St.
Alban's Episcopal Church
Austin, Texas
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Austin, Texas
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From the Pulpit:
The other morning as I was getting ready to come to church I saw a TV commercial that has really been upsetting me. There was very nice music – that was what got me to pay attention – and then the announcer said, “If you don’t get everything you want this holiday season, remember there’s no law that says you can’t get yourself a little something.” It didn’t bother me that it was an ad for Lexus. Lexus is just a car – neither bad nor good. My problem here wasn’t even the commercialization of Christmas even though that is a real problem. What kept me thinking about the commercial, though, and what has caused me to mention it now is what it says about our expectations. For me, then, it is a comment on faith and trust, and our lessons this morning are all about expectation, faith, and trust. The commercial and the marketplace paint the picture that Christmas and by extension life itself is all about getting our expectations met. It is the long list of what we want, very little of which do we need. And if other people don’t meet up to our expectations, well the Lexus commercial tells us to go out and get what we want ourselves. When all is said and done, we are in control. That, my dear friends, is not the gospel message. The third Sunday of Advent we light the pink Advent candle. I heard a new version this week about why this one is pink. It came from our Presiding Bishop, who said, with a twinkle in her eye -- so don’t anybody get bent out of shape by this -- that maybe Mary secretly wanted a girl. The tradition of the pink candle actually comes from the medieval church, when on the third Sunday of Advent the antiphon began with the word “Rejoice!” In Latin that is “gaudete” and we call this gaudete Sunday. The pink candle represents the joy among the purple candles of penitence. Ultimately it represents radical hope. And on the third Sunday of Advent we get to read the canticle known as the Magnificat in the place of the psalm. If we’re used to thinking of Mary as meek and mild, I think we’re selling her short. Ask any mother – she is accepting a vocation that takes all the power and wisdom and courage you can muster, and Mary has the faith to accept God’s invitation not knowing whether Joseph will still marry her or whether the townspeople might take her out by the dump and stone her to death. Her yes to God doesn’t meet any of her expectations for her life and she isn’t given a picture of how it is all going to turn out, but she says yes anyway, trusting that God will take care of her.
There is nothing calculated or rational about it. The author and poet Madeleine
L’Engle put it this way: It’s not about reason. It’s about love. Last Sunday a lot of us gathered to hear our choir sing John Rutter’s Magnificat, and we’re going to be blessed once more today when they sing the first movement as our offertory anthem. This is the song Mary sings as a response to her cousin Elizabeth’s blessing of her and her child. As I said last Sunday, Mary’s song is not a lullabye. It
is a call for justice. Listen again to these words from Luke’s gospel: These are not the words of a wimp. They are the words of a prophet. These words are an expression of radical trust. These are the words of a young woman – and remember, Mary was probably about fourteen years old – these words express her trust in God that was so fierce and fearless that she has willingly given up everything she had expected from life not knowing what she would get in return. In Luke’s gospel we aren’t told what Joseph’s response was. We’re not told how Mary broke the news to her father about the baby, just that she set off to see her cousin Elizabeth and in her song understood that her rejoicing, no matter how excited and bewildered she might have been, was ultimately about the whole world being turned on its head. The poor will be rich and the oppressed will have power. It is not just Mary’s life that has been changed. It is everything. All human expectations are irrelevant. And then there is our gospel reading from Matthew and the spotlight is once more on John the Baptist. According to Luke, John had acknowledged Jesus as the savior from the time he was in his mother’s womb and leapt to greet him when Mary first arrived at Elizabeth’s house. John’s whole life was dedicated to pointing to Jesus, but here he is in prison, knowing that he is about to be killed, and suddenly he is consumed with doubt. This is not what he expected, and he wonders if he had wasted his life. He sends messengers to Jesus for reassurance. Are you the one or should we keep looking? Or, in John’s words, are you the messiah or have I wasted my whole life on an illusion? Jesus could have given him a straight answer, but we know Jesus doesn’t deal in straight answers. He says, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. In essence the message he sends back to John is much larger than if he’d simply said, “Yes, it’s me.” Jesus is telling him that what is happening is that the world is being turned upside down.
Look around, he says, and you’ll see Isaiah’s prophecy coming true. This was the
scripture Jesus read in the synagogue: Believing that Jesus is messiah is not the point of the synoptic gospels. The message of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and John is that the kingdom of God has broken into time. It is here, all around us, and that changes everything. It blows our expectations and our wish lists to smithereens. If we don’t get what we want, or to use therapeutic language, if others don’t meet our needs, maybe it is because our expectations are too selfish and too small. In his new book, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, Peter Gomes writes: Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned against cheap grace, and I warn now against cheap hope. Hope is not merely the optimistic view that somehow everything will turn out all right in the end if everyone just does as we do. Hope is the more rugged, the more muscular view that even if things don’t turn out all right and aren’t all right, we endure through and beyond the times that disappoint or threaten to destroy us.” How did things turn out for Mary? In the end, the son she loved was executed by the Roman Empire for sedition. How did things turn out for John the Baptist? Herod had his head cut off as a reward to a sexy dancer. Their expectations were not met, and in the end they couldn’t fix things for themselves, just as we can’t fix everything for ourselves. Real hope is more than that. Real hope is the truth of the kingdom, which is resurrection. Who is God, but the one who brings life out of death? Who is God but the one who has come to live among us, who has invaded this world with kingdom power? It is not nearly as neat or easy as strolling into the Lexus dealer, writing the really big check and driving away as if everything were fixed, the last item on our list checked off. We all know that’s not how life goes, and that our deepest hunger will never be filled with a thing. We are not defined by what we get but rather by what we give. We are not defined by what we expect but rather by what we accept, and what God gives us in turn is far more than anything we’d have the nerve or the sense to ask for. It is God’s own presence in this world.
Our former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold says it so well: Amen.
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05/16/2008 | ||||||
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The
Rev. Margaret Waters