ADVENT 3B: Hallowed Be

Lectionary Passage:  1 Thessalonians 5: 16-19 (20-24)
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit.

How do you pray without ceasing?  I mean, OK, now, let's pray.  We pray and we pray.  Things are going OK.  We're praying along.  Wait, who's phone is that?  Hold on, it's mine.  Stop praying.  Answer the phone.  OK, now, I need to pick up the house a bit.  And I need to write the blog for tomorrow.  And tomorrow is trash day.  And Maynard needs his dinner. And, to be honest, I think I do too.  Pray without ceasing?  Really?  How do you fit that in?  And, sadly, the Spirit is quenched.

Paul was not laying down a rule for prayer.  Paul never envisioned us living body-bent and knee-bowed 24/7.  After all, there is WAY too much work to do.  We've got some Kingdom-building to accomplish, don't we?  No, Paul was not calling us to a life spent in prayer; He was calling us to a prayerful life, a life that is sacred, hallowed, a life lived in the unquenchable Spirit of God.  It's not about logging prayer hours.  Rather, it's about perspective, about seeing everything that is your life as hallowed and holy, as of God, as prayer.  Olga Savin says that “[the Scriptures] tell us that ceaseless prayer in pursuit of God and communion with [God] is not simply life’s meaning or goal, the one thing worth living for, but it is life itself.”  And a life lived the way it is called to be lived is the very will of God.  It is prayer.

And so, pray without ceasing.  When you answer the phone, cherish the family member or the friend or the co-worker who has called you.  In fact, give thanks for the person on the other end who inadvertantly dialed the wrong number.  After all, they, too, are your brother or sister.  God has called us to love one another.  And as you clean and straighten, look around you.  Your dwelling is more than shelter.  It is an expression of you.  Give thanks for the you that God has made.  And then do what God has called you to do.  Use your talents.  Give thanks for them.  They were given to you by God to use in the building of God's Kingdom.  And that big black lab that wants his dinner?  Personally, I thank God everyday for bringing us together.  How did I find a companion like this on the internet?  He needed me; I needed him.  Isn't that why Creation exists?  Then sit back and taste dinner.  Taste that which has been lovingly grown by the Divine.  And give thanks.  Every household task, everything thing you do, do as a prayer.  And all of those never-ending interruptions?  Think of them as holy.  (After all, think about it--when did God show up as planned?)  Make everything you do an offering to the Divine.  Let everything you have and everything you are be a preparation for God's coming.  Embrace it.  Rejoice in it.  Give thanks.

In this season of waiting for the coming of God, pray without ceasing.  In other words, live your life to the fullest and the best.  Offer it to God.  And rejoice in what you have--companionship, beauty, work, love.  G.K. Chesterton exhorted us to “let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” I love that.  You know, God is coming. It will happen. But don’t forget that God is here. Rejoice! And live your life waiting and rejoicing, rejoicing and waiting.  And, most of all, love.  That is how you pray without ceasing.
 
In this season of Advent, give yourself the gift of seeing your life as prayer, of living in a love affair with God.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

ADVENT 2B: As If



The Burning Bush, Nicholas Froment, ca. 1476

ADVENT 2B:  Lectionary:  2 Peter 3: (8-10) 11-15a
Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness,waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish;and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.

God will come when God will come.  We've heard that over and over. But, granted, this life of faith is difficult.  How do you keep holding on to a hope when you often see no progress at all?  How can we continue to be forced to wait for whatever it is for which we're waiting?  Because, as the passage says, we are promised a new heaven and a new earth.  We are promised that all of Creation will be recreated.  We are promised that, once and for all, righteousness will have a home.  Righteousness, then, will be the norm.  Righteousness will be an everyday thing.

And in this Season of Advent, we learn to wait.  Good things cannot be rushed.  The plan for God's Kingdom was not made hastily and it cannot be just thrown together because we are getting a bit impatient with the whole ordeal.  So, what do we do in the meantime?  We live as if it's here.  We live righteousness.  We give it a home.  The Holy and the Sacred is not unattainable.  In fact, if we just open our eyes, it is spilling into our lives even as we speak.  God does not sit back and watch us squirm and strain until all is said and done.  Rather, God gives us glimpse after glimpse and incarnation after incarnation and waits with infinite patience for us to respond. Look around...there are more burning bushes and parted seas than we can ever possibly imagine.  As the writer of the Epistle passage that we read this week maintains, it is that Holy Patience, that Waiting God in which we find our salvation.  And so if we live as if the Holy and the Sacred has completely filled our lives, righteousness will indeed have a home and we will no longer be waiting for salvation.

