Month: November 2011

Advent 1 – Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

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Today starts the season of Advent – a time of expectation, anticipation and hope. As I reflect on the season this year, I keep returning to the question of what it means to live into the expectation of the incarnation. So much of the rhetoric I hear about what this time of expectation means though is limited to the trappings of the rituals of the season. Instead of embodying anticipatory waiting, what I hear most often are complaints that others aren’t waiting properly. From rants about churches singing Christmas Carols instead of Advent hymns or about those that deck their halls with pagan reds and greens instead of the proper liturgical hues, to the yearly condemnation of consumerism, Santa, and people who say “holiday” instead of “Christmas,” Advent isn’t so much about embracing an alternative reality as it is about delineating superficial difference.

We somehow seem to have forgotten the earth-shattering reality of that which we await. Advent is more than just a coming; it is the breaking in of the divine into the everyday patterns of this world. It is the hope of the future incarnate in the present making all things new. To live expectantly into the incarnation is to affirm the eschatological hope of the future while at the same time be transformed by that very hope already at work in the present. To observe Advent isn’t simply to reenact a memory of the past or look towards a second coming someday, for both would implicitly assume a present absence of the divine. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, forever transforming possible modes of being in this world. To anticipate the fulfillment of this hope is to accept the new way of being that broke into our world with the incarnation of the long expected Jesus.

It is safe to in remembrance await the coming of a powerless child or to simply tinker with the language and rituals that comfort us with the promise that the liberating hope of Christ is something we can only await. What is seemingly far more difficult is to actually live into the alternate reality that the advent of Christ ushered into the present. To anticipate hope by actively going out to meet it. To await the coming of the Kingdom of God by living in it right now. To declare that the status quos of injustice, oppression, and suffering have no place in the transformed new creation of Christ.

We are not the ones creating hope, but neither are we the ones simply awaiting a future hope. Advent reminds us that hope in the form of Jesus has already broken into our world. To live in expectation of that hope is to live into it – to embody the alternate reality Jesus made possible. The world and even the church may resist this subversion of the status quo even as they incant the very refrain “Come thou long expected Jesus,” for they have safely bracketed off hope in the past and future. Expecting to encounter the transforming and liberating hope of Jesus in the present is the far more difficult aspect of the incarnation to await.

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The Call to Mourn on Thanksgiving

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For the 1970 annual reenactment of the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock – a festive tourist attraction complete with costumes, prayers, and parade – the organizers wanted to highlight the relations between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe since it was the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival. To do so, the organizers invited the current leader of the Wampanoag, Frank James, to deliver a speech for the occasion. James wrote his speech based on the Pilgrims’ account of their first year in the area which included how they had opened Native graves in search of treasure, forcefully took food from Native tribes, and then captured and sold Native Americans as slaves. Although his speech’s theme was on reconciliation it was rejected for being too inflammatory. Rejected from the official Thanksgiving celebration, James instead delivered his speech on a nearby hill, establishing the first National Day of Mourning. Every year since a group has gathered there for a National Day of Mourning – committing to gather as long as there are injustices in our nation that need to be mourned. At times the gathering has been met with armed police, state troopers, and pepper spray, but since 1998 the gathering has been permitted to assemble as long as it doesn’t interfere with the official Thanksgiving celebration.

Not just in November, but every week, Christians around the world gather for official Thanksgiving celebrations. Eucharist, which means thanksgiving, is a celebration of praise and thankfulness to God situated in the memory of a death. When we gather, we hear the story of what happened on the night Jesus was betrayed and partake in the broken body and shed blood, for we believe that “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Our process of giving thanks involves the retelling of a sacrifice – a confession of acts done on our behalf. To do so in remembrance implies that the past, however painful and uncomfortable, cannot be forgotten. We gather not only to give thanks and praise, but to remember the events of the story that we find ourselves in.

Participating in this ritual of thanksgiving and remembrance shapes us. We in the church not only partake symbolically of the body of Christ, we are the body of Christ which believes that sharing the bread and the cup represents the communion we have as a body. We are not individuals who happen to gather once a week, but integral parts of a body that depend on each other in order to function. We remember the sacrifice of Jesus by caring for each other’s needs – living sacrificially for one another as part of that act of remembrance and thanksgiving. Within that communion many of us pray as part of our very act of thanksgiving words of confession and repentance for what we have done and what we have left undone, including our failure to love our neighbors as ourselves. Those aren’t (or shouldn’t be) just perfunctory words; for to enter into thanksgiving involves placing ourselves in community and not only confessing the ways we have failed to remember the sacrifice of Christ as part of that community, but repenting of those ways by seeking reconciliation instead.

