Today's psalm 41 (below) says: You uphold me, O Lord, because of my integrity, and put me before Your face forever. That is, we are worthy because we are whole beings made by God, now and forever…worthy, just as we are, in our own integrity; our own inherent wholeness.
Today's meditation on this verse is yesterday's inspiring sermon by Dr. John McDargh:
THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT Gaudete Sunday December 14, 2013 CANTICLE: LUKE
1:46 – 55
GOSPEL: Matthew 11: 2-12
John McDargh
One of my day jobs on
the theological faculty at Boston College is to teach a year-long comparative
theology on Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity. Two weeks ago at the conclusion
of our first semester study of Christianity I had the great pleasure of
introducing my students to two living human documents: the guest lecturers were
our rector Gretchen and the rector of that other St. Paul’s, St. Paul’s
Brookline, Jeff Mello.
It was
quite amazing. Picture forty two BC seniors at the end of a long semester,
running on little sleep and copious quantities of Red Bull , yet for seventy five minutes
totally attentive and deeply engaged with what Jeff and Gretchen were sharing
of their own spiritual journeys. I was
too.
One of
the many memorable lines in that conversation was when Jeff ( though it could have Gretchen) observed:
“Every preacher really has only
one sermon , which they give again and again in many different ways… and it is
usually the sermon that they most need
to hear themselves”.
That is certainly true for me as well, and fortunately it
happens to be an Advent sermon. If I were to give the theological core of my sermon
in as condensed a way as possible it would be something like this. In a way that parallels Buddhism – the other
great soteriological religion ( to use the fancy theological term) - the heart of Christianity is that it offers a path of salvation. It is somehow about “being saved”. I have never forgotten the heartfelt
disclosure forty years ago of a young Catalan seminarian as we talked together
one evening after dinner walking on the roof of his seminary.Yo soy un Christiano porque necessito un
Salvador. “I am a Christian because I need a
savior”.
But it
makes a crucial difference what we think we are being saved from, and what we
are being saved for. Now for me growing
up in parochial school in Georgia and Florida the answer I might have given to
that question is that we are being saved from our sins, relieved of our guilt for the many offenses we have committed
against the glory of God and against one another. And what are we being saved for, well , that was about being purified and eventually
found worthy to enjoy the company of God and of the saints for eternity in a
condition, or I might have said, in a place called “heaven”.
Now, having almost run out my allotted
three score years and ten, I am coming to see it somewhat differently. The saving action of God to the people Israel
and through them to all humankind, is
addressed not to our guilt over the
terrible things we can do to ourselves, one another and to nature and the created order, but rather to
the underlying sense of shame
that is at the root of those violations. If we find in this Jesus a Savior it is
because we find in his life and teaching , passion and death and Risen Presence
a healing of the condition of our chronic
separation or disconnection from
the goodness of our Source.
To
restate my point: the reason we need a savior then is not “guilt”
but rather “ toxic shame” – the
haunting, undermining and corrosive feeling that there is something wrong with
us as we are – as we are made. Living under the regime of shame we read the great story of creation in the
first chapter of Genesis – you remember , the account in which our creator
looks at creation and sees it as good, indeed VERY good - and we do not trust it. In some conscious or unconscious way we feel
that while that may be true for others it is not true for ourselves.
Psychologically
we can be recruited to narratives of
shame within our families of origin, in our society, and in
our culture. Indeed shame arises in any
interaction in which we feel seen and judged for something about us that we did
not create and cannot control but that
renders us feeling unworthy as a member of
the human race. . Think of all
the ways in which we are made to feel a
sense of shame for such things as our
social class, our ethnicity, our gender, our physical condition, our sexual
orientation - the list goes on and on.
Quite
apart from the social and interpersonal conditions that lock us in the house of
shame, there are also those universal aspects of our very existence as being
human about which we are profoundly ambivalent. Who cannot identify with poet
William Butler Yeats characterization of human existence as , “sick with desire
and tied to a dying animal” (Sailing to Byzantium) . We can experience shame over our radical dependency on others from birth through
the whole life cycle. Have you ever
wondered what is really underneath our elder’s protest, “I don’t want to be a burden”.
We can experience shame over our
powerlessness over physical vulnerability and the fact of our inevitable aging .
You might think of how shames drives the botox and plastic surgery industries.
Ultimately however we are haunted by our mortality , the fact of our
inevitable vulnerability to death . That
is the big one . As the GLOBE recently reported that fear was what drove
the late Ted Williams into a fantasy of a cryogenic resurrection . But the
shame around death and humiliation also
underwrote the tragic illusions of
the Third Reich that was to last for a Thousand Years. It may
indeed be the psychic motive for our
resistance to recognizing ourselves as part of the natural order, vulnerable to
forces of climate and change that are part of life on “this fragile earth our
island home” (Book of Common Prayer)
How
does the Creator we know in and through the story of the birth of Jesus speak
words of comfort and healing to this
shame? How does this story save
us from the shame that is often the motive source of those actions for which we
feel guilt?
To
grasp that we need to go back to the Manger- the cow trough – the place and
condition in which God chooses to introduce the child Jesus into the human
story.
