Advent Advent III.v

Tomorrow is the first day of Actual Advent. This has been good practice, easing into the rhythm and discipline of it all. Good to get myself ready before trying to add my smalls into it. Telling the Jesus story to them is so tricky and my beloved and I have to work hard to tone down our grown-up jaded cynicism to allow for the loud, shouty embarassment that is a child's faith.  We haven't done as much as I'd have liked to grow them up in faith, so the least I can do is the Jesus story part. It's my favourite part in the end, so surely it's possible.

Today is short and sweet. Two blind men are sitting by the side of the road when they hear that Jesus is going by. They can't see him, but they just start shouting "JESUS! HAVE MERCY ON US!" They can't really know how close or far he is, but they just keep yelling, "JESUS! HAVE MERCY ON US!" The people around them tell them to shut up - it's kind of embarssing right? to have two people so desperate and yelling at the Lord when there should just be polite, quiet appreciation? Maybe some golf clapping? But these two blind yahoos just keep yelling.

Jesus hears them.

And stops.

And says, "Wait. What do you two want for me to do?"

And they answer, "We want our sight."

So Jesus has compassion on them and touches their eyes and gives them sight.

The end.

I don't fully get why people wanted them to stop yelling. I made it up, the polite clap part. And I don't get why Jesus stopped. And I don't even get why it made the Matthew story. There's no explanation or summation from Jesus about anything. It just happens.

But maybe I'll practice this over Advent: "JESUS! HAVE MERCY ON US!" And if Jesus stops to ask me what we want, probably I'll say, "We want our faith."

I'll let you know how it goes.

Matthew 20:29-34

New International Version (NIV)

Two Blind Men Receive Sight

²⁹ As Jesus and his disciples were leaving Jericho, a large crowd followed him. ³⁰ Two blind men were sitting by the roadside, and when they heard that Jesus was going by, they shouted, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us!”
³¹ The crowd rebuked them and told them to be quiet, but they shouted all the louder, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us!”
³² Jesus stopped and called them. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.
³³ “Lord,” they answered, “we want our sight.”
³⁴ Jesus had compassion on them and touched their eyes. Immediately they received their sight and followed him.

Advent Advent III.iv

I love the Jesus Disciple stories in the New Testament. Lest anyone think they are not qualified for the Kingdom, they need only look at the morons Jesus chose to be his closest friends to see that the Kingdom of Heaven is made up of jackasses and idiots.

In this passage in Matthew, the two Zebedee boys ask their Mom to ask Jesus if they can be super important in Heaven. And their Mom does it! They've been hanging out with Jesus for a while now - we're almost at the end of the book - and probably Jesus not-unreasonably expects that they should be getting it by now. When he's asked, he turns to these two and says, "Can you drink the cup I'm going to drink?" and they're all like, "Yeah, we totally can." And Jesus is like, "Oh right. Yeah. You will. But the point is, shouldn't you know by now that the Kingdom of God doesn't reward and recognize the way it's done here on earth? And didn't I just say, like a story and a half ago that you're supposed to leave your parents behind?"

I made that last part up. But surely Jesus is irked that they got their mom to ask. I digress....

The ones who have heard it most often, lived beside it most closely, seen it lived out most intimately still misunderstand and still ask stupid questions. Or get their mom to (I can't get over this!). What hope do we have, thousands of years later, in a completely different culture, speaking an entirely differently language, to get this right? We rely on these guys' best memories of what was said. It's ludicrous.

And yet.

Thousands of years later, our world still goes bonkers trying to figure out how to celebrate Jesus showing up. Like the disciples, we're getting it horribly wrong. And like the disciples, we make up the Kingdom. Jesus chooses people like us, over and over and over again.

Imagine that.

Matthew 20:17-28

New International Version (NIV)

Jesus Predicts His Death a Third Time

¹⁷ Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, he took the Twelve aside and said to them, ¹⁸ “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death ¹⁹ and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!”

