Eco-Palms

Lent begins in ten days. ‘Lent’ comes from an Old English word for spring, for the lengthening of days, and despite the ongoing snow and ice and cold temperatures in Nebraska, there are a few reminders that spring is on the way – the lengthening days, the appearance of flocks of geese, and the things we do in churches to prepare for observing Lent.

On the list of things to do now to prepare for Lent is ordering palms for the Palm Sunday liturgy. This year, parishes may want to do something different and order eco-palms. These palm branches are sustainably harvested. Instead of paying workers according to the quantity of palm branches brought in from the rainforest, the pay is for the quality of the branches. This encourages careful harvesting of only the most usable branches, with much less waste from branches that are harvested and then never shipped because of their poor quality. This way of harvesting and paying workers has increased the income for the workers, paying them more fairly for the work they do.

The eco-palms project  originates with The University of Minnesota Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Agricultural Management (CINRAM). Their website provides links to pages from the Presbyterian Church (USA) , Lutheran World Relief, and the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR); it also has a page of links to news articles about how and why various churches have used eco-palms, and ordering .

The "eco-palms" are branches of the chamaedorea palm, suitable for use in vases or as branches to wave in the Palm Sunday procession. These are not the thin fronds that many parishes order to bend into crosses. The rubrics for Palm Sunday in the Book of Common Prayer (p. 270) talk about distributing “branches of palm or of other trees or shrubs” to people to be carried in the procession. In his Commentary on the American Prayer Book, Marion Hatchett noted (p. 225) that these rubrics encourage the use of branches rather than fronds or small crosses “which can hardly be waved and certainly fail to signify a parade”. However, if the palm crosses are a meaningful parish tradition, a parish could order the fronds from another supplier and eco-palms for use on the altar and by at least some of the people in the procession.

On Palm Sunday, we greet Jesus as our King. Prayerful consideration of how our purchase of palms for this celebration affects both the people who harvest the palms and God’s creation seems important if Jesus is truly our King.

Plastic Bits and Healing Waters

Driving frequently between Hastings and Grand Island, I’ve invented a game that I call Spot the Plastic. Any time I think of it, I look for plastic along the roadside or out in the fields. So far, every time I’ve looked, there has been something to see – a plastic bag from a store, a cup, a chunk of Styrofoam from a cooler. It's not a lot of fun; it's really very discouraging to realize that there's so much plastic to be found.

This week I’m on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, where plastic litter along the ocean shore is as obvious as it is in the Nebraska countryside. A year ago I wrote about the plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean and its effect on marine birds and animals. When I visited the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge on Sunday afternoon this week, I saw a display of objects that had been found in dead albatross chicks as part of the food bolus.

Some of these plastic bits from the ocean look like the same things we find in the middle of the U.S. mainland. This is a photo I took last winter of plastic debris along the edge of Lake Hastings:

And this is a photo from early last summer on the shore of Lake Ontario:

These are some of the things I saw early yesterday morning here in Kaua’i:

These bits and pieces of plastic are so much a part of our environment now that we often don’t notice them. When we do, finding a way to clean up our fields, waterways, and oceans seems so overwhelming that we can feel paralyzed by helplessness.

The Gospel lesson for today’s Daily Office was John 5: 1-18, the healing of the man at the pool. Jesus asks the man “Do you want to be made well?” The man answers, “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up.” (The stirring of the water indicated a time when the water had healing properties.) The man doesn’t say whether or not he really desires healing; he says he can’t do it because he needs someone to help him. Then Jesus says, “Stand up, take your mat, and walk,” and the man does just that. He didn’t so much need someone to lift him up and place him in the pool as he needed someone to empower him to get up and walk on his own. Instead of being paralyzed by helplessness, he needs to start walking.

Many people wish we could clean up our environment. As we discover more about how plastics are entering our food chain and how pervasive they are in our environment, many of us wish we could find a way to make things better. Do we have the will to do that? Do we – collectively – want to be made well? Do we want our world and ourselves to be healthier and more whole? If so, we can get up and take the first steps. We can do small, everyday things that add up: carrying reusable shopping bags with us, using real mugs and cups at home and church instead of plastic or Styrofoam, recycling plastic if we live in a community where we can do so (or working to make recycling available).

Doing the small and obvious things that we can and being aware of the plastic debris we see every day will lead us to the next steps, to seeing what bigger changes we all need to make to have a healthier world. If we truly want our planet to be healed, God will empower us to see what we need to do and to be able to do it. Then the water in our oceans, lakes, and streams will be life-giving water, healing water.

