of mission. Just as Hubert was deadly serious in his desire to see students brought to Christ, John the Baptist was serious about his calling as the forerunner, the messenger, the harbinger of Christ. “I baptize you with water,” he’d say, “but one who is more powerful than I am is coming, and I’m not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” In other words, he’s saying, he’s not worthy to be Jesus’ slave.

If it was important to John that he not be mistaken for the one whose coming he foreshadowed, it was equally important to the early Gospel writers. Disciples of Jesus that they were, they wanted to make sure their readers knew that Jesus was the one, not John, the followers of whom may have been still around. In fact, some Biblical scholars think there may have been a rivalry between the followers of John—beheaded by Herod for speaking truth to power—and those of Jesus, crucified for doing the same.

Well. Be that as it may, it’s important to note the content of John’s message. “You brood of vipers!” he’d say. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Don’t tellnme you have Abraham as an ancestor. God can make children of Abraham out of those rocks over there. That’s not gonna cut it any more. It’s not about ancestry it’s about the fruit you bear. In fact, even now the ax is on the tree, it’s on the tree of Israel, the leafy ancestors of Abraham, ready to cut it down if it doesn’t bear fruit, ready to cut it down and feed it to the fire! As we’ve seen, John could be a just a bit over the top . . .

 And his followers would say “If it’s not about our ancestry, if it’s not enough to be sons and daughters of Abraham, then what shall we do?” And it’s as important to notice what John doesn’t say as much what he does. He doesn’t say “just believe in the one to come,” he doesn’t say “you must follow the one named Jesus.” He tells them that they have to reform their behavior. Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do the same. It’s not enough to mouth platitudes, it’s not enough to just believe, you’ve gotta change your behavior, you’ve gotta put some money where your mouth is.

It’s a theme that runs throughout the whole New Testament, from the Gospels to the Epistles. Over in Matthew, Jesus tells a parable of a king (clearly meant to represent himself) who separates the sheep from the goats according to how they take care of the poor—whatsoever you’ve done to the least of these, the king says, you’ve done to me. In John, Jesus says that he has come so that we might believe, Paul is the avatar of salvation through faith, but the author of James insists that faith without works is dead. There is a tension in the New Testament between being and doing, belief and action, faith and works.

Here, John comes down squarely on the action side. How do the Israelites avoid the ax and the fire? Give clothes to the naked and food to the hungry. Don’t take more than is your due, especially if you’re a tax-collector. Don’t use your power to extort money from folks by threats or false accusation, and don’t be greedy, be happy you have a job, for Pete’s sake.

Traditionally, John is seen as an avatar of the old, the last of the hair-shirted prophets, preaching hell-fire one last time before the coming of grace, and there’s certainly something like that going on. But I think he represents something else as well: an acknowledgment that the Gospel is to be practiced, not just believed. John was the forerunner of Christ, all right, but he was also the forerunner of a new social order, which combines prophetic action—you will be known by your fruits—with forgiveness by the grace of God.

And there’s one other thing John was a forerunner of, and that’s Christianity as a whole. He prepared the way for the entire Christian enterprise, that begun with the coming of the one whose sandals he was not fit to untie. He prepared the way for the apostles and St. Paul. For Benedict and Augustine, St. Francis and St. Teresa. He prepared the way for John Calvin and John of the Cross, for Martin Luther and Billy Graham, for all the evangelical preachers right down to good old Holy Hubert. And last, but certainly not least, he prepared the way for the denizens of Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian—he prepared the way for us.

But not only did he he showed us how to prepare as well. Advent is a season of preparation, and not only did John the Baptist prepare the way for Christ and every Christian to come, he showed us how to do it as well. We’re to examine our lives, how we relate to each other, how we conduct the business of living, how we relate to God. The meaning of repentance is turning ones life around—each Advent we’re invited to examine ours and see what needs turning. Amen.

