Merry Christmas to all! On this most blessed day, I share with you a poem by Lynn Ungar, titled "Incarnation":
The trees have finally
shaken off their cloak
of leaves, redrawn
themselves more sternly
against the sky. I confess
I have coveted this
casting off of flesh,
have wished myself
all line and form, all God.
I confess that I am caught
by the story of Christmas,
by the pronouncement of the Spirit
upon Mary’s plain flesh.
What right did the angel
have to come to her
with the news of that
unprovided, unimaginable
birth? What right
had God to take on flesh
so out of season?
When Mary lay gasping
in water and blood
that was of her own body
but not her own
did she choose one gleaming,
antiseptic star to carry
her through the night?
The flesh has so few choices,
the angels, perhaps, none.
The trees will shake themselves
and wait for spring.
The angels, unbodied, will clutch
the night with their singing.
And Mary, like so many,
troubled and available,
will hear the word:
The power of the Most High
will overshadow you
And in her flesh, respond.
(Thanks to Tuhina Rasche, fellow FTE Ministry Fellow, for making me aware of this poem through her sermon from 4 Advent on her blog, This Lutheran Life.)
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Saying "Yes" to God's call
In my baby book, my mother writes about my baptism when I was sixteen months old:
“Pastor Sims baptized you. When he poured the water over your head, you shook your head and said, ‘No!’”
Tomorrow, I will say yes. Twenty-nine years after my baptism, I will be ordained a deacon in Christ’s church and say “yes” to God’s call on my life.
Although in my adult life I became a critic of infant baptism and delighted in the baby book witness that even as a one-year-old, I was against having something chosen for me that I did not choose for myself, I later discovered that the date of my baptism – February 27 – was the same date that I had an evangelical “conversion experience” in high school and the same date that I first started volunteering with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge, Mass., the homeless ministry out of which my calling to the priesthood emerged. So I can’t deny that something must have happened at my baptism, however much I did not choose it for myself at the time.
And as I approach the eve of my ordination, which marks my transition from being a lay person to being a member of the clergy, a transition in identity which can never truly be reversed – an ontological change, if you will – I am reminded of all the ways in which I did not choose this call for myself. Yes, I am assenting to it of my own free will, but it was not simply an individual, personal choice. The Episcopal Church does not allow people to take on ordination solely of their own choosing – the community has to affirm that they see the call as well.
The authority that will be given to me at my ordination is not mine to take, but the church’s to give, and I accept it with a measure of humility and honor and gratitude. The priest who led our pre-ordination Quiet Day told us a story of how the priest in her home congregation used to always have members of the congregation put his vestments on him before the Eucharistic liturgy, symbolizing that he could only be vested and serving them as priest by virtue of their assent and their choosing him as their representative leader. I like the metaphor that we cannot vest ourselves, just as we cannot celebrate Eucharist alone – there must be a community present to assent to the words that the priest offers on their behalf.
There have been times during the formal discernment process and my seminary career when I have wanted to shake my head and say, “No!” to this “odd and wondrous calling,” as UCC pastors Lillian Daniels and Martin Copenhaver refer to it. But after giving the matter serious thought and prayer, tomorrow, I will choose to say yes even to something that I have not entirely chosen for myself. And as a reminder of that, at the ordination tomorrow, under my collar and out of sight from everyone else, I will be wearing a tiny gold cross with a thin, short chain that barely fits around my neck. It is a delicate necklace made for a baby: my baptismal cross, the cross that was chosen for me by parents I did not choose as a keepsake for a sacrament that I did not choose – but that somehow has transformed my life, even without my consent.
“Pastor Sims baptized you. When he poured the water over your head, you shook your head and said, ‘No!’”
Tomorrow, I will say yes. Twenty-nine years after my baptism, I will be ordained a deacon in Christ’s church and say “yes” to God’s call on my life.
Although in my adult life I became a critic of infant baptism and delighted in the baby book witness that even as a one-year-old, I was against having something chosen for me that I did not choose for myself, I later discovered that the date of my baptism – February 27 – was the same date that I had an evangelical “conversion experience” in high school and the same date that I first started volunteering with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge, Mass., the homeless ministry out of which my calling to the priesthood emerged. So I can’t deny that something must have happened at my baptism, however much I did not choose it for myself at the time.
