Homily: The First Sunday of Advent [November 27, 2022] St. Alban's, Westwood

            Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the day which begins the Christian year. It is a shame that the cultural noise of our American holiday season almost obliterates this beautiful four-week moment. Advent is a time of watching and waiting, a time of hope, of expectation, and self-examination. We have turned it into a frenzy of shopping and partying instead.

            Not that there’s anything wrong with buying gifts or seeing friends. But the way we do it gets in the way of the wonderful if strange rhythm of this season. Taken together, the four weeks of Advent prepare us for the coming of Christ. Later in the season we will focus on the approach of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. Today, at the start, we look way toward the future, toward, in the words of today’s collect, “the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead”. Advent on this first Sunday is more about last things than former things. It is about getting ready for the ultimate disposition of our souls.

            When I was in seminary I studied with Krister Stendahl, a great New Testament scholar and future Archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden. When discussing today’s gospel passage, Professor Stendahl said that this day, the First Sunday of Advent, has had a curious history. Over the course of the Christian centuries, churches have used every single liturgical color—purple and blue, yes, but also white, green, red and (you guessed it) even black to represent our perception of how we ought to regard the second coming of Jesus. Over time, the church has been both powerful and weak. If Jesus’s return is good news—if we’re oppressed or suffering—we’ll use white or red. If it’s bad news—if we’re the oppressors or the inflictors of suffering—we’ll use black. When in doubt, purple or blue will do.

            Stendahl also said this when asked about the seeming contradiction between God’s judgment and God’s mercy. “God acts. How we respond to it depends on where we are in relation to it. Some of us will experience God’s action as judgment, others as mercy.”

            Those two gems of wisdom from seminary days come to mind in relation to the gospel passage for today [Matthew 24: 36-44]. Jesus tells his disciples about the “coming of the Son of Man”. Everything will proceed as normal, he says. Then “one will be taken and one will be left”. It is easy to see how generations of apocalyptically-minded Christians have portrayed the coming of the Son of Man as a dramatic, cosmic event. It’s also possible to read this saying as a comment on the unpredictability of how each of our lives will end. One way or another, you and I are proceeding toward a final summing up. When we encounter God and Jesus in that moment, some of us will experience that meeting as judgment, others as mercy. Probably, for all of us, a little of both.

            According to Jesus, this is a final exam for which we can do little to prepare. His advice in the mean time? “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

            “Keep awake”. I have watched with some amusement and then growing alarm the recent controversy about the word “woke”. I thought it a bit self-congratulatory for the original users of the term to describe themselves as having awakened from the slumber the rest of us endure. And then I thought it entirely bogus for those who objected to the term “woke” to apply it to all who espoused even modestly progressive views. Nobody, I believe, is truly “woke”. As Henry David Thoreau says in chapter two of Walden, “I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

            When Jesus tells us to “keep awake” he is telling us neither to “get woke” nor to hop ourselves up on No-Doz. He is, rather, telling us something about an attitude toward life.  We might also render his words as something like, “Pay attention”. For after all, isn’t paying attention what spirituality is really about? 

            You and I live in a world that is making ever-increasing demands on our attention. American work life has become so invasive as to spill over the bounds of the week and take over what used to be our leisure time. Our devices connect us both to each other and to an endless stream of ads and messages that claim supreme importance. The pervasiveness of these messages makes us behave more reactively than intentionally. They ask that we respond to everything that comes at us without thinking.

            One of the reasons the church has developed the prayer practices it has is simply to hold up for us things to contemplate that we wouldn’t otherwise encounter. When we come together on Sunday, from week to week we hear an array of scripture readings that tell us things we will not get on social media or cable TV. We are asked to listen to those Bible readings because they speak to us truths that can get obscured by the cultural noise which always threatens to overwhelm us. There’s not much room for love, justice, and compassion in our shared cultural pandemonium. We’ll only hear about God’s values if we seek them out.

            I was once on a panel with the late Diogenes Allen, an author who taught the philosophy of religion at Princeton. At the end of the discussion, he told us to remember one thing: “We become what we attend to.” That saying has stuck with me over the years. “We become what we attend to.” If you attend to Tik Tok videos showbiz gossip, they will form your character. If you attend to Jesus, you will over time become like him. I believe that is what Jesus means when he tells us to “keep awake”. In a world dominated by celebrity and power and all kinds of bad values, the way to follow Jesus is to attend to him. Come to church. Read the Bible. Say your prayers. It’s not hard, but it requires the desire to do it.

