The Outcasts and the Unexpected
St.
Francis' Church
Advent II
December 10, 1995
Gospel: Mark 1:1-8
"Repent for the kingdom of God is at
hand." "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the
way of the Lord, make his paths straight." He "wore a garment
of camel's hair, and a leather girdle around his waist; and his food was
locusts and wild honey."
Now here was someone who could make a dull
dinner party interesting! Can you picture this? A wild-eyed
visionary, passionate about ideals to excess, a strict vegetarian, dressed in
leather pants and a camel-haired sport coat. Not bad.
Do you know someone like this? Perhaps
there is some distant cousin on the family tree that we don't like to talk
about, let alone invite to Christmas dinner. John would definitely
qualify for a "black sheep" of the family if I ever saw one.
We have all crossed the paths of a such a
character. He's part Christopher Lloyd, the mad professor from "Back
to the Future." He's part homeless crazy waving a broken umbrella on
Wall Street shouting about the injustices of the subway system, or a Reverend
Billy Sol waving a worn Bible at the TV camera. And he's part uncle
Albert, who had a bit too much cheer, telling a bad ethnic joke about the
Pope's nose just as the turkey is being served at Thanksgiving dinner.
This is a person who makes us feel just a bit uncomfortable, someone not like
us, someone we'd probably avoid. Can you picture interviewing a John the
Baptist to work in your accounts receivable department?
But what is John doing? He's preparing the
way of the Lord, calling people to repent. Repent! Frederick
Buechner defines repentance as a "coming to your senses," but
also as something that "spends less time looking at the past and saying,
'I'm sorry," than to the future and saying 'Wow!'" It is an
awakening and a call to the future, to what is coming. Repentance is less
about guilt over the past, than about creating the openness to the
"Yes" of God. "Prepare the way of the Lord!" shouts John.
And we are astounded.
This must be some kind of divine joke.
After all, the people who cared about the faith were looking to the
scriptures, the Torah or sacred laws, and the learned priests who were its
guardians. And here comes this malcontent, brandishing a broken umbrella,
telling us the messiah is coming. Who would listen? Who would
listen?
The thought that God would speak through an
outcast is offensive to our sensibilities. Why would God choose a
spokesperson who no self-respecting press secretary would ever put
in front of the cameras? But this is how God seems to work, through the
least expected avenues -- turning our expectations upside down. After
all, Jesus was a carpenter from an unimportant town in the hills of the
backwoods of the Appalachia of Israel. And John is calling us to our
senses!
What we hear in John's message is a divine
"No!" --what Karl Barth calls God's "Halt!" It stops
us dead in our tracks and throws into question our beliefs, our sensibilities.
Before we can hear the "Yes" of God is His divine
"No!" It says we were looking in the wrong place. It is
God saying "I have found you"; "I come to you
'like a thief in the night.'" Will you recognize me behind the
disguise? So John is crying in the wilderness and washing away
sins, the old clothes, like laundry forgotten on the banks of the
Jordan.
- - - - - - - - - -
In the business world, we are always looking for
new ways of viewing the future, of how to be more innovative and creative to
insure future success. In fact, we are so interested in gaining insights
in an increasingly competitive and global economy, we have driven business
books to a new growth business. (If you've been to Borders Books
recently, you know what I mean. The business section has exploded, and
the shelves have been rearranged and expanded several times in the past two
years.) One of the popular concepts to come out of this new thinking is
the "paradigm shift." Have you heard of this? A paradigm
shift is a change in viewpoint that suddenly brings new insights into the
problem at hand. ... a change in viewpoint that suddenly brings new insights
into the problem at hand.
For example, I remember reading in Readers
Digest, sometime in junior high school, about a tractor trailer that had failed
to see the low clearance warning sign and had wedged itself under an overpass.
(If you travel to the Old Greenwich train station, you may have seen this
first hand, at the railroad bridge on Sound Beach Avenue. It seems to
happen there once a year.) So this truck is stuck under the overpass and
the driver can't back out. The town's public works people are called in
by the highway police, along with a local civil engineering firm.
Pushing with a large tow truck fails. So they examine the bridge and the truck
and consider the options of dismantling the trailer or removing a bridge
girder. A young boy of nine who is watching all this with great interest
from his bicycle, finally goes up to one of the engineers, tugs on his sleeve,
and says, "Hey mister" "why don't you just let the air out
of the tires!" And sure enough, it works. That's a paradigm
shift: looking at the problem in a new way, from a new frame of reference.
And we're left scratching our heads, saying "sun of a
gun!"
If you gave John B. a shower and a shave,
dressed him in pinstripes and wing-tips, he'd qualify as a paradigm shifter.
Why? Because he is reminding us that God comes to us in new ways,
through the back door, through people we least expect, through the outcasts who
are out of the mainline. Will we hear that? Will we say with the
civil engineer at the overpass, "wow", "sun of a
gun?"
- - - - - - - - - -
M. Scott Peck, author of the Road Less
Traveled, says that in the modern age, we may be losing our taste for
mystery. He says that the "fully mature spiritual person is not so
much a clinger to dogma as an explorer, every bit as much as any scientist, and
that there is no such thing as complete faith. Reality, like God, is
something we can only approach." "... is something
we can only approach." hmm! He goes on to say that "when
Jesus gave His big sermon, the first words out of His mouth were: 'Blessed are
the poor in spirit.' There are a number of ways to translate 'poor in
spirit,' but on an intellectual level, the best translation is 'confused,'
Blessed are the confused." He continues, "If you ask why
Jesus might have said that, then I must point out to you that confusion leads
to a search for clarification, and with that search comes a great deal of
learning." Confusion is an opportunity for learning; it is forward
looking, and so has a bit of mystery and a bit of John's repentance.
