Advent II: Repent!

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” (Luke 3:1-6)

A week into the COP21 climate talks in Paris, it is too early to tell whether a strong enough agreement will result from these meetings. We hope for a just agreement that is strong enough to mitigate global warming sufficiently to avert catastrophe and not just delay it. People who understand the importance of these talks are eager for news in the days ahead. 

Although what the world’s leaders do with this opportunity will probably be what we remember most about 2015 in the years ahead, our news in the United States this week has been dominated by other stories. More gun violence, related concerns about both foreign and domestic terrorism, and coverage of presidential candidates seemed to predominate. Even with the effects of climate change exacerbating the conditions that allow terrorism to take hold, some American politicians and pundits have suggested that it is wrong to give the climate conference any sort of priority if we face any other sort of threat. 

A great flaw in such thinking is that we can separate environmental issues from other issues. The failure to realize the interconnections within the web that sustains all life on this planet is what has gotten us to this critical last hour attempt to negotiate an agreement that might avert a global catastrophe. A similar failure, the failure to recognize the interconnections among various “issues”, is one of the greatest political obstacles to success.

Despite the increasingly obvious human toll of climate change, we have a habit of thought left over from the

twentieth century that continues to make concern for the environment a side issue. That leftover way of thinking separates concern for humankind from concern for the earth. A pinched perspective on life, perhaps a legacy of the Great Depression, gave us a sense in the last century that we could — and probably should — be concerned primarily for humankind without being concerned about the rest of creation. Given the false choice between concern for people and concern for “nature”, we chose concern for human welfare over concern for the great outdoors. (The latter, after all, would always be waiting for us when we wanted to take a break.) We developed a false dichotomy between human welfare and the welfare of other living things that not only was an intellectual error, but has resulted in the biggest threat ever to human beings around the world. Many of our politicians and pundits continue this error. 

This week’s Advent Gospel (Luke 3:1-6) turns to John the Baptist proclaiming a “baptism of repentance”.  John the Baptist isn’t calling for a simple confession of our sins or a change in government policies. He is calling for a deep, life-changing reorientation of our souls that results in righteousness, in lives aligned with God’s ways, not the ways of the marketplace or the political forum. Such a reorientation of our souls results in a strong grounding in reality, an immersion that restores our sense of wonder and our awareness of the interconnections among things. This restoration reveals the fallacies in the ways of thinking we are offered by so many of the loudest voices in our nation. 

Luke begins today’s Gospel passage with references to various political and religious leaders in order to set the events he is describing in history, to pin down the year when John began preaching. Yet we pay much more attention today to the words of John than we do to anything the people considered “historical figures” said or did. What endures today isn’t so much what the rulers thought or did; those loud voices of their time aren’t the ones that echo down through the centuries to the Church today. What is important to us as the second week of Advent begins is the single voice of John the Baptist in the wilderness.

We are preparing ourselves to once again bear witness to the Incarnation, to God becoming human, bridging the divide between heaven and earth and showing that divide to be less real than we had thought. One way to prepare ourselves for that Christmas witness is to learn to think past the paradigms and categories the loud voices of our time would have us accept as real. 

Everything is connected. Interpersonal violence in our homes and communities is connected to violence between competing factions within nations. These forms of violence are connected to violence between nations and violence to the biosphere. Violence to our biosphere results in droughts, floods, famine, and rising seas that produce refugees who need to go somewhere. Violence to our biosphere results in lack of access to food and water and living space that easily results in conflict. Everything is of one piece. A nation or world that solves problems at the point of a gun will never be able to restore a sustainable biosphere. 

Repent. Say no to the false choices we are offered. Refuse to listen to the loudest voices. Instead, listen to the quieter voices that call us to peace and restoration. Listen to the voices that matter in the long-term, the ones that prepare us to better hear and follow Jesus, the one who taught us to love of God and love our neighbors. 

Joy to the World: Twelfth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

When Thoreau describes the ice melting in Walden Pond in the spring, he says, “Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes.” Thoreau's enthusiasm for observing the spring melting of Walden Pond came to mind today as a stop to walk around and stretch our legs at Holmes Lake Park in Lincoln turned into something more.

