The Gentle Whisper

Sermon by the Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church, San Francisco

January 22, 2017

Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year A

The last several days have been a whirlwind for so many of us--from the inauguration to the Women’s March. From the President’s threat to deport millions of undocumented people and deprive many more of their healthcare to passionate calls to resist those cruel policies.

A whirlwind. How do we find our bearings in such a moment? How do we find a way forward?

Can we take our cues from something deeper than the cliches and labels--Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, progressive--and from something deeper than knee-jerk reactions to the latest headlines and presidential tweets and posts on Facebook?

How to get our bearings in this whirlwind?

Maybe you remember the old story about Elijah... It was a dark moment in Israel, a time of great upheaval in the land. Elijah had spoken out against all the corruption and murder in Israel, the ways Israel had abandoned its own deepest values and dreams.

Many great prophets had been killed, and now many in Israel were coming after Elijah, wanting to kill him as well.

He’s hiding in a cave. One day God tells him to go outside and stand on the mountainside where God will pass by.

And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind.
And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire.
And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

And that’s where God’s voice was to be found, in that gentle whisper. There, in that gentle whisper, Elijah finds the energy and the guidance for his next steps.

I love the story, and I’m hoping that same grace, that same gentle whisper, will come to me and to each of us in this crazy time, to help us get our bearings and find a way forward.

I hope that we can find that gentle whisper deep in our own hearts, deeper than all the roles we play, the hats we wear--spouse, parent, friend, professional, priest. Deeper than all the fear and anger and the need to be right. Deeper than all the labels--Hillary voter, Trump voter. Deeper than our skin color or sexual orientation.

I hope we can reach deep into our own hearts to hear that gentle whisper, the voice of God.

Which is a long way of saying I hope in these days we can be people of deep prayer.

Because even with all the other noise going on around us, we can still hear that gentle whisper if we want to, can still live out the joy, the passion and compassion, the love it stirs in us.

I recall the story of the teenager from rural Iowa who was visiting Manhattan with her mom. It was high noon, and there were taxis and trucks zooming by, horns blaring, people pouring out of the office buildings racing off to lunch. In the midst of it all, the young woman stops and says, “Wait, mom! I hear a grasshopper!” This annoys her mom who says, “Honey, we’re right in the middle of Manhattan. They don’t even have grasshoppers here! And even if they did, you’d never hear them because of all this racket.

At that, the girl went over to a small bush next to a light post and pulled back the branches to reveal a grasshopper happily chirping away.

Her mom was astonished and said, “How did you manage to hear that grasshopper in the midst of all this craziness?” The girl got very philosophical and said, “Well, we hear what we want to hear.”

Which is true not only of grasshoppers but also of that gentle whisper God placed in our hearts.

I see that same gentle whisper, that voice of God, playing itself out in Jesus' life.

For example, in today’s gospel Jesus has had an Elijah moment. Jesus’ time, like Elijah’s, like ours, was dark and turbulent. The Romans occupying Palestine had slaughtered many innocent men, women, and children; they had inflicted much poverty and cultural genocide on Jesus’ own people.

And in today’s reading, things take an even sharper turn for the worse. Herod has just incarcerated John the Baptist. The darkness is closing in.

And in that moment, Jesus immediately moves to Galilee, into Herod’s own territory and jurisdiction. This is a bold and dangerous move on Jesus’ part. It brings him onto Herod’s radar.

And when he gets back to Galilee, he goes even further, he does three things:

• He begins proclaiming the exact same message that got John into trouble: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” The kingdom of heaven--so completely different from the kingdom of Herod and the empire, a subversive alternative to the world as we know it. Jesus takes up this message knowing full well it is likely to bring down Herod’s wrath on his own head just as it had on the Baptist's.
• And he begins to gather a community of disciples who can support each other in proclaiming that same message, be a light in the closing darkness, defy every effort to crush the human spirit.
• And he reaches out in compassion to heal the sick of diseases, many of which had resulted from what the Romans had inflicted on the Jews: the economic hardships, the lack of clean water, the shortage of good, nutritious food.

Proclamation, community, compassion--ah! God is here!

Where does Jesus get this boldness and courage, this deliberateness and clarity of vision in such a perilous time as his?

