The Birth of John the Baptist Foretold

 

Icon of the Deesis - St. Catherine's Monastery Sinai, 12th century

Our God reigns. Where does he reign? First of all, in the human heart. But it does not end there. It is more than that. Much more: The personal stories of the holy families of Old Testament and New begin personally, with old couples, young women, widows, children, but the implications are divine. 

Imagine Abraham and Sarah, wandering from Iraq across Syria into Palestine and down into Egypt then back into Palestine, all the time hoping the promise would be fulfilled, keeping the faith that someday she would have a child of her own, and they would settle down in the land of promise. 

Imagine their daughter-in-law Rebecca wanting a son, waiting for a child, hoping for that vindication after years of barrenness. And her daughter-in-law Rachel, in turn, in hopes of waiting. 

They each had hope fulfilled, holy promise kept. Isaac was born to Sarah, Jacob was born to Rebecca, and Rachel had her two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. They were not the last. 

Naomi returned from across the Jordan to her native village and her daughter-in-law bore a son so precious to her that people said, “Naomi had a son.” It was Jesse, whose descendant was David. (And from the house of David was to come the Messiah.)

Elkanah, a pious man, went to the temple to pray every year, and his wife Hannah went with him. But into her old age she too wanted and wept for lack of a son. In the temple she prayed and the priest discovered her. And God fulfilled her wish - her son was Samuel who became the prophet who anointed David. 

And then here at last, at the end of the old story and the beginning of the new, an elderly, pious, childless couple, faithful to the Lord, are blessed with a child. Like Hannah, Elizabeth feels vindicated: a weight has lifted. And her joy is more than personal: it is as if Israel had awaited vindication, a new hope, a promise of ages come true. 

The old stories, the old songs, the old promises: all these are brought into a new era.

They were scary times. The nation was divided into hostile camps. Compromisers, survivalists, puritanical rule-keepers, insurrectionists. Contention. Mistrust. Fear.

Sadducees were accommodationists, who cut a deal with Herod the Great, awarded rule of Palestine by Caesar Augustus the emperor across the sea. Essenes were separatists, who withdrew from society to keep themselves perfect and safe. Pharisees sought to redeem themselves through piety and purity, keeping the letter of the law and sometimes its spirit. Zealots were all for combat; they brought down the wrath of Rome on everybody’s head. 

And then there were those odd birds, the followers of -- hope. 

Hope. Built on an ancient promise. A series of minor miracles. Long stories long told. Of people who kept faith through dark times, who spoke gratitude when things changed. Whose children grew up with the knowledge of God, and found their way to faith in turn.

It was the beginning of the fulfillment of the promise of ages. It was not yet the new thing. It was at once both the last of the old and the first of the new. But it was not yet fully time. The new would come. And here was the son, and here the promise, here the proclamation. And hear the good news!

***

So we see that Zechariah and Elizabeth and John, like Abraham and Sarah and Isaac, like Rebecca and Isaac and Jacob, like Hannah and Elkanah and Samuel, saw the fulfillment of long held hopes and ancient expectations. And so the traditions and practices of Israel continued into their time. Of course there was a complication. The Romans.

Greg Woolf, historian of ancient Rome, refers to emperors as ‘embodied symbols’. Where the emperor was, the empire was too. But emperors could not be everywhere imperial presence was needed. In their stead, as Laura Hollengreen has taught me, the Romans put up, in their law courts, statues of empires, to represent the living symbol that was (as the saying goes) just a man. Statues then represented the presence of the emperor and the empire. 

We certainly did not want to see one in the Holy of Holies, or even in the sacred city. But they were there, in proxy, in the emperor’s good friend Herod, at the time of John’s birth.

The last of the prophets, the greatest of them, would herald not only the fulfillment of old promises, but the advent of a new era. And in this era the titles and claims of Messiah and of Son of David would come into clashing conflict with the “king of kings” and ‘son of God’ that the emperor styled himself to be.

We can learn from this as we reflect on our own times, when divided nations have factions that variously choose to accommodate or combat or influence or withdraw from the mixing of peoples and ideas and values that comes with a cosmopolitan society. We do not have the embodied presence of an emperor, or statues in his stead. What then do we have? What is the imperial hegemony, the dominant power structure, we swim in, like goldfish in a bowl?

Like the old fish in the joke, you may encounter young fish who do not even know they are swimming. 

But it’s there. Walter Wink wrote about the powers that be, the ‘principalities and powers’ of our time that William Stringfellow and James Wm. McClendon also warned against, who now inhabit our lives. 