Last Saturday I had the great joy of leading a
day of prayer at the Franciscan Shrine of St. Anthony for gay and lesbian
Catholics and their families. When the
friars asked me to come up with a name for this day of recollection I immediately suggested the title “Welcome Back
to the Manger”. I had been thinking
about how in 1226 Francis of Assisi for
the first time in Christian history in
the village of Greccio brought together an ox and an ass and presented a Nativity tableau for ordinary Italian peasants. His aim
was to make vivid and accessible the
scandalous, radical truth of the birth
of Jesus in conditions that the poorest and most marginal of his society would
recognize as familiar.
Francis’ intuition then may also
be ours today. We must look for the coming of God’s mercy in time precisely at
the place of our deepest shame and
estrangement from one another – the place of our most ordinary, commonplace
down and dirty human experience.
That I think
was that same spiritual intuition that lay
behind the decision to present last week the musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream
Coat” the longest and more
detailed of the family sagas in the book
of Genesis. Listening last week I could
appreciate why some say that the stories of Abraham and his off spring present the most
dysfunctional family line in history.
The stories of Genesis are riven with the violence that arises from
fathers shaming sons, men abusing women,
“ trickery, theft and murder” ( Rabbi Toba Spitzer). In Genesis we have husbands favoring one wife
over another and setting in play family dynamics that cogwheel down the generations producing brothers who are murderous rivals for their father’s
attention and love. Our biblical family history is not pretty and
neat. It is not the stuff of Brady Bunch
happy blended families. In fact the whole human family in Genesis from the very
beginning as an object lesson in the toxic power of a brother’s shame.. Why does Cain kill Abel? Because Cain felt shamed and rejected by God’s acceptance of his
brother Abel’s sacrificial offering over
his own.. “Dad or
Mom always loved you best” is crie d’coeur
we all know something about
.
And yet, and yet.
The
power of the Joseph narrative , as Gretchen so movingly pointed out last week, is that Joseph’s suffering in prison –
like that of Nelson Mandela - somehow
opens his own heart and transforms
him. Here we have one of the most decisive moments of forgiveness and
reconciliation in the whole Hebrew scripture.
Twenty years after they sold him into slavery Joseph, sobbing, reveals his identity to his brothers with the
words, “I am Joseph your brother, whom
you sold into Egypt.. And now do not be distressed, and do not be angry with
yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me
ahead of you” (Genesis
45:4-5).
Grace strikes, the power of God at work in human hearts to
break the shame-driven cycle of violence.
Last
week our brother Praban who played Joseph sang
that despairing lament from prison that
begins:
Close every door to me,
Hide all the world from me
Bar all the windows
And shut out the light
Hide all the world from me
Bar all the windows
And shut out the light
Yet that same lament also contained
something between a plea and a promise that “children
of Israel are never alone” This Advent we
again bend our hearts to
experience how The Holy One of Surprising Second Chances fulfills that hope – we are never alone - in
the most radical way: by becoming one with us in the person of Jesus
of Nazareth.
In today’s chant before
the Gospel we are reminded that this story too begins at a site of shame. An unmarried but engaged young girl in the
town of Nazareth finds herself pregnant. Do we have a Virgin Birth here, or do we have
, as a second century counter-Christian polemic maintained, that this child was the off spring of Mary and a Roman soldier? Each of us can chose the story that makes the
most sense for our own faith. However the
geneology of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew seems to know of this
humiliating and shaming narrative,
probably meant to be discrediting.
Matthew’s genealogy traces Jesus’s ancestry from Abraham to Mary’s
betrothed Joseph , and here is what is
more than interesting. It is a totally patriarchal lineage except that includes reference to five women -
Tamar who bore two sons to Judah,
Rahab, Ruth , the mother of
Solomon by David who is pointedly identified as Uriah’s wife , and Mary. If we were to tell each of these stories we
would be here all afternoon and the sermon would have to be x-rated: incest,
prostitution, seduction and adultery,. You get the point. Perhaps what Matthew is saying is that it is
God’s way – as it was in the story of Joseph -
to bring blessing and good out
of situations that are shame soaked .
And so Mary, pregnant with this strange new life, flees to
the home of her cousin Elizabeth who is
also mysteriously and beyond all human
reckoning pregnant . There as they greet one another and Mary breaks into an
ecstatic praise of God . With fierce abandon she celebrates the way in which
the God of Israel has transformed her shame and fear into celebration.
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.[1]
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.[1]
And then our Gospel reading we are back once more
in prison. Now it is John the Baptizer who has been locked up by the tyrant
king Herod for challenging his immorality and violence .. The reader knows as
John does not that John will soon enough lose his head ., In a first century
Game of Thrones Herod’s illicit wife has
felt shamed by John’s denunciation and plots revenge, and the mightiest ruler
of the region in turn is too insecurely
invested in his need not to appear the
fool that he cannot resist her daughter’s request for the head of the Baptizer.
