Advent I - Skip Windsor

Mark 13:24-37
Let us pray: “Most gracious God be with us and give us the Spirit of Christ.” Amen.
Could be!
Who knows?
There’s something due any day;
I will know right away,
Soon as it shows.
It may come cannonballing down through the sky,
Gleam in its eye,
Bright as a rose!
These lyrics, of course, are from the musical West Side Story that premiered fifty years ago in New York City. The hero, Tony’s song, about something coming is apt for Advent since John the Baptist announces something’s coming, too.
The particular message in today’s Gospel from Mark is a clarion call is to stay alert, to be ready for a new reality when God’s Kingdom will be made known. It could not be any clearer: STAY AWAKE. But, right now, it is hard to be attentive and alert. Mighty things in the world distract us. We worry… we worry for our families… we worry for our friends and neighbors… we worry about a world caught up in a global economic crisis.
All of us are swept up in an economic whirlwind unprecedented in our generation. Diminishing investments, vaporizing 401K’s, rising unemployment, and imploding global markets—all make for a Perfect Storm of uncertainty and fear.
None of us are immunized from what’s happening right now. Families are weighing priorities. We are re-evaluating past decisions: what to save, what to spend, how to invest what precious savings we have left, and how to sustain a standard of living moving forward. How can we sustain what we have?
As much as anything, the Gospel lesson for this Sunday and for this moment is about SUSTAINABILITY. And I don’t mean sustainability as a fancy buzzword meaning photovoltaic cells or carbon footprints or melting ice caps – although that is part of it – No. What I mean by sustainability is whether we can continue to live now the same way we have lived in the past? Can we continue to live with the certainty that things will return to the way they used to be? The Gospel lesson for today says, NO. It’s going to be different… it’s going to be better…
Crisis and uncertainty was part of the Evangelist Mark’s world… the Temple in Jerusalem that had stood for generations was destroyed. People’s lives were disrupted by external forces they could not control. The Empire was making decisions that adversely affected them causing many to lose their homes and jobs. Such cataclysmic events made them question their faith in a just God.
Their hope rested on a promise that Jesus made to them that He would return. He would return as the one and only sovereign Lord who would make things right and bring justice and peace to an unjust and troubled world. Mark exhorted the people to remain alert for His return; hence, his familiar words, “Stay Awake!”
But, the Risen Christ didn’t come on time. At least He did not come on their timetable. The people had to make adjustments, take more responsibility for their actions in the midst of fear, and to sustain their faith and their lives without the immediate return of Jesus Christ. They had to learn what it meant to live “in the MEANTIME.”
You and I are still “in the MEANTIME.” We are being challenged in uncertain times to sustain our lives and the lives of others.
As you know, I have just returned from my sabbatical leave. About half of my leave time was spent in Maine. When you are up there that long you cannot help but be affected by the seasons and the tides. You notice the people of Maine: the lobstermen, the waitresses and waiters, the truck drivers and the dockworkers, and children and the families. You realize there are still many families who carve out a living on the outer islands of Maine such as Monhegan, Frenchboro and Matinicus.
Sustainability is a way of life for them. They struggle to keep their island life – their way of life for countless generations. For them sustainability is not about fancy light bulbs, grants from the State or gifts from wealthy summer people. For these year-round island people sustainability is about keeping their unique island culture. For them, it means providing for the mutual needs of the island community and for the careful stewardship of its finite resources. For them it means low-impact living, going barefoot until Thanksgiving or eating home-grown kelp until Christmas. It means hard, hard, work by all: men and women, young and old.
We can learn what sustainability is -- in hard times -- from Maine island people. I think church communities are like island communities. Christ Church is part of a vast archipelago we call the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. We are connected but also separate islands; and it is the responsibility of Christian “islanders” to be sustainable, vital and viable. There is no bail-out for us. There is no TARP to bolster our endowment. Like those islanders in Maine, it is up to the Christ Church community to sustain the ministry built up in the past and to be, now more than ever, instruments of God’s peace in a broken, uncertain, and needy world.
There are tough headwinds blowing our way. How long they will last…we do not know. To weather the uncertain economic storms that may lie ahead we must act like an island community. Taking a page from these island people and looking ahead into the New Year, I believe we are called to sustain our common community life together; to sustain the vital ministries of worship, prayer and healing, and sustain the vital mission of outreach – now more than ever – to one another and to the wider community.
It won’t be easy. It will be hard work. It may be different than the way we’ve done things in the past. The contours of the Cross demand change. To pick up the Cross of Christ in difficult times is hard work… hard work by all. It will take all of us – men and women, young and old – to carry the Cross.
For us the Cross should not be a burden but a blessing… it symbolizes for us that life defeats death, love eclipses hate and hope overcomes fear. It is “the Bridge to Somewhere,” promised in Scripture… where all will be well and all manner of things will be well. That’s our faith… and that’s our hope…
And one thing more… it’s the most important thing. The promise of Advent is clear: God comes to us. During this season of Advent we will be distracted by many concerns and perplexed by what the future will hold; but, one thing is sure: God is coming to us. He is our Emmanuel….
Could it be? Yes, it could.
Something’s coming, something good,
If I can wait!
Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is,
But it is
Gonna be great!
Let us pray:
O God of the night and the day, the seasons and the tides, be with your people and sustain them with your grace and love. Look with favor upon those who seek to find you in their lives during uncertain times. Uphold them and enable them to continue the work of ministry and to go forth to be ambassadors of your most gracious will. All this we ask in the name of Jesus, our Emmanuel. Amen.

Christ the King - Peter Tierney

Last week, we heard Jesus teaching about God’s judgment in the parable of the talents, and I asked you to take away one idea in particular: Since God’s essential nature is love, God’s love judges everything in this world that goes against love. Love is the limit and the measure of God’s justice and judgment, which is why Jesus can teach that all the law and the prophets, the entire history of God’s dealings with the people of Israel, hang on the two great commandments: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s what God really cares about: do you love him, and do you love each other? The parable of the talents teaches us the consequences of our failure to love God; the failure to respond to the love that God has shown us. If we do not have love, if we do not invite the God who is love itself into our lives, then we have nothing; without love, our lives are empty and anguished.

But Jesus also teaches us that it’s not enough for all of us to run around loving God all by ourselves. We were not made to be discrete individuals captivated by the brilliance of our creator, with no mind for anything else; we were made to be social animals who share the love for our maker with each other, and in doing so, showing love to each other as well. Love is meant to bind us together, to knit us together into a great body in which all are cared for and valued. In fact, God is clear that unless we love one another, we can’t really say that we love him with any honesty, because we aren’t obeying his instructions to care for each other! God’s history with the people of Israel in the Old Testament is a long saga of God saying, “What good are your sacrifices and your religious observances and your claims that you love me when you ignore the plight of the poor, and the widows and the orphans?” God is always asking us, “How can you say you love me if you do not love the people I love?” God especially loves the weakest, the most helpless, and even the most useless people in the eyes of the world! God loves the starving children of Haiti; God loves the soldiers and the civilians in Iraq who have lost limbs and hands and feet in the war; God loves the homeless of Boston and God loves the men and women who have lost their minds in nursing homes, who need other people to feed and clothe them. God loves the people who are easiest for us to ignore, and God asks us to love them, too.

The Gospel we have heard today ties all of these things together: love of God, love of neighbor, God’s love for those the world would rather not love, and of course, judgment. All of them are brought together in Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, who is both our God and our neighbor—God and man together—and who will be our judge when he comes as the King of all the nations and peoples of the world. In the scene of Christ separating the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the accursed, we see and hear the judgment of love. Christ tells us that when we clothe the naked, or feed the hungry; when we welcome the stranger, or tend the sick, or visit the prisoner, we are doing all of those things for him, for the King of all creation. The righteous perform these acts of love, not because they seek to curry favor with their God and king, but because love has become part of their nature—loving those who need their love is just what they do.

The goats, the ones who are condemned to eternal punishment, are bewildered. When the King accuses them of neglect, they ask “Lord when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked, or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Of course, if they had seen the King in his glory, they would have done anything for him, but not out of love. If the goats knew what love was, if they had love in their hearts, they would already have given aid to the needy that Christ the King condemns them for neglecting. Godly love, the kind of love that God shows to us, and asks us to give to each other, does not take status or privilege or rank into account—it is indiscriminate, impartial. Godly love goes where it is needed, and we all need love.

