Advent: Promise

Advent is a time when we remember the promises of God, which we do by retelling the Christmas story. 

This is the story of a God who promised to fulfill humanity's ancient longing to restore harmony to the world and to restore all that had been disordered.

It began with the birth of a child so unimportant that the only people who noticed were his parents, and a group of ruffians. When the child's parents took him to the Temple to dedicate him eight days later, amid the hustle and bustle and the jostling of the crowds only two other people are said to have noticed anything unusual: an old man, and an old woman, who each had been waiting their entire lives to see this child born.
 

The gospel of Luke tells us that Simeon and the prophetess Anna declared that the infant would do great things, that he would honor the weak and the downtrodden and bring ruin to the mighty.
 

This is what the people expected the messiah to do, after all. As he ushered in the Apocalypse, he would free prisoners, give the outcast a place of honor at the feast, and bring to an end the haughty and the powerful.
 

That Jesus was born is a sign that God is committed to honoring the promise he made to us in the myth-time, to overthrow oppression, to reveal money for the lie it is, to confound the wise and to leave the mighty confounded in their places. That's why the leaders of the day killed him.
 

The Resurrection is a further promise that it doesn't end there. If death has no power, neither do the dictator and thugs who tell us to trust them as they harass refugees at the border, who threaten their critics, or who oppress people of color on a daily basis.
 

You can't silence Truth when it won't stay dead.
 

"Stories are a promise," someone once said. "They are a promise that the ending is worth waiting for."

The Great Longing

You know, all I really want in life — all I think any of us really wants — is that sense of connection with somebody else, the idea that we belong to something bigger than ourselves.

I remember sitting at the altar by myself for hours, desperately wanting to feel that connection with God the way others at church seemed to, but it would never happen.

To this day, my biggest struggle is an unmet hunger for that connection, with God, with friends, even with my partner.

With that comes the tension of "Do I stay and give it more time?" or "Is it time to cut my losses and go?"

Forty-eight years old and I still struggle with this.

I’m not after forgiveness. I want fulfillment, and I want to belong. I want to be celebrated as I am, as God created me. What hope does your gospel offer?

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Natural

What could be more natural than a flower? Pollinated by bees, blossoming on a bush, growing in good New Jersey soil.

The Rose of Sharon comes from India, eight thousand miles from where it grows in my back yard. This bush is one of dozens that mark the boundary between my yard and my neighbor's, all planted a foot apart in rows with scarcely 10 inches between them. Is there anything about this arrangement that can be said to be natural?

Surely the bees are natural. Drawn by nectar, they buzz from one flower to another, spreading pollen so that the flowers will yield the next season's generation of seeds. 

Alas, the honeybees that pollinate the flower, like the worms that build the soil the roots anchor the bush in, don't belong on this continent either. Apiarists brought the bees and gardeners brought the earthworms because they felt the native species didn't do the job as well.

There's nothing natural about any of this. If this were natural, you'd be looking at an oak hickory forest that would spread inland and up and down the coast for hundreds of miles. Over the past four hundred years, we've felled the forest, introduced invasive new species that drove the natives out, and forced the land to support a vast monoculture grassland.

This isn't natural. It's an environmental jigsaw put together by blind idiots.

And yet for all the damage we've done to Eden, it's still a place of beauty and routine miracles. Plants still run on sunlight, they still grow and build new branches out of thin air. They still keep the earth from washing away when it rains, and provide shelter and food for animals of all shapes and sizes.

The direction of history tells us that Eden is gone and we won't be returning. But with a little planning, a little wisdom. and a lot of grace, we can look forward to a bright future that reflects all the changes we've made, not as bugs in the system but as part of a deliberate design.

And in the final analysis, what ending would be more natural than that?

When a sacrament is just lunch

Eat some bread and drink some wine during church, and it's a sacrament we call Communion.

Outside church, it's lunch.

During church, we can have all sorts of rules on how to celebrate the sacrament correctly. Does it have to be consecrated by a priest? What kind of bread do we use? Is it actually wine, or is Welch's grape juice acceptable? What about some other brand?

No one complains that Maurice is defiling the sacrament if he goes to the deli and orders the wrong bread, adds some pastrami, or gets apple juice instead of wine.

Same bread, same wine. One's a sacrament, the other isn't.

If the deli owner refused to sell Maurice lunch because he was disrespecting the deli owner's religious beliefs about Communion, no one would take the deli owner seriously.