            Keeping awake, becoming what we attend to: these are what the season of Advent is about. It’s not only, or even particularly, about getting ready for Christmas. Advent is about a stance toward life.  That is what Thoreau meant when he said, “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn . . .”

            My late friend and mentor George Regas used to say that someone who doesn’t feel the joy and pain of the world has “gone to sleep on life”. It is only when I am spiritually asleep that I can drive by the homeless encampments around Los Angeles and feel nothing beyond annoyance. It is only because I have gone to sleep on life that I can ignore the stories of real suffering and injustice in the news and get distracted by the gossip. It is only because I have gone to sleep on life that I can miss real moments of natural beauty or interpersonal connection because I’m distracted by the intrusive claims of my iPhone.

            Thoreau also said, “To be awake is to be alive”.  He might have been channeling Jesus. On this First Sunday of Advent, we hear Jesus calling us to wake up! Step out of the information glut that engulfs you and pay attention to the people and the world around you. Stop listening to pundits and start listening to Jesus, whose teaching will always point you toward a true appreciation of life in all its mystery and wonder. We have all become sleepwalkers. It is time for us to wake up.

            “We become what we attend to.” As we make our way through this beautiful time of year in California, let us approach December 25 not in a slavish frenzy of consumption but in a watchful, hopeful “infinite expectation of the dawn”. God is always coming toward us. Let us prepare for God’s advent by watching, by waiting, by paying attention. If we are faithful and persistent in redirecting our gaze toward Jesus and the life he offers, we will, as Paul says, “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light”. 

            Wake up! Jesus is coming toward you. Use this time to prepare yourself to recognize and receive him as he approaches. Amen.

 

Homily: The Twentiy-third Sunday after Pentecost [November 13, 2022] St. Michael and All Angels, Corona Del Mar

            It is a real pleasure to be with you here at St. Michael’s, this morning. I made my first visit here in the fall of 1976, when fresh out of seminary I served as the late Bishop Rusack’s chaplain. I preached here a few times in the 1990s when my good, longtime friend Peter Haynes was your rector, and your church surprisingly was not struck by lightning even once. And Barbara Stewart (who was made a canon of the diocese by Bishop Taylor at our Diocesan Convention this weekend) and I have long been members of a clergy colleague group together. (Barbara, I’ll show you the secret handshake at coffee hour.)  So I have many ongoing connections with this parish, and I appreciate Louise’s invitation to join you today.        

            I, for one, am deeply glad that the midterm elections are (almost!) over. It got to the point in the days before Tuesday that I was afraid to turn on the television. The cable channels were filled with the kind of pointless prognostications that TV anchors usually reserve for the moments just after earthquakes. “Where was it? We don’t know. How big was it? Your guess is as good as mine.” And then there was the barrage of political ads designed both to enrage and confuse you. It was enough to make you want to go live on a desert island.

The days leading up to and following Tuesday’s midterm elections have felt positively apocalyptic, so we should feel right at home in this morning’s gospel reading [Luke 21: 5-19]. Jesus paints a lurid picture there: wars, insurrections, a thrown-down temple, persecutions, and betrayals. To one who lived and worked in Washington D.C. for several years, this sounds like a normal day in Congress.

            We Episcopalians are very near the end of the church year, a calendar based not on solar or lunar models but on the outline of the story of Jesus. The year begins in Advent as we expect the coming of Christ, and it ends with the revelation next Sunday that Jesus, not the principalities and powers of the world, is the one finally in charge. In between those poles we experience Jesus’s birth, his teaching and healing, his entry into Jerusalem, his conflict with the authorities there, his trial, crucifixion, and death, and finally his resurrection, ascension, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. A lot happens in a year with Jesus, and today we are getting ready to ask ourselves what it all means.

            There seem to be two clusters of ideas in today’s gospel: one describing the chaos of the present moment, the other suggesting how Jesus’s followers should interact with the world. I’d like to say a word about each cluster and then to conclude with a thought about stewardship, which I gather is the focus this morning of parish life here at St. Michael’s.

            Listen again to Jesus:

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.

The great 20^th century theologian Karl Barth once said that preachers should hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. (I wonder what he would have said about Facebook and Twitter.) There are times when the Bible seems hopelessly alien. There are moments when it seems ripped from today’s headlines.