My guess is that, as with Elijah, it springs from that gentle whisper deep in his own heart. That whisper is what drives Jesus--more than fear or anger or dread, more than any expectations others may have of him, more than his own need to be right or recognized or successful or in control. He stays attentive to that small gentle whisper, trusts it, follows it, regardless of the consequences, with a deliberateness, a fierce determination.

Jesus, in other words, prays.

May it be that way for us as we get our bearings, find our way forward, together, in the dark and challenging days ahead.

Pray any way you like. Meditate here on Tuesday nights with the Buddhists in Mission Dharma, or take up a mindful form of yoga. Try some of the ancient Christian practices: centering prayer, the rosary, the Daily Office, Ignatian contemplation of the Scriptures. Or if music’s your thing, spend time listening attentively to Bach or John Coltrane or the other great composers.

Do it in your own inimitable way. But do it! Pray!

However we do it in these stormy times, may we, like Elijah, like Jesus, listen attentively to that small gentle whisper of God, trust it, and follow it--together--with deliberateness and courage, determination and joy--through the coming dark days of struggle.

Come and See

A “Come to Jesus" moment

Richard Smith

Second Sunday after Epiphany

Year A

The term “Come to Jesus moment” has seeped into everyday conversation. Back in my days in Silicon Valley, whenever a manager faced a rapidly approaching deadline and wanted to be sure the product would be ready for delivery on time, they’d gather the team for a “Come to Jesus meeting”. It was a moment of reckoning; each team member would have to report on the status of their deliverables; would they pass Quality Assurance; would everything be ready to ship on time. A Come to Jesus moment.

I’ve heard the phrase used in other contexts, like when friends and family need to confront a loved one who is abusing drugs or alcohol or engaging in some other destructive behavior. They sometimes call that intervention a “Come to Jesus moment.”

As I understand it, the phrase originated in the evangelical revival camp meetings of the 1920s when evangelists exhorted people to “come to Jesus.”  Sinners would walk down the aisle and come to the altar to repent of their sins, and ask Jesus to come into their heart.

In its purest form, it’s the kind of moment you realize what’s most important in your life--an Aha! moment--in which you reconnect with those basic values you may have lost sight of in the daily grind of making a living, deciding what to have for dinner, folding the laundry. It’s the clarifying of priorities that can come with a brush with death, say a car accident or a sudden health problem. In its purest form, a Come to Jesus moment brings you back to what you know is true and beautiful and good.

Welcome to today’s gospel. Two of John the Baptist’s disciples follow Jesus. Jesus asks them, “What are you looking for?” It’s not a question about finding lost car keys or a misplaced cell phone. It’s rather about their deepest desires, what they most want from life, what they most cherish and long for. “What are you looking for?”

Because our deepest desires have something to do with what God is calling us to. To paraphrase a popular theologian, “The place God calls you to is where your deepest desire meets the world’s deepest need.”

What are you looking for? Underneath all the surface wants to be billionaires, with looks like George Clooney or JLo--underneath those surface wants, what is your own deepest desire?

The disciples reply they want to know where Jesus staying, where he lives. This is code, a way of asking not only where he lives physically, but more: what drives him, what is he about, why does he do what he does? We might say colloquially today, “Where are you at?” or “Where’s your head at?” It’s the right question to ask of Jesus, the right thing to be looking for.

That’s when Jesus turns their following him into a calling. “Come and see,” he tells them. They came and saw and stayed. It was a come to Jesus moment. A calling.

Sometimes, as for these disciples, a calling can be a bit dramatic, involving an actual displacement, physically moving from one place to another.

But more likely it’s a matter of recognizing and embracing the displacements that have already occurred in the ordinary course of our lives: a discouraging report from the lab, the loss of a job or a loved one, the birth of a child, or taking up new and exciting responsibilities. Or maybe as the years go by, we realize ways of thinking or rituals or family traditions that once helped us understand our lives are no longer appreciated, leaving us lost and alone.

The task is to allow these actual displacements to become places where we can hear God’s call.

The fact is, God is always active in our lives, calling us, asking us to follow. And usually that call comes not in some dramatic moment, but much more subtly in the ordinary stuff of our lives.