Just saying.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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President Trump, the Religious Right, and my Jesus

My Jesus cares about justice. There is no evidence that Trump or his supporters do.

My Jesus healed the sick. Trump has made cuts to healthcare, while his supporters approved.

My Jesus welcomes refugees. Trump turns them away while his supporters nod their approval.

My Jesus said "Blessed are the poor" and "Woe to the rich," and warned about the dangers of wealth. Trump is a billionaire who passed tax cuts for the wealthy, cut social aid to the poor while his supporters applauded.

My Jesus welcomes people of every tribe, nation and language. Trump wants to build a wall, block entire countries and set strict quotas on immigration. His supporters are all on board with this.

My Jesus warned against people who harm children. Trump's administration tears them from their mothers at the border, loses track of them, and defunds groups that provide prenatal care. From his supporters on the Religious Right? Crickets.

The first-century followers of my Jesus understood something about the holiness of sexual commitment in marriage. Trump brags about grabbing married women "by the pussy" and covers up a string of affairs. The Religious Right "gives him a mulligan." Ralph Reed even says character doesn't matter.

My Jesus talked theology with a Samaritan and commended the faith of a pagan. Trump slanders Islam,and his Religious Right supporters cheer him on.

My Jesus warned us against men like Trump. The Religious Right tells us he's the dream president for Christians.

What's the matter here? Which god do you serve?

‘Cause I’ve got to say, for all the news you make about your faith, it doesn’t look much like my Jesus.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Exiles in their own land

The Bible notes that when the walls of Jerusalem fell, the people who were carried into exile in Babylon were the nobles and the ruler of the people.

And yet the Babylonian captivity was something that affected the entire nation.

The Bible never really tells us the story of the people who remained. There’s a postlude in Jeremiah for the exiles who fled to Egypt and convinced him to go with them and of course there are the books like Daniel and Esther that tell the story of the captives in Babylon. For its part the Ezra scroll tells the story of how Ezra and Nehemiah led the descendants of the captives back. There are even psalms about how the exiles felt when in captivity (“Down by the rivers of Babylon, we wept as we remembered Zion”) and when they returned. (“We were like men who dreamed”) but about the people who remained in the land, nothing.

They never stopped being Jewish. They never stopped being people of the covenant; but, the writers of the Bible being who they were, they also never mattered much when it came time to write the history.

What was it like to have your identity, your entire way of life, upended and negated by the Exile, and yet have everything stay pretty much the same? Every day you went to the river to wash the clothes, watch your sheep, make your deals. Probably every Shabbat you went to the same high place your ancestors had gone to since before the Temple was built, excepting those brief periods of reform by kings like Hezekiah and Josiah, when they tore the high places down.

But the city was gone. The Temple was gone. Did you notice? Probably. the king was gone too, and now people ruled you who worshiped Astarte or Marduk or one of the other, more fashionable weather and fertility gods (though not Baal. He was kind of passe these days). Without the Temple priesthood around, the proo-Judaism of the day was more folk religion than anything else, centered around an unseen god talked about in stories that were passed down like beloved heirlooms.

Then one day the captives returned. What was it like when suddenly you were told that these strangers who didn’t even speak Hebrew were your superiors? All because their grandfathers had lived in Jerusalem and yours had tended sheep in Beit Shelem or Shechen, or Hebron or some place else.

Did your identity matter? How maddening must it have been to be pushed aside and subordinated to complete strangers, to be shoved to the margins because they mattered and you didn’t, simply because that’s the way status works

Being common is a form of exile in itself.

Good Friday in America today

It was, of course, an injustice.

Police found Stephon Clark in the back yard of his grandmother's house after he reportedly had climbed over the fence to get there. They were looking for someone who had been breaking car windows on the street, and when they caught up with Clark they ordered him to show his hands. An officer shouted “He has a gun!” and Clark was struck with a hail of bullets.

He was holding a cellphone. There was no gun.

According to an autopsy, Clark was shot 8 times from behind or from the side. Police have yet to provide any evidence that Clark was the window-breaking vandal they were looking for.

Fatal incidents of police violence have been a matter of routine horror in the news for years, compounded by our rush to assure ourselves that, while unfortunate, there's really nothing we can do about it. It's just part of the cost of having a safe society.  Sometimes people get killed, but it's their fault anyway, because they didn't follow orders, because they acted aggressively, or because police felt threatened. And besides he had a rap sheet.