And as I approach the eve of my ordination, which marks my transition from being a lay person to being a member of the clergy, a transition in identity which can never truly be reversed – an ontological change, if you will – I am reminded of all the ways in which I did not choose this call for myself. Yes, I am assenting to it of my own free will, but it was not simply an individual, personal choice. The Episcopal Church does not allow people to take on ordination solely of their own choosing – the community has to affirm that they see the call as well.
The authority that will be given to me at my ordination is not mine to take, but the church’s to give, and I accept it with a measure of humility and honor and gratitude. The priest who led our pre-ordination Quiet Day told us a story of how the priest in her home congregation used to always have members of the congregation put his vestments on him before the Eucharistic liturgy, symbolizing that he could only be vested and serving them as priest by virtue of their assent and their choosing him as their representative leader. I like the metaphor that we cannot vest ourselves, just as we cannot celebrate Eucharist alone – there must be a community present to assent to the words that the priest offers on their behalf.
There have been times during the formal discernment process and my seminary career when I have wanted to shake my head and say, “No!” to this “odd and wondrous calling,” as UCC pastors Lillian Daniels and Martin Copenhaver refer to it. But after giving the matter serious thought and prayer, tomorrow, I will choose to say yes even to something that I have not entirely chosen for myself. And as a reminder of that, at the ordination tomorrow, under my collar and out of sight from everyone else, I will be wearing a tiny gold cross with a thin, short chain that barely fits around my neck. It is a delicate necklace made for a baby: my baptismal cross, the cross that was chosen for me by parents I did not choose as a keepsake for a sacrament that I did not choose – but that somehow has transformed my life, even without my consent.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
What happens when we get what we are waiting for?
Sermon preached at Wednesday Morning Prayer, Chapel of the Apostles, Sewanee, Tennessee.
The reading from Matthew this morning (Matthew 24:45-51) comes from the apocalyptic discourses towards the end of that Gospel, those series of parables about what the last judgment and the kingdom to come will be like. The common theme is that it will come when we least expect it, and we should remain watchful and be attentive to how we are living our lives, lest we be caught off guard when the end comes.
Keep awake! Be watchful! Be alert! These are themes of Advent, which invites us into a period of holy waiting and expectation.
But today, thanks be to God, our expectant waiting for the end of the semester has finally come to an end. Juniors, you’ve survived your first semester of seminary! Middlers, you’re halfway through your seminary career as of today. And Seniors, well, we’re gearing up for our transitions out of this place, with only one semester remaining before graduation.
So here’s a question for us to ponder as we come to the completion of another semester and as we move closer to the arrival of the Christ child at Christmas: What happens when we get what we’ve been waiting for? What happens to us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, when the object of our expectant longing and hopefulness is suddenly realized?
Sometimes there can be an anti-climactic moment when we you get what you’ve been waiting for. The day after the graduation or the wedding you don’t really feel all that different than you did the day before. Or the day after the big party, you feel the loss of all the excitement you’d felt in preparing for it.
It can also be disorienting to get what you’ve been waiting for: suddenly your identity, which for so long had centered around waiting for that day when you would finally graduate or finally meet that person with whom you would share your life, has changed. If you’ve spent years of your life working for a certain kind of social change and you actually accomplish your goal, what then? If your identity has become that of an “anti-war protestor” and the war comes to an end, who are you now? You’ve gotten what you were waiting for, but now you don’t know who you are. Perhaps this is why common wisdom advises us to “be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.”
As Christians, we teach that our hope and longing will never be fully realized until the Second Coming. We talk a lot in seminary about “realized eschatology,” about the “already” and the “not yet,” but the Advent themes of waiting focus more heavily on the “not yet” part. To be a Christian means always to be waiting, not just during Advent, but throughout the church year. No matter how many To Do lists we check off and no matter how many major life transitions we experience, there will still be something we have to wait for. We will never “get what we’re waiting for” until the Second Coming.
But the “already” part of the equation says that we have gotten what we’re waiting for. The incarnation of God in Christ has “delivered us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” Part of our story as Christians is that we have gotten what we are waiting for – or at least, that the Israelites have gotten what they were waiting for in the Messiah.
So what happens when we realize we have already gotten what we are waiting for? Disorientation? An anti-climax? A loss of a sense of identity? The early church certainly went through these things, and I suspect we continue to experience these responses as we get things we’ve been waiting for in our lives. But there can also be great peace, contentment, and joy in getting what we’ve been waiting for, in seeing our hopes and dreams fulfilled.