But do we see, feel, and recognize God’s call, or do we keep waiting for that illusory, dramatic moment when it will “really” happen? Can we embrace the displacements that have already occurred in our lives and discern the callings they hold for us?

This weekend, we’re celebrating Martin Luther King. Like us, he had to navigate a time of great polarization in the country. At a time when the Civil Rights movement was struggling to make gains, the Vietnam War was also in full swing. Although it was very controversial among his followers, he discerned a calling, a vocation, to speak against the war even as he continued his struggle for civil rights.

Here is how he put it at the time, in words that could have been written just last week:

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

In the chaos and polarization that history had bequeathed to his generation, King discerned a vocation. It was for him a Come to Jesus moment, to reach deep into his heart and his faith tradition and speak a prophetic word.

Perhaps the coming week with its inaugural celebration, is our Come to Jesus moment. Perhaps in this moment, we, like Dr. King, need to reconnect with our own deepest values and desires and discern our own vocation. Whether we join a march, or call our representatives, or hold a sign for Amilcar at Mission Police Station, the questions that Dr. King wrestled with are ours as well. How will we speak? How will we break the silence of the darkness that seems so close around us?

The Epiphany 2017

Robert Warren Cromey

January 8, 2017

I read in the newspaper that Christmas sales were up again this year. Or were they down. I forget.

Why do we have the shopping frenzy to buy gifts and presents? Well, you can blame it all on the Three Kings. They brought gifts to the holy family and now we give gifts to our beloved families, friends and even to our rotten relatives.

We have just heard the ancient story of the three kings who travelled many miles through the desert to visit Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They were following a star.  The kings brought Jesus gifts, Gold, Frankincense and myrrh.

They were not Jews. They were Gentiles. The writer of Matthew wanted to tell his readers that the Jesus was not just for the Jews but also for all people.

St. Matthew showed us that the message of Jesus was for all people.

What was the message of Jesus? Shall I give you a quiz?
We are to be truly human. To be truly human is to love, forgive, care for the poor, the homeless, the sick and those facing injustice.

I want to tell you a story about another man who travelled afar in the desert.

In the 1960s TV show Branded, Chuck Connors plays a classic Western figure, Jason McCord--courageous, loyal, yet aloof and alone.  In the first episode, he meets a dying man in the desert and saves his life by giving him water and even carrying him on his own horse--only to find himself held up at gunpoint at an oasis, as the duplicitous Colbee takes McCord's horse and leaves him to walk across the desert, very likely to die in the attempt.  Colbeen explains that he has to do this because he has a wife and two daughters, and so he has to live--and to get to town in time for his daughter's birthday!  McCord survives, and meets up with the Colbee family in town.  A friend urges him to anger and confrontation.  McCord really is angry, and he walks toward Colbee resolutely, as Colbee's two little daughters play around him with their hoops.  McCord, looking at the family, then has a second thought; he turns around and walks away.  As he does, he says over his shoulder, with a wry smile, "Happy Birthday, Janie."

Here is one way to handle anger and move to forgiveness, a basic teaching of Jesus.

Some members of this parish are happy that Donald Trump will be our new president.

Some of us are angry and upset that he is our president elect.

We are a community who call ourselves followers of Jesus.
We are on a life-long quest to learn how to forgive.

Creative Christians will move on, past our upsets, or our self-righteous glee, and into a new life.

We continue to insist:

 That the people living in the tents outside our church have adequate housing.

That all people have adequate food to eat. We try through the Julian pantry.

That legal and illegal immigrants find justice and residency.

That all Americans have adequate medical care.

That there is continual witness for peace in the world.

I have noted over my many years that both Democrats and Republicans do not care much for these basic rights and needs.

We need to stop squawking about the election and get on with the gifts we have been given in following Jesus.

The light given to everyone

Feast of St. John the Evangelist

John 1: 1-14

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

Back in the days of slavery, there were certain passages of scripture the slaveowners would not allow the slaves to hear. Today’s gospel from John, the patron of this parish, was one of those passages.

This passage is the start of what, for John, will be a new creation story. It begins with the very same words as the old creation story in Genesis: “In the beginning…” And it goes on to speak about everything in the cosmos coming into being. And then it says out of the Creator came life, and that life was a light given to every person. That light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

That divine life, that light, is given to every person--no matter their skin color, or gender, or whether they’re Christian or Muslim or Jewish or card carrying atheists. That divine light was planted deep in every one of our hearts by the one who made us. It is very powerful. The darkness cannot overcome it.

The slave masters were afraid that if the slaves started to really believe they carried in their own selves this powerful divine light, they might begin to see themselves as creatures of vast and infinite beauty and dignity. They might start to resist the slave masters’ brutality and cruelty; they might rise up.

John’s message in today’s gospel has powerful implications.

Women who start to believe it might not be as willing to go along with all the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of a rape culture--whether those manifestations come from a President-elect, or at work, or just walking down the street.

Undocumented immigrants might reject the characterizations they are rapists and criminals, might rightfully take pride in their determination against enormous odds to find a way care for their kids, their amazing contributions to this economy and culture. They might refuse to let their families be torn apart by unjust immigration laws.

Let me say this another way drawing from the recent work of Richard Rohr…

Take a look at this fifteenth century icon by the Russian iconographer and mystic Andrei Rublev. It’s called “The Hospitality of Abraham”, or simply “The Trinity”.

There are three primary colors in Rublev’s icon, each illustrating a facet of the Holy One:

• Gold: “the Father”—perfection, fullness, wholeness, the ultimate Source
• Blue: “the Incarnate Christ”—both sea and sky mirroring one another (In the icon, Christ wears blue and holds up two fingers, telling us he has put spirit and matter, divinity and humanity, together within himself. The blue of creation is brilliantly undergirded with the necessary red of suffering.)
• Green: “the Spirit”—the divine photosynthesis that grows everything from within by transforming light into itself (Hildegard of Bingen called this viriditas, or the greening of all things.)

The gaze between the Three shows the deep respect between them as they all share a meal from a common bowl.

Notice the Spirit’s hand points toward the open and fourth place at the table. Is the Holy Spirit inviting, offering, and clearing space?

At the front of the table there appears to be a little rectangular hole. Some art historians believe the remaining glue on the original icon indicates that there was perhaps once a mirror glued to the front of the table. There was room at this table for a fourth.

That fourth person is you, the observer. You—and all of creation—are invited to sit at the divine table.

This is the Christmas mystery. As one of the most ancient prayers of the church says, God humbled himself to take on our humanity so we might share in God’s divinity.

This is who we each are: beloved creatures, bearers of a divine light that is powerful and can never be overcome, welcomed into the very life of God.

Our task is to claim that dignity.

The problem is we forget who we are, lose touch with that light and life the Creator planted deep in our hearts. All around us, we hear so many messages to the contrary:You’re too old, or too you. Too skinny, or too fat. The wrong color or gender or sexual orientation. If we’re not careful, we can unconsciously start believing those voices.

Which is why we need other people to remind us now and then of our own profound beauty and dignity that no one, not even we on our worst days, can take away.

Cleve Jones, one of the leaders in the modern gay rights movement, says that when he was a kid, he never knew any other gay people existed. He thought he was the only one who felt and experienced the world and people as he did. After being beaten and bullied several times at school, he began to quietly stash away whatever pills he could find, thinking someday he might use them to commit suicide.

Then he found a copy of Life magazine that told about some homosexuals in San Francisco, the culture they were forming, the movement they were creating. He stumbled across authors like Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Allen Ginsberg and eventually came to believe that he was not alone.

Once he discovered there was a community of people who were like him, who could understand and welcome him, Cleve says he flushed all those pills down the toilet. A few years later, he arrived in San Francisco, joined the movement for LGBT rights, and the rest is history.

Sometimes we lose touch with the unique dignity and beauty given us by the Creator. We forget who we are: bearers of God’s own light, invited into his very life. We need other people to help us see it.

It’s why we need communities like this one at St. John's where we gather week after week to immerse ourselves once more in the ancient stories, and share this meal, and remember not only God's mighty deeds in history and who Jesus is, but also who we are.

I hope we in this crazy community can be this reminder to each other in the year ahead; each of us in sheer awe of the beauty and dignity and dignity the Creator has given us, reminding each other of theirs.

Let me close with a poem by Jan Richardson...

Blessed Are You Who Bear the Light Blessed are you who bear the light
in unbearable times,
who testify to its endurance
amid the unendurable,
who bear witness to its persistence
when everything seems in shadow and grief.
Blessed are you
in whom
the light lives,
in whom
the brightness blazes—
your heart a chapel,
an altar
where in the deepest night
can be seen the fire
that shines forth
in you
in unaccountable faith,
in stubborn hope,
in love that illumines
every broken thing it finds.

Christmas 2016

A sermon by the Rev. Deacon Jacqueline Cherry

Christmas Eve, Year C, 2016

The birth we have been waiting for, preparing for, is happening, now.

Let heaven and nature sing!

Do you know what it sounds like when a baby is born? Birth mothers, and those who have witnessed the birth of a baby, know that it is anything but silent. The pain of labor obliterates any sense of decorum. In the hallways outside the delivery room, grunts, cries, heaves and four-letter words are easily heard. Like it or not, if we believe in the Incarnation, we must also believe that Jesus’ birth, too, was noisy and messy. Certainly there are differences - instead of the beeps and alarms of today’s medical equipment, Mary and Joseph were likely deafened by brays and bleats. Tempting as it is to marvel at the sudden appearance of the angel and heavenly host, Luke’s birth narrative begs us to remain grounded. On this holy night, all of heaven is focused on the birth of a baby boy. An ordinary birth like ours, and the births of our ancestors before us, and the births of our descendants to come.

Luke tells us that the glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds as an angel proclaimed, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.

Again, don’t focus on the angel, rather pay attention to whom the angel is speaking. It is the shepherds in the fields who are the first to be told that Jesus was born. If that holy birth had happened tonight, in 2016, the angel might appear to migrant workers, or perhaps to those living in the tent encampments right outside our church. Before all others, God wanted the lowly shepherds, the powerless and the displaced, to be the first to hear the good news of the Messiah’s birth.

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. While the Emperor was busy with the state census, a young unwed mother gave birth in a stable to the King of kings. God slipped into this world through the birth of a fragile infant. Indeed, it is good news of great joy for all the people. Except for the Emperor; to the powers that be, the birth of Jesus is treasonous.

With haste, the shepherds went to Bethlehem where they found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. And the news of the Savior’s birth spread rapidly, from one tent encampment to the next, through homeless shelters and soup kitchens, under the highways, across neighborhoods. Have you heard the good news? The one who will cast down the mighty from their thrones has been born.

The field dorms in Watsonville and the Central Valley buzzed. The one who will fill the hungry with good things has been born.

Drug addicts in dark doorways startled awake. The one who will lift up the lowly has been born.

En masse they marched - the unemployed, oppressed, undocumented, disabled, addicted - together they moved east to see this thing that had taken place.

Shoulder-to- shoulder the people assembled. With each arriving sojourner, the crowd parted just enough to welcome them in. All eyes were fixed on a newborn baby wrapped in bands of cloth. At first the whispers were barely audible. Then ever so softly these words could be heard repeated over and over again, each time in a different voice: To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

Looking into the eyes of an old Nicaraguan woman, a man in torn clothes gently placed the baby in her arms; To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

In turn, the old woman handed the infant to a 16-year- old runaway standing next to her; To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

While I realize some among us are feeling grateful for a year full of blessings, there are many of us in despair. During these past four weeks of Advent, we knew exactly what to expect come Christmas Eve, and we have gathered to celebrate his birth. But looking forward, the future is full of uncertainty and fear.

As Michelle Obama recently explained, We are feeling what not having hope feels like.

Homeless or hungry, afraid or depressed, we are all shepherds tonight. We are the first to hear the good news of the Messiah’s birth, the good news that God has joined us in flesh. However, it is a disservice to Mary to proclaim this night silent and calm.

When an angel tells a shepherd; Or a prophet tells a slave; Or a community organizer tells a refugee, To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord, it is a call to action, not a time to go Christmas shopping.

Although the shepherds didn’t see what was coming, let alone understand what had already come to pass, Mary had birthed a revolution. Her song, The Magnificat, is our rallying cry to scatter the proud, cast down the mighty, and liberate the oppressed. The message is clear, Jesus has no tolerance for bullying tyrants – emperors, presidents, kings – rulers who are rich and arrogant are offensive to God. And as Christians they should be offensive to us too. Jesus always stands with the powerless and the poor.