That reaction should chill the very marrow in our bones. I can think of no reaction further from the heart of Christ and the heart of the Good Friday story that we celebrated in our churches today.

Even those outside the Christian faith know the Good Friday story. Jesus Christ, an innocent man, was arrested under cover of night. Denied the due process of law, he was deprived of his basic human rights, brutally tortured and finally executed.

Preachers often play up the story of Jesus' trials and execution for the moral affront that they were. To convict, all the priests needed was for two witnesses to agree on a charge. The gospels note that they couldn't even manage that. For his part, Pilate, the Roman governor, couldn't find any basis for a charge. Neither could Herod.

So why was he executed? The chief priest was afraid that Jesus was disturbing the peace and getting people riled up. Pilate wanted to maintain order. Herod just didn't care.

Christianity used to be a religion of the powerless, but after 1,700 years of holding the reins of imperial power, we've become far too comfortable with the way those reins feel here in the West. We treat the execution of Jesus as though it's an aberration, a once-in-history occasion when the justice system failed in its duty and killed an innocent man. The effect is that we treat the Crucifixion as a one-time failure, an especially heinous act of evil. We always stress the innocence of Jesus to stress how shockingly unjust his death was.

I wonder, if we were to survey his contemporaries, how unusual they found it that Rome would kill an innocent man. I wonder how many peasants, carpenters and bricklayers there were who felt they couldn’t get a fair shake either. I wonder how many people could point to the mountaintop of Jerusalem, to Mount Gerzim in Samaria or to the rolling hills of Galilee and tell the story of family members, neighbors and friends who had been unjustly executed by the state.

It wouldn’t have been hard. After the riots that followed the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE, when rioters burned the city of Sephoris, the Roman legions restored order through the process of decimation. One man in every 10 was pulled out of the crowd, taken outside the city and crucified as a warning against unrest, without benefit of trial.

Good Friday wasn't a once-in-history event for the people whom Jesus lived with and walked among. It happened all the time.

It's the same in America now. Remember the names of those who have been denied justice by the authorities and killed without a trial. Can you even remember them all?

Michael Brown.

Eric Garner.

Walter Scott.

Philando Castile.

Alton Sterling.

Tamir Rice.

Terence Crutcher.

Sandra Bland.

Freddie Gray.

Laquan McDonald.

Unarmed. Shot by police, their murders justified just as the execution of Christ was. They were disturbing the peace. They were resisting arrest. They had a history. There were extenuating circumstances.

We were afraid.

When we in our fear excuse, allow or approve the death of the innocent, we take the reins of Caesar in our hands, give them a familiar grip, and we say to ourselves, “This isn't so bad.” When give approval to their deaths, let us remember the words of Jesus.

“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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This is the sermon on guns you probably won't hear

There is a sermon you probably won't hear in church tomorrow, and that's a shame, because it's a sermon that needs to be preached from every pulpit in this nation, from coast to coast, from North to South, from city to city, from the highest mountain to the lowest valley, until we understand and our leaders finally listen.

It's the sermon that says that a society that claims to value life and freedom but brushes off death as casually as it puts on a new coat, is a society that has shaken off all semblance of morality and justice, and values nothing but power. It's the sermon that says that our nation has come unmoored. It's the sermon that says our guns have become an idol, the NRA has become the priesthood of a false religion, and our government has been bought lock, stock and barrel.

It's the sermon that says "In Christ's name, enough."

Seventeen students died at Parkland school in Florida earlier this week. Add those to the 58 murdered at the Las Vegas Strip last October, to the 49 mowed down at the Pulse Night Club, the 20 first- and second-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Remember the 33 college students killed at Virginia Tech in 2007? How about the 15 killed at Columbine High School in 1999? That number seemed so large at the time; now it almost seems like it's barely worth mentioning. There have been so many mass shootings in America that it's almost impossible to remember a time when they weren't routine, when Aurora, Colo. (2012, 12 dead); Jonesboro, Ark. (1998, 5 dead); and Erie, Pa. (1998, 1 dead), would be burned into our psyches forever.

Why do we tolerate this?

