A Foggy Soul and Being Ready

I've been thinking and preparing for over a week now, for Sunday, November twenty seventh!  Advent Sunday. I’ve been turning to the reading the passages of scripture that introduce the events described in the four Gospels. For the first time I can remember, giving deep attention to what the angle spoke to Elizabeth before her baby was born.  What an awesome experience that must have been!  He told her that her son’s name would be John. That he would be for the world a herald of the Messiah who was coming. Saint Luke records this in his first chapter: “He will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah,” the angel told her.

And that’s exactly what happened some thirty years later. The New Testament writers report that John called all who would hear to repent and believe just as God’s angle had promised his mother, John would do.  He was sent to prepare the way for the coming Lord, to prepare hearts to recognize God among them. “Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God,” proclaimed the angel. This John did and continues to do.

As I ponder, it seems a little odd to me that this untamed, locust-eating figure of John the Baptist is one of the key figures in celebrating the Christmas season. His wild and probing message continues to cry in urgency, “Are you ready,” and for this, despite the sentimental and domesticated visions of Christmas common to at least, my era, is a cry worthy of the bizarre and jolting doctrine of Incarnation. In fact, I am stopped in my tracks, right here, right now, and asked, “Bill, are you ready to respond to the fragile infant that came into the world through a manger in Bethlehem? Are you ready to hear him, see him, consume his flesh and blood? Are you ready to recognize God in body, the hunter, the king, the great I AM?” Isn’t the testimony of John essentially tame compared to the mystery of an incarnate God? St. John in his first chapter and repeats often the Baptists’ insistence: “I am not the Christ, but truly and fearfully, there is one who is.”

I’m reminded again, the Incarnation, this embodied presence of God, bids me not only to remember God’s descent into a dirty stable in Bethlehem, but to keep myself awake to the reality of God’s descending upon the thresholds of my life. As John called the people of Israel, so the Incarnation continues to sound the consequence of this mystery: Keep yourself clothed in readiness, for God is near.

I am unable to explain a spiritual chill.  But I get one when I recognize even John, who was the first to recognize Jesus for who he was, leaping in his own mother’s womb at the arrival of the pregnant Mary, struggled through dark and confusing times, wondering perhaps if God was indeed near. Thrown in jail by Herod, John’s certainty, seems to me, to be challenged for the first time.  I can attest to likewise seeing a fog coming over the “Go and ask Jesus,” John told his disciples, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”message of light I’ve preached so confidently. “If this man is who I thought he was, why am I in this place?”

With John in mind, I turn back to some of my underlining of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer once compared our waiting on God to the waiting that is done in a prison cell, “in which one waits and hopes and does various unessential things… but is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside.” It is a dramatic metaphor, particularly from one who stood imprisoned himself, chained for standing up to the Nazi’s, waiting for them to deal with him as they would. Bonhoeffer saw clearly something I have forgotten many times in the midst of a sentimental holiday: the Incarnation is about God breaking through the door that I myself cannot open. And in fact, all year round, the Incarnation is my promise that God will come breaking through once again.

I have always wondered if Jesus’s response to John’s question frustrated the prophet behind bars or if it is my own frustration so easily read into his words. Jesus didn’t offer a clear and certain answer for the alone and imprisoned baptizer, but invited John to answer his own question in Matthew 11:4-6. “Go back and report to John what you hear and see,” Jesus told John’s disciples. “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.” I can’t find a response given from John. O’ I wish I could. What matters today is my response; isn't it?

Sitting within his quiet cell, perhaps, just perhaps, John began to recount the conversations he had with Jesus. I wonder, perhaps, hearing again the words God had placed on his own lips. “He who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire:” as St. Luke records in his third chapter.