Do you know what it sounds like when a baby is born? It sounds the same as the birth of a Messiah – it’s noisy and messy. There are grunts, cries, heaves and four-letter words. In fact, it sounds a lot like the corner of 15 th St. and Julian Ave. When a baby is born, it’s never silent. But as with all of God’s creation, it is always holy.

Amen.

Are you the one who is to come?

Third Sunday of Advent, Year A 

December 11, 2016

Richard Smith

When John the Baptist had announced the coming of God’s kingdom and proclaimed Jesus as God’s anointed, he expected the world to change.

But nothing seemed to change; in fact, things had gotten worse. Rome continued its oppressive occupation of their lands, and religious leaders continued their policies of appeasement while getting rich off of their own people. Crowds no longer listened to John's powerful call for change at the Jordan River. Now, John was in prison, and, in fact, whether he knew it or not, on death row.

So, from the brink of despair for himself and the people he loved, John sends his disciple to ask Jesus, a question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

We had desperately hoped you might be, but now we’re not so sure.

Words of anxiety and quiet desperation…

Words echoed in our own hearts and our own world today.

I recall talking to an old woman in a nursing home years ago. She knew her death was not far off. She said, “You know, I’ve been a believer all my life. Always had a deep faith in God. But now my time is getting close, and, well, I just can’t help but wonder…”

Quiet desperation about the very meaning of her own life.

And the other night I was at a meeting in the neighborhood. The mother of Mario Woods was there. Mario was the young man killed by police a year ago in the Bayview. At that meeting, his mother, with tears in her eyes, was pleading with the District Attorney for justice in her son’s case. She told him,

There are days I say, "I had a son. I had a baby son." I have to say his name out loud. He used to be here. And he mattered.
There are so many mothers you have to pray for, so many sleepless nights, so many dragging themselves out of bed.

Quiet desperation.

Just after the long night of the last election, the rapper Macklemore wrote these lyrics:

Mad world, mad world, that's what the TV said
Imagine tryna keep your head
While your daughter sleeps in bed
And when she wakes up, will the world be the same?
Will my girl be afraid in the home of the brave?
See I hope, I hope, that it's gon' be alright
But what a hell of a night.

Quiet desperation.

And when Jesus hears John’s question of quiet desperation--“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”--he does not answer him directly. Instead, he points to what he’s doing, as if to say, "Here's what I do. You can decide for yourself whether I am the one you're waiting for."

What Jesus is doing is restoring things that were missing.

The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

What he’s doing in his own ministry is playing out what the prophet Isaiah had dreamed in today’s first reading. It’s a dream of restoration: That which was missing is found: sight, mobility, hearing, life, the sparkle in one’s eyes.

It’s a longing deep inside our fragile human hearts--this desire to be restored to wholeness.

Because in this world we lose things: sometimes we lose our car keys or cell phones, sometimes it’s a job or a dear friend; aging bodies can lose their looks and their lustiness; mothers can lose their sons.

And sometimes just to get along in the world we can lose parts of ourselves. The poet Robert Bly personally describes these lost parts of ourselves as “a long bag we drag behind us.”

When we were one or two years old we had what we might call a 360-degree personality...but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts...They said things like: “Can’t you be still?” Or “It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.” Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: “Good children don’t get angry over such little things.” So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Wisconsin, we were known as “the nice Bly boys.” Our bags were already a mile long.

Of course, these lost parts of ourselves do not stay in the bag forever. Eventually they demand to be heard and integrated in a more life-giving way. The longing to be whole again runs very deep in us and must have its say.

This restored wholeness--whether the finding of lost keys or a lost son, or a society restored to its own best values after a divisive and corrupt election, or a self fully alive and at peace with itself--this wholeness, the ancient prophet tells us, is our future; it is our destiny, what God made us for.

This dream of restoration is what we are to hold onto in these Advent days.

And this future we dream of is already on the way. In fact, it already shapes how we are right now.

We know from psychologists how the past shapes our present. Past experiences, pleasures, traumas, even from the time we’re still in our mothers’ wombs, shape who we have become and how we understand and respond to our present moment.

