B Advent 4 OL BFC
2014
Isaiah 54:1-14
December 21, 2014
Rated as one of the movies you had
to see before it went off of Netflix, the 2003 romantic comedy, “Love Actually”
begins with these beautiful words:
Whenever I get gloomy with
the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.
General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and
greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's
not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and
sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old
friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the
phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they
were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll
find that love actually is all around.
Again, these are beautiful words and this is a lovely movie with some
real life heartache. In the movie, love
is defined as romantically sentimental and serendipitous whether you are a small
boy wondering if you should tell the girl of your dreams that you love her or how
a marriage goes forward after love has been betrayed.
All we need is love. Love is a many splendored thing. What’s wrong with filling the world with
silly love songs?
Folk singer and songwriter, Carrie Newcomer, a
self-identified Quaker, reflects on a regular spiritual practice she does in
gratitude for the love she regularly receives from God or, at the least, a
friendly universe. Every night before
she goes to sleep she says out loud three things that she is grateful for, all the
material of her life. She talks about
this simple and humble practice in a poem she titles, “Three Gratitudes”:
Every night before I go to sleep
I say out loud
Three things that I'm grateful for,
All the significant, insignificant
Extraordinary, ordinary stuff of my life.
It's a small practice and humble,
And yet, I find I sleep better
Holding what lightens and softens my life
Ever so briefly at the end of the day.
Sunlight, and blueberries,
Good dogs and wool socks,
A fine rain,
A good friend,
Fresh basil and wild phlox,
My father's good health,
My daughter's new job,
The song that always makes me cry,
Always at the same part,
No matter how many times I hear it.
I say out loud
Three things that I'm grateful for,
All the significant, insignificant
Extraordinary, ordinary stuff of my life.
It's a small practice and humble,
And yet, I find I sleep better
Holding what lightens and softens my life
Ever so briefly at the end of the day.
Sunlight, and blueberries,
Good dogs and wool socks,
A fine rain,
A good friend,
Fresh basil and wild phlox,
My father's good health,
My daughter's new job,
The song that always makes me cry,
Always at the same part,
No matter how many times I hear it.
Decent coffee at the airport,
And your quiet breathing,
The stories you told me,
The frost patterns on the windows,
English horns and banjos,
Wood Thrush and June bugs,
The smooth glassy calm of the morning pond,
An old coat,
A new poem,
My library card,
And that my car keeps running
Despite all the miles.
And
after three things,
More often than not,
I get on a roll and I just keep on going,
I keep naming and listing,
More often than not,
I get on a roll and I just keep on going,
I keep naming and listing,
Until
I lie grinning,
Blankets pulled up to my chin,
Awash with wonder
At the sweetness of it all.[1]
Blankets pulled up to my chin,
Awash with wonder
At the sweetness of it all.[1]
Though these gratitudes share her response to love, Newcomer reflects on
how difficult it is to define love. “I think we
talk about love a lot,” she says, “and I think love can get really big. You
know, like, love gets like, you can't almost get your arms around it, it's such
a big thing, but kindness . . . kindness is like the country-cousin to love. You know, it just kind of — it kind of does
dishes. When no one asked it to.”[2]
This is the fourth Sunday of Advent
when we light the rose-colored Advent candle.
The night sky is now clearly transforming. Dawn is on the way. And we say that God’s love will be born into
this night. So we need to reflect and
discern on how ancient story and mythology reflects on the character of God’s
love. Is love the romantic and
sentimental feeling conveyed by the movie “Love Actually” or the simple and
humble sweetness for which Carrie Newcomer is grateful?
Religious
writer and social psychologist, Christina Cleveland, writes that “Advent isn’t
about our best world, it’s about our worst world. Advent is an invitation to plunge into the
deep, dark waters of our worst world . . . .”[3] Cleveland
countenances the circumstances found during the Biblical Exile.
In
my previous two sermons, I shared the Biblical Exile as a time of incredible
hopelessness, a time of night without a singular star in the sky. The representatives of God, Judah’s leaders,
had been executed or taken into chains in exile. The land, the object of God’s promise, had
been ravaged by war and left desolate.
The Temple, the special place of God’s abiding, had been reduced to rubble. Prophets said that God was angry that the
religious and political elite had abandoned the covenant, had broken the heart
of God in violence and injustice, and so God had left. God appeared to be gone, absent.
That
is why, if love is going to matter, love is going to have to do more than just
do the dishes, it will have be particular enough, gritty enough, maybe even big
enough to matter at a time of hopelessness and despair. If love seems overly romantic and sentimental
during your absolute worst days, days when you may have lost a child in a
tragic car accident; or your best friend at school, the friend you trusted, betrays
you and makes fun of you; or when a natural disaster takes your home, your
livelihood, and maybe even members of your family, love better be particular
enough, gritty enough, and big enough. Or
faith in a loving God becomes irrelevant at the absolute worst times of our
lives.
The
word in Hebrew translated as love or lovingkindness from our Scripture passage
today, hesed, is a word often used to
describe the difference between life and death.
“Steadfast” is regularly used as an adjective to define this kind of
love. Throughout Hebrew Scripture, hesed is used to convey how God
remembers, keeps covenant and promise. Hesed reflects God’s commitment as a
marriage partner to be in steadfast relationship with the Jewish people. Biblical scholars have also used gritty words
like persistent, relentless, ongoing, and mutual to describe hesed.[4] Culturally, love has come to mean a private,
familial, and sometimes romantic idyll. In
Biblical context, however, love or hesed is
about God’s public, corporate, saving, staying power on behalf of
the community and nation.
Stay
with my Biblical geekedness here, for if Biