Advent One sermon

Advent I 2018

           

          In the name of the God who is coming among us, Amen.

          “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near….”

          That’s what Jesus says in today’s gospel. He is teaching in the Temple. He is standing in the holiest spot on the face of the earth for his people and he is teaching about the end of days, the Last Things, the Apocalypse, the signs that will signal the coming of the Son of Man in power and great glory. “Heaven and earth will pass away,”  he proclaims, “but my words will not pass away….”

          And what does he tell his disciples to do? How does he want his followers to face the end of all things? “Stand up!” he says, “stand up and raise your heads…your redemption is drawing near….”

          We tend to see Advent as the time to prepare for the celebration of Christmas. We tend to spend these weeks talking about “preparing our hearts for the Christ Child.”  But that misses the more dominant theme of Advent. Advent is a time to reflect, not on Jesus’ birth, but on his promised return to Earth as the Son of Man. Advent not about the ‘first coming’ of Jesus. It’s about his second coming…and the end of days.

          “When you see these thing taking place,” Jesus teaches in the temple, “you know that the Kingdom of God is near….”

                                                          *

          When I went to Israel 18 years ago now, our group toured an archeological site called Megiddo. Megiddo is located on the south side of the Jezreel Valley on the Eeron Pass—the route taken by conquerors from the Pharohes of Egypt to King Solomon to the Roman Legions to the British Army in World War I.

          Megiddo is a vital strategic location for anyone seeking to control Israel. That is why twenty different cities have been built on that one spot—one on top of the other. Each conquering army destroyed the city they seized and built their new fortress on it’s ruins.

          The first settlement at Megiddo dates back to 4000 B.C.—6000 years ago, at the dawning of human civilization. To stand amid the ruins of Megiddo today is to stand on a spot that dates back to the Stone Age. That is almost impossible to ponder—a place that takes in the whole of human history.

          But after telling us all this and more about the history of Megiddo, our guide told us something else. Megiddo has another name. It is also known as Armageddon.

          The hair on the back of my neck stood up. For a moment I could hardly breathe. All the old stories of the Pentecostal preachers of my childhood rang in my ears and in my heart. The Day of the Lord…the Second Coming…the last battle of planet earth—all that was contained in that single word: Armageddon. We were standing on the place where the Book of Revelation tells us the world will end….

                                                *

          When I was a child, the end of the world through nuclear war was something almost everyone imagined could be true. We got under our desks in grade school and covered our heads, practicing for the Atomic bomb attack.   And today, the ecological crisis should provoke our imaginations as well. It is possible that we human beings could bring death to the planet through our carelessness and greed. The end of the world, in that way, is not unthinkable.

                                                                   *

          When I was 25 years old, I spent many hours over the span of a week, sitting by my mother’s deathbed. I took turns sitting there with other members of my family, watching for the signs and portents of the end of my mother’s days. It was over 45 years ago, yet the memories of those days and hours and moments are still vivid in my heart. Though she was in and out of a coma and never spoke during that week, she did wake up enough one day to let me feed her a little cup of vanilla ice-cream with a plastic spoon. She drifted away before she had eaten it all and I took the last bite. I still remember that as one of the most delicious and sensuous bites I’ve ever had. All my senses were heightened because I knew each moment I sat there might be the last moment of my mother’s life.

          I would try to match my breath with her breath, try to breathe in rhythm with her. And in those moments, every breath I took was distinct and different. Like snowflakes, no two breaths were the same.

          Most of the time, I don’t even notice that I’m breathing.

          Jesus tells us this today: Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down…and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap….Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.

          Advent is the time to wake up. Advent is the time to remember to be aware, on guard, alert while we are waiting. Most of the time, we just don’t notice how life is flowing around us. Most of the time, we are asleep.

          While I sat and waited for my mother to die, each moment took on “meaning”, every instant was important, the normally unnoticed seconds of my life were precious and rare and like snowflakes, all different from each other.