The temperature was in the upper 60’s, the sun was shining, and in the brief time we were there we could hear and see the fairly thin layer of ice that had covered the lake breaking up and melting. A park full of people enjoying the warmth, the sounds of the ice, the brightness of the sun, and the honks of geese were appropriately joyful for the last day of Christmas!

A few minutes later, the ice gives way!

Joy to the World: Eleventh Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

This is the Green Team at St. Stephen’s in Grand Island. The work we are doing is joyful and exciting, and spending an evening meeting with this group gives me great joy.

We are about to begin our second year of the GreenFaithCertification Program for houses of worship, learning and acting in the areas of environmental stewardship, environmental justice, and spirituality. We are building on a strong conservation tradition in rural Nebraska, but we are doing many new things on that foundation.

Some people look at our great environmental challenges and our overall failure to do enough to ensure a sustainable environment and despair; some simply avoid looking at any of it, denying that the challenges exist. We are doing something rather than nothing, doing what we can to lead in another direction, finding joy in one another’s support and in caring for the world we love in the name of the God we love.

Joy to the World: Tenth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

There was no time for a walk outside today, but as I ran out to go an afternoon meeting, the squirrel who lives in our hackberry tree greeted me. This is the squirrel who eats from our bird feeders and will nibble some of my flowers this spring – a rascal indeed – but it’s also the wild creature who hangs around without being terribly concerned about our presence, and who entertains us with great contortions as it goes after the food in the bird feeders. Rascal though it is, this squirrel brings me joy, and surely it’s one of God’s beloved creatures.

Here it is a few days ago. It often sits on this bent branch to eat a nut and chatter.

And here it is late this fall, dining at the bird feeder.

Joy to the World: Ninth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

Afternoon moon!

This reminder that the moon, other planets, other solar systems and galaxies, are all ordered so that each part of the universe – including our little corner of the world -- has a place enhanced the joy to be experienced under a bright blue sky.

“O ye sun and moon, bless ye the Lord.” (Canticle 1, The Book of Common Prayer)

Joy to the World: Eighth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

With sunshine throughout the day and a couple of hours driving in the country, many things served as signs of joy for me today. Here are two of the most basic things in our world in Nebraska, things that we sometimes don’t notice, that stood out today: the sky and the land.

The clouds in the late morning sky made beautiful patterns.

Fields of corn stubble, some with cattle grazing, lie fallow until spring. The expanse of the land, the evidence of its fertility, the promise of sustenance for the year ahead, or maybe just the way the light hit the fields today, radiated well-being. The earth itself can be a sign of joy and the cause of joy in our hearts.

Joy to the World: Seventh Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

It’s been warm here. While I actually enjoy wintry weather, and while I’m a big fan of long spells of seasonable temperatures that might indicate that our climate is still fundamentally stable, there is always joy in seeing new growth.

This is what I found in the patch of mint on the south side of our house: a little bit of green, a few new leaves growing among the dead stalks of last summer’s plants.

One of our Easter hymns, “Now the green blade riseth” (Hymn 204), is set to the tune of the Christmas carol Noel Nouvelet. The last verse is this:

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,

Thy touch can call us back to life again,

Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:

Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Here’s the King’s College Choir from Cambridge singing Noel Nouvelet:

Joy to the World: Sixth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

 During a conversation with my spiritual director this evening, I happened to look over at the window just as the sun was setting and saw this sky.  We were both amazed at the colors: red, purple, and blue. We wondered at the beauty of the sky; the joy was in the surprise of looking up at just the right moment to see such beauty, and in having another person with which to share it.

Joy to the World: Fifth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

Today was unusually warm for December 29 in Nebraska. Early this morning I thought I heard doves cooing, something I don’t hear most winter mornings, though the sound was so faint that I wasn’t sure that it was doves. Around 9:30 the sun got just high enough in the sky to really light up the room I was in, a definite moment of joy! I stepped outside to take a look at the sky and the sunlight, and noticed this pair sitting at the top of a spruce tree where doves often sat this summer and fall.

Later in the afternoon, while I was sitting at a window looking at the photos from the morning and writing, I saw a dove landing at the top of the same tree. It looked white in the sunlight, and landed in a way that made it look just like a dove ornament we used to have on our Christmas tree.  When I got outside to snap a picture, I heard it calling, and the second dove appeared. Double joy on the fifth day of Christmas!