And that’s the truth of this Gospel: the righteous sheep at Christ’s right hand, the ones who will inherit the kingdom of heaven, love the people who are in need and the King of glory at the same time. So, it’s not that God loves the poor and the needy more than everyone else; God loves them because God loves everything and everyone, and if God has a special love for those the world prefers not to love, well that’s because God’s love may be the only love they know. We are commanded to have love for everyone, not just the poor and the forgotten in the world. Our neighbor is anyone who crosses our path, including the actual neighbor who lives next door and blows leaves onto our lawn, the family members who insist that you travel 500 miles every year for Thanksgiving Dinner, the really annoying people in the supermarket who roll their carts down the middle of the aisles, instead of keeping to one side. More seriously, we are asked to love the people who have hurt us, the people who have rejected us, the people in whom we don’t see the possibility of love. We are asked to make love a way of life—that’s the righteousness that the King of Glory rewards in his judgment. And that’s one reason why we need to love God, because without God’s endless and boundless love helping us to live a life of love, we just don’t have the strength to love the people we’re supposed to love.

How are we to learn this depth of love? How can we possibly hope to love the way God wants us to love? Well, maybe we should start by learning from the one who will judge our efforts in the end. Jesus came to us teaching the law of love, healing the sick and helping the poor—living the life of love that God asks of all of us. And instead of being received by the world, acclaimed and hailed as a great teacher and miracle worker, he was met with fear, and suspicion, and ultimately hatred. The world rejected him, at first; some were drawn to the love and kindness he showed, but more were afraid of it, afraid of what it might mean for their power and privilege. And so they put Christ’s love on trial, the powers of the world stood in judgment over him, and they condemned him to die. And the people Jesus had loved, the ones he had shown his divine love to, most of them were too afraid to stay with him. The Son of God, the fullness of God’s love, was judged by humankind, and condemned, and nailed to a cross to die, abandoned by his friends. And what words did he have for his tormentors? “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” The life of love is the way of the cross; there is no thanks or reward for it in this life—the way of love is its own reward.

The King that we are waiting for has been a prisoner, has been naked and thirsty. The Judge that we are waiting for knows what it means to be judged unjustly. Christ the King is Christ the Crucified; Jesus the Judge is Jesus the good shepherd; the God and Lord who will come to judge the living and the dead is also the child of Mary, who was born in a stable, on that first Christmas. God’s judgment has already been made—it is the judgment of love and forgiveness. We are guilty, all of us, of being unloving, but we can rely on the judge’s mercy: he has already forgiven us—all that is left is for us to come to him—again and again—to confess our guilt, and to ask for his assistance in living better, trying to follow him in the way of love. Come Lord Jesus, come O King of Love, and reign in our hearts.

Pentecost XXVII - Peter Tierney

Judgment. Wrath. Destruction and Darkness. Bitter Devastation. Weeping and Gnashing of teeth. We are told that these are the things the Day of the Lord will be filled with—the Day of God’s reckoning—the day of God’s judgment. It’s not a pretty picture: “I will bring such distress upon people that they shall walk like the blind; because they have sinned against the LORD, their blood shall be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung.” Talk about a bleak image! The Day of the Lord is not comfortable, in fact, the biblical picture of the coming of God is downright terrifying.

And notice, this isn’t just the witness of dour Old Testament prophets like Zephaniah—the picture is no different in the New Testament, when Jesus himself is talking about the day of the Lord. The master of the parable of the talents, standing in for God, renders his judgment on the unproductive slave: “You wicked and lazy slave! . . . Take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus himself is right in line with the Old Testament prophets: God is a God of judgment, and on the last day, people will be called to give an account of their lives. In fact, Jesus is in on this judging thing, too—we’ll hear more about that next week. And every Sunday, we agree with him! We stand up after the sermon, and we say that line in the creed about Jesus coming to give judgment: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