A Mother’s Request

²⁰ Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.
²¹ “What is it you want?” he asked.
She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”
²² “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”
“We can,” they answered.
²³ Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.”
²⁴ When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. ²⁵ Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. ²⁶ Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, ²⁷ and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— ²⁸ just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Advent Advent III.iii

Where I ought to be. That's where I am tonight. The panic has eased, I can see. What was certain doom on Monday is now just life on Thursday. Hope won.

Again.

Tonight we read in Matthew a parable where I think Jesus is trying to say that God's generosity can feel shitty. And that the Kingdom of God is like that sometimes. Especially if you're the person who get hired first thing in the morning. If we're the one getting chosen first, looking most worthy for the work, being the most capable - if we're the successful ones at the beginning of the day, it's pretty likely we're going to feel screwed at the end of the day when all the losers gets paid just the same as us. 

Of course, sometimes we're the losers who have watched everyone else get picked. Even the other losers who we thought we were going to sit and comiserate with over drinks at the end of the day.  Gaw'dammit. Even *those* assholes got picked first and here we sit, unchosen and useless and unsure of how we'll buy breakfast tomorrow. But then at the 11th hour, we're picked. And we work. Or more like, "work". And then we're called by the boss and we're paid a day's wage and it is insane because we know we didn't earn it. But there it is - More Than Enough.

The Kingdom of God is like that.

Either way, when we don't remember that we're trying to make the earth more like the Kingdom of God and instead keep trying to make the Kingdom of God look more like earth, we end up so heartsick and sad and disappointed and broken. It just feels so shitty. But when we remember... then there is Life.

Matthew 20:1-16

New International Version (NIV)

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard

20 “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. ² He agreed to pay them a denarius^[a] for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

³ “About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. ⁴ He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ ⁵ So they went.
“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. ⁶ About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’
⁷ “‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.
“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’
⁸ “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’
⁹ “The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. ¹⁰ So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. ¹¹ When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ¹² ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’
¹³ “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? ¹⁴ Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. ¹⁵ Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
¹⁶ “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Advent Advent III.ii

I read this early this morning, in a daily-delivered email that I usually delete:

Our practice of contemplation is not the avoiding of “distractions,” as was foolishly taught, but instead we use them “to look over their shoulder” for God! This was the brilliant insight of the author of the fourteenth-century book, The Cloud of Unknowing (Chapter 32). The persistence of the distraction can actually have the effect of steadying your gaze, deepening your decision, increasing your freedom, your choice, and your desire for God and for grace—over this or that passing phenomenon. The same can be true with any persistent temptation.
The “shoulders” of the distraction almost become your necessary vantage point and they create the crosshairs of your seeing. Who would have thought? It is an ideal example of how God uses everything to bring us to God. (...)
It is not the avoidance of problems that makes you a contemplative, but a daily holding of the problem, straight on (while not letting it hold onto you)—and finding a resolution in the much deeper and more spacious “peace of Christ, which will guard your heart and your mind” (Philippians 4:7). I never knew it would take such hourly vigilance to guard my heart and my mind from anger, judgment, fear, jealousy, and negativity of any kind. Only the vast peace of Christ can do it.  

Adapted from Contemplation in Action, p. 18, Richard Rohr

As I went through today's readings (Obadiah? yesterday Nahum? I truly did not even know these were in our Bible and wondered if I had accidently tripped across a Catholic site... Sunday School fail), I found myself alternately thinking of other people for whom these particular words would be more useful and how I would arrange childcare and pay some of our bills. As the Psalmist waits and waits and waits for God to deliver him from life's Too Hard and the prophets promise justice and Peter exhorts the early church to hang in there together and Matthew tells the story of Jesus using camels and needles to illustrate how impossible it is to live in the Kingdom of Heaven but promising that it is the very impossibility of it all that is what is made possible by the Creator... as all that happens, I have to look over the shoulders of my own Too Hard and the enormous eye of the needle in front of me and let them deepen my desire for Grace, let them be the crosshairs of what I'm seeing. A God who does not abandon us to the Too Hard, a God not flummoxed by my holding on to too much.