Joy to the World: Fourth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

The rivers in south central Nebraska are running freely as the year ends. I stopped today and listened to the sound of the river and watched the water flow. With the sun shining on it, this was a place to find joy.

Joy to the world! the Savior reigns; let us our songs employ,

While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy.

Joy to the World: Third Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation. (See yesterday's post .)

Today I found ducks making a joyful noise on a partially frozen lake. There are usually plenty of mallards around this park in the winter. Today I was pleased to see a couple of wood ducks among them. The ducks were active today: flying, splashing, and swimming around, then resting on the ice along the open water. 

Joy to the World!

Let heaven and nature sing…

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

(Hymn 100)

The beautiful skies of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Nebraska echoed our joy in the celebration of the birth of Christ, the Incarnation of God come to live among us. The Christmas Eve sunset, the stars in a clear sky on Christmas Eve, and the abundant sunshine on Christmas Day gave us light during the darkest time of the year, helping us to understand John’s Gospel (John 1:5): “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

We Episcopalians celebrate Christmas for twelve days. With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation. During a walk today, I was surprised by a hawk that flew out of a nearby tree and glided on the steady southwest breeze.

Our Christmas Gospel from John (John 1:1-14) begins by articulating the connections among God’s creation of the world, Christ, life, and light:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

The wonders of the world around us not only help us stay connected to joy; they also remind us that God is God, the creator and sustainer of all that is in the entire universe.

He rules the world with truth and grace, and make the nations prove

The glories of his righteousness, and wonders of his love.

Sandhill Crane Sunday

St. Stephen’s, Grand Island, incorporated the sandhill crane migration into our liturgy on Sunday, the third year of celebrating Crane Sunday. Because the crane migration peaks in mid- to late March, this Sunday falls during Lent. While it may at first seem a little unusual to have any sort of special celebration during Lent, the juxtaposition of our Lenten journey with the arrival of the cranes on their annual journey says something about the way Christians live in the world and about our incarnational theology.

Highlighting the connections between the salvation story and what is happening in this particular place at this particular time helps us pin Lent down to our lives and our world. The salvation story is easy to ignore once we leave church if it does no more than float somewhere up above our lives. When we see the ways in which it connects to our lives and our world, the Word remains enfleshed, incarnate, for us. Seeing the connection helps us understand what it means for God to come and dwell among us.

This Crane Sunday our weather in central Nebraska was still wintry. I drove to Grand Island partway in freezing rain and partway in snow, past dances of cranes that were well camouflaged with their gray plumage in the foggy fields. The origami cranes decorating the church took on extra meaning this year as we keep the people of Japan in our prayers. Our Christian education classes had made “bejeweled birds” on which the children had written their sometimes poignant hopes for renewal or new life at Easter. The reality of the salvation story for our own lives becomes more vivid with a range of particular concerns in mind, from the Japanese people on the other side of our planet to the children in our own parish, and with our gratitude for the abundance of God’s creation that we see with thousands of birds flying through the Central Flyway.

Our lessons Sunday morning included Exodus 17:1-7 and John 4:5-42, both reminding us of the importance of water, with Jesus talking about living water in the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. Sunday’s sermon on these texts can be read here.

In Sunday’s Psalm (Psalm 95), God says, “Harden not your hearts as your forebears did in the wilderness.” One way to soften our hearts so that we can receive the living water that Christ offers in abundance is to go outside and give thanks for the wonders we find there, for the cranes, the other spring birds, the sky and the rivers and even the snowflakes, sleet, and rain.

Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

It’s Christmastime! We celebrate the Feast of the Incarnation with lots of appropriately embodied – incarnate – expressions of our joy: special foods, gathering with family and friends, the exchange of gifts, greenery and other decorations for our homes and churches. The sounds of Christmas music add to all of this.

The song “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” has become part of the Christmas repertoire, but I’ve been listening to it off and on since August, when this song I barely knew came into my head after I spent some time in the apple orchard at the St. Benedict Center. I wrote about that experience in a post called Apples and Manna . The sense of connection with God and of spiritual nourishment from that experience must be something like the mystical experience the original author of this song describes. While the song is often sung at a faster tempo, the words are very clear in this clip:

The Christmas Gospel from John (John 1:1-14) begins with a very abstract concept: “In the beginning was the Word…”, but ends with the Word becoming flesh, becoming incarnate, and coming to dwell among us. The unseen and ethereal God becomes visible and tangible.