Haiti

The devastating earthquake in Haiti last week has touched our hearts. People here are responding with generous donations and with prayers; the images we have seen from Haiti touch us deeply and raise the question of what we can do to help.

At times like this, some people – both those in Haiti who were directly affected by the earthquake and people who are watching from afar – ask theological questions: Where is God in all of this? Why do such terrible things happen? Where is Christ? When something like this earthquake results in such a huge amount of human suffering and loss of life, these questions are not asked in the abstract. The questions come from the heart, as part of the cries of the victims or the exclamations of the rest of us as we see the pictures and the estimates of the number of people killed or badly injured or homeless.

As we all know by now, the answers have run the gamut. Pat Robertson’s now infamous explanation that this suffering is the logical outcome of a “pact with the devil” made by the ancestors of the people who are suffering is only one example of many who think bad things happen because God punishes people. On Sunday evening, CNN showed a clip of a religious service held in Haiti that day, with the pastor telling the congregation that God was punishing Haitians for their sins.

Episcopalians for the most part reject such explanations; we think Christ is found the midst of people who are suffering; when we are suffering, Christ shares our pain and grief, comforts us and encourages us. Christ’s love and presence is made visible through the Church; our task is to provide food, water, shelter, healing, comfort, and hope. This report from the Episcopal News Service provides examples of particular responses to the earthquake from the Episcopal Church. Most importantly at this time, we can continue giving to Episcopal Relief and Development’s Haiti Fund. The Diocese of Haiti is numerically the largest diocese in the Episcopal Church; our network of churches, schools, and people has been badly damaged, but still gives us a way to get to the work at hand fairly quickly and well.

One of the most heartbreaking things about Haiti is that the earthquake is one of a history of tragedies in that country. There was great need there before the earthquake struck. When we talk about the Millennium Development Goals targeting the poorest people on Earth, we are talking about places like Haiti. Like most other countries where there is extreme poverty, one piece of the puzzle has to do with the environment. In Haiti’s case, deforestation has resulted in soil instability that makes hurricane rains take many more lives than in places like the Dominican Republic, which shares the island; with deforestation, topsoil for growing food is gone, and desertification makes it more difficult to grow food. (Pictures and links to animation showing satellite images of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic – made very clear because of the deforestation on the Haitian side of the border – is available here from the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.)

Most Americans don’t know about the deforestation of Haiti; before the earthquake, many were vaguely aware that Haiti was a poor country, but knew little about why Haiti is so poor. Yesterday evening there was a Prayer Service for Haiti at the Washington National Cathedral. Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached; I recommend taking a few minutes to watch the video of her sermon . One of the things she said was this: “May this terror shake us out of complacency and willful ignorance.”

We have chosen to remain ignorant of conditions in Haiti and many other places in the world where there is severe poverty. Knowing little history, we don’t know the causes of Haiti’s political and economic instability. Knowing little science, we don’t know about deforestation and pollution and the ways these intersect with economic and political forces to impact people’s lives every day. Many people choose to remain ignorant of the wider issues of pollution and climate change and how they affect every living thing on the Earth.

Bishop Jefferts Schori talked about planting seeds of hope in Haiti, and we are doing that now as we respond with aid. But she also reminded us that we must be constant in our caring: “Our remembering has to be long term. It must endure if it is to beat back the terror of this disaster.”

Her words apply not only to the current disaster in Haiti, but to all the work there is to do in our world to end extreme poverty. A big piece of that work is the seventh Millennium Development Goal, ensuring environmental stability so that people are less vulnerable to natural disasters and so that all of us can live in hope of a healthier, more secure future.

Please consider a generous donation to Episcopal Relief and Development’s Haiti Fund . As we reach out to help our sisters and brothers in Haiti, may we become more aware of the world around us, more willing to look at the realities of our world, and more able to serve as the Body of Christ.

Carbon Covenant for Epiphany

The Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, was the first anniversary of the Green Sprouts blog. That first post a year ago talked about the wise men and the star of Epiphany, and how the world around us serves as a door or opening to The Holy. The desire to care for the Earth as a precious spiritual resource is one reason for churches to be intentional about environmental stewardship. The fact that we believe God created the world, pronounced it as good, and gave humankind charge over caring for it is another major reason to be engaged in this work.

For many of us, though, the fact that pollution of all sorts and climate change tend to affect the poorest people in the world first and worst is at least as big a reason as these others for Christians to make environmental stewardship a priority. A January 4 article, Shelter from the Storms, in America magazine talks about a new category of refugees in our world, environmental refugees. According to the article, there are already more environmental refugees than political refugees.

