Homily for December 23, 2007 4th Sunday of Advent

That was a long reading, the genealogy, and I'm sure you can see why I didn't attempt to memorize it.
Did anything strike you as you listened to the genealogy? What? Sevens, and fourteen. By the way, the name David in Hebrew has the numeric value of 14.
If you'd have told Matthew, "Mr. Matthew, your genealogy doesn't meet the standards of the people in Utah," he would have said, "Get a life. That's not what I'm trying to assert."
Anything else strike you? None of the names were repeated. Anything else? Yes, the wife of Uriah. Do you know the story there? David saw Bathsheba, and Bathsheba was married to Uriah, and David invited her over. Well, Bathsheba was with child, Uriah was in the army. So when David discovered it, he brought Uriah home on leave and said, "Go home to your wife." Uriah didn't do it. David kept saying, "Go home to your wife."
And Uriah said, "No, I'm a soldier to my king, and I will stay with the troops."
And so after many attempts to get Uriah to go home to his wife, David sent him back and said, "Put him on the front line, and fall back and let him be killed."
By the way, this genealogy, if you made a movie of it, would probably be R rated or PG13 at best. It's a story of adultery, violence, murder, corruption, deception. There would be themes of sexuality and intense violence and corruption.
Anything else strike you in the genealogy? Some missing names? The women who are mentikoned. Well, let's look at those five women.
First of all it wasn't common to put women in the genealogy. So what do you know about those five women? Tamar was a widow who had had two husbands die on her, and she was the daughter-in-law of Judah. Now keep in mind I said this would be R rated. She was the daughter-in-law of Judah, and Judah promised her another son as a husband, and he didn't deliver o-n his promise.
Tamar posed as a temple prostitute and tricked Judah into becoming the father of her son, and she exacted his ring as a pledge. So when it became known that she was pregnant, and Judah was going to have her put to death, she showed him the ring and said, "The owner of this ring is the father of the child." And Judah said, "You are more righteous than I am." It's kind of a roundabout way of continuing the genealogy, isn't it?
Rahab was an innkeeper who had a red light in the window of her inn, if you know what I mean. And she became the father of Boaz. Ruth  by the way, you know that beautiful song they sing at weddings, "Wherever you go, I will go," and it's sung, it's made up as though it's a husband and a wife? It's really what Ruth said to her mother-in-law, Naomi, after both of their had been killed. So it's really about a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law.
By the way, all of these women were foreigners. They were Gentiles. And they all showed that God continued the line in ways that were outside of social convention, and outside of the line of purity, and outside of the way you would expect it to happen.
In a way, Matthew's community was struggling with the question of diversity and purity of Jewish origins. It had failed in its mission to the Jewish community. It was achieving success in the mission to the Gentiles. Its composition was changing. The liberals were saying, "We don't need those Jewish ways anymore." And the Jewish people were saying, "We've got to hold them at all costs."
And Matthew is trying to hold the middle ground between the liberals and the conservatives. So what did he say? This is who we are. Jesus is not only the Messiah, the son of God, but he's the son of Abraham and the son of David. This is our heritage. We are thoroughly Jewish, but we've always had diversity, and we've always had newcomers, and we've always had foreigners in our blood line.
So how does Jesus qualify as a descendant of David? By all appearances he's the child of an unwed mother, who is adopted by a descendant of David, not a direct descendant. But legally it fits. Maybe the reason Jesus was so sensitive to outsiders and to the marginal people is that he grew up considered a child of an illegitimate union and as somebody marginalized and excluded.
Any other thoughts that come to you? By the way, the kings in there, they were all corrupt. They were adulterers, idolaters. There were some good ones? Who were the good ones, Shirley? Josiah and one of the Hezekiahs, but for the most part they were a pretty corrupt breed. They made the mistake of thinking that it was their kingdom rather than God's kingdom, and so they tried to secure it by human means.
So what's the point of all of that for us? We look at us in the year 2008. It's a mixed history, isn't it? We look at the church and Christianity. It's a history of violence, corruption, deceit. It's a history of many things, and yet God has been there through it. It's God's revelation and God's story, and often God brings the story to completion in ways that defy our expectation, in ways that run counter to our judgment, to our prediction, in ways that don't fit our neat categories of thinking, in ways that often go beyond our moral categories. But through it all, God will fulfill God's promise.
And so here we are. We don't even know when Christmas really was, but if the story were to continue, it would have all of those elements in it, and hopefully we would recognize God's abiding presence and God's hope.
And let's turn and celebrate the Eucharist, maybe with that awareness. This is who we are, and we have always been a mixed breed.

