Christmas Eve 2020

Christmas Eve 2020 A letter to Vanessa, Lillian, and Becky upon the occasion of your baptism. Dear Vanessa, Lillian, and Becky, Today, after a really long wait, you are going to be baptized into the body of Christ in this, your faith community. This is not how any of us expected it to be when we first planned your baptism. It was supposed to happen months ago at Easter. It was supposed to be inside the church surrounded by those most important to you with the sweet fragrance of Easter lilies wafting around you. It was supposed to be different. No other year has taught us how our faith must grow and change in the face of the unexpected, the disappointing, the difficult. We all have known some dark times this year, and you girls are no different in that. We all continue to learn that things don’t always work out the way we think they are supposed to. But even in the midst of darkness, difficulty, uncertainty, God does not abandon us. Today/tonight, we gather to remember the ancient truth and wisdom of Emmanual—which means God with us. We remember that God chose to be born into this world as a testament to God’s love for us and that Jesus, God with us, proves that God does not abandon us, even when things seem their darkest. Today, you are being baptized into that God who is with us, “a long-sought withness for a world without.” i You have, ever since your creation, been claimed as God’s beloved and “marked as Christ’s own forever.” In and through your baptism today, you are saying “yes” to your belovedness and you are promising to live your life as one of God’s beloved; you are promising to set your life and to follow the path of faith as one who lives as a part of “God with us.” And we do this with you as we renew our own baptismal vows. It is a joyfully daunting task, this year more than ever. And the good news is that no matter how dark or difficult the way may be, you are not alone. God is with us. We are all in this together. Today/tonight, we remember that the church is so much more than a building. We, the church, are the people for whom God is with us. And when we the church are at our very best, we take turns lighting the way in the dark for each other; we take turns holding up the light of Christ for one another when one or many of us feel too weary or heart-broken or disappointed to go on. We take turns carrying each other through the seasons of darkness and doubt and disbelief. Because that is the truth of this night: that God is with us and that God’s love is stronger than anything. God’s love is stronger than the darkness of this world. God’s love is stronger than plague or pestilence. God’s love is stronger than our daily disappointments or our loneliness. God’s love is stronger than the worst things we can do to each other. God is with us and the light of God’s love that shines forth in the person of Jesus Christ is stronger than absolutely anything we may have to face in this life. Even death. And so, on this day of your baptism which is also the eve of the birth of God with us, may you each be given some of the gifts of those who first knew and experienced God with us on this night so many years ago. May the gift of the bold courage of Mary be yours to light your path. May the gift of the quiet faithfulness of Joseph be yours to steady your heart. May the clear vision of the angels be yours, along with their song of joy. And may you also know the shepherds willingness to be dazzled by a light that will always shine for you, even in the darkest of nights. God is with us. And we are with you. Now and always. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+ i. This line is from the poet Malcolm Guite’s poem “O Emmanuel”

4th Sunday of Advent Year B

The 4th Sunday of Advent Year B December 20, 2020 This week, I learned of a spiritual construct that I’ve never heard of before. I am now calling it Holy Indifference. I was listening to a podcast with a spiritual director and writer named Ruth Haley Barton, and she was talking about this spiritual gift of indifference and the importance of indifference in personal and communal discernment and in accepting God’s will for your life. But here’s the thing. Often when we talk about indifference, we mean apathy; not being too hot or cold about particular issues. Indifference often has the suggestion of a coldness or an uncaring. But Ruth Haley Barton’s definition of indifference is not apathy; it’s actually very different. She says, “In the language of spiritual formation [this holy indifference] speaks to being indifferent [or not attached] to anything but the will of God, so it means that we’re indifferent [or not attached] to matters of our own comfort or safety; we’re not thinking so much about ego gratification; we’re giving up appearances. We’re indifferent to that. We’re indifferent [or not attached] to our own pleasure, and we’re even indifferent [or not attached] to what our own personal preferences are, and what it is we think we want. It is a state of wide-openness to God in which we are free from undue attachment to outcomes, and we have the capacity to relinquish anything that might keep us from choosing for God and God’s will and God’s loving plan. Outside of Jesus himself, Mary is the clearest expression of this spiritual indifference.”i So, let’s look at our readings for today because they give us two different glimpses, one of someone who is not practicing holy indifference and one who is. First, we have King David in our Old Testament reading for today. David has this great idea that now that he is established as king in Israel, he is going to build a house for the Lord. He gets buy in for his plan from the prophet Nathan, but then God lets them know God’s indifference to this plan in a lovely, playful way. “Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?" David’s plan is somewhat self-serving (but cloaked in piety, which is a temptation we all face) because if he builds God a house, then that will not only confer some status on the king who houses the Lord, but it also means that David can always know exactly where to find God when David gets in a pinch. But God reminds David that up until this point, God has been at large, loose and wild and free, working in the world. God does not want to inhabit a temple or a building but rather God wants to inhabit a people. And we get this, don’t we? We who have had to struggle with not being able to come into this space, this building, where we are accustomed to connecting with God. But this is an important reminder for all of us that God is not and will not be bound to this building or any building. One of my colleagues was talking about this and about how she has grown and changed in her faith over the years. “For many years,” she said, “the church and the liturgy were the container for my faith. It was like going to the gym. I would go to the gym to work out. I would go to church to pray and to work on my faith.” Now, she quotes another writer who says that “faith is in the mutable and messy processes of our lives.”ii My friend is learning to look for God in the change, in the mess of her life, and that has shaped her faith in ways she could not have imagined before. And then there’s Mary. She offers the model of holy indifference for us in her response to the angel’s perplexing news: “let it be unto me according to your word.” In that one prayer of indifference, Mary shows that she is willing to embrace the invitation of God, even though it is going to completely blow up the plans that she and her parents have for her life—marriage to a good man who will take care of her. In embracing God’s invitation, in living into that holy indifference, Mary sacrifices her own vision of her life and gives it up with complete trust of God and God’s work in the world. In and through her indifference, she puts herself completely at God’s mercy, and she seems completely composed about that. One of my other friends talked about how normally this week, she would be preparing her guest room for her mom to come and stay. But because her mom isn’t traveling this year, her guestroom is full of so many things: her husband’s guitars, all of her supplies for her knitting, so many other aspects of the detritus of their lives that have accumulated in that room over the year. She noticed that our collect for the day has us praying that God will purify our consciences by God’s daily visitation so that when Christ comes, he may find in us “a mansion prepared for himself…” and my friend confessed that she would most frequently maybe invite Christ into the cluttered guest room of her heart to stay when it was convenient but that she didn’t think that she had made the room of a spacious and lovely mansion for him where he could stay always. And I resonate with that, too. For me, I think it is because I am nowhere near where Mary was. Most of the time, I do not practice holy indifference. I struggle to hand my life over to God and to relinquish my attachment to my preferences, my comfort, my ego, and what I think I want. But fortunately, Ruth Haley Barton reminded me in her podcast that coming to indifference isn’t like flipping a switch. There is a process to coming to indifference to anything but the will of God, and we are not alone in that process; for Mary it was the angel who accompanied her; for us it is the Holy Spirit and, I would say, the communion of the saints and all believers—the Church that isn’t the building. The first step in this process is to pray the prayer for indifference; this means acknowledging our attachments, our preferences, our commitment to keeping up appearances and our egos and asking God to free us from all that. It has been eye opening for me this week to realize that I really need to do that work around Christmas and what that experience is going to be and feel like for us this year. So, your invitation this week is to join me in praying the prayer for holy indifference, for an openness to God’s will and the willingness to embrace God’s invitation. If you find that you have attained indifference at some point, then your prayer may shift to a prayer of indifference: “let it be unto me according to your word.” If you are struggling with the connection of your faith with this building or in gathering together, then I invite you to not only pray for holy indifference but also to begin looking for God who will never be contained to this building but who is found out loose and wild and at work in the world and in the “mutable and messy process of our lives.” i. From the podcast Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership. The Fourth Sunday of Advent Year B ii. Wiman, Christian. My Bright Abyss: Meditations on a Modern Believer.

The Third Sunday of Advent Year B

Third Sunday of Advent-Year B December 13, 2020 Last week, I read an opinion article that was titled, “What if instead of calling people out, we called them in?”. This article talks about a college class that is being taught at Smith College by a woman named Professor Loretta J. Ross. It highlights the cultural phenomenon of “calling out”: “the act of publicly shaming another person for behavior deemed unacceptable”. This behavior is frequently seen on social media, and Professor Ross says that the call out culture is toxic because it alienates people and makes them fearful of speaking up. She also thinks that call-out culture has taken conversations that could have once been learning opportunities and turned them into mud wrestling on message boards, YouTube comments, and Twitter… In her class, Professor Ross tells her students, “I think [calling out] is also related to something I just discovered called doom scrolling…I think we actually sabotage our own happiness with this unrestrained anger. And I have to honestly ask: Why are you making choices to make the world crueler than it needs to be…?” “The antidote to that outrage cycle, Professor Ross believes, is “calling in.” Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect. ‘It’s a call out done with love,” she said. That may mean simply sending someone a private message, or even ringing them on the telephone (!) to discuss the matter, or simply taking a breath before commenting, screen-shotting or demanding one “do better” without explaining how.” i. After I read the article, I realized that it doesn’t really explain further how to do this “calling in” that Professor Ross is referring to (and perhaps that is intentional because the article does say that she has a book on this subject forthcoming). But as I’ve been pondering it over the last couple of weeks, I have realized that our scriptures for this week actually give us some indication of what not to do and what to do. In our gospel passage from John’s gospel today, we see John the Baptist coming on to the scene, but he is not our typical wild-eyed, angry John the Baptist. He is someone who is clear in his calling: one who has come “to testify to the light.” And where, in other gospels, John the Baptist is the one who is usually doing the “calling out” of the religious authorities (“You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come!”), in John’s gospel, it is the religious authorities who are actually “calling out” John the Baptist; just listen to the questions they ask him and how they ask them: “Who are you?” He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said. Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” In our Isaiah passage, we see the children of Israel returning home to the promised land after being in exile for many years. There are three voices in this passage: the voice of the prophet, the Divine voice, and the voice of Zion, who is being restored. In all three of these voices, we see a calling in of the people back to their special relationship with Yahweh, a promise of the restoration of grace and good things in the midst of hardship and suffering. And there is an added layer of significance in this Isaiah passage for today; Jesus’s first public act of ministry in Luke’s gospel, after coming off his baptism and wilderness temptations, is to go to the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. He is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to this portion from today and reads: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me; to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bring release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” Then he rolls up the scroll, sits down, and says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” It is both the ultimate calling out of those who are in power and the ultimate calling in, inviting everyone into the reign of God’s kingdom that is being brought to fulfillment in and through the person of Jesus. So, what does all that have to do with us? What if instead of calling people out, we called them in? When I am being truthful, I am much more like the religious authorities calling out John the Baptist than I am like John, unwavering in my commitment to testifying to the light. I am much more likely to “doom scroll” and to become indignant over what I see on the news or on social media than I am to invite someone into a conversation that challenges us both to go deeper, to learn more, to practice kindness and empathy. I’m much more ready to assume the worst about someone than to assume the best, and to give them the chance to live into their better selves. So my invitation to myself (and to anyone else who resonates with this) for this week is to commit to being a witness to the light; to look for ways to seek out the light of Christ who has come to draw the whole world to himself in each and every person I come into contact with—stranger and friend and family member. And to be like the John the Baptist, unwavering in my commitment to testify to the light. I. What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)