A long time ago the Phonecians worshiped a god name Moloch. Moloch wasn't a genteel god who liked to collect baubles, hear a few rhyming prayers and let people go about their business. He was a god of power. His priests promised the people wealth and good crops, military might and protection from their enemies. If you followed Moloch, you didn't have anything to worry about when other people came into your country and tried to take your place, they promised. You didn't need to be afraid of thieves, or home intruders or any threat to your well-being. If you worshiped Moloch, he had your back. All he wanted was your children.

Moloch was a right bastard of a god, but the Phonecians trusted him. There are remnants of their architecture, their literature and their art. The Israelites, when they came to the land, were appalled at what they found, and did their best to eradicate all trace of Moloch and the other gods of his ilk. The ruins we've found indicate that he had a tremendous appetite for the blood of humans, especially children.

The stories that his priests told are the same ones the NRA tells today about guns. There's a lot to be afraid of, but if you have a gun, you'll be safe. There's no need to worry about immigrants, inner-city gangs or even your own elected officials if you're armed enough. The bigger the gun, the better off you are, so why not own the kind of hardware professional troops use in combat zones? And if someone comes to town and massacres a dozen or more children? Well, that's just the price of being free. Anyone who opposes the exaltation of firearms is someone who hates freedom.

The Israelites didn't get rid of Moloch. He just hung around a while and opened shop under a new name with a new priesthood.

Our national religion makes a big deal about guns, and it's managed to convince a number of people that our embrace of gun culture is something that squares well with Christianity.

It does not.

The NRA and its acolytes spread an atmosphere of fear. There are bad people out there, and no one is coming to help you. The only way to stop them is if you are armed yourself. If they are armed, you need to be too. Put guns into every church, into every store, into every school. Fire first, and don't back down. When everyone is afraid and everyone has guns, and everyone is on edge, then we will know peace.

Jesus warns that those who live by violence will die violently, and he tells his disciples to put away weapons of violence. Rater than fearing the alien, the outsider or the stranger, he encourages us to take the risk, welcome them, and befriend them.

This is a message the church needs to shout, and that it needs to live out as loudly as it can. I don't expect to hear it.

This Sunday, most churches are going to offer noting more than an anodyne prayer for the latest victims of the latest horror show. Some will offer even less. There may be a few churches that collect an offering, but that's as far as it will go.

Six years ago, Trayvon Martin was murdered by a vigilante who stalked the teen to the point that he feared for his life and felt the only chance he had was to fight back. (Zimmerman, who was armed, shot Martin and killed him.) Few churches said anything about it that Sunday; my own pastor made a throwaway comment about it in the beginning of the sermon where pastors usually use their bad one-liners as warm-up material, and seemed surprised that anyone responded negatively.

The truth is, we live in times that are marked right now by profound spiritual darkness. Our federal government has embarked on a relentless campaign against immigrants of color, it has placed abusive and racist men in positions of power, and it is led by a man of vulgar appetites with no regard for the truth, nor for justice. The church in America can choose either to embrace this darkness and call it "light"; to focus on "spiritual things" like truth, morality and principles of clean living; or it can call out evil in high places.

The NRA's tireless advocacy to sell more guns is one place we can start. The casual acquiescence of our leaders to the NRA's culture of death is a second.

It's a sermon our country needs to hear. Let's start preaching it.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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‘What Would Jesus Do?’ and other things Jesus wouldn’t say

Back when I was in college, there was a trend in the church toward pithy sayings that sounded deeper than they really were.

The big daddy of these was “What would Jesus do?” or “WWJD?” It works like this. Post a question with serious moral overtones, like “Should we deport law-abiding people who entered the country without documentation?” or “Is it all right to vote for a vulgar, adulterous conman with no integrity?” Now ask, “What would Jesus do?” and follow accordingly.

Unfortunately, there are limits. “My girlfriend is pregnant!” one might share with a confidant. “What should I do?”

“Well, what would Jesus do?” comes the helpful rejoinder.

Not get her pregnant in the first place, would come the answer. Not much help there.

Other people tried to overapply it on the grounds that every area of life should be surrendered to God. (Waffles or an omelette — which would Jesus order?) Given the earnestness with which such questions were asked, they soon became incredibly fraught ethical and spiritual quandaries and led to people no longer inviting Ted to join them for breakfast.

As bad as those were, I remember one particularly bad time to ask the question. It was on a trip to LaSource, Lagonav, and it involved a disabled man who had withered legs and could not walk.

What would Jesus do? I leave it to the reader to ask that question, determine the answer and then guess how things went from there.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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