Father, God, You are moving!  Every indication in the world says You are. Yet I confess I’ve been sitting, waiting. During this time of ruminating and puzzling this story of John the Baptist and the question Jesus seemed to ask of him has become the question for me.  Am I ready?  Am I ready for You, my redemptive God, Who continues to do the unthinkable?  My answer:  Yes! Yes!  Father, forgive me for I have sinned. Amen 

Lesson By Cell Phone

It seems interesting to me, having returned to my home in Florida, within recent weeks, that my life without a cell phone would be more than inconvenient. Not so much so when I am at Quiet Rest.  While there, it seems to tether me in so many ways.  But here, I fit in with everyone else. I can take calls with an “excuse me,” in the midst of that conversation with the understanding, garrulous (my newest found word)  friend. Nor do I need to make a mad dash home from the workshop in order to make that important phone call. I now make it on the way, sitting in traffic, driving to the hardware store, doctor’s appointment, making a stop at the grocery store for items Bettyann has asked me to bring home or all the above. And I admit I do have a great appreciation when I remember the time I had to use the phone with a five foot cord, having to operate within a five-foot radius. On the other hand, this is not to say that I don’t feel a tethering of a different sort. Owning a cell phone has fostered the attitude that I am always available, always working, always obtainable. While there is no cord to which I am confined, the phone itself has proven it can be ironically confining.

But these kinds of shifting dilemmas, I’m particularly aware of today,  are not all that uncommon. Just as the pendulum swings in one direction offering some kind of correction, I’m finding, it swings back to the other side introducing a new set of problems. Major and minor movements of history possess a similar, corrective rhythm, swinging from one extreme to another and finding trouble with both. The pendulum swings from one direction, often to an opposite error, or at best, toward a new set of challenges.

I’m forever realizing that within and without its walls, the church, too, is continually responding to what I perceive needs correction. When the need to get away from dead, religious worship initiated certain shifts within the church, it was an observation wisely discerned. But from my viewpoint, what this has meant for many churches has, unfortunately, been a shifting away from history, common liturgy, and its own past—in some cases contributing to a whole different set of problems. I don't say much outside my closest circle of family and freinds but I have long observed; that while breaking away from the “religiosity” of history, I think some now find themselves tethered in a sense to all things contemporary and individually, unable to draw on the riches of the history from which they have isolated themselves.  I think, that probably, while the intent may have been good, and the shifts did separate their flocks from certain problems within church history, it also seems to have separated the sheep and lambs from all of history. As a result, I wonder if many church leaders now seem more divorced from history than ever, having swung so far in one direction that they we can no longer see from whence they have come? Coupled with our culture’s general devaluing of anything that is “outdated,” the risk of seeing the church’s identity more in terms of today’s form than its enduring essence seems, to me, both high and hazardous.

Something in the image of the ever-oscillating pendulum reminds me of the countercultural professions and practices that are meant to root the church in an identity beyond the one that might exist at any given time or changing mood.  Is this ever-moving world, with all it's technological improvements and ideological corrections rushing in so fast that I get caught up living my life with no fear of the future or disdain of the past? Or am I professing with the community, which St. Paul mentions in first Corinthians 10:11, saying:  “upon whom the end of the ages have come?” And in the midst of this culture consumed with the new, the contemporary, and the progressive, am I rooted in the identity of a Man who lived 2000 years ago, One who proclaimed the reign of God on earth here and now, but whose future return He also asked me to look to expectantly.

Moreover, as I've been looking at this, the spirit of awe brought something to my attention the last time I took communion at church. The church professes something Christ left behind as a means to understanding my identity and mission, at having turned seventy three. Before going to the cross, Jesus imparted that the disciples were to continue breaking bread together, as they had done so often before, but that now these common meals would also hold new meaning. They could not go where Jesus was going, but they were to be partners in what was about to be done. The bread broken was to be His body which would be broken; the cup they share was to be His own blood shared—and their repeated sharing in this common meal was to continually move them to participation in His dying, rising, and victorious life. In this, the disciples were to be united with Christ in an event that would inform all past, present, and future.  I just can’t help but to keep going back once or twice a week and ruminate on some of Lesslie Newbigin’s explaination in The Open Secret: “When they are still far from beginning to understand what ‘the reign of God’ means, Jesus does a deed and gives a command that will bind them to him in a continually renewed and deepened participation in the mystery of his own being….The disciples will thus themselves become part of the revealed secret of the presence of the kingdom.”

Father, God, I thank You for allowing an expanded peek into Your being!  Amen