In this season of Advent, give yourself the gift of living as if righteousness and peace and the fullness of God is all you know.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

 

Unless A Grain of Wheat Dies

Lectionary Text:  John 12: 20-36
Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.  “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?” Jesus said to them, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.” After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.

The tide has begun to turn.   The palm branches and spilled perfume have turned to talk about death and we wonder how long we can take it.  We live in a world that tries it best to avoid death, either literally or figuratively.  We instead work to be in total control of our lives and of what happens to us.  And so we push death away.  But here Jesus is saying that it is death the brings life, that relinquinshing control and letting go allows the fruit to grow and prosper.  That is totally backwards from what we have figured out our lives should be.  So what, then, does this all mean?

This passage never really made sense to me until I discovered that wheat is a caryopsis.  This means that the single seed of this plant remains joined with the ovary wall.  Together, they form the grain.  In other words, the seed does not remain a seed but rather dies to self and becomes the grain, a true metamorphosis into new life.  In essence, death and life are interconnected, indeed dependent one upon the other.  So, Jesus was using this as a metaphor for what would happen to him and, ultimately, what would happen to us.  Our death and our life are interconnected.  In this life, we find death.  And then in death, we find new life.  Abraham Heschel said that "eternal life does not grow away from us; it is planted within us growing beyond us." (Sabbath, p. 74)  So, our life, our eternal life has already begun.  It is already part of us.

So, why is this still difficult for us?   I think that it is because when we start talking about death and crosses and dying to self, we have to face our own self in order to do that.  No longer can we be satisfied with a Sunday-only sort of faith.  No longer can we just talk about it.  Dying to self calls for real change, real reflection.  And perhaps change is more painful than death itself.  The cross is the place where our humanity meets the Divine head-on.  There is no holding back.  There is no hiding away.  There is no waiting for a better time.

But we still want some sort of proof.  We still want to see Jesus.  I'm pretty sure that the reason that we don't see it has more to do with us than with Jesus.  I have many times been on a bus racing across some country with a group of people trying to see as much as I could see--the Highlands of Scotland, the Alps of Austria, the rolling lands north of Moscow, Russia, or the wilderness desert around the Dead Sea.  Well, you get the idea.  You have your own images.  Oftentimes, rather than just sitting and enjoying the whole panoramic view, I have attempted to take pictures of it.  Well you know that it is a near-fact that if you try to snap a picture from a bus of a panoramic view, you will instead get a tree, or a highway sign, or, my favorite, the side of another bus.  It is not because the picture is not there; it is because you are moving too fast to see the whole thing.  When you move too fast, you don't have enough space through which to encounter God, through which to see Jesus.



Jewish Cemetery near the
Old City of Jerusalem

 Holy Week provides space, space enough to see the Cross, space enough to see the life that comes from death, space enough to let go, space enough to breathe in what God has given us.  But this will not happen unless we slow down enough to let go of that to which we hold so tightly, let go of those things that you think you cannot live without, let go of those things that you are convinced are necessary for life.  Because you know what?  They're really not.  Life cannot be unless a grain of what dies. 

Our path has taken us through the city and we are getting nearer and nearer to the Cross.  God never promised that we would not experience loss or pain or grief.  They are part of our human existence.  But at the Cross, there is enough space for the human to encounter the Divine.  At the Cross, a very human death becomes new life as the Divine spills onto the seed of our humanity and becomes life.  At the Cross, we will see Jesus.

And then the tide begins to turn

And talk of death ensues

But not just death for death’s dark sake

But death so life won’t lose.

We hear tales of wheat that when it dies

Leaves no seed behind

For the seed itself has died away

To itself bear fruit sublime

So, in this holiest of weeks, let go of that to which you hold, to that thing that you do not think you can live without.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli