A House That Will Last

Second Day of Advent: Monday, December 4, 2023

2 Peter 1:1-11

Have you ever tried to build a house? Most of us haven’t, even though we spend our days in houses of one kind or another. Over my lifetime I’ve resided in small apartments, cottages, a trailer, dormitories, duplexes, ranches, and venerable two-story edifices. Their inner bones have been encased in wood, brick, aluminum and vinyl. A few I once called home no longer exist, or now appear tired or out of fashion. When Dorothy Gale discovered that “there’s no place like home,” she had more in mind than properties and structures that are as mortal as their builders.

Reading the first chapter of the epistle named 2 Peter, I get a sense that the one who penned these words knew something about building houses. Whether its author was the disciple Jesus called “Rock” or an anonymous 1st Century Christian, he counseled his readers to choose well what they incorporated in the building of the spiritual house in which they chose to dwell. Imploring them to reject materials that were corrupted by the world, he drew up for them a punch list of the necessary supplies, i.e., spiritual attributes, he believed would work together to fashion a life reflecting the nature and presence of God.

I’m not sure the writer of 2 Peter had a hierarchical order in mind when he listed the qualities he urges his readers to adopt and witness. But if he did, the eight-level sequence of attributes is worth pondering. Starting with a foundation of faith, which I think is best understood as trust—trust in God—he adds goodness, both as an ideal of pure intention and a character trait that is harder to define than it is to discern in others. Next comes knowledge, tempered by self-control. Godliness follows, leading, as it must, to mutual affection or, in some translations, brotherly love (philia in Greek). Finally the capstone to his well-constructed life: love, in this case a very specific brand of love most often referred to in the New Testament as agape. More enduring than the sensuality of eros, as devoted yet more committed than the philia we feel for comrades in arms and social organizations, agape is best understood as the durable, long-suffering and unbreakable bond that we know and depend upon in a family, where blood really is thicker than water, and agape holds more staying power than like’s fleeting infatuations. Lives so fashioned get a foretaste of the eternal love of God, which, as Paul beautifully put it, bears, believes, hopes and endures all things.

This Advent word invites us to be intentional in how we build our lives: one thought, one word, one action at a time. For it is in that house, ultimately, where we will discover, and ensure, life eternal with God.

May each of these Advent days find us, with patient determination, building our lives on that foundation of faith from which God’s spiritual gifts may grow and flourish. Amen.

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A doubt-full faith

Third Day of Advent: Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Matthew 21:12-22

If you devote time each day to a thoughtful reading of the scriptures, you are likely to come away with at least three impressions. First, God’s voice seems to be speaking directly to you in story, verse, or turn of phrase, striking a resonant chord with your soul’s yearnings. Or, none of these texts relates to you, making you wonder if they are just too distant in time and circumstance, language and custom to reach where you are living today. Or, you think you understand what you’re reading—you just don’t get it or agree with it. While many Christians like to profess that they always come away with the first of these impressions, many of us find the second or even the third closer to our experience than we might want to admit out loud.

I guess that is why Matthew 21 is a stumbling block for me, and I suspect, for many others. “All you have to do is believe…” “If you just have enough faith…” Since my teenage years I wanted to believe this in all of its literalness, urging me to pray for the miraculous healing or invasion of the supernatural to alter what was about to happen or undo what had already occurred. And at times I have felt a personal inadequacy in a faith that could neither move mountains nor cure the sick. So upon hearing these words that Matthew attributes to Jesus, my shoulders sag and my head shakes in the disappointment of my own spiritual deficiency.

But if faith is really grounded in our trust in the goodness and power of God, then it seems to me an act, not of faith, but of manipulation whenever we assume that we can summon powers from on high on the strength of our belief that it will come true. Such incredible feats may be commonplace among the wizards and witches of Hogwart’s Academy or on stages where magicians appear to defy gravity or make objects vanish and materialize before our very eyes. Coming from Jesus the challenge to our faith appears well beyond what most of us, perhaps any of us, could ever hope to attain or accomplish.

It may be more than coincidence that Advent falls squarely on the three weeks in which America’s hopes for wish fulfillment reach a crescendo. All of us, it seems, become unabashed believers. For children it is in Santa’s beneficence. For retail businesses and Hollywood studios it is in holiday spending. Belief is never stronger among those whose lives depend on restaurant traffic, liquor, candy and greeting card sales. Mountains of merchandise are moved, and faith in humanity’s goodness is rekindled, or so we tell ourselves each year.

On his approach to Jerusalem on that most fateful week of his life, Jesus’ faith was certainly put to the test. And at every turn his eyes reminded him, in a barren fig tree, a betrayer’s kiss and a friend’s denial, that doubt is not the absence of faith or enemy of faith. It is the seedbed from which our belief turns from self to God, from magical incantation to the soul’s deepest sigh, “not my will, but Thine, be done.”

Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief. Amen

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Measuring our days

Fourth Day of Advent: Wednesday, December 6, 2023

2 Peter 3:1-10

“…with the Lord one day is like a thousand years.” Have you ever taken much time to think about this well-known and oft-quoted passage? It is somewhat humbling, considering the relatively few solar migrations we make over a lifetime when compared to all the revolutions planet earth has made around the sun. From God’s eternal perspective, our existence is little more than a nanosecond’s tick of the cosmic clock. The writer of Peter’s second letter seemed to be offering that sobering assessment of time, God’s time, in order to quell the impatience of those 1st Century Christians who wondered when God would finish the Divine judgment that was prepared for, and predicted by, Jesus. In our reading of this Advent lectionary text today, we may be inclined to wonder along with them. When? How much longer?

Depending on which prophetic texts we hang our hats, or which ones we try to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle holding the secret to God’s timetable, we may be inclined to think we are living in “end times.” Or we may put more stock in Jesus’ cautionary words directed at those looking for signs of God’s final act in history. “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Mt. 24:36). Recalling that two millennia of believers, in every era and age of Church history, have been expectantly waiting for the final curtain to fall—and all have been wrong in their calculations—it seems the wisest course for us is to stop trying to second-guess God in matters well beyond our ability to predict or grasp. Our best course is, in the words of an old gospel song, to “trust and obey”, especially if obedience is reckoned as living a life of decency, compassion, truthfulness, and love of neighbor as much as self.

During this Advent season our lectionary will invite us to read many of those texts first written by prophets and seers awaiting God’s decisive intervention on behalf of the people of Israel. But we must keep in mind that we can only read and understand them from our vantage point of nearly 2,000 years after they were first scribed. Applying the time formula of 2 Peter, that means we are reading this text some two days after it was written, or so it might seem if we take it literally. Perhaps the intent of Advent, then, is not to provoke us into deeper speculations about the times and seasons of God’s actions which lie sometime in the future. Rather we are to arouse our minds and awaken our hearts to the person and meaning of God’s revelation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the culmination of our three weeks of spiritual anticipation on Christmas Day. For every day in which we find room in our hearts and lives for Emmanuel, for God truly “with us”, is, in fact, the Day of the Lord.

O God, teach us to measure our days, counting each of them as both gift and blessing. For yesterday, like tomorrow, is beyond our ability to fully understand or change. Only on this day, the day that the Lord has made, can we live and love fully. Amen.

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In the Waiting Room

Fifth Day of Advent: Thursday, December 7, 2023

Psalm 62

There is something to be said for waiting. While it may not be an experience those in the younger generations have known as often or with as much impatience as those who have waited for letters from distant hands, or stood in lines waiting for bread or job interviews, or sat in cars waiting to pump gas. Even the thought of waiting a few months for an acceptance letter from college is more than most parents or high schoolers can bear.

The writer of Psalm 62 seems to have known something about waiting. Although attributed to the legendary King David, it seems to reflect a later moment in Judah’s history, likely when the nation was besieged by any of the expansionist armies that kept them in a state of terror or vassalage for hundreds years. It was during those decades of political uncertainty that many a prophet took to the streets to rail against kings and priests whom they believed had forsaken God’s covenant, their vices and corruptions running roughshod over the poor, all the while buying false security from extorted alliances with the powerful. Taking in the failed dreams of God’s once favored Israel, the psalmist can only ask for strength to endure, to resist, and to wait.

For us, living in this era of immediacy with its rapid delivery of nearly everything our hearts tell us we must have, right now, we nonetheless find ourselves in a waiting game. When will our world find its way to managing its conflicting interests other than with bombs and bullets? When will our best minds finally solve the riddles of those diseases which rob so many of us of vitality and shorten our intended longevity? When will our leaders channel their energies into healing wounds, addressing injustices, and caring for country more than career? When will we find the way to relegate our parochial agendas in forging global remedies to stem the tied of the atmospheric fever that is drying up our water and scorching our forests?

“For God alone my soul waits…on God rests my deliverance” for God is “my mighty rock, my refuge.” I wonder how many of us can really grasp the level of soulful trust in this voiced prayer from more than two millennia before any of us ever waited on anything. Not only does the call to be patient and trusting fall strangely on our ears, the source of the writer’s hope, God, may not hold such a lofty place in minds like ours that tend to believe only what we can see, verify and prove. But the futility of tapping our feet, twiddling our thumbs, shaking our heads and gulping more of our favorite caffeinated elixir may, for some of us, return our attention to the kind of faith that Jesus saw most clearly in small children. Could Advent provide us with a reason, an excuse, to look to God as we once did when we prayerfully knelt next to our beds, our hands folded in respectful supplication ? Will Advent reawaken in us that trust in God for our salvation that gives us hope, and patience, and resolve, no matter how long we must wait.

“O Come to us, abide in us, our Lord, Emmanuel.” Amen.

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Will you accept the call?

Sixth Day of Advent: Friday, December 8, 2023

Matthew 22:1-14

Since the arrival of cellular phones I’ve never once fielded a call in which an operator first announced: “I have a call for Bill Summerhill, will you accept the charge?” I’m sure some of you reading this remember such interactions with a nameless voice from some impersonal switchboard. Yet the metaphor retains much usefulness for us even in this age of ubiquitous mobile phone connectivity.

The Latin root behind our verb “to call” is vocare, from which we also get vocation, our anglicized term for a life or career calling. Matthew’s gospel, chapter 22, includes the parable of the wedding banquet in which a king throws a lavish celebration for his son, only to find that few of the invited guests bother to show up. In his rage, the king then invites an assortment of folks of lesser stature who eagerly fill the wedding hall. Yet it ends with the king sternly accosting one of the new guests who happened to be inappropriately dressed for the occasion. Matthew’s concluding punch line may give us pause: “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

My father took this scripture to heart and recited it often in my presence. I believe he read it as an indication that God invites all of us into the Kingdom, yet only a few prove worthy to be included in his favor. I suspect this interpretation has served many of us whose understandings of God’s grace always has an exclusionary asterisk attached. In my reading I prefer a slightly different slant, favoring to qualify the free-ranging call of God with what seems to me a practical admission of human nature. So I tend to hear the punch line this way: “Many are called, but few accept the invitation.”

Admittedly I may be taking liberties with the original intent of the parable. But in my own experience, it seems truer to me that the winnowing of the guest list is more likely to come from our self-preoccupied choice to attend or stay away than from God’s critical judgment to exclude. I think I’ve received a number of calls in my life. Some invited me to open my mind to new ideas, to chart a course down unfamiliar roads, or to enter into relationships in which I was less sure of myself. A few of these I accepted, but for many more I took a pass. While I was never sure which of these calls were from God, over time the wisdom or foolishness of my choices became apparent to me.

I see in this parable a reminder to us that God’s call to seek the truth, to love one another, to serve even the least of these is an invitation that comes to us every day in one form or another. It may be a sight that stirs our conscience to compassion or courage. It may penetrate our thoughts via a word that inspires us to reconsider what we are doing and where we need to be going. It is a never a collect call, but one which only requires of us an open mind and a willing heart. And during Advent 2023 it is a call that each of us would do well to not only take, but actually hear.

Open our eyes, our ears, and our minds, to attend to Your call O God. Amen.

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Rainbows or Streams?

Seventh Day of Advent: Saturday, December 9, 2023

Amos 5:18-27

A favorite teenager of yesteryear, Dorothy Gale, yearned for a place where skies were blue, bluebirds sang and troubles melted like lemon drops. While vivid in her dreams, it was, at least in MGM’s imagination, ever-so-distant from the sepia toned, Depression-era Kansas of her day to day life. Over the years many of us have sung along with her, hoping for some Over the Rainbow paradise we might one day find.

A more troubling seer named Amos also longed for a time, not on the far side of a rainbow but right here on earth, when” justice would flow like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” And his utopian dream was not lost on those prophetic voices of the Civil Rights movement who saw in his words a clarion call for America to finally live up to its once declared, but never realized, ideals of liberty and justice for all. Amos remains the inspiration for many of us today, and the source of frustration for even more whose thirst for freedom and equality has never been quenched by words alone.

But Amos was also a realist, and his gaze into tomorrow never lifted him above or beyond rainbows. He saw no Ozian wizards or benevolent Glinda’s poised on the horizon, eager to restore a broken world. Rather his eyes were fixed on the coming darkness, and with it a tempest in which lions, tigers, and bears--oh my—were coming to devour, and where serpents lay coiled to strike no matter where we might seek refuge. For the terrible swift sword of the Lord, as a later visionary would pen, will be unsparing on those whose trust is in a religion that is more pretense than grace, more performance than sacrifice.

We can’t be faulted for turning a deaf ear to Amos’s voice during the Advent-Christmas season. For it is a strange, unwelcomed shot across the bows of the pleasure crafts we steer towards another exercise in self-indulgence and shameless acquisition. Yet how long dare we dismiss his words of God’s judgment that hit so close to our time, our place, our experience.

O God of overflowing justice, God of life-quenching righteousness: turn our eyes not to rainbowed skies, and our minds past sugar-plummed illusions to see You in the faces of those those in need; to hear You in the voice of those who stand for truth, justice, and peace. Amen.

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