As we enter this liminal time between the semesters, we have much still to wait for and anticipate: our final grades from the semester; a visit home to see family and friends; for us seniors, the dreaded GOEs. But in a twist from our usual Advent theme of waiting, as get what we’ve been waiting for today – the end of the semester – and as we draw nearer to Christmas Day, I invite you to reflect a bit more on what we have already received: the gift of Emmanuel, God with us.
Whatever awaits us, whatever things are unfinished, however much the Christian tradition looks forward to that final re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth, we have already gotten some things we’ve been waiting for: a God who offers us unconditional forgiveness and love, a God who took on human flesh, lived as one of us, and died in order to free us from the powers of sin and death. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last words from the cross are, “It is finished.”
What more could we be waiting for?
The reading from Matthew this morning (Matthew 24:45-51) comes from the apocalyptic discourses towards the end of that Gospel, those series of parables about what the last judgment and the kingdom to come will be like. The common theme is that it will come when we least expect it, and we should remain watchful and be attentive to how we are living our lives, lest we be caught off guard when the end comes.
Keep awake! Be watchful! Be alert! These are themes of Advent, which invites us into a period of holy waiting and expectation.
But today, thanks be to God, our expectant waiting for the end of the semester has finally come to an end. Juniors, you’ve survived your first semester of seminary! Middlers, you’re halfway through your seminary career as of today. And Seniors, well, we’re gearing up for our transitions out of this place, with only one semester remaining before graduation.
So here’s a question for us to ponder as we come to the completion of another semester and as we move closer to the arrival of the Christ child at Christmas: What happens when we get what we’ve been waiting for? What happens to us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, when the object of our expectant longing and hopefulness is suddenly realized?
Sometimes there can be an anti-climactic moment when we you get what you’ve been waiting for. The day after the graduation or the wedding you don’t really feel all that different than you did the day before. Or the day after the big party, you feel the loss of all the excitement you’d felt in preparing for it.
It can also be disorienting to get what you’ve been waiting for: suddenly your identity, which for so long had centered around waiting for that day when you would finally graduate or finally meet that person with whom you would share your life, has changed. If you’ve spent years of your life working for a certain kind of social change and you actually accomplish your goal, what then? If your identity has become that of an “anti-war protestor” and the war comes to an end, who are you now? You’ve gotten what you were waiting for, but now you don’t know who you are. Perhaps this is why common wisdom advises us to “be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.”
As Christians, we teach that our hope and longing will never be fully realized until the Second Coming. We talk a lot in seminary about “realized eschatology,” about the “already” and the “not yet,” but the Advent themes of waiting focus more heavily on the “not yet” part. To be a Christian means always to be waiting, not just during Advent, but throughout the church year. No matter how many To Do lists we check off and no matter how many major life transitions we experience, there will still be something we have to wait for. We will never “get what we’re waiting for” until the Second Coming.
But the “already” part of the equation says that we have gotten what we’re waiting for. The incarnation of God in Christ has “delivered us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” Part of our story as Christians is that we have gotten what we are waiting for – or at least, that the Israelites have gotten what they were waiting for in the Messiah.
So what happens when we realize we have already gotten what we are waiting for? Disorientation? An anti-climax? A loss of a sense of identity? The early church certainly went through these things, and I suspect we continue to experience these responses as we get things we’ve been waiting for in our lives. But there can also be great peace, contentment, and joy in getting what we’ve been waiting for, in seeing our hopes and dreams fulfilled.
As we enter this liminal time between the semesters, we have much still to wait for and anticipate: our final grades from the semester; a visit home to see family and friends; for us seniors, the dreaded GOEs. But in a twist from our usual Advent theme of waiting, as get what we’ve been waiting for today – the end of the semester – and as we draw nearer to Christmas Day, I invite you to reflect a bit more on what we have already received: the gift of Emmanuel, God with us.
Whatever awaits us, whatever things are unfinished, however much the Christian tradition looks forward to that final re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth, we have already gotten some things we’ve been waiting for: a God who offers us unconditional forgiveness and love, a God who took on human flesh, lived as one of us, and died in order to free us from the powers of sin and death. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last words from the cross are, “It is finished.”
What more could we be waiting for?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)