            We live now in a time of dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. It is no wonder that Monday night’s lunar eclipse was hailed by some as an omen about what the next day’s elections would bring: wars and insurrections indeed. The leadup to Tuesday was brutal: horrible negative ads, lawsuits filed contesting votes that hadn’t even happened yet, promises of violence if the election did not go a certain way. We are fortunate that there has been relative calm since Tuesday, but the recounts haven’t started yet.

            Those of us of a certain age have spent most of our lives under a relatively peaceful national and international order. We became conditioned to a long stretch of world peace and bipartisan domestic tranquility. But history and our recent experience teach us that the post-World War II period was a bit of an anomaly. Chaos and contention are more rule than exception. Those who came before and after us have been more conditioned to sustained conflict both at home and abroad. 

            When we listen to Jesus, we should remember that his own time was one of great animosity and tension. Israel was subject to a brutal Roman occupation. And the gospels also witness the internal dissensions within Judaism itself. Jesus was living with, ministering and preaching to, people who were stressed out economically, politically, and even spiritually. They lived, as the King James Bible had it, under the continual threat of “wars and rumors of wars”.

            The first thing we need to hear today is that we should not be misled by our nostalgic wish for a more bipartisan, harmonious time. Sure, it was more peaceful in the 1950s. But that peace was paid for by the silencing and oppression of people who were not white, straight, and male. Relative peace can hide systemic injustice. History is the record of an ongoing struggle between good and evil, justice and oppression, love and hatred. From time to time we may experience a pause in the conflict, but we should not confuse a temporary calm with a lasting peace. 

As much as I dislike the tensions and enmities of the current moment in America and the world, the persistence of the conflict reminds us that people of faith are always asked to engage with the issues of our day. Long as we might to escape into a fantasy of a more civil and harmonious past, Jesus reminds us that there is no safe haven on offer for those who follow him. We will make our way through wars and rumors of wars by remaining faithful to the vision of hope and justice to which Jesus always calls us.

            This first realization cluster suggests a second. Again, in Jesus’s words:  

You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.

            Just as the second half of the last century was a time of relative political calm, so the relative security in which we who follow Jesus live, at least in the United States and Europe, can lull us into thinking that it’s easy to be a Christian in a contentious and violent world. Again, history helps us here. The earliest Christians were persecuted by Rome because they refused to accept Caesar as the one with ultimate authority over them. In every subsequent era of world history, the followers of Jesus have found themselves at odds with the values of the prevailing culture in which they live. Our current critique of environmental, racial, and economic violence is another version of Jesus’s critique of the values of ancient Rome and all subsequent authoritarian impulses in world history. If we really get and enact what Jesus is saying about how we ought to live with each other we will always be an irritant to the powers that be. 

            When Jesus tells us, 

so make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict,

 

he is simply telling us not to live through something painful twice. When we worry about something in advance, we experience it both in anticipation and in real time. Once is clearly enough.

            From what I read on your website, today is the day on which St. Michael’s begins its stewardship campaign. I will leave it to others to say in particular why this parish deserves your support. But, given what we’ve heard in the gospel this morning, I would like to leave you with one thought about living in and supporting a Christian community.

            We Episcopalians are fairly worldly as Christians go: we dance, we drink, we even play cards. We are at ease in the habits of the secular world. We do not hand out tracts on the street. We wear our faith lightly.

            Our church’s cultural comfort should not disguise the extent to which we nevertheless hold the world and its values up to the judgment of the gospel. Like Jesus’s earliest followers and Christian witnesses through history, we know deep down that we are not entirely at home in this world. And that is why, even at an unconscious level, we Christians come together and form communities. As much as we love this world, we know we are not entirely of it. We need a place and a community where we can remember and live out who we really are.

            Remembering who we are as Jesus’s followers and living out our true identity in worship, in fellowship, in pastoral care, in service to those who are sick or who suffer—this is why churches exist and this is why you and I who belong to them give them our support. We give to the church not out of guilt but out of gratitude that there is at least one place where we can be who we are and live as God calls us to live.

            The midterms aren’t entirely over, and 2024 is just around the corner. You and I who come together in the church will continue to hear of wars and insurrections. We will continue to come up against the skewed values of the culture we live in. We will continue to be asked to witness to the compassionate values of Jesus. We cannot do that entirely on our own. Jesus promises to be there with us when we come face to face with the forces that would deny him and dehumanize us. He is there with us in the life, worship, and ministry of our parish church. We need our church community more than we know. And it is there for us in ways we can never truly enumerate. That is why St. Michael’s deserves your support. Amen.