In Epiphany we think about how to help bring Christ’s redemptive love into the world. This year, other parishes may want to join St. Stephen’s, Grand Island, in considering a new program from Interfaith Power and Light, the Carbon Covenant project. The Carbon Covenant gives parishes an opportunity to do something fairly concrete to help people in parts of the world most affected by climate change. The program links faith communities in the Global North with faith communities in the Global South who are addressing deforestation, one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions. Parishes can make a pledge of financial support or a one-time contribution to partner in one of these projects.

The four projects featured at this point are in Ghana, Cameroon, Cambodia, and the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Details about all four projects are available on the website . As we connect with these other communities, we will learn more about the effect of climate change on our neighbors in the global community, and have the joy of knowing we are doing something meaningful to help make life better for people whose daily lives are affected by climate change.

It may be hard to think about carbon emissions and global warming when we have experienced so much cold weather this winter, but of course specific weather events and general climate patterns are two different things. Summer is a warm season and winter is cold in Nebraska (that’s our climate) even though we can have cool, rainy days in the summer and a sunny day with 70 degree temperatures in the winter (that’s the weather). Similarly, the overall climate trend of global warming is obvious to statisticians and climate scientists even though the weather in much of North America and Europe has been cold this winter. And meanwhile, in the southern hemisphere, Melbourne just had its hottest night in 100 years with a temperature of 98 degrees F. at midnight.

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.

Advent 4: Magnificat

In churches this morning, we remember Mary’s visit to Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-55) and the joyful Song of Mary , the Magnificat. The first part of Mary’s song praises God and talks about what God has done for her; the middle of the song describes God’s inversion of the economic and political order – casting down the mighty while lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things while the rich are sent away empty -- and it ends with a reminder of God’s promise of mercy. It’s a song about God creating something that’s very new and yet grounded in God’s eternal care and love for God’s people.

Our Daily Office lessons yesterday included Christ’s clear call in Matthew 25 to care for people who are poor, sick, powerless, or lonely. Whenever we do something to serve “the least of these” we are serving Christ; whenever we ignore the needs of the least of these, we turn our backs on Christ. It was in many ways a fitting lesson for the end of the Copenhagen climate conference. The politics of the conference dictated an outcome that keeps the nations in conversation about climate change and leaves the door open for a significant agreement at some unspecified time in the future, but it also leaves people in poorer nations that are already feeling negative effects from climate change where they were at the beginning of the conference. The wealthier nations like the United States, aware of the lack of political will back home to do the hard work of making deep cuts in carbon emissions, negotiated this the way we do other issues.

Compromise is a grand thing, and a few tentative first steps can be claimed as a political victory on many issues, but the physics of climate change doesn’t leave any room for political expediency or compromise. Just as not making a decision is a sort of decision in itself, so declaring ourselves favorable to the idea of making some undefined cuts in carbon emissions without making the commitment to deep change that science tells us is necessary is a decision to turn our backs through our inaction on those who are harmed first and worst by climate change.

One dynamic of this conference was that President Obama did not have a clean energy bill from our Congress to show a real commitment from Americans. The Senate will be debating this legislation in coming weeks and months. Today’s Omaha World Herald has an op-ed piece signed by several of us Nebraska clergy that articulates why climate change is a faith issue that calls for our attention.

In Mary’s song, we hear her joyful faith in God’s mercy and in God’s love for the least of these. Where is our merciful and loving God in the news from Copenhagen, when the needs of the least of these were sacrificed to the agendas of the rich and powerful? God’s promises endure; God calls us back again and again to live in harmony with God’s intentions for our world. Reports from Copenhagen talked about the crowds of people from all over the world who gathered every day and every night outside of the Bella Center, bringing the needs of the poor and vulnerable to the ears of those in power, and giving encouragement and support to the delegates from less powerful places. God is working through these people and through all of us whose words and actions bring the needs of all people – and all species – to the attention of the rest of the world.

This may not look like a success, just as Mary’s baby in the manger didn’t look like a king. God works with whatever is available, and what is available are people of faith who are willing to look at the science of climate change, and look at God’s children who will be most severely affected by climate change, and then do what we can to help. Mary had no power or influence, and yet because of her faith, God was able to use Mary to become Incarnate and change everything for all of us.