This
morning the imprisoned John , likely
thinking that his whole prophetic mission to announce the coming of the
Messiah was a failure, has a last hope that maybe this itinerant rabbi might
just perhaps be the promised one .. Look
at what Jesus points to as evidence of God’s faithfulness to God’s people in
the midst of their shaming occupation by the power of the Empire: not deeds of military power or the pulling
down of the powerful from their thrones – but the practical manifestation of
God’s compassionate presence to suffering persons:
The blind receive sight, the lame walk,
those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and
the good news is proclaimed to the poor.
Beginning to grasp in
our hearts and in our heads the meaning of the manger changes the way we might
think about preparing for Christmas.
One of the enduring tropes in the
classic carols of the Christmas season is that we are preparing to welcome
within the God who was unwelcomed at the door of the Inn in Bethlehem. Think of
the words we sing in Isaac Watts classic carol: “Joy to
the world, the Lord is come, let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven
and nature sing”
When I was in elementary
school Our Lady of the Assumption
Atlanta Georgia, one Advent my mother got the idea from some religious
parenting magazine about a way we might
prepare a room for the Christ child. She gave
each of us kids one of those small pie tins that were used to hold a
Morton’s chicken pot pie and we were told to put it by our bed. This was Jesus cradle we were told. Then every
day in Advent if we had done some kind of good deed (or perhaps not done
anything particularly naughty) Mom would cut a straw from a broom and we could
put there with the idea that we should strive to create as comfy a cradle as
possible for Jesus. Then while we were asleep Christmas eve my parents place in
each of our pie tins a small image of the baby Jesus.
I remember being thrilled by discovering the
baby Jesus.. But even then I felt it a
bit problematic . The immediate reason
was that I felt broom straws not matter how many couldn’t be very comfortable. Now when I think about
it as an adult the difficulty is that that it seems to suggest that Jesus comes
to us only when we’ve cleaned up our act and piled up enough good deeds to
cancel out all the bad ones. In other
words it confuses shame with guilt. It
is the same problem I find in another Advent hymn I otherwise love.
Then cleansed be every
breast from sin, make straight the way
of God within/ And let each heart prepare a room, where such a mighty guest may come.
Preparation to receive this mighty guest is a
bit like welcoming a cosmic Leona Helmsley who can not tolerate our messiness
and disorder. The mighty guest will only be pleased to enter if first we have
been cleansed of our sins.. But if our salvation required
that Jesus would have been born in the Priest’s Suite of the Bethlehem
Hilton welcomed by the most pious, faultless and ritually pure of the
people. But that is not the cow trough.
… as St Francis knew.. So we will hear
on Christmas eve the Nativity story in Matthew. Mary and Joseph are not visited by room service and a well-groomed
concierge. Their first welcome is from Shepherds a marginal social class that smells of the fields and the
flock.
In other words,
we don’t need to be cleansed before the Holy One take up residence in
our hearts. We are cleansed by welcoming without resistance the love of God,
mediated to us by so many sacraments of the human and natural
relationship. It is this love that finds
us out exactly in the place where we
feel most unlovable..
Each week, and each new liturgical cycle. we are invited once again to trust those
words that Gretchen pronounces at the benediction each week… each week because
we can’t hear it enough , “Your Creator has made you holy”.
And that finally
takes me to what I now see to be THE
Christmas Icon. Robert Lentz, Franciscan iconographer was asked by
the Episcopal Church of The Good
Shepherd, I believe in Connecticut to
paint a patronal icon. Brother Robert responded that he would be happy to , but
he didn’t paint lambs. Nice sweet fuzzy lambs are easy to like he said. They are cuddly and warm. But Lentz
as a younger man worked on a farm that
raised goats. Goats are another matter. They can be independent minded,
obstinate, sometimes bad tempered, willful. They smell bad, eat
indiscriminately, and – not to put to fine a point on it – are chronically
horny.. In other words, the kind of
creature only Jesus might love and risk his life to rescue. In other words.. a lot more like us. So he painted this icon..
When on
Christmas eve we are charmed and warmed by watching other parents’
children represent lambs -
their parents already know that there is something goat-like there too,
and if not - wait till adolescence! But
that is just the point - In the love of
God made manifest and available to us in Jesus .. as accessible as the break
laid into our hands and the wine in the common cup – all that we have and all
that we are is broken and blessed and seen for what it really is , the Glory of
God that overcomes all shame by reminding us again and again who we really are,
and whose we really are.
And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?
And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare —
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine
[1]
Once
a month I facilitate a prayer group of
senior Christian lifers in Norfolk prison and over the years I have
gradually learned something of the
circumstances of psychological and
physical violence and the chronic shame
of alcoholism or economic and emotional
deprivation that marked their childhoods. I have over time been trusted
with the stories of the institutional
and interpersonal assaults on their
sense of self-esteem and dignity that they endure on an almost daily
base behind bars. And yet,
every month the group ends by
these men holding hands in a circle and pray in the words of the angel Gabriel,
“Hail Mary, the Lord is with you ,
blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb –
Jesus”. There is a deep identification
these men have with the Mary of the Magnificat and her own hope in a God who has thrown in his lot with “the hungry
and those of humble estate” .
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