          While we are “waiting for Christmas” or “waiting for the Coming of the Son of Man”, the gift and meaning of Advent is that the “in between time” is precisely where we will find love and purpose and hope and wonder and God…and each other.

          It’s not What we’re waiting for that’s important. What’s important is what we do with the “waiting time”.  Our lives have purpose. Our love “makes a difference” in this world. Every bite of ice cream, every moment of waiting, every second of our lives is full and overflowing with the glory of God.

          Advent calls us to “be always on the watch”, wide awake with anticipation, leaning into every hour of our existence as if God were always breaking into our lives.

          Advent calls us to wake up and notice every breath as if God were breathing in rhythm with us. The Kingdom of God is that close to us, as close as our next breath…

          “Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Bush 41

I disagreed with much that he did, but unlike today, I always believed he did what he thought was right and good and moral and in the interest of his country.

I met him once because his aunt, Mary Bush House, was a member of St. Paul's in New Haven. A sweet, gentle, generous woman. He and Barbara would visit her at her nursing home, which made the nursing home crazy because the Secret Service would show up three days prior and turn things inside out.

He was as gentle and good as his aunt in our brief meeting.

I also know his brother. Jonathon, from Emmanuel Church. Jon--you would never know he was anything but a normal guy from the way he dresses to the way he interacts with us 'normal people'.

I emailed Jonathon to give him my heart in these days.

How much I wish a man of the integrity of G.H.W. Bush were in the White House today.

How much I wish that.

And how much I appreciate his long decades of service to his country.

Rest well, George Herbert Walker. We will miss you and your kind of man....

what is that in the sky?

I came inside today and said to Bern, 'there's a big shining orb in the sky. It looks familiar but I'm not sure what it is."

The sun shined on Connecticut today after days of gray autumn skies.

People in New England should be issues, free of charge by the states, those lights that simulate sunlight so you don't get depressed by the darkness.

I even took Brigit out at 4:30 plus in daylight. I usually take her out before dinner and then again before bed with a flashlight.

I've been sleeping 10 hours a night and Bern, a light sleeper, has been sleeping from 9:30 or so until almost 8.

The dark overcomes you here in the North-East.

And there are 23 days before the Winter Solstice when the light begins, a few minutes each day, to return to this part of the earth.

I couldn't live in Alaska, of that I am sure. Or Greenland either.

I need the sun and it is just over 3 weeks away from beginning to return.

Darker each day until then. And cloudy so much.

Welcome to the Nutmeg state!

Great line

I just watched Rev. Nadia Bolz-Webber on Huffington Post at a event for women.

She is a minister who wore a tank top revealing all the tattoos on her arms and a great necklace tattooed around her neck. She is asking Evangelical women to send her their 'purity rings'--given to them when they  promised not to have sex until marriage--so she can melt them down and craft a golden vagina out of them. She sees the "purity rites" of many evangelical churches as a way of shaming women about their bodies.

She has a valid point.

But she had a great line that I will use over and again. She was in a conference with many very successful and prominent women and she wondered if she should change her life and become like them.

Then she said, "but then I realized I have a graduate degree from a seminary, which is like a degree from Hogworts--it's not much use in the world, but you know the magic."

I have 3, count 'em, post-graduate degrees: a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard, a Master of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary, and a Doctor of Ministry from Hartford Seminary.

I can honestly say I am 'the Rev. Dr. Jim Bradley'.

And all those degrees are like degrees from Hogwarts.

Outside the church, they have little meaning.

But I 'do know the magic'.

Thank you Nadia, for that great line....

The most important 8 words in American life

WE BELIEVE THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF EVIDENT

There they are, in all their infamy and glory. What comes next are these words, "that all men (sic) are created equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

Well, the Declaration of Independence has needed a lot of tweaking  since 1776--the whole nasty slavery thing, women's rights, inclusion of minorities--but we've made a lot of progress even if it took over 250 years!

But more is to be done.

It is part of the 'truth' that is 'self evident' that anyone from another country has the RIGHT to apply for asylum in the United States. That is true and right and law.

And yet, our President is denying that truth and right to those waiting in Mexico.

I would say because they are brown and not white and don't necessarily speak English.

He would say because they are criminals and bad people--without any evidence of that!

And America is based on "evidence" as well--one of those 'truths' we find self evident. That's what law is about. Law. I have a son who is a lawyer and a daughter-in-law who is a judge--let me know and I'll put you in touch with them if you don't believe LAW is a self evident truth of our democracy.

And those frightened, haunted people just want to do what our LAW says is self evident and apply for asylum.

And we shoot tear gas at them.

LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF FREEDOM.

It appears that people of color and ethnicity were denied the right to vote in the mid-term elections or removed wrongly from the roles.

I vote in Connecticut. I took an envelope addressed to me from our oil company and that was all I needed to vote.

Why these 'picture ID's' and signatures matching? I don't sign anything to vote. I never show my picture. Why is it so hard to vote other places.

When the 'rights' of anyone--people who want to ask for asylum or people who want to vote who don't have a picture ID--are violated, all our rights are violated.

Democracy is strong but not beyond defeating.

We must all begin to defend the 'truths' that are 'self evident'.

Bad things are happening.

They must stop.

THEY MUST.

And soon.....Very soon.....

Something I've never shared

I wrote the following sometime before my father died in 1987. It tells of the first moral decision I ever made in my life--to quit baseball rather than play for a manager who was cruel and awful about the boys who loved him. I've never shared it before. I regret I didn't tell people way back then, in 1960. But it would have broken hearts and hurt many. "Moral decisions" I've learned since then, don't always lead to 'moral actions'. Would that they always did. But they don't. Alas and alack.

So, now, all these years later, I share it.

BASEBALL

          My father played baseball in a rag-tag country league that covered three or four counties in south-eastern West Virginia and south-western Virginia. Actually, it is a misnomer to call what my father played in a ‘league’, even a ‘rag-tag’ one. It was more like a network of young men from scattered farm communities who knew each other from logging jobs, country fairs and cattle sales. Each of those young men would go back to their community and fire up enough enthusiasm to schedule a two Sunday double header, home and away, during the summer. They would play on rough hewn ball fields beside local schools or on make-shift diamonds in the middle of someone’s cow field. They would assemble early, strutting their farm grown stuff, the 1930’s version of ‘macho’, drinking lots of half-fermented homemade moonshine, playing a little baseball that would end up in a fight.

          The next Sunday they’d do it on the other team’s field.

          I know the names where those rough farmers grew up. There are places like Waiteville (where my father grew up), Paint Branch, Rock Camp, Peterstown, Greenville and Wayside. Names I know from my father and because, in my boyhood, I have been there.  And in all those places, according to my father, there were raw, rough, harsh, sunburned farm boys, itching for sunny weekends, home brew and baseball. Not to mention, it was a good way to meet girls from other towns.

Those girls would come in their home-made dresses or summer things from Montgomery Ward, full of freckles and giggles, hiding their faces behind their hands, but their eyes were sharp, focused, sizing up the Farm Boys that weren’t boringly familiar. The girls would sit in the shade of the schoolhouse or under trees in the outfield of the pastures, always distant, always shaded, remote from the action but fully involved. Dreaming dreams, I imagine, that Farm Girls have always dreamed.

I have disappointed my father in many ways, but no two as profound as my not playing baseball beyond backyards and two years of little league and my not being a Republican. All the other disappointments and betrayals pale beside those two. And now, in the last of the ninth of his life, with a Republican in the White House who even confounds my father, in the last months before the intricacies and failures of his own mind and body began to be his only confusion, it my not playing baseball that causes me the most guilt.

He never understood why I quit playing baseball. I was ‘promising’. I played first base with a grace and effortlessness that still surprises me when I pass ball with my son. I was, in the language of the game, ‘a glove’. And in batting practice, or in softball, I scattered hits to all fields and showed occasional power to right-center. But when the game began, when Ray Smith was on the mound for Gary and I was at the plate, people went for sodas. “All field, no bat” was the scouting report when I was 12 and 13. But everyone thought I would ‘come around’. People who had seen me in practice knew it was just a matter of time and timing and all those sharply hit balls just outside the right field line would be landing in the alley and I’d be standing on second base before anyone knew what had happened. I had one year left of little league and people in Anawalt were counting on me to develop into a hitter. I’d bat second next year, right behind Danny Taylor, who led the league in hitting and was a constant threat to steal, even with the strict, no-lead-off rules. Danny would get on more than half the time and the worried picture would serve me some fat ones. Danny would score from first on all those doubles into right center. The Anawalt Comets would, at long last be winners.

Then, with one game left in the 1960 season and the Comets securely in second place, preparing for the playoffs, I quit. I walked off the field after turning a brilliant, unassisted double play that ended a 16-3 rout of the Elbert Aces, in which I even had two hits, and, never explaining, turned in my uniform.

There was one out and a Subric boy, Bobby, I think, on first. And Leo Kroll, the only decent hitter Elbert had, was batting. He hit left handed and I was guarding the bag, holding the runner on. Jason Butler was pitching, which showed the disgust in which we held the Aces—Jason only pitched against Elbert, allowing us to save Danny Taylor or Bobbly LaFon to pitch against first-place Gary. Leo dried his hands, spit on them, dried them again. We were ahead by 13 runs and most of the parents were anxious to go home to TV. Benny Braham’s mother stated hooting at Leo, questioning his manhood (or at least his boyhood). Benny scraped the dirt around third base, hanging his head as he always did when his mother embarrassed him, which was often. Leo stepped in, took some practice swings, ignored Betty Braham’s insults and hit Jason’s pitiful fast ball like a shot about a foot off the ground a yard to the right of first base.

(But before all that, I had been listening to our coach, standing about ten feet to the left of first base, talking with a friend from out of town. I have great hearing and often overhear conversations never meant for me—and this one certainly wasn’t! Jimmie N. our coach was telling his friend about the player’s on our team. He called me ‘four-eyes’ because I wore glasses and pointed out the obvious, I couldn’t hit worth a “God damn”. He said Jason, pitching, was a “fat assed bastard” and that Benny Braham had a ‘whore’ for a mother—and he said, “I know that first hand!” He said Danny Taylor was an ‘ass-hole’ and a ‘cunt’. He said Billie Bridgfield in center “likes to pat butt too much, he’s a queer, I know it”. On and on he went, saying horrible things about each of us. This was a man I had given two summers of my life to. A man I looked up to and trusted. And no one on either side of my family used the language he used for anything—much less to talk about 12 and 13 year old boys who idolized him.)

I don’t remember thinking about what to do when Leo hit that line-drive. Obviously, I didn’t think at all, but threw my body to the right, leaving my feet as I had done so many times playing catch with my Uncle Del in my Uncle Russell’s yard, and caught the ball in the air. The runner was already half-way to second base, not even looking back. Nevertheless, I pulled myself to my knees and dived back to first, slapping my Ferris Fain mitt on the base for the game ending double play.

The crowd, whether delighted by my fielding or merely glad to be able to go home (or a little of both) cheered and cheered. Someone picked me up and suddenly the arms of my friends were lifting me up on Benny Braham’s and Jason Butler’s shoulders. I was carried off the field for the first and last time in my life. They put me down into the waiting arms of my Daddy and he carried me, all 112 pounds of me, almost to the car. Half-way home down the winding mountain roads, I told him I was quitting baseball.

There was so noise save the whizzing of the wheels on the cooling pavement and the cracking of my father’s heart. He said nothing. We rode in silence. When we got home neither of us told my mother about my two Texas-league singles, my run scored, my miraculous double play. My father went outside to the coal house for drink or two of bourbon and I folded my jersey, #7, just like Mickey Mantle, for the last time.

Christ the King

Today was the Feast of Christ the King. I'll sending along a sermon I preached on this day 11 years ago.