But our present is shaped not only by our past but also by our future. The future we perceive shapes how we stand and what we do right now.

Here’s a metaphor. Pretend I’m about to toss you an orange. Imagine how you stand physically, how you hold your hands in order to catch it. Now imagine I’m tossing you a dish towel. How do you stand, how do you hold your hands to catch it? How about if I throw you a chair?

You get the point. The way we stand, our posture and what we do is shaped by what we see coming toward us.

Similarly, how we live our lives right now, what we do, how we spend our time and energy is shaped by the future we perceive coming toward us.

If, for example, you imagine with George Orwell that “the future is a boot stamping on a human face -- forever”, this will shape how you are in the present--perhaps causing you to cower, or defiantly clench your fist and your jaws, or anxiously hoard what little you have in a universe that you perceive to be brutal and cruel.

But if, with the ancient prophet and with Jesus, you imagine the future to be a world restored, where broken relationships are healed, where our fragmented selves and world are made whole again, then this vision will likewise shape how you are now.

• If in the world to come there will be no more tears, then we wipe the tears from each other’s eyes now.
• If in the world to come, there will be no more wars, no more violence, then we let the weapons fall from our hands now.
• If in the world to come, everyone will be welcomed, with enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, then we resist the building of walls and the violence against people of color and of other religions, and we throw open our doors to welcome the homeless and immigrants, trans people and Muslims.

This prophetic dream of restoration has work for us to do right now. It asks us to resist going numb when the world within or beyond us is falling apart and fragmented.

In the height of despair, in the deepest darkness, this ancient prophetic dream calls us to open our hearts, our eyes, our hands, to engage the world when it breaks our hearts. This dream, passed to us from our spiritual ancestors and now part of our spiritual DNA, this dream goes with us, step by step, providing the sustenance we most need.

This is the dream that can, if we let it, carry us through these harsh, wintry Advent days.

Let me close with a poem by Jan Richardson.

So may we know
the hope
that is not just
for someday
but for this day—
here, now,
in this moment
that opens to us:

hope not made
of wishes
but of substance,

hope made of sinew
and muscle
and bone,

hope that has breath
and a beating heart,

hope that will not
keep quiet
and be polite,

hope that knows
how to holler
when it is called for,

hope that knows
how to sing
when there seems
little cause,

hope that raises us
from the dead—

not someday
but this day,
every day,
again and
again and
again.

How The Light Gets In

Sara Warfield, 2nd Week of Advent

Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist December 4, 2016

I love Advent. After an almost interminable Ordinary Time, we suddenly but quietly, it seems to me, pull out the blues and purples, and we enter into the darkness. With intention. With quiet anticipation.

In this part of the world, Advent comes as we approach literally our shortest days of the year, and I know a lot of us have felt as though a different kind of darkness has descended since November 8 th . It feels like the beginning of a very long night indeed. I’ve been stumbling through these weeks, not sure how to find my bearings. Groping around, wondering how to move forward. I feel so lost. So like a child lost at the grocery store, I’ve just stopped, stayed in the same place, and watched for someone I recognize.

In stopping, though, I’ve started to notice something about this long night. In this long night, it’s hard to really see one another. When it’s dark, we can only make out the obvious features. We hear a Spanish accent, or an Evangelical quoting scripture from the King James Bible. We notice the woman in a hijab, or the man under a blanket on the sidewalk. We see black skin, or a red cap that reads Make America Great Again.

When it’s dark, we use this limited information instinctively to do one thing: to determine if that person is a threat. And I say that with no judgment. That’s just how we were built. The oldest part of our brain, the part of our brain that evolved first, just wants us to survive and so constantly scans the environment for threats. It’s sensitive. It’s reactive. It’s fight or flight. Like a wild animal.

There were some animals in our readings today. The prophet Isaiah imagines an ideal world, or in our tradition’s language, a kingdom come, where:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
   and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
   their young shall lie down together;
   and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

Isaiah lived in a time of a long night. His land was under attack. The Assyrians had become the dominant power in the region, wolves who posed a constant threat to Israel’s survival. Those who could fight had a weapon by their side. And for those who couldn’t fight, I imagine a sort of restless fear. The two options were aggression or suspicion. Everyone was afraid, lambs bunkered down, hoping somehow to withstand the stronger force.