Thanking God for all God has done for us without acknowledging the parts of our body that are in pain or even the ways we have caused harm to that very body is to fail to remember Christ’s sacrifice. The first Thanksgiving is not just a tale of blessing (if it is even that at all), it is also a tale of the failure to love our neighbors – a failure that gets perpetuated every year mourning and reconciliation are avoided in the name of a celebration. Participating in Eucharist, in thanksgiving, involves acknowledging that because of Christ our lives are intricately bound up in each others’. We rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn because we are all one body. There should not have to be a separate National Day of Mourning to call us to repentance for the injustices caused by things done and left undone. Pleas for the confession of our failure to love our neighbor should not be silenced for being too inflammatory or met with armed police for getting in the way of official celebration. Thanksgiving for the body of Christ should by its very nature involve mourning as well as celebration and confession as well as praise.

The Thanksgiving table is also the Eucharist table where we can partake only in lived remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice.

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Dangerous Questions

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In the traditional Jewish service for Passover, it is assumed that children will ask questions about why the family is partaking in a meal of remembrance. The service states that there are four types of children asking questions – the wise child, the wicked child, the innocent child, and the child who does not yet know what to ask. Contrary to what many Christians who are fixated on right doctrine might assume, the wicked child is not the one asking forbidden questions that challenge static absolute truths. The wicked child is instead the one who refuses to ask questions – the one who doesn’t engage and therefore places herself outside the community. It is a poignant reminder that wrestling with the hard aspects of faith and even being consumed with doubts and questions is a far better place to be in than one who has stopped asking questions. Challenging the status quo through engaged reflection on one’s faith implies that one is still on the trajectory of discipleship – seeking to ever discern what it means to follow after God even when it might unsettle the assumptions of the community.

It was this wickedness, this failure to care about what God cares about by challenging the status quo, that Amos witnessed when he came to Jerusalem. A poor herdsman from Judah, Amos was part of a population that was subservient to Israel at the time. Judah therefore bore the brunt of the expenses of Israel, with the poor and needy being trampled to cover the expenditures of those in power. Through the manipulation of debt and credit, the wealthy had amassed more and more of the land at the expense of poor landowners. Some scholars believe that the only thing that would have even brought a poor shepherd like Amos to Jerusalem was the requirement that he pay tribute to those that controlled his lands at an official festival. But what a struggling working class man saw in Jerusalem was a population that not only lived in extravagance, but one that had stopped asking questions about if they were living in the ways of the Lord. In fact they not only had stopped asking questions about whether their lifestyles based on the oppression of the poor reflected God’s desires, they had been told by the powers that be that it was not proper (or permitted) to ask questions that challenged the ways of Israel.

Seeing this abandonment of the faith in the guise of apathy moved Amos, who was not a religious professional, to speak the word of the Lord to Israel. Although the governing religious hierarchy told him to not prophecy against the ways of Israel, Amos knew he could not remain silent about the injustices he saw. He saw the people doing religion as normal while the poor were exploited on their behalf and knew they had rejected their God. So the message he was given to deliver on the streets of Jerusalem was that God hates their worship gatherings and the noise of their praise songs because they have given up on caring about what it actually means to be God’s people. Amos tells them –

Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches,… who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music; who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” 

Not caring about how their lives and not just their ritual gatherings are caught up in following God had turned Israel into the wicked child at Passover. They enjoyed the prosperity injustice allowed them and therefore had accepted the injunction against questioning the practices of the government and economic system. They went through the motions of liturgy without doing the actual work of wrestling with the questions of the faithful. Amos called them to instead to stop exploiting the poor and let justice roll across the land. He begged them to ask the hard questions of themselves and of their rulers – to be disciples despite the cost.

But questioning the status quo is dangerous. Jerusalem had no interest in hearing the word of the Lord that challenged their economic prosperity. The powers that be moved to silence his prophecy and evicted Amos from Jerusalem.

And yet his witness stands as scripture. Thanks be to God.

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It Isn’t Nowhere to Them

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I was watching one of those competitive cooking shows the other night with my six year old daughter Emma. The challenge in that particular episode involved taking the chefs out to (as they called it) “the middle of nowhere” and having them butcher a pig and cook it over a fire they built from wood they gathered. I found the whole thing to be amusing, but Emma was visible confused by what they had said. She asked me, “How can they be in the middle of nowhere? Someone must know where they are. They had to get there somehow, so there must be roads and towns nearby. I bet the people who live there know where it is; it isn’t nowhere to them.”

It is in our nature to trivialize the other. To redefine what is precious to others according to our point of view. So what is home to someone becomes nowhere under a certain gaze. It is this tendency to redefine the other or the space of the other in light of our own image or interests that shaped the entire westward expansion of the American nation. If the land was redefined as wilderness or frontier – a wild space that needed to be tamed by those with the science and skills to do so – as opposed to being someone else’s home, then it was not only permissible but our duty to claim that nowhere as our own.