The weather in central Nebraska today was sunny and warmer than it has been in several days. With beautiful snow cover still on most of the fields, a big blue sky, and the sound of running water from melting ice and snow, our souls might well magnify the Lord out of sheer joy in God’s creation. Climate scientists tell us that this is a critical time for the future of our climate, and of the planet to which human life is adapted. This is the time for people of faith who find joy in God’s creation and comfort in God’s promises to listen carefully, watch carefully, and see where God is calling us to speak and act.

Advent 3: Despair and Hope

The decisions made in the next couple of days at the climate talks in Copenhagen will be of great importance to all of us, but their effects will initially be felt most keenly by people from places like island nations and Bangladesh who came to Copenhagen with hope for an agreement that might save their homes. At this point, it's difficult for some people to stay hopeful, as the probability of reaching a significant agreement appears to be lessening.

How do we remain hopeful given the possibility that the world’s response to climate change will be too little and too late? What is the Christian response as we face the historically unique possibility of witnessing the social, economic, cultural, and spiritual consequences of inaction, the unraveling of our ways of life on a worldwide scale?

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is in Copenhagen. Archbishop Tutu’s experience in the fight against apartheid in South Africa has helped him develop wisdom about being hopeful in situations that appear to be hopeless. The Hopenhagen blog for December 15 provides video clips of Archbishop Tutu talking about what gives him hope this week.

Our lessons for the Third Sunday of Advent have been good companions while following the climate talks. The short passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians (Philippians 4:4-7) tells us to rejoice and not worry about anything; Paul says “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God”. There is part of the answer to these difficult questions: pray. Pray for the people participating in the climate conference, for the heads of state who will make the final decisions, for the people with little power who will feel the effects of climate change first and worst, and for a change of heart – repentance – when we are tempted to put our own comfort ahead of the basic needs of others.

In our Gospel lesson (Luke 3:7-18) John the Baptist talked about repentance. In my sermon this Sunday, I was not speaking directly about the climate talks, but it was in the back of my mind as I wrote about hope and despair. No matter what the issue, our call as Christians seems to be to a call to witness, to really look at, the places where there is darkness or despair. As we walk through the darkness, we are supported by our faith that the darkness cannot overcome the light of Christ. I believe our call at this time is to proclaim both the truth about what is at stake as the nations decide on a response to the climate crisis and the message of hope grounded in our faith.

Advent 3C: In the Bleak Midwinter
Zephaniah 3:14-20; Canticle 9 (Isaiah 12:2-6); Luke 3:7-18 (and the Godly Play version of the angel’s visit to the shepherds)
Preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Grand Island, Nebraska, December 13, 2009

It’s good to see so many folks dug out from this week’s snowstorm and able to get here this morning. Little did we know last Sunday that our Tuesday and Wednesday evening church activities would be cancelled this week, children would be home from school, and many other plans changed. I was relieved early Tuesday evening to find out that the earliest morning classes at Hastings College had been cancelled already, as I was wondering how I would get from our house to campus for my 9:00 class. If I’d had to, I could have gotten there on foot if no other way, but it would have been a very difficult and very cold walk, and I was more than happy not to attempt it.

Looking out Wednesday morning after more snow had fallen and it had all been blown around by strong winds, one of my favorite Christmas hymns came to mind, Hymn #112, ‘In the bleak midwinter..’, that beautiful combination of Christina Rossetti’s words and Gustav Holst’s music. “In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago.”
This morning, though, we are singing Advent hymns and thinking about John the Baptist: “On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry announces that the Lord is nigh…” Our Gospel lesson is John the Baptist at his most prophetic, referring to the crowds who have shown up to be baptized as a “brood of vipers” – the children of snakes – and calling everyone to repentance, to a radical change of heart that will become evident in their everyday choices and actions. John says that the one coming after him will baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit and fire, and follows this with a very intimidating exhortation about Christ separating the metaphorical wheat from the chaff, in which it becomes very clear that we do not want to part of the chaff. After all of this, which does not at first hearing sound like “tidings of comfort and joy”, Luke writes: “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.”

We heard another part of Luke’s Gospel today from our children as they told us about the angel coming to the shepherds. Most of us are more familiar with this story, and it sounds more like Good News to us. We’re more comfortable with angels and shepherds, but part of that comfort might be that familiarity has lessened the impact of the prophetic element of this story. The announcement of Christ’s birth came to the shepherds first, not to kings or high priests or the people who lived in comparative comfort in town. Shepherds were poor people who lived outside the walls of the town with the sheep, and sheep are some of the smelliest creatures on God’s green Earth.