Homily for December 16, 2007 Third Sunday of Advent

First, I want to thank those who have braved the cold and the weather to come out this morning. Normally on these days, the church is packed. So I don't know what's going to happen after Mass with the food basket preparation. Somebody asked me, and I said I don't know. I'm not in charge. So, thank God. We'll hear later what's going to happen.
Normally I ask what parishes are represented. I'm not going to ask. I know we have some from Christ the King; thank you for being here. We have some from Holy Spirit. We have some people from Saint Matthew's who came for the music.
By the way, you noticed we have a youth orchestra today. That's something new that we hope to continue.
Are there any other parishes? Holy Cross. Yes! Normally I'm embarrassed to ask who's from Holy Cross for fear that the visitors will think we don't have any people, because they so far outnumber us on this day.
In my letter in the bulletin -- and this is what I want to go with today -- are some readings from Vatican II and from Teilhard de Chardin. To understand readings, we need to read two texts. The first is the text of life that is happening around us, and the second is the text of the Bible. In the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, in Vatican II, it begins with these words:

The joy and the hope, the grief and the anxiety of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, are the joy and the hope, the grief and the anxiety of the followers of Christ. Nothing that is genuinely human is alien to them.

Did you hear those words? What do they say to us as we read the text of life around us? I think of it often as I drive through the neighborhood, and you see people walking. The other night I went out to eat and drove through an underpass that was filled with homeless people bedding down for the night. You can see people with their grocery carts full of their belongings walking the streets. Their joys and their hopes, their grief and their anxiety are our joy and our hope, our grief and our anxiety. Does that ring true, or are those just nice words?
I think you have to avoid looking for the answer that will get you an A. Maybe a C would be good enough. But do those words ring true for us as a community? Not as well as they could, but perhaps we can find signs where they do begin to ring true. What we do today is one small token sign of that. As we pray today, I think let those words and whatever questions they raise be with you.
The other words I quoted in my letter in the bulletin are words from Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest who was a paleontologist and mystic who wrote on the priesthood. And he said, "To the full extent of my power, because I am a priest" -- we could say, "because I am a Christian” -- "I want to be the first to be aware of all that the world pursues, loves, and suffers. I want to be the first to unfold myself and to sacrifice myself; to be more widely human and more nobly of the earth, than any of the earth's creatures." I hope you remember those words and maybe reflect on them as we worship today.
The other scene I want to give you is John the Baptist and his question of Jesus. "Are you the one, or should we look elsewhere?" As we look at the world around us, with all of its hope and grief and anxiety, and think of ourselves preparing for Christmas, ask yourself that question. Is Jesus really the one, or do we look somewhere else for the answer?
Pope Benedict wrote a book on Jesus of Nazareth in which he said, what did Jesus really come to bring us? He didn't give us a blueprint for world peace. He didn't give us a detailed plan. He didn't even give us a strategy. What did he come to give us? He came to give us God, and with God all of those things can happen. Without God all of our efforts are doomed.
The images in the readings today are poetic images. Let me repeat them, and think of your memory of the readings. So if I leave any out, feel free to chime in.
What are the images? The blind see; the lame walk; the deaf hear; the tongue of the dumb will sing; the dead are raised; lepers are cleansed; the desert will bloom with flowers; knees that are weak will be strengthened; hands that are feeble will be made firm. Any other images you remember?
They're there, and by the way, the passages in scripture that have those images are always written in poetry, not in prose. I want to conclude with a reflection on poetry. I've been reading a marvelous book lately called Teaching with Fire. The editors invited teachers from all over the country to submit poems that gave them courage and sustained them. Let me ask you, how many of you have little poems or little sayings tucked away in your wallet or hidden in books or posted somewhere in your house? How many of you? We all do, don't we? It's poetry or some of those sayings that often sustain us in our hope.
And one teacher, in submitting a poem  and by the way, when I quote this, I don't want to offend any of the engineers who might be here  but who said, "What if the process of school improvement is more like interpreting a poem than it is reading a blueprint? And what if the task requires the skill of gardeners rather than engineers, gardeners who can nurture and tend and pay attention to the garden?" Today, let those poetic images speak to you.
Jesus didn't give us a blueprint, but he gave us wonderful hope. And maybe we can ask ourselves, as John the Baptist did, as we pray today, have the courage to ask the question all over again of Jesus: Are you the answer, or should we look somewhere else?