Holding Our Breaths (Advent 1C)

I was talking to a pastor one time from another denomination, one that doesn’t follow the church calendar, and he said to me rather wistfully: “I kind of miss Advent,” and I said, “well, you can always put some in . . .” as if it's a commodity, like put a little tiger in your tank.  But it’s true, you can put a little Advent in, you don't have to hurtle full-throttle from Thanksgiving right on into Christmas, like some mean, holiday-celebrating machine. My sister and brother-in-law used to plan worship for a little Baptist church in Gold Bar Washington, and even though Baptists don’t do Advent – or Lent or Baptism of the Lord Sunday, for that matter – my sister and brother-in-law did Adventy-kinds of things for a while before Christmas day. But in many Protestant traditions, including my fellow pastor's, Advent has been lost, and to reintroduce it can cause dissension in the ranks.

These days, many of our fellow Christians can’t seem to wait for December 25^th to roll around . . . they want to start celebrating Christmas right after Thanksgiving, just like everybody else. And why not? It’s a festive, joyous season . . . Andy Williams called it the “Hap-happiest time of the year!”  We go out and sing carols, our breaths all puffy in the cold, and come back inside to drink hot spiced cider and eat cookies with those little sprinkles on top. Cities large and small construct mini-wonderlands out of colored lights and people walk or drive through them in great numbers. There’s a state park up the coast from where we used to live in Oregon that lights up the night right up until Christmas Eve, and the combination of Christmas cheer, crashing surf and barking sea lions is stunning and unique.

The fact is that every year, Christmas appears out of nowhere, almost as if someone’s thrown a switch.  The stores pipe carols through their Muzak speakers and lights twinkle merrily on electric shaver displays and if you like Jimmy Stewart, you’re in luck because It’s A Wonderful Life gets the royal treatment from NBC, and every time a cash-register goes ka-ching, another angel gets its wings.

Why would anybody in their right minds want to put this stuff off? Don’t we have a right to be happy? Aren’t we sick and tired of politics, politics and more politics?  Don’t we want a little joy in our lives? Well, of course we do, and truth be told, not many of us will forgo these things entirely in the next twenty-three days. So what’s the point of Advent? Why does the church insist that we stop and linger these four weeks when everybody else hurtles full-tilt-boogie into a winter wonderland?

Well, one answer is . . . we’re not everybody else, or at least we’re not supposed to be . . . and more importantly, Christmas is not everybody else's festival, or at least it’s not supposed to be. It’s our holiday, our story, and it started long before the year of Christ’s birth . . . we believe that God was working divine purposes long before four B.C. or whenever the latest guess at Jesus’ birth year happens to be. We believe that all of creation waits for final redemption, and that we must wait as well, to re-enact the yearning, longing desire for the coming of the Lord.  Isaiah expresses this well: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” He craves that presence, that over-riding comfort, as many of us do, deep down where our souls live . . . we are tired of the fighting, tired of the hate and oppression, and we ache after the spirit-balm of the coming of the Lord . . . can you not feel it? Can you not taste it, blowing on the winter winds? That's what Advent is about . . . it's about the longing, the anticipation, the preparing for the savior of the world. In short, it's about the waiting.

Jesus Christ, the savior of the world . . . who'll save us from more than just our sins. He'll free the oppressed, feed the hungry and we ain't a-gonna practice war no more. The ground-zero beating heart of Christian hope will be born 23 days from now, in a manger, in an out-of-the-way town in a minor Roman province. That's when Christmas is . . . it's not today, it's not next Sunday, or the Sunday after that. It's December 25^th, and until then, there is just the waiting.

But Isaiah also says that God works for those who wait upon the Lord, and this makes lingering, it makes abiding a virtue. Of course, it's a virtue we seem to have less and less of these days . . . advertisements blaring want and desire leave little room for waiting, little time for patience . . . the credit-card industry has been built on impatience, people ruin their lives for the benefit of the CitiBank bottom line. It's much easier to hand over that little piece of plastic than to wait.