The birth of Christ was the Incarnation, but opportunities for little experiences of the incarnation surround us. The wonders of God’s creation – the plants and animals, the rivers and hills, and the skies and land themselves – are constant signs of Emmanuel, God-with-us. 

Merry Christmas!

Christmastide: Incarnation

"Praise the LORD from the earth, you sea-monsters and all deeps; fire and hail, snow and fog, tempestuous wind, doing his will.” (Psalm 148: 7-8)

Christmas celebrations in the Diocese of Nebraska this year were shaped by the winter weather. Some parishes, including our parish of St. Stephen’s in Grand Island, went ahead with Christmas Eve plans knowing that attendance might be down a bit because of snow or ice, while others cancelled or rescheduled services.

In south central Nebraska, the Christmas Eve blizzard watch had been dropped for a winter storm warning. (Our true blizzard was to come on Christmas Day.) Before the weather became a big factor, I had planned to be at both our late afternoon family-oriented service and our 10:30 Eucharist. On Christmas Eve, though, knowing that weather conditions were supposed to deteriorate sometime overnight, we started out for the earlier service thinking that as we drove back to Hastings afterwards, we could determine how safe it would be to drive back up for the second service. We were surprised when we got to the edge of town and into more open country! It was clear that the roads were bad and quickly becoming much worse, and so, despite disappointment at the prospect of missing both Christmas Eve services, we turned around and went back home.

Our daughter’s church in Hastings, First Congregational UCC, had a 6:00 Christmas Eve service, so we joined her for that before driving very carefully back to our house for a much more leisurely supper than we can usually squeeze in between Christmas Eve services. The entire evening was a very different experience, not what we had had in mind and not without disappointment about missing the celebration at St. Stephen’s , but a good start to Christmas nonetheless. In the end, the reason for our evening turning out the way it did was a fresh reminder of what we celebrate at Christmas: God’s Incarnation; God being born as a human being, as one of God’s own creatures, to live among us on Earth.

While we find the terms or categories ‘body’ and ‘soul’ useful, we human beings are a complex combination of these elements. Some of the ancient Greeks thought that we had pre-existent souls that were inserted into bodies and that at death continued to exist without a body. In the Nicene Creed, in contrast, Christians emphasize the resurrection of the body, the hope of everlasting life in a new body, not a bodiless eternity. Our sacramental sense in the Episcopal Church also points to the intertwining of the physical with the spiritual. We use physical elements – water, bread, wine, oil – to deepen our experience of God’s grace, and in our liturgy we move around in physical space instead of sitting still, trying to leave our bodies behind.

Pointing to the connection evident in the Hebrew between Adam and his creation from Earth, Robert Alter (The Five Books of Moses, p. 21) translates Genesis 2:7 this way: “…then the LORD God fashioned the human, humus from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature.” This is who we are; we are connected both to the Earth, to the physical world, and to our creator God, whose breath of divine spirit gives us life.

We often talk about our souls and our spiritual lives as if they are something separate from our bodies and the rest of life; perhaps we do that to help us remember that we have souls and need to tend to their health, or perhaps we do it to compartmentalize our lives and keep God at a distance. At times we need to give special attention to our spiritual lives because our culture makes it difficult to keep a healthy balance among the variety of human needs, but we err if we take the physical world – and our bodily experience – to be second-rate. We are inextricably connected to the physical world. Our health, both body and soul, is tied to the health of the Earth.

This year, the blizzard’s shaping of our Christmas celebrations is a reminder of our connection to the Earth. Just as the Holy Infant was born in a stable, the last place most people would have looked for the birth of the Messiah, so Christ gets born again in our hearts in unexpected places. We might expect to find the wonder of Christmas in the beautiful liturgy and music of a Midnight Mass or the joyful retelling of the story in a children’s Christmas Eve pageant, places where we have found it before, but we can also find the wonder as we look out alone on wind-driven snow. Our God came to live here among us on Earth, and so we can find God in the earthly elements of wind, cold, and snow.

We are not isolated from the world around us, and we Nebraskans are certainly not unaffected by the weather. Who we are and what we do is bound up with the natural world around us; and who we are and what we do -- and what it is like to live as a human being on this Earth -- are important to our God, who became Incarnate as a baby born in a stable in Bethlehem.