The same story plays out in the religious realm. Call a place or a group of people godforsaken or simply in need of receiving (and incapable of giving) ministry and their identity changes. I’ve been reading recently of the history of Hispanic churches in Texas where this dynamic was in evidence. The studies I read demonstrated that the denominations that started mission churches in what was then Mexico did their best to Anglicize those they converted. The Mexicans (who when the border shifted became Mexican-Americans) were expected to accept hymns, liturgies, and preaching styles in an imposed cultural idiom. They were barred from attending seminary and therefore from serving in leadership in those denominations – in the eyes of the traditional denominations their identity as other was as needy inferior. Outsiders defined their somewhere as a religious nowhere in need of being shaped and formed in an Anglo image. It is no wonder then that many Mexicans eventually rejected traditional denominational churches and flocked to fundamentalist churches that didn’t strip them of their culture or their dignity, but instead provided space for such things like indigenous expressions of music, preaching training for laypeople, and the respect of communal self-definition in worship.

As such obviously racist and colonialist redefinitions of the other (slowly) become a mistake of the past, the urge to question the validity of the identity of the other remains strong. Instead of scorning the culture of the other however, it is now the very idea of culture and identity that gets scorned. In an age of identity politics where the voices from the margins are finally emerging as valid conversation partners, the latest redefining trend is to deny the very idea of identity. “It’s not that you are inferior it is just that you are not actually who you think you are. Gay, female, black? – those are meaningless categories, so therefore there’s no need to argue about the need to listen to something that doesn’t actually exist.”

Once again the other is being redefined as being nowhere.

But, as my six year old so astutely pointed out, it isn’t nowhere to them.

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He Has No Power?

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At a conference I attended recently we sang a worship song one evening with the repeated refrain “He has no power.” The song was a South African freedom song and the cantor explained that the “he” in the song refers to Satan. Knowing how songs of liberation work, the reference to the oppressor Satan here serves as a place-holder for the actually physical oppressors which in this situation would be the white Apartheid government (for more on this in songs see James Cone’s work). In instances of such extreme oppression, it is safe to sing hymns about freedom from Satan, but not so safe to sing openly about the desire to be liberated from the racist forces of the white government.

So there I was in a room full of a few hundred older, very reserved, and 99.9% white Christians who were singing a South African freedom song as if it were a 17th century hymn. It was in the middle of singing the song that I was stopped short by the thought that what we were doing there was the exact opposite of what we were proclaiming in song. How could we truly believe that the powers of oppression have no power if we weren’t embodying any visible sign of it? Beyond the oddity of having someone conduct our singing about freedom so as to ensure we hit the right pitches, the dissonance of the entire situation was unsettling. I couldn’t help but wonder if the act of appropriating a song of liberation from another culture and subduing and anglicizing it was not in itself an act of oppression of the song’s very power all for the sake of allowing us to feel multicultural an affirming of the “other.” Where were the acts of liberation? Where were the faces and voices of those others? Where in our midst was the struggle to turn the world upside-down, destroy the segregation of our churches, and humbly sacrifice our vision of how a worship service must function in order to make room for the hallelujahs of others?

These thoughts stopped my voice in the moment; I couldn’t finish singing the song. I did hear others grumbling about the song after the service. Either they had missed the explanations of the “he” referring to Satan and were upset that we would dare sing that God had no power. Or they were upset that they had to sing about the person of Satan since we all know he doesn’t actually exist. But I was met with blank stares when I suggested that I was uneasy singing a song of liberation in an unliberated space.

I am fully aware that no one there, especially not those who planned that liturgy, had such motives in mind in choosing that song. In fact I am sure they assumed that the choice was one for diversity and inclusion that challenged assumptions about what constitutes proper hymns. But as I reflected on the moment my unease remained. It made me wonder how often in the church we make that promise of freedom into a hollow platitude. Like when we spiritualize the call to release the oppressed and free the prisoners into being simply about overcoming our personal demons. Or twist the call to love our neighbor as ourselves to really be about just loving ourselves. Or preach that Christians shouldn’t be distracted by politics, or economics, or corporate greed (since addressing those issues might require us to live counter-culturally…). We speak of liberation and freedom as if they are facades. They make us look great on the outside, but are so impotent of concepts in our theologies that they do nothing to affect who we actually are. But the veneer of liberation only serves to further hide away the oppression still inside. The most empowering thing for racism is for people to believe it has been dealt with. But that isn’t true freedom.

Liberation cannot be just a guise. Inclusion cannot be trivial. Freedom from oppression cannot be spiritualized away. I had to stop singing because I felt like I was participating in the very act I was claiming to have overcome. There were voices missing in that space and I knew I couldn’t say Satan had no power in the midst of that absence. But even so, all I could do was not sing.

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