Does this sit well with you, this description of the Day of the Lord and the Judgment of God? Or does it make you shift a little bit in your seat, set your teeth on edge, so to speak? I know that it’s not what I want to hear about God as we get closer and closer to Turkey Day and looking forward to Christmas. I want to hear about the God who loves me, the God who created the world and called it good, who fills my life with blessings. I want to hear about the God who comes into the world as a cute little baby, the God of “silent night” and the Christmas Crib. I want to hear the easy things about God, the nice things about God: that’s what I want to hear; but I need to hear the harder things about God, too: I need to hear the whole truth about God. I need to be reminded that God is not all puppy dogs and rainbows; God is not just a warm fuzzy feeling—God is real, and God is powerful, and God loves with the world with a ferocious love that will not rest until we are what God has made us to be. God’s love is not indulgent affection: God’s love is like the love a mother has for her children when they are in danger—a love that will do anything to protect the loved one from harm.

We are not accustomed to thinking about love and judgment together; in fact, I suspect we’ve been trained to think about love as overcoming judgment: isn’t love about forgiveness? But judgment and forgiving aren’t opposed to each other—you can’t forgive someone unless you’ve judged that what they’ve done is wrong, and requires forgiveness. God is everything that we say about Him—God is full of love and compassion, forgiveness and mercy, but God is also a god of Justice. And if there’s one thing I want you to hear today, it’s that all of those things: God’s justice, God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, and God’s judgment—all of it stems from God’s true and fundamental nature: God is love. And God’s love judges everything that goes against love. That’s the meaning of justice—justice is not about vengeance and punishment; God’s justice is about making room for real love to flourish and grow by removing the things that try to stamp it out.

Jesus teaches us that the greatest commandments are these: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Our senior warden Myra preached a fine sermon about those commandments just a few weeks ago. The judgment that we hear about in today’s lessons is mostly a judgment on our failure to love God—next week we will hear more about loving our neighbors, but for now, the focus is on God. Who are the ones undergoing judgment on the day of the Lord, according to Zephaniah? They are the ones who have contempt for God: “those who say in their hearts, ‘The LORD will not do good, nor will he do harm.’” According to Zephaniah, God’s judgment comes upon those who think God is irrelevant and uninvolved in their lives, it comes upon those whose lives are consumed with the accumulation of things and wealth and who care nothing for matters of the spirit: “Their wealth shall be plundered, and their houses laid waste. Though they build houses, they shall not inhabit them; though they plant vineyards, they shall not drink wine from them.” If all of our attention is on our material well-being, and not on what is pleasing to God, how can we say that we love God? If we think that God is impotent, that God will take no action, will do no good or harm, how can we say that we love God? If we are to really love God, then we have to act and behave as if God matters to us, we have to spend time talking to God, and listening to him, trusting him, and recognizing that God cares about everything we do.

But we also have to recognize that God cares out of love, and not out of a desire to catch us in our wrongdoing—God is not out to get us. And that’s the other obstacle to loving God, the obstacle we see illustrated in the parable of the talents. The problem with the slave who buries his master’s money isn’t that he doesn’t care what his master will do; the problem is that he is so afraid of his master that he completely misjudges the master’s character. The unproductive slave is so afraid of his master that there is no room for love; he is paralyzed by fear. When the master demands an account, the slave insults his master: “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid.” We can do the same thing to God, we can convince ourselves that God is harsh and cruel and vindictive, and if that is how we approach God, without love for God in our hearts, should we be surprised if that is how God appears to us? If we are convinced that God is a terrible and awful and harsh judge, how can we say that we love God? How can we say we love God if we refuse to see that God is love?

The parable of the talents closes with that terribly hard verse that seems to go against so much of what we say and believe about a loving God: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Whatever happened to the God who loves and cares for the poor? Will that God take away what little they have? This verse makes no sense if we think it is talking about possessions, or money, but it makes perfect sense if it talking about love. When God calls us to account, and judges our lives—if we have no love to show from the love that God has given us—then we have nothing. But if our lives are full of love, if we are bursting with love, then we will filled with even more.

God is judging us, but the basis of God’s judgment is God’s love. And we know the fullness of God’s love in the life and death of Jesus Christ. I’m going to say a lot more about that next Sunday, when we celebrate the feast of Christ the King, but for now, I want to leave you with some words from St. Paul about God’s judgment, and about how we are to support each other in faith and love as disciples of Jesus: “God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.”