Huge Silence

Christ the King Sunday, Year B
November 26, 2006

(Sorry these are out of order!)

Well, the season has started…Thanksgiving, Black Friday. Holiday travel, overeating, sweet food, credit cards, family events, too much shopping. Shopping at ungodly hours. Newspapers that are 75% advertising. By January 2 we will be carrying hundreds of dollars more debt, approximately 2 more pounds around our waistlines, be tired and ready to enter into the dark depths of a quiet winter.

Well, that might be a bit dire. But we just finished political ad campaign season, and now we will be spending 1/12th of our year preparing for Christmas, and I bet I’m not the only person who gets a bit weary with all the hype and business.

As the old joke goes, Jesus is coming, look busy. We don’t have to. We will be.

Isaiah, hundreds of years ago, said to his people, Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?

But you don’t need another pastor preaching to you about the evils of consumerism and commercialism this season, either from 2500 years ago or today. So let me give you an invitation instead.

I invite you to make space for your spirit this season.
Advent is the time of making ready for Jesus, of making space for the unexpected.
We are terrified of emptiness but we need emptiness so there is a little room.
We fill our homes with clutter but we love the emptiness of the lake and the sky above it.
We need a little space for God. Huston Smith says there is a God shaped space inside each of us, and we often try to fill it with anything we can find. But only God will fit.
How much space did Mary need in her heart, in her life, to welcome the Christ Child?
We need a little room.
So take a walk on the lakewalk
Go out at night and look at the stars.
Come sit in the sanctuary sometime during the week when it is empty.
Clear out one little space inside your house and don’t put any decorations in it except a candle.
Think about what you can let go of this season to make more room inside your heart,
what angers or grievances have grown old, what habits can be released.

I invite you to make time for your spirit this season.
I know most of us have extra parties, church events, tasks that take up time.
But a little time can make a difference in our spiritual lives.
Father Thomas Keating, who teaches Centering Prayer, says that
twenty minutes of meditative prayer can change us deeply.
He’s not interested in how it lowers our blood pressure or slows us down,
but how it heals our spirit, deepens our relationship with God.
Take a little time.

So get up twenty minutes earlier for a month.
Skip something (but not church, of course.)
Go sit in a deershack.
Take the long, prettier way to work and keep the radio off and cell phone off.
Turn off the TV and light a candle and sit quietly before bed.

I invite you to find silence for your spirit this season.
It is in the silence we can hear the angels speaking to us, in the silence we find God is nearer than we thought.
In the silence we discover new ways to think about things, and find new hope.
Silence is a way to remember how alive we are, how God might work in us,
how new life might be possible.
We are a thirsty people, and God knows how to quench our thirst, if we allow it.

Pablo Neruda has a poem, found in your Meditations this week
about the healing that might happen if we were all quiet for a bit…

And now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines,
we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with ire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade,
doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.
(Life is what it is about; I want no truck with death.)
If we were not so single indeed about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve, and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

So let’s be quiet, for a few minutes

(we sat in silence as a congregation for 4 minutes after this, in a deep silence only held by a room full of people...)

Welcoming the Messenger

2nd Sunday of Advent C
Luke 3:1-6

On the far side of the sun a spaceship is traveling on its way to enter the Mercury orbit. On August 3, 2004 NASA launched the Messenger spacecraft which will swing around the Earth, Venus, the sun and to Mercury to study the planet closest to the sun. It has heat shields to protect it from the immense heat, sometimes 840degrees, and is set to send photographs of the entire surface of Mercury, to investigate if there are polar caps of ice on the planet, and to investigate why Mercury is so very dense. Of course, at the heart of this is always the question, how did we get here and how did this world happen?

There is a Messenger in the wilderness.

John the Baptist was also a messenger in the wilderness. Born the surprise child late in life for Elizabeth and Zechariah and supposedly the cousin of Jesus, he led a lonely life in the desert. He dressed in animal skins, he ate only wild food. He knew the desert was a place to meet God, a place without home or security or comfort but a place where the people of Israel had always found God. He returned to the communities around the Jordan river to preach the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He did baptisms – not dainty ones like we do, but full body immersion, which signifies the person’s death to the old life and rising to the new. He preached repentance, which means to turn around. He spoke as one who had seen something that is not always seen; heard that which is usually drowned out in our lives. He called to people to turn away from what they were focused on and to turn to God. His word was a preparation for the Word, the one who came after him, Jesus.

We have messengers in the wilderness in our lives, people who live in wild places, who know things we don’t know. There are homeless people in our community who something about the wilderness in the middle of our streets. There are youth who are longing for love who know something of what it means to not be at home. There are people around us who have suffered and have seen things we would not want to see. There are faces that look at us through the photographs in the newspaper and on TV that have something to tell us about our lives. Turn, they say. Turn. When some of the people of our world are not safe, fed, or home, there is cause for our attention. Turn.

