We cry... we wait... we watch for the dawn.

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Lord, have mercy.  Christ, have mercy.

They are the words that came to me when my eyes landed this afternoon on the news out of Newtown, Connecticut.  How in the world?  Not again.  Not again.  Not again.  Too many times, too much grief; how in the world do we respond?

As the hours slowly passed and the images of intense grief were projected across our screens, I kept coming back to the only plea I could muster; Christ, have mercy.  We were expecting to celebrate the Joy of Advent this Sunday.  How do we now come together this weekend to worship? 

We will come bearing our grief and our prayers and join together to bear witness to the one who comes to bring light into the darkness.  The psalmist writes:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,

Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;

Though its waters roar and foam,

Though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

God is in the midst of us; we shall not be moved;

God will help us when the morning dawns.

…The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

       from Psalm 46

We will come bearing our grief and our prayers and join together in the hymn of this season, crying for the coming of God among us:

O come, O come, Emmanuel…

Disperse the gloomy clouds of night, and death’s dark shadows put to flight.

We will come bearing our grief and our prayers and join together to hear the Gospel proclaim:

What has come into being in him was life

and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness did not overcome it.

       from John 1

 

We will come bearing our grief and our prayers as:

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We cry…

we watch…

and we wait for the dawn.

       from Psalm 130

Alien Spies

It was rather unexpected when a parishioner told me a few weeks ago of his dream that we had been sent to infiltrate a foreign bunker where we were to convince a rather unsavory and influential historical character to surrender.  It happened to be the same week that the lectionary text was about Jonah getting sent to Nineveh.  The dream sequence was an intriguing comparison to ponder and provide a few chuckles.  When another parishioner told me shortly after this that Sarah and I had populated his dream as spy recruiters sending he and his wife off to spy school, it set me to pondering.

I remember as a kid discovering that my scoutmaster in Chile was a spy.  Later as a young adult I heard from my best friend about the attempts to recruit him as a spy when he was living and teaching in Kenya.  All of that was decades ago and my only more recent connection with that sub-culture has been through Robert Ludlum novels providing fodder for beach reading.  So one might imagine my surprise in hearing this world come to the surface in two unrelated dreams within weeks.

After recovering from the initial surprise of this theme, I was reminded of a book entitled Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon wrote it in the late 1980’s, and it remains quite on point over 20 years later.  Much of the orientation of the book is a struggle with the challenging question of how to live “in the world” without being “of the world” – that is, in their term, how to be “resident aliens.”  Of course, the connection I made to the book from the two stories related by parishioners is that spies are indeed aliens in the lands in which they live and work – be that as a teacher, a scoutmaster or otherwise. 

I’d like to think there is something going on in our faith community that is stirring some sort of collective unconscious sense that we are placed and engaged in a society that is foreign to the Jesus-centered tradition we seek to follow.  One of the themes Hauerwas frequently discusses is that ethics is primarily a way of seeing the world rather than a more objective rational engagement.  He appropriately pushes us to seek out the view of reality presupposed by a particular ethical system.  The point brought home is that Christian ethics as laid out by Jesus Christ in his sermon on the mount simply don’t accommodate principles of a culture not based in the gospels.  It is a disquieting argument, as it is when more than one person in one’s faith community begins to at some level recognize how alien we are called to be in a culture that excludes the hungry, the poor, and the marginalized.  It’s disquieting in a good way.

Emergence

Sociology has intrigued me for some time; particularly sociology of religion.  Recently I read Phyllis Tickle's The Great Emergence.  As a sociologist of religion, she is a professional observer of the field and of American Christianity in particular.  The subtitle of the book is How Christianity is Changing and Why.  Tickle offers a sweeping overview of church history and suggests that people of faith have a rummage sale every 500 years to reassess Christianity.  "About every five hundred years the empowered structures of institutional Christianity, whatever they may be at the time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur." 

Since I am more of a practitioner than a sociologist, I am again intrigued by the perspective of someone on the outside looking in.  As her perspective inevitably colors her commentary, my perspective affects mine.  I also see the changes.  It is only with some serious intellectual contortionism that one can avoid that reality.  The impact of social media and the presence of this blog is a case in point.  Even a few years ago, I had not envisioned engaging in this way.  Park Central's fourth generation website features links to our Facebook page, YouTube channel and this Blogspot.  Keeping the lines of communication open involves a whole new set of tools.

Yet even amidst all the change, there are strong strands that remain.  While Tickle acknowledges this, I see a depth and strength to those strands that comes out of my own perspective as a practitioner.  The story of God in relationship with God's people begins in the beginning and continues through today.  A part of that story is God's faithfulness and another part of the story is the less than stellar track record of God's people.  Even so, God continues to bless us beyond measure.  It is our responsibility, as Jean Calvin so aptly said, to remember that "all the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbors."

May we all remember how blessed we are and share from those blessings.


A study group of Tickle's book will begin at Park Central at the end of October.  If you are interested in joining us, drop me a note.