It must have been surprising at the least, and perhaps even scandalous, that the shepherds would be the first ones told about the birth of the Messiah. But people who knew and understood Scripture would not have been surprised, because the Hebrew prophets repeatedly talk about God’s care for the outcast, for the people who inhabit the margins of society because that’s where people with more power and wealth have pushed them. In our passage from Zephaniah this morning, the prophet announces God’s message of hope: “I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth.” So this morning we have an angel telling the shepherds about the birth of God’s son, and we have John the Baptist saying that people who have clothing and food must share with those who have nothing, and those with some degree of power – tax collectors and soldiers, for example – must not abuse that power.

The angel says something else, though: “Do not be afraid. Be joyful.” Again we hear an echo of the prophetic voice; Zephaniah says, “The king of Israel is in your midst…Do not fear,” and in our Canticle Isaiah says “Surely, it is God who saves me; I will trust in him and not be afraid.” These prophetic messages bring hope, but that hope often comes intertwined with information or commands that can make us fearful. John’s message, while meant to literally put the fear of God into us, is ultimately hopeful: We can’t do anything about our ancestors or even who we ourselves have been in the past, but what’s important, says John, isn’t the past but what we do now and in the future. We’re invited to repent and live lives that bear good fruit, lives that show we are wheat to be gathered into God’s granary, people living into the Reign of God.

The prophet’s message is always a message of hope because it’s ultimately a message of God’s faithfulness. We not only have nothing to fear when God is with us, but acting out of fear prevents us from responding to God’s faithfulness in a way that moves us from despair to hope, from darkness to light. The prophet’s message is a message of hope, but it’s also a message that calls for a response from us, a call to deep faith that results in good fruits. The prophet’s message in whatever point in history tells it like it is; it doesn’t sugarcoat or deny the reality of the way things are right now. Looking at the reality of our lives and the effects our choices have on Christ’s beloved poor around the world requires us to be open to experiencing uncomfortable emotions like grief and despair. We might grieve the loss of familiar and comfortable ways that we must give up so that others might live; like Ebenezer Scrooge, we might despair when we look outside of our own small worlds and let ourselves see the reality of other people’s lives, and, in our point in history, when we learn about the effects of our lives on the oceans, the air, and other species.

But we have to be willing to walk through the discomfort and darkness of despair to get to hope; a hope based on burying our heads in the sand isn’t hope at all but denial. Just as I was happy to avoid the discomfort of walking through the snow and bitter cold to get to campus, we are understandably reluctant to experience the discomfort of walking through despair to get to hope.

Advent is a time when we hear the prophetic message in our Sunday readings and in our Daily Office lectionary. The Daily Office this week included readings from Amos and Haggai, difficult messages for people of their time to hear, but messages that were ultimately full of hope, full of the promise of God’s faithfulness to a repentant people. Haggai (Haggai 1:5-6) starts out with this: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider how you have fared. You have sown much, and harvested little; you eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and you that earn wages earn wages to put them into a bag with holes.” Yet Haggai moves from this portrait of [in Thoreau’s words] “lives of quiet desperation” to a promise of blessing to a newly obedient people.

The Church calls us to hear the prophet’s message today as well, to hear the words that God is speaking to us in our time. In Advent, the Church calls us to step back a bit and set aside time to enter the silence so we can hear the still, small voice; the Church calls us to enter the darkness so that we can more clearly see the Light of Christ. Advent is about listening to the prophetic call, about hearing the message of hope as we anticipate Christ’s birth and his coming again, and it’s also about choosing our response to a faithful and loving God. But that’s what Christmas is about also: our response to God becoming Incarnate and saying, “Follow me”.

The repentance to which John the Baptist calls us is not simply a matter of adding a few charitable acts to our to-do lists, good though it is to do that. This call is to something deeper, something internal, a profound change of heart. It’s a call to genuine generosity, kindness, compassion, and love. It’s a call to give our fears a nod and then joyfully go ahead and go where Christ calls us to serve as his body in the world – to see with the eyes of Christ, to hear with the ears of Christ, to think with the mind of Christ, to speak with the voice of Christ, and to serve with the hands of Christ.

The last verse of ‘In the bleak midwinter’ talks about how we can respond to our twofold awareness of our spiritual poverty that points to our need for repentance, along with the joy in our hearts when we hear the Good News of God’s promises and Christ’s birth: “What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; if I were a wiseman, I would do my part; yet what I can I give him – give my heart.”
Don’t be afraid; be joyful! God’s promises assure us that when we choose to walk into and look at the dark places where we are called to bring the light of the Gospel, our faithful and loving God will be with us, and Christ will light the way. Amen.