This metaphor or image or whatever it is is helping me so much this morning.

What happens when you look over the shoulders of what's distracting you?

Matthew 19:23-26

New International Version (NIV)

²³ Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. ²⁴ Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
²⁵ When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”
²⁶ Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Advent Advent III.i

Change is an event. Transition is the process.

I heard that in a staff training today, and it is lingering. I suppose it is mostly true that I am always sliding between transitions, pockmarked by the changes they are processing. That might just be life's story actually. And if we are eager for change to be for the good, then apparently we do things like communicate and include and give each other tools through the transition (on each side of the change) that equip us for the new tasks or ways or requirements the change has brought.

I think I was supposed to be using this information to manage some of the change in my work place. At the time, I was filtering it mostly through my own lens of family change we are living. It was helpful.

Tonight though, I am thoughtful about how Jesus showing up - in history, in our lives, each Christmas - is The Change, and that Advent is the process that preceeds the change, and then epiphany and the weeks that follow (or maybe the years that follow?) the process that follows the change. But the process, that process has to be full of communication and inclusion and other tools for us to experience The Change as Good.

Huh. I wonder.

Jesus showing up matters. It is a change. The Change. It has been for me, and it is irrefutable that it has been for the whole planet. Whether or not we have experienced that change as Good, well that just may depend on the process, on the transition.

For me, the change is Good. It is a relentless reminder that all things work for Good. Even the parts that are difficult and awful.

So praise be for being able to re-read Psalm 121 and remember that I am not left on my own through the process.  The Lord is watching my coming and my going.

Psalm 121

A song of ascents.

¹ I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
    where does my help come from?
² My help comes from the Lord,
    the Maker of heaven and earth.

³ He will not let your foot slip—
    he who watches over you will not slumber;
⁴ indeed, he who watches over Israel
    will neither slumber nor sleep.

⁵ The Lord watches over you—
    the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
⁶ the sun will not harm you by day,
    nor the moon by night.

⁷ The Lord will keep you from all harm—
    he will watch over your life;
⁸ the Lord will watch over your coming and going
    both now and forevermore.

Advent Advent III

I'm not sure exactly how long I've been thinking about Advent Advent but it has to be at least three years. Probably more. Maybe ten. But definitely more than two. Multiple years of feeling the press of The Coming and trying to decide if it's anticipation of Good or Awful. Winter after winter bringing the darkness and the looming and the foreboding excitement and all of it being a tiny bit more than I can manage.

And so I turn to the discipline that seems to be the surest way of letting the light sneak in: The Word(s).  The Word becomes flesh and so my flesh will seek the Word and use some words and see if peace trips along next to us eventually.

This year has brought some good wonderings about the person of Jesus and about what it must mean for me to be faith-full and somehow find a way to teach my children the language of faith all the while not finding a community of faith for them. It is fraught, but still leaves me full of fondness for this Jesus and full of hope that my two smalls will find their own hope in his story and life, their own fondness for God With Us.

Oh. So maybe this will be part of this year's journey: making space to teach my littles to be the little ones who come unto Him. Oh. This could be something for me. For us.

Again this year, I will be following the daily readings laid out here and once Advent starts, here.

This morning the Psalmist starts with a sweet spot for my heart to rest: Praise the Lord. Give thanks to the Lord, for God is good. God's love endures forever. The writer then goes on with stories of God's people getting forgetful about what God has done, and getting frustrated and impatient when God does not do what they think God ought to be doing. God's people are so dumb. We are such idiots. So forgetful and impatient. But God's is good and God's love endures forever and God shows mercy over and over even when we've sinned and despised the pleasant land God has provided (v. 24).

Children, our God is good and gives a love that endures forever.  Let me tell you our family's stories, so that we can remember together God's goodness to us and maybe be a bit less forgetful and impatient.

Psalm 106

¹ Praise the Lord.^[a]

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
    his love endures forever.

² Who can proclaim the mighty acts of the Lord
    or fully declare his praise?
³ Blessed are those who act justly,
    who always do what is right.