CHRIST THE KING 2007

          Here we are, on the Sunday before the first Sunday of Advent, poised on the edge of preparing ourselves to receive the Christ Child into our hearts, and what is the reading we get? Something from Luke about Good Friday….Something about the crucifixion.

          A little jarring and ‘out of time’, it seems to me.

          I’m reminded of how the Council of Churches—which became the Interfaith Ministry—used to have a Good Friday service here at St. John’s.

The service was “The Seven Last Words of Christ” combined with our Book of Common Prayer Good Friday Service. There were always 7 sermons—talk about a way to make Good Friday dismal and BAD!!!—and I was in charge of making sure the whole thing fit into the hours between noon and 3 p.m.

          Dealing with 7 preachers and a set-in-stone time frame was always an adventure! Preachers, by-in-large, don’t like to be given limits but I would limit them to no more than 7 minutes for their sermons, knowing full well most would go past 10 or 12. I’d built in enough silence to manage that. But the last one of those we had, the preacher on the 6^th word had gone on for almost 15 minutes about the crucifixion, when he said: “Now let us go back to Bethlehem….”

          “Oh no!” I said to myself, with expletives deleted, “we’re going in the wrong direction!”

          That’s rather how I feel today. We’re preparing to embark on the journey to Bethlehem and Luke has jerked us to Golgotha and the conversation between Jesus and two other dying men.

Since it is what we are given by the Lectionary, it is what we will attend to—Jesus talking with the two thieves.

          What is interesting about the exchange, in my mind, is this: the first thief parroted the slurs of the crowds and jeeringly called on Jesus to save himself—and to save the two other condemned men as well. Not only did that first thief by into the “conventional wisdom” of the leaders of his day, he was thinking of ‘himself’ above all. “Save yourself and US!”

          The second thief had another view of the situation. “We have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds,” he tells the other man. “But this man has done nothing wrong….”

          The second thief is not thinking of ‘himself’. In fact, he has a realistic understanding that, for him, ‘the punishment fits the crime’. Instead, that second thief, bleeding and dying, is thinking of the one beside him, who is innocent in his mind.

         

          That is a place well worthy to begin Advent—thinking of the one beside you, the ones around you, those even far away…instead of thinking of yourself.

          That could be recommended for all of us as a way to prepare our hearts for the visit of the Child of Bethlehem.

         

          But the conversation is not yet over. The second thief has one more thing to say to Jesus.

          “Jesus,” he says, life slipping away from him, “remember me when you come into your Kingdom….”

         

          That is certainly a second recommendation for all of us as a way to prepare our hearts for the visit of the Christ Child.

          REMEMBER ME….REMEMBER ME….REMEMBER ME….

          Memory is one of the most precious gifts God gives us. Memory is our anchor in the angry sea, our Rock in the storm, our Hope in the times of Trouble. Memory ties us to our identity—to WHO we are and WHOSE we are as we continue our journey.

          WHO we are and WHOSE we are is clear. We are the children of God, and as we move through the shadows and darkness of Lent we should pray God to “remember us”. And God will….

          “Truly I tell you,” Jesus tells the thief, “today you will be with me in Paridise.”

      

       There’s a third recommendation to us in today’s readings as we verge on the preparation of Advent. It comes from the Psalm of the day—Psalm 46, my favorite Psalm of all. After that Psalm tells us that we need not fear the changes and chances of life, the song reminds us of this: Listen—“BE STILL, THEN, AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD….”

          Next Sunday, Advent begins—one of the great and wondrous seasons of the Church’s year. And today we are given advice on how to prepare to prepare our hearts and lives to receive the gift of God at Christmas.

          It’s not hard. It’s not rocket science or heart surgery. It is, in fact, as simple as ABC.

          Think of others, not yourself.

      Pray to God to ‘remember’ you.

      Be still…find time to be still…and in that you will know God.

          That’s the advice I’ll seek to follow.

          I invite you to do the same.