We struggle against the unseen - or the unnamed - just as much as the Jews, Sadducees and Pharisees and Essenes and Zealots, did against the visible imperial foe of their time.

So John the Baptist when he came had a lot to do. He was the herald, the precursor. Prepare ye the way of the Lord! he cried. As the way through the desert welcomed their ancestors home from exile, as the dry land cleared the way on the exodus from Egypt, so now John would be the one to clear the way for the arrival of the long expected savior.

He would do it, as we know, through a symbol of his own: a cleansing immersion in the Jordan, the river that the people had crossed centuries before to reach the promised land.

Come out from the cities, into the wild country, come home to the places where God reigns. Not a threat or terror, but the place where God had led them before: as our service sometimes says, through the desert, past the parted waters, led day and night, to home.

That is what the herald of Messiah was calling them to do; he was calling the people again to be the people of God, and to get ready: the day was coming.

It will be a day of fear, of terror, and of obedience. But first and last it will be a day of joy.

The presence of the Lord! He is on the way: get ready. 

Prepare your hearts and make him room.

JRL+

The Birth of John the Baptist Foretold : Luke 1.5-25

Responsorial Canticle: Isaiah 40:1-5, 40:9; 60:1-3 (KJV)

Jeremiah 33:14-16

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Lutheran Church of the Foothills, Tucson. https://youtu.be/gF4Yeo-DFpQ

Martyrs and Kings

Every transition has an end, a middle, and a beginning. The Church Year ends with the feast of Christ the King, the Reign of Christ, a feast instituted by Pope Pius X during the rise of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s. The feast spread to many other church bodies; we celebrate it now as a reminder that God reigns, not us. The Church Year begins anew four Sundays before Christmas Day (whether it occurs on a Sunday or a week day).  

And so as we reach the end of the season that culminates in the feast of Christ the King, we find the story of Jesus about to loop around itself from the end back to the beginning: from the consummation of time to the birth of a baby. "Come thou long expected Jesus" we soon will sing. And he arrives twice! First he comes to us as the infant terrorizing Herod and again as the one before whose throne all will gather. Same person. 

Herod the Great, ruler of Palestine under Roman sponsorship -- who built the great buildings whose ruin Jesus prophesies -- got the message early and he did not like it. That earthbound despot wanted no rivals, especially legitimate ones. Some more recent sovereigns have had similar inclinations.  But God prevails. 

And that is good news that we hear today : Christ forewarned his followers of the difficulties ahead of them and yet reassured them of their ultimate vindication. And so it is when we face hard times, adversity, or mortality: we are not alone. That is why the one who comes is called "Emmanuel" - God with us.

This good news comforts the comfortable and the afflicted, the desperate and the sorrowful and the joyous alike. Since sometimes that can be all of us or any of us this is good news indeed.

That reminder that God reigns came home with force within a decade or two after the feast was first proclaimed. Among those who made it stick in hearts and minds was Kaj Munk, a Danish playwright and pastor, who wrote an impolitic play during the second World War. 

What was the point, and what was the problem, was that he uniquely compared Herod to Hitler. And this did not make the occupying army happy: indeed he was soon a martyr, murdered by the Gestapo, his body found in a ditch the morning after a midnight abduction. 

Call it an arrest or call it an abduction: it was the prelude to murder. He was not the last. Not certainly the last. There have been many martyrs and prophets since his death who have stood in front of evil and proclaimed God’s reign. 

Later in the 20th century it was Janani Luwum, Archbishop in Uganda, who confronted an evil regime with the power of love. He paid with his life. One night he was summoned to the presidential palace, and he stood right in front of his country’s ruler, Idi Amin, and refused to renounce the truth. For that he was shot and killed.

These are among the known martyrs; others are known but to God. But their work continues; their truth persists; and the culmination of this year and all years is still this: God reigns. That means that whatever claims on our allegiance are offered to us, none is as important as the integrity of the faith that God keeps with us. And that we, faltering and failing and forgiven, attempt to keep with God.  

How are we to follow this one who rejected earthly titles but is 'ruler of the kings of earth' and seated at the right hand of God? Challenging questions as we anticipate the arrival of the King of Kings.

 

The book of Daniel and the book of Revelation reveal visions of what God is doing by telling us what they see God doing in the future. In some ways the prophecies of Daniel seem like visionary accounts of what was already happening in his time while revealing what is really going on in the deep currents of time. 

For example, he speaks of four kingdoms that could be the successors to Alexander the Great. 

Indeed it was one of these, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, r. 175 BCE-164 BCE, who was the immediate enemy of Israel at the time of the book’s composition. 

Nevertheless it has implications beyond that moment, for Daniel prophesies not only what is happening, or has happened, or is going to happen, but what it means. What it means is that God reigns; not Pharaoh, not Nebuchadnezzer, not Cyrus, and certainly not Antiochus IV Epiphanes. 

 

What then is the nature of that reign? Jesus refuses the label of comparative kingship, as if he were to be a head of state alongside the clients of Rome or its rival powers. No, his kingdom is not of this world: it is a heavenly kingdom. But what is that to us? What does it mean for us? 

 

It means our loyalty lies beyond the immediate present press of events; our faith is in something transcendent, someone eternal. The Ancient of Days, in fact. The one who is and was and is to come. And in the Son of Man, who is likewise the first and the last, first born of the resurrection and witness of all that is coming to pass, has come to pass, and will come to pass.

 

And we are in their hands, ultimately; the hands of God. 

 

Our God reigns. Where does he reign? Most of all, in the human heart.

Yes, first of all in the human heart. But it does not end there: it is more than that.

When Jesus speaks of truth he speaks of what is solid, reliable, real. And it implies there is something to be done. Truth that is God made known in Jesus Christ is actionable knowledge. If you know Jesus, you act upon that knowledge.

And so when you know that truth, you have a way, a life, before you: a truth that will set you free.  Free to center your life on the abundant grace of God, revealed in Jesus Christ in its fullness. 

So as the psalm says there may be a night of sorrow but it will open into a new dawn of joy.

 

That is something people of faith have held onto, from that day to this, when that night looks black.

 

And that is the sunrise into glory that we anticipate on the feast day of Christ the King.

JRL+ 

Ancient of Days

 

William Blake, Ancient of Days

As I was watching,

        thrones were raised up.

    The ancient one took his seat.

        His clothes were white like snow;

        his hair was like a lamb’s wool.

        His throne was made of flame;

        its wheels were blazing fire.

Daniel 7:9, Common English Bible

The "Ancient of Days", from the visions of the book of Daniel, is one of the most famous images by the mystical poet and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827). His apocalyptic visions have been turned into song, notably the revolutionary poem, "Jerusalem", which somehow became a triumphant hymn. (A friend used to play the version from "Chariots of Fire" on loudspeakers while he mowed his lawn). But Blake was always revolutionary, and even more so was his master, and ours, Jesus. How are we to follow this one who rejected earthly titles but is 'ruler of the kings of earth' and seated at the right hand of God? Challenging questions as we anticipate the arrival of the King of Kings.

The book of Daniel and the book of Revelation reveal visions of what God is doing by telling us what they see God doing in the future. In some ways the prophecies of Daniel seem like visionary accounts of what was already happening in his time while revealing what is really going on in the deep currents of time. For example, he speaks of four kingdoms that could be the successors to Alexander the Great. Indeed it was one of these, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, r. 175 BCE-164 BCE, who was the immediate enemy of Israel at the time of the book’s composition. Nevertheless it has implications beyond that moment, for Daniel prophesies not only what is happening, or has happened, or is going to happen, but what it means. What it means is that God reigns; not Pharaoh, not Nebuchadnezzer, not Cyrus, and certainly not Antiochus IV Epiphanes. 

What then is the nature of that reign? Jesus refuses the label of comparative kingship, as if he were to be a head of state alongside the clients of Rome or its rival powers. No, his kingdom is not of this world: it is a heavenly kingdom. But what is that to us? What does it mean for us? 

It means our loyalty lies beyond the immediate present press of events; our faith is in something transcendent, someone eternal. The Ancient of Days, in fact. The one who is and was and is to come. And in the Son of Man, who is likewise the first and the last, first born of the resurrection and witness of all that is coming to pass, has come to pass, and will come to pass.

And we are in their hands, ultimately; the hands of God. 

So as the psalm says there may be a night of sorrow but it will open into a new dawn of joy.

That is something people of faith have held onto, from that day to this, when that night looks black.

And that is the sunrise into glory that we anticipate on the feast day of Christ the King.

Our God reigns. Where does he reign? Most of all, in the human heart.

Christ the King

Keeping the Faith: Twentieth Century Martyrs

Every transition has an end, a middle, and a beginning. The Church Year ends with the feast of Christ the King, the Reign of Christ, a feast instituted by Pope Pius X during the rise of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s. The feast spread to many other church bodies; we celebrate it now as a reminder that God reigns, not us. (The Church Year begins anew four Sundays before Christmas Day (whether it occurs on a Sunday or a week day).  And so as we approach the end of the season that culminates in the feast of Christ the King, we find the story of Jesus about to loop around itself from the end back to the beginning: from the consummation of time to the birth of a baby. "Come thou long expected Jesus" we soon will sing. And he arrives twice! First he comes to us as the infant terrorizing Herod and again as the one before whose throne all will gather. Same person. Herod the Great, ruler of Palestine under Roman sponsorship -- who built the great buildings whose ruin Jesus prophesies -- got the message early and he did not like it. That earthbound despot wanted no rivals, especially legitimate ones. Some more recent sovereigns have had similar inclinations. But God prevails. And that is part of the good news that we hear today : Christ forewarns his followers of the difficulties ahead of them and yet reassures them of their ultimate vindication. And so it is when we face hard times, adversity, or mortality: we are not alone. That is why the one who comes is called "Emmanuel" - God with us.

This good news comforts the comfortable and the afflicted, the desperate and the sorrowful and the joyous alike. Since sometimes that can be all of us or any of us this is good news indeed.

That reminder that God reigns came home with force within a decade or two after the feast was first proclaimed. Among those who made it stick in hearts and minds was Kaj Munk, a Danish playwright and pastor, who wrote an impolitic play during the second World War. What was the point, and what was the problem, was that he uniquely compared Herod to Hitler. And this did not make the occupying army happy: indeed he was soon a martyr, murdered by the Gestapo, his body found in a ditch the morning after a midnight abduction. 

Call it an arrest or call it an abduction: it was the prelude to murder. He was not the last. Not certainly the last. There have been many martyrs and prophets since his death who have stood in front of evil and proclaimed God’s reign. Later in the 20th century it was Janani Luwum, Archbishop in Uganda, who confronted an evil regime with the power of love. He paid with his life. One night he was summoned to the presidential palace, and he stood right in front of his country’s ruler, Idi Amin, and refused to renounce the truth. For that he was shot and killed.

These are among the known martyrs; others are known but to God. But their work continues; their truth persists; and the culmination of this year and all years is still this: God reigns. That means that whatever claims on our allegiance are offered to us, none is as important as the integrity of the faith that God keeps with us. And that we, faltering and failing and forgiven, attempt to keep with God. [JRL+ 2021 11/15]

https://www.episcopalcommonprayer.org/uploads/1/2/3/0/123026473/lesser_feasts_and_fasts_2006.pdf

https://www.anglicannews.org/news/2016/02/ugandans-urged-to-pray-for-elections-on-archbishop-janani-luwum-day.aspx

An earlier version of this essay was published as "God keeps faith with us" in the Arizona Daily Star in the Keeping the Faith feature of the Home + Life section, November 28th 2021 page E3.

buildings & grounds

 

“Do you see these great buildings?”

And now a word from our building committee…

Do you see these great buildings?

Well, guess what…

It’s a heck of a time to bring up such things. This is Stewardship Season, after all. So it’s a good thing it is also Gratitude Season. 

Traditionally this time of year is called, with some derision, the October Ask-a-thon. That is because once a year congregations plan their budgets and how to meet them. And so, modeling on the old sobriety pledge, many congregations ask for a simple commitment, based on faith, that will guide their financial movements during the next year. 

This causes some anxiety. After all, who knows what is going to happen? And who knows, really, if they will be able to meet any promise they make ahead of time?

Piled on top of that are the real worries that gather. Personal tragedies, uncertainties, infirmities. Social and public problems. Extreme weather events that make the inconvenient truth of climate change all too real. It is scary. 

And there is frustration. But we are not the first to face these fears. The people of God have experienced fear before.

Anticipations and predictions of the end of all things are not new. 

For the people huddled around the reassuring, well somewhat reassuring, figure of Jesus, there was personal impoverishment, the oppression of an occupation under the Roman Empire, and the frequent rumors of revolutionary change.

Since their time, there have been times of plague and times of war. Empires rose and fell. Strange new places have become home. And familiar places have been transformed.

Through all these times there has been a thread of hope. We sing the songs of ancient times, brought forward into the present, because they remind us of things that last, that remain true.

We pray. We sing. We celebrate the Eucharist, we baptize the new to faith and welcome the stranger. We tell the story of love.

We can see beyond our anxiety and predictions of destruction to something that lasts. And that is God’s faithfulness.

 

“My heart exults; my strength is exalted in my God;” even, “my mouth derides my enemies”, all these are words of praise and even joy from Hannah which we hear echoed from Mary in the Magnificat when she sings “my soul magnifies the Lord”. 

Hannah says “those were full now scrounge for bread” and Mary says “the rich he sends empty away”--  these are words of joyous praise for that they are certainly words of assurance of God’s faithfulness and vindication.

The letter to the Hebrews assures us that having been forgiven and accepted by God we can approach his throne -- and we can approach life -- with confidence: for he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. He is faithful and our hope is sure.

And so we pass from gratitude to confidence in knowing that the promise of the one in whom we put our trust is sure: he is faithful and this gives us the attitude, the fortitude, the ---,  to face the new possibilities that come with troubled times. He is faithful: confidence, gratitude, Steadfast hope.

Martin Luther put his finger on something we do well to remember today. We do not give out of fear or obligation, we do not obey in order to be safe: we are saved. That single offering by Christ has once for all made our hopes sure and our faith complete.

We respond to God’s grace with gratitude and in gratitude we respond with our lives, our hearts, all we have to offer; and this is what it means to say all things come from God and of his own I have given him. For he is the source of all being and from him is the satisfaction of our hearts: all we do in gratitude is from the eternal words spoken for all. “You are my beloved child.”

When David dedicated the site of the temple he offered the first fruits of the harvest in thanksgiving. Even of the building materials he brought to the site he said “all this abundance we have provided for a house for your holy name comes from you and is all your own”. In that new confidence in the love of God the gifts, the faith in the Lord, and obedience of a faithful servant, are all offerings given freely and joyfully.

Over and over again we hear in the Hebrew Scriptures, including the Song of Hannah that was our response to the first reading today, of God’s steadfastness. We hear of the grace of God and love of God that last forever. And we hear also of how the people of God have responded with gratitude and love. 

And we hear of how God has vindicated the downfallen, protected the poor, and liberated the oppressed. And the people of God have been the hands of hope that have fashioned the future.

In other words (and council, cover your ears) what really lasts is not our structures, or even our achievements, but the love of God and our love for God and of each other and all of creation.

But don’t shred that pledge card yet!

It still has a purpose.

For the living church that is built is built out of our hearts, our hands, and our response of gratitude for all that God is accomplishing – including in us and through us … and despite us.

Christ’s work in us is not on some ethereal, ideal, unreal plane, but is accomplished here and now, where we can see it.

Indeed, we recall the apostle who said, “I speak to you of what I have seen and heard and held in my arms.”

“We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—” (1 Jn 1.1)

God’s love is physical – manifest – at work in the world. That this world is made by God and saved by God and charged with the power of God is what Incarnation is all about.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (Jn 3.16)

Therefore we acknowledge that all is gift: every day is a gift, every breath, even all we accomplish, comes as a gift from God and so we pray, along with the ancient servant of God, “…all things come of thee, and of thine own have we given thee.” (1 Ch 29:14b)

That familiar prayer of offering comes from the first book of Chronicles, from the story of how David, at the end of his long and eventful life, came within an inch of his dream, to build a house for God, and indeed laid the foundation for what his son Solomon would accomplish. The building of the first Temple, the magnificent structure and opulent furnishings the Torah describes.

That Temple was destroyed, the people it sheltered scattered and dispersed among the nations surrounding them. Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and forgotten lands beyond, became the new homes of a generation of pilgrims, of refugees that would never see what they had left behind. 

Instead their children and grandchildren who returned found a lot of work to be done, to reclaim what they could of what had been lost, and to build a shallow replica of what had gone before.

Among them also were those who did the more glorious work of reclaiming the spiritual heritage, bringing back with them solid achievements of preserving past teachings and developing new understanding of the living truth of the love of God for humankind.

And the Temple that was eventually built was grand indeed, great indeed, and its builders were put to the work by a king himself called Great, Herod, whose monuments still rear above the inhabitants of Palestine and Israel. His tomb, his retreat at Masada, the Temple remnant we now call the Western Wall. 

When Jesus asked, “Do you see these great buildings?” it was those proud structures he was talking about. 

What was happening, on the surface, was an occupation, an oppression, a time of turmoil, disturbance, and woe. But what was really going on, deep in the hidden purposes of God, was the building of a new Temple, a new house of God, that is his people.

Those are the living stones: the people to whom Jesus preached and ministered and brought salvation. And it is the building up of that living Temple, not made by hands, to which we are called. 

Direct our hearts to you O God:

For you are the source of all being, eternal word and Holy Spirit. Amen.

November 14th 2021

BProper28(33) 

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp28_RCL.html

Daniel 12:1-3

1 Samuel 2:1-10

Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25

Mark 13:1-8