⁴ Remember me, Lord, when you show favor to your people,
    come to my aid when you save them,
⁵ that I may enjoy the prosperity of your chosen ones,
    that I may share in the joy of your nation
    and join your inheritance in giving praise.

⁶ We have sinned, even as our ancestors did;
    we have done wrong and acted wickedly.
⁷ When our ancestors were in Egypt,
    they gave no thought to your miracles;
they did not remember your many kindnesses,
    and they rebelled by the sea, the Red Sea.^[b]
8 Yet he saved them for his name’s sake,
    to make his mighty power known.
⁹ He rebuked the Red Sea, and it dried up;
    he led them through the depths as through a desert.
¹⁰ He saved them from the hand of the foe;
    from the hand of the enemy he redeemed them.
¹¹ The waters covered their adversaries;
    not one of them survived.
¹² Then they believed his promises
    and sang his praise.

¹³ But they soon forgot what he had done
    and did not wait for his plan to unfold.
¹⁴ In the desert they gave in to their craving;
    in the wilderness they put God to the test.
¹⁵ So he gave them what they asked for,
    but sent a wasting disease among them.

¹⁶ In the camp they grew envious of Moses
    and of Aaron, who was consecrated to the Lord.
¹⁷ The earth opened up and swallowed Dathan;
    it buried the company of Abiram.
¹⁸ Fire blazed among their followers;
    a flame consumed the wicked.
¹⁹ At Horeb they made a calf
    and worshiped an idol cast from metal.
²⁰ They exchanged their glorious God
    for an image of a bull, which eats grass.
²¹ They forgot the God who saved them,
    who had done great things in Egypt,
²² miracles in the land of Ham
    and awesome deeds by the Red Sea.
²³ So he said he would destroy them—
    had not Moses, his chosen one,
stood in the breach before him
    to keep his wrath from destroying them.

²⁴ Then they despised the pleasant land;
    they did not believe his promise.
²⁵ They grumbled in their tents
    and did not obey the Lord.
²⁶ So he swore to them with uplifted hand
    that he would make them fall in the wilderness,
²⁷ make their descendants fall among the nations
    and scatter them throughout the lands.

²⁸ They yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor
    and ate sacrifices offered to lifeless gods;
²⁹ they aroused the Lord’s anger by their wicked deeds,
    and a plague broke out among them.
³⁰ But Phinehas stood up and intervened,
    and the plague was checked.
³¹ This was credited to him as righteousness
    for endless generations to come.
³² By the waters of Meribah they angered the Lord,
    and trouble came to Moses because of them;
³³ for they rebelled against the Spirit of God,
    and rash words came from Moses’ lips.^[c]

³⁴ They did not destroy the peoples
    as the Lord had commanded them,
³⁵ but they mingled with the nations
    and adopted their customs.
³⁶ They worshiped their idols,
    which became a snare to them.
³⁷ They sacrificed their sons
    and their daughters to false gods.
³⁸ They shed innocent blood,
    the blood of their sons and daughters,
whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,
    and the land was desecrated by their blood.
³⁹ They defiled themselves by what they did;
    by their deeds they prostituted themselves.

⁴⁰ Therefore the Lord was angry with his people
    and abhorred his inheritance.
⁴¹ He gave them into the hands of the nations,
    and their foes ruled over them.
⁴² Their enemies oppressed them
    and subjected them to their power.
⁴³ Many times he delivered them,
    but they were bent on rebellion
    and they wasted away in their sin.
⁴⁴ Yet he took note of their distress
    when he heard their cry;
⁴⁵ for their sake he remembered his covenant
    and out of his great love he relented.
⁴⁶ He caused all who held them captive
    to show them mercy.

⁴⁷ Save us, Lord our God,
    and gather us from the nations,
that we may give thanks to your holy name
    and glory in your praise.

⁴⁸ Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,
    from everlasting to everlasting.

Let all the people say, “Amen!”

Praise the Lord.