But Isaiah imagines a different way of being. A kingdom to come where lambs can be lambs and wolves can be wolves, and they can live together in peace.

But as we sit in our own long night, we wonder, how? How is this possible? In all of our differences, in all of the ways we feel threatened by one another, in all of the ways we seek to dominate each other. How?

Most mornings, I listen to music on my bart ride to the city. I’ve been listening to a contemporary Advent song, a millennial hymn, you might say. The song, by The Brilliance, is called “May You Find a Light” and the verse that has stuck with me says:

There are weary travelers
Searching everywhere you go
Strangers who are searching
Longing deeply to be known

Who of us is not longing deeply to be known? Who of us has not sought out our tribe? People who look like us. Love like us. Create like us. Believe like us. We look for similarities, for affinities, points of connection to join us together in community. I think it’s why a lot of us are here this morning. These communities help us to feel like we are known, like we are seen, and they make us feel safe. We find our wolf groups, our lamb groups, our lion groups, our bear groups, our ox groups. And in those groups, we can rest. I’m glad we have these places to go.

I want you to love the lamb you are. The wolf you are. The bear you are. The ox you are. But becoming who we are, and loving who we are, only gets us part of the way to Isaiah’s vision of peace, or what we call the kingdom to come.

The one we wait for during this season of Advent calls us to widen our field of knowing, to expand who we see as our neighbors, who we deem worthy of our love and care. There is only one thing I know of that connects every single one of us. One thing that every one of us shares. We have all suffered. To have this flesh, this human experience, means to suffer.

Isn’t that the power of this season? God comes down to inhabit this flesh. This earth. This mess. Emmanuel, God with us, God inhabiting our brokenness. Through Jesus, God suffers with us. Through Jesus, we are known.

Most of you know that I spend my days serving as a street chaplain. I spend much of that time with the men and women who come for sacred sleep through the Gubbio Project, both here and at St. Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin. Most of what I do is check in on folks. “How are you doing today?” When I’m here, I hang out in the courtyard and shoot the breeze with the regulars out there.

There’s one man I see most times I’m here. He’s always well dressed. He always smiles and gives me a hug and tells me that his favorite aunt’s name is Sara. I always ask him how he’s doing, and he always says he’s doing well. This past week, though, when I asked him how he’s doing, he looked down. I smelled alcohol on his breath, and he said with a sad smile, “they took me to detox last night, but…” and he trailed off. From there, a story poured out. How he hasn’t talked to his children in five years. How he missed their graduation because of his drinking. How he was clean for ten years but then he wasn’t. I drink by myself, he kept saying. I just need to go somewhere and get clean by myself.

I put my arm around him and felt something right here in my chest. I recognized his desire to be alone, how I don’t want anyone to see me when I’m falling apart. And I named that suffering out loud. “I know when I want to hide that I’m feeling ashamed,” I said. His head dropped, and he started to cry. I held him and tried to keep back the tears in my eyes.

To be a chaplain means to encounter people in their suffering, and to be willing to know them in all the ways that life has cracked them open. But in order to do that, I have to open myself to the ways my life has cracked me open. How I grew up with a pastor who told me that if I just had enough faith, I wouldn’t have asthma attacks. Who preached that gay people are going to hell, and so I always thought of myself as a condemned outsider.

I know that these cracks cause me to lash out in fear sometimes. To see others as threats. To retreat to the comfort of my tribe and never leave. I also know that the ways I have been broken have helped me connect to others who also think of themselves as condemned outsiders.

And together we have experienced healing.

I don’t know how life has cracked you open. I don’t know the loss you’ve experienced. I don’t know who has caused you harm or how. I don’t know your addictions, your fears. And I don’t know how you try to cover up those cracks. Maybe you avoid conflict. Or maybe you create it. Maybe you hide the cracks by always putting on a smile. Maybe you give, give, give until you have nothing left for yourself.

What I do know is that we all have brokenness of some sort, and it gives us a shared language through which we might connect, a way to be with one another through all of our differences.

An awesome man named Leonard once sung, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. In this Advent season, we wait for Jesus to break in through the cracks of this

world, and the cracks in us, to bring light.