Homily for December 9, 2007 Second Sunday of Advent

This is going to be show and tell today. I want to concentrate on the first reading, and as Glenn said, in your bulletin you will have the complete text of that first reading, as well as a copy of this woodcut.
The wood cut is by an artist named Fritz Eichenberg, who did a whole series of woodcuts for The Catholic Worker. Does anybody know about The Catholic Worker? It's a newspaper founded by Dorothy Day. This wood cut is a portrayal of the first reading. I'm going to just walk through and show it to you and ask you what you see and notice. If you've got the bulletin, you can look at it in the bulletin.
What stands out as you look at the picture? The lion right in the middle, big and menacing looking. But look at what's underneath the lion, a little baby playing by the hole of the snake, and the snake crawling toward the baby. What else do you notice?
Pure peace, and of course in the reading from Isaiah, the implication is, when we have learned wisdom and understanding and knowledge of God, when we have learned to judge rightly, especially for the poor, then all of creation will be at peace. And it will be a peace that will even extend to the wild beasts and the domestic animals. There will be no ruin or harm.
What else do you notice? There's a city. Is there? Oh, yeah, off to the left there's a city. I didn't notice that.
I'm struck by the wolf and the lamb being together. You see the cow and the bear. The Quaker artist Edward Hicks had a whole series of paintings like this. They're very popular in Quaker circles, and they were called The Peaceable Kingdom. In many of his paintings, across the river there is William Penn, making the peace treaty with the Native Americans in Pennsylvania.
Now, I want to invite your imagination. If you've got the picture in front of you, look at the wolf and the lamb. What do you think that lamb is thinking? "I wish he would quit drooling like that. I sure hope his mouth doesn't get any closer. Why does he look at me like that?"
What do I think the wolf is thinking? "How long? I sure am tired of this hay. Lamb chops would be really good." Right?
What do you think the baby is thinking? "The bunny is cute." Okay. The baby is thinking, "I wish I could pet the wolf."
In Edward Hicks' series of paintings, the child is walking and is leading, and the animals are following. And one simulation I was exposed to in this reading had the child say, "Where am I going, and what am I going to do if they don't follow?"
If you could project yourself into that scene, I'm sure you could have myriads of feelings, ranging from confusion to fear to being a little leery of everybody around you, and it would be very easy to get all wrapped up in those feelings.
When we look at the world around us, often, don't we feel like lambs among wolves? Don't we feel the insecurity, the threat? Or aren't we exposed to people who maybe think, "If God didn't intend them to be sheared, he wouldn't have made them sheep." You've all heard that phrase, right? Or maybe we don't know quite where to go.
Well, I think the overwhelming message I want to leave you with today is the good news is that it's not all about us and what we feel and what we do. But it's about what God wants for our world. And the message of the prophet is that God will do it. We don't know how, we don't know when, we don't know where, but God wants peace and justice for our world and for us, and God has promised it. The challenge is, can we let that hope and that trust enter into our hearts and guide us?