We see this kind of openness to what is new in
Paul's letter to the church at Rome. In his usual style, Paul is blowing
away tradition and convention. "Welcome one another, therefore as
Christ has welcomed you." "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his
people." This business about welcoming Jew and Gentile alike in the
early church was not easy stuff. The Gentiles, after all were the
outcasts, the uncircumcised, the uncouth. But Paul reminds us that they
were among the all for whom Christ came and died and rose
again. In God's love there are no outcasts. So in the cry
from the wilderness, in the coming of Christ, God turns our expectations
upside down and makes us confused, bewildered, uncomfortable.
Perhaps we are not familiar with
"Gentiles" as a good example of outcasts (because in the words of
Pogo, "them is us." and though a little strange at times, we
don't feel like outcasts at all.) But how about some other outcasts?
In the last century, they were the slaves of the south; in the 20's it
was women seeking the right to vote, in the 40's and 50's it was the Jews,
wickedly oppressed and then in search of a homeland. In the 60's is was
blacks in search of civil rights, and today it is gays asking to be full
members of our communities. Who will be the next outcast crying to be
heard? Or , in the words of Professor Peter Gomes, in his editorial in
the NY Times, will homosexuality be the "last prejudice"
in our society?
Now I am not at all versed in the political
issues of gay rights and I don't understand all the arguments. I do know
that I am usually uncomfortable with it, and confused about what is right and
what is wrong. The events of the past few years, and the past few weeks
at St. Francis' have turned things on its head for me. If, as Scott Peck
says, confused is of God, then I am among the blessed.
But such issues are never resolved by political
or philosophical reflection. They are hammered out through the one-to-one
relationships, through the conversations that take place on both sides.
This is first a person-to-person issue, not simply a
matter of principle. So that the issue is not a "gay rights
issue," but this person whom we have come to know.
Like St. Anselm's great principle of fides quaerens intellectum, faith
seeking understanding, we first come to know, and then try
to make sense of these personal encounters. It is no different when God
snares us in the middle of a tragedy, and we try to then make sense of
it.
Are John and Paul saying something to us here at
St. Francis? Are they saying to us "look, listen"
God may be coming to us in these events which we did not invite, through
this person who we least expect?
I asked a long-term parishioner this week what
she thought about Doug's sermon last week. She echoed what I heard from
many, that it was wonderful. But she also said she was numb. I
agree. We have been through an emotional wringer at St. Francis', and at
times I wanted to shake my fist at heaven and say to God
"Halt!" Enough already! So I hesitate speaking
about this, and long for the peace and quiet of a North Stamford sanctuary.
But there is no healing without confession, so speak we must.
- - - - - - - - -
Like some of you, I had the privilege of sitting
with Edward in his hospital room just a few weeks before he died. This
was a very difficult thing for me to do. Happ's have a long tradition for
avoiding doctors and hospitals; hospitals were where people go to be hooked up
to tubes and monitors. Hospitals were where people go to die. And
Edward was confirming all this for me. Before going for the first time, I
can remember asking Tom Hitchcock about what to do, how to handle things that
might come up in a hospital room with someone who was bed ridden. I
hadn't a clue. Thank goodness Richard had the foresight to provide a
sheet of instructions.
With the encouragement of others, and training
of Tom and Richard, I was ready to go minister to this person in need, if only
to sit with him and just be there. One night, after a brief nap, Edward
asked for some juice, and then wanted to talk. He told me about when he
first fell ill, and about a series of dreams he had. When he found out he
had AIDS, he was angry at God, asking "why?, why me?, why this
illness?" In a dream, he had the sense of God saying, "to learn
and to educate." Edward then prayed, "to learn what?"
Another dream, and a sense that the lesson was to "learn to face your
fears and demons." So he told me about how he was doing that, about
how he reconciled with his mother just days before, and about how much that had
meant to him. Then he leaned forward and said, "You know, Father
Gahler was here yesterday and said to Richard, 'Edward must feel that God has
abandoned him, that he is all alone.' And I said, No. I have never felt
closer to God; I feel as if he is at my shoulder."
I was stunned, frozen in place. God's Halt was a
cold sweat on the back of the neck. Here was this man dying of an illness
that scared the wits out of me, in a hospital room that gave me the creeps,
ministering to me ... Ministering to me
--telling me how this terminal disease had brought him closer to God. How
humbling! I told him, "Edward, you are not the only one facing your
fears and demons, through this, many others around you are as well."
Blessed are the confused!
With Richard we are grieving the loss. We
are grieving with him and for him. And when we are grieving, we are
vulnerable, naked and exposed. We need to keep this in mind when we read
our Stamford Advocate. With exposure comes confession, and
with confession comes reconciliation. We need to remember that it
is precisely when we are vulnerable that we become open to new
possibilities. In His sermon, Jesus also said, "blessed are the meek, for
they will inherit the earth." Or to paraphrase: 'blessed are the
vulnerable, for they see God's kingdom in the here and now.' In a moment
of weakness, we are open to hearing a new voice, seeing a new reality.
Our artists and our poets know this truth first hand. Only when we
stop and listen, do we hear and see the nuances of our present
experience. We know that like deer on the backroads at night, frozen in
the headlights, we are stopped dead in our tracks by the possibility that God
is coming disguised behind a darkened windshield.
On this second Sunday of Advent, I would like to
leave all of us with this thought. Are we willing to hear God
speak, even if his voice comes through the outcasts?
Will we look to the future, the coming of Christmas, and the Christ
child, and see the hand of God in the unexpected?
With the new babe's
wail
will we hear the voice
of the one
crying
in the wilderness
and know?
Amen.
Ed Happ
Warden
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