Sometimes we are the ones in the wilderness. A serious illness, divorce, loss of a job, a tragedy in our lives, depression, or just the years of wondering what it is all for can put us into the wilderness. And sometimes there we find that we have turned, we have discovered a different view of things, we realize that the landscape needs to be changed, and that God is working in a way we did not expect.

How do we welcome the messenger?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another messenger from the wilderness of a WWII concentration camp, invites us as Christians to listen to the messengers in our lives. In his book, Life Together, he writes:

"The first service that one owes to others in community consists in listening to them. Just as love for God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that He not only gives His Word but also lends us His ear ... Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians because these Christians are talking where they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and, in the end, there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words."

In the 1970s NASA couldn’t figure out how to get a spacecraft to orbit Mercury. There was a problem of needing too much fuel to get to the right place. In the 80s they figured out how to use a gravitational assist, and that is how the Messenger is getting into its correct position. It will swing near the Earth, Venus, and Mercury and each time the gravitational pull of the planet will alter the course of the spacecraft a bit, turning it to its correct place.

When we listen to the messengers in the wilderness we let them pull us, we let them turn us. We let ourselves be pulled by the gravity of something larger than we are, and then we are set more accurately on the right course.

The Messenger spacecraft will not survive. It will eventually crash into the fiery surface of Mercury. John the Baptist did not survive his return from the wilderness – Herod had him arrested shortly after these events, and then beheaded. Many of the messengers in the wilderness do not survive their sojourn there – it is a dangerous place. But John’s words still speak to us these thousands of years later. Prepare the way. God is coming. Turn toward God. All flesh shall see the salvation of God.

Welcoming the Lost

1st Sunday of Advent
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Luke 21

At my last congregation I had been at the church a few months when a member came up to me and said, "I have fourteen family members from Sierra Leone who are coming soon. I need help finding a place for them to stay."

I didn't know what to do, so I took the request to the Mission Committee.
"Oh good," the chair said. "We've been praying for a project."
"Be careful what you pray for!" I said. "You have a project now."

We floundered a bit and then hooked up with the Minnesota Council of Churches Refugee Services Program. They were like angels for us. They told us what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and why.

Six months later we had raised money, rented enough apartment space, filled the homes with furniture, clothing, food, and toiletries I vividly remember a line of little cups and toothbrushes sitting on the bathroom counter, waiting.

A few weeks after the family arrived the Confirmation Class had an event for them, and each family member received a gift. Emmanuel, who was fourteen, received a watch. He was ecstatic. "Why are you so excited about this watch," I asked him.
"Because now I know I will be on time for the bus to go to school."
"You are that excited to go to school?"
"I haven't been to school in two years," he said. "I couldn't go to school in the bush, or in the refugee camps."

I asked the matron of the family once if she missed Africa. "Here I don't hear gunshots," she said. "Here my children are safe."

Being a refugee seems such a foreign experience to us.

It is the experience awaiting the people of both our texts today, the dire, dour texts: Jeremiah’s people were about to be captured and carried off to Babylon. In Luke the Diaspora was just starting as Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel. The words seem so violent to us, but I think they sounded different to these people.

We hear stories of refugees today, but still from so far away – people coming from Sierra Leone, Darfur, the Lost Boys of Sudan, the Iraq people flooding into other countries.

But tonight we are showing a movie (Chronicles of Narnia) of English children in WW II, refugees of war sent to the country without their parents so they might be safe.

And, frankly, I don’t think my ancestors came to the US because they were on a luxury tour and decided to stay. They came because they were hungry, they were looking for a safe place to raise their children.

The life of a refugee is not so far back in our memory, really.

And sometimes, just sometimes, we feel like refugees in the midst of our settled lives. We might not feel safe in our homes, or we might not feel we belong. We might feel lost in the middle of people we have always known. There are homeless people in town who have lived here all their lives who had some bad luck or made a series of mistakes and now they are refugees among us. Or we might look at how fast the world is changing and feel like refugees right in our hometown, adrift and without anywhere safe to be.

Jesus came to us as a refugee as well. He was born in a strange town without a home. He traveled as a child to a foreign country as his parents sought safety. He lived as a man with “no place to put his head.”

But Jesus came reminding us that God makes a home with us. Jesus was called Emmanuel, the same name as the boy with the watch, God with us. Homeless or not, Jesus comes to make home with us, to remind us that God is our home, to show us how to be home for one another.

Annie Dillard quoted Meister Eckhart once: "God is at home; we are in the far country. "To welcome the refugee is a little like welcoming the lost part of ourselves, the lost part that is searching for God, for the holy among us, for the One who makes home with us.