Homily for December 2, 2007 First Sunday of Advent

We have several different things going on today, and I want to try, in some way, to pull them together.
When I was asked if we could have a baptism of babies during Advent, to tell you the truth, I don't know if we can or not. I'm sure the question arose  was it Advent when you got married? [We had a couple who had gotten married 40 years ago this day at Holy Cross.] The day before. I'll bet some people thought you shouldn't get married during Advent. But then I thought, Advent is about preparing for the birth of Jesus, and what better time to celebrate birth and new life and marriage than during this season of Advent?
I was reading a criticism of the liturgical year in the newspaper yesterday that said the church goes in a cyclical year, but our lives are not cyclical; our lives are linear. Mainly, people's lives go on, people are getting married, they're dealing with grief, they're dealing with whatever is happening in their life, in spite of the cycles that we celebrate in the church year. You might feel like you're more at Easter time than you are at Advent time; you might feel more like you're in Lent than you're in Advent.
So I know the fact that we're celebrating Advent doesn't mean that that's where everybody is in their life. But, you know, I don't believe that our lives are linear, either. I believe they come in waves. Do you know what I mean? A wave comes and moves us in this direction, then it subsides. Then another wave comes and moves us. Sometimes they wash over us. Sometimes we get caught up in them.
In those waves there are certain images that keep coming back over and over and over. There are images of light and darkness. You know, it's no accident that we celebrate Christmas in December. We had a Mass yesterday and I asked the young people, “do we know when the birthday of Jesus was?” Not really. You know why we celebrate Christmas December 25? The winter solstice. The days are getting shorter and shorter. Darkness seems to be prevailing. December 22nd will be the shortest day of the year, and then, imperceptibly, the days will get bigger.
The ancient Romans celebrated a feast in honor of the unconquered sun, and we Christians, as we do all the time, we took it over and made it our own, to celebrate the birth of Jesus.
That theme of darkness and light comes again and again in our life. And there are other images. The image of wakefulness and sleep, alertness and drowsiness, attentiveness and drunkenness  those images occur again and again in our lives. Images of birth and rebirth, of life and death, occur again and again in our life. And images of hope, the dawn of new light, the dawn of hope, the coming of peace and our longing for peace  that image occurs again and again in our life. And the image of freedom and captivity occurs again and again in our life. Sin and forgiveness are related to this as are images of fidelity and infidelity. Can you relate to it?
Are there any other big themes that I've left out? I think I covered most, Yes? (Inaudible.) Anticipation, right, and surprise. So, that sense of longing, that something big is about to happen. As Glenn mentioned at the beginning, we want to focus on hope during this season of Advent. The first reading gives us beautiful images of hope.
What would happen if God was the arbitrator of all of our disputes? What would happen if God was the arbitrator between nations, and between governments? What do you think? We might beat all of our weapons into the ground. Nations might decide that they didn't need them anymore, that they didn't need to prepare for war, because God would arbitrate all of our disagreements.
Let me ask you, do you think the United States government would buy into that? Not really, because we would want to insist on our national sovereignty and on nobody being above us. And yet that image and that hope is there in Isaiah. Nations will come to God’s holy mountain. They will receive instruction from God. They will learn God’s ways. God will judge between them. God will impose terms. And then the nations will turn their weapons and the use of resources that goes into production of weapons toward the production of food. I ask again, do you think the United States government would buy into that? Do you think other governments would? Would the U.S. be the leader or the follower in that movement?
I want to read you a poem about hope that I think ties together wedding anniversaries -- because of  you've been married 40 years, you've got grandchildren here, right? -- and tiess in so it ties grandchildren and children, and it ties together the image of loving what we can't see and longing for what we can't see. And the poem is by a man named Rubem Alves, and it's called Tomorrow's Child.
[The poem was read in its entirety in church but is not quoted here because of copyright laws. The poem mentioned that hope is a pre-sentiment that our imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It expressed the conviction that the oppression we see is not the last word. It expressed a connection between suffering and hope. “Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair.” “hope without suffering creates illusions. It ends with suggesting we plant dates even hough we will never eat them and that we love what we cannot see.]
Well, in hope, we baptize these children today. In hope for the life that our grandchildren will have, we try to work for peace in our world. In hope for the world that our grandchildren will grow up in, we try to protect our environment. In hope for our grandchildren's future, we commit ourselves to welcoming the light of Christ.