But at Advent, we're required to wait upon God, and that's not a bad thing. Good ol’ Isaiah says that those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. They'll mount up with wings like eagles, run and not be weary. They'll walk and not faint. God works through the waiting, it’s a means of grace, as theologians put it, and this recognition of waiting is at the center of contemplative prayer.  All the techniques for clearing the mind of clutter, all the ways of meditating on scripture, of rolling images of Jesus or words of comfort around and around in our minds, they're all aimed at one thing – to enable us to wait upon the Lord . . . to clear the mind of the debris of everyday life, all the centipedes of incidental thought crawling through our brains, all the extraneous detail of our full and busy lives. And when our thoughts are cleared, there is room for God to work in them and on them and thereby in our hearts . . . and it's a slow process, which seems much more like waiting than working. I know it's like that for me . . . I'm a product of our can't wait, why-not-have-it now society, and I want instant results from what I do. But when you do contemplative prayer, there’s most of the time no instant effect, no immediate improvements or change, and it can be discouraging.

But I’ve learned that God works in God’s own time, slowly and deliberately, perhaps because things easily gained are easily lost, and with anticipation comes value. As we wait, we have time to savor, to reflect, to integrate the changes fully in our lives, to make them truly part of us. And so at Advent, we're asked to wait for the Lord's coming, and as we do, God will work on us. As we take time to meditate on the season, and to contemplate our need for redemption, it becomes richer for us, and we come to know Christ more fully.

That's how Advent began – 1400 years ago it was a time of meditation and renewal, a time of cleansing and purification, a time for God to work on us before the coming of the Christ. As scripture says, we all become like one who is unclean, we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, our sorrows, our pain – like the wind—carry us away.

And as the years passed, it came to pass that Advent became a time for contemplation not only of the past but of the future as well . . . it became a time to look forward to not only Christ's first coming, but his second too . . . and so we read passages like the one from Luke, describing poetically the final days. And just as we can't separate Jesus' identity as the crucified one from that of the ruler of the universe, so we can't separate the babe in the manger from the final judge of us all. They are the same event, really—the coming of the kingdom of God.

The great theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote that the first coming of Christ, on that cold winter's night, makes sense only in light of his promise to come again. God's kingdom reached its greatest expression yet in the person of Jesus. In fact, Jesus is the kingdom personified, as he himself told his disciples – he said the kingdom of God is here among you. And if we had only his first coming to celebrate, it would be hard to believe that our current existence – definitely not heaven on earth – is somehow God's reign. So at Advent, we hold two events together, in celebrated tension, so that we can see the kingdom for the trees, so that we can see that despite all appearances, despite the famine and the misery and the wars and rumors of war, God's kingdom is coming, and it's already here and it will be here and fulfilled in the future.

Christ himself said it to John, in a dream there on Patmos Isle: “I am the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” And he stands there, in the center, holding the past and the future together, and so through him is forged our present. Christ – at the center of our lives, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we take advantage of it or not, whether we allow him to mold us or shape us or use us or not. Christ at the center of the universe, within everything, holding together the past of bondage to corruption and sin over and against the future when our redemption is complete.

Christ at the center, in time as well as outside of it, in our world and yet transcending it, coming again – soon! – and yet for the first time ever. And our task over these coming weeks is simple – all we have to do is wait upon the Lord, who will act and has acted in his own good time. And it's a profoundly subversive task, a counter cultural task in the best sense, for it goes against the dominant tide of our culture. “You don't have to wait for anything,” it roars, over and over, time and again, and yet, we Christians – some of us, anyway – wait. We wait because we know it's a virtue, because we know that God will bless those who wait for the Lord. We wait because we know that in the waiting, the thing we await becomes sharper and sharper in focus, that as we meditate and cogitate and contemplate, when it finally arrives, when Christ comes in a lowly manger and in fire and cloud-bedecked glory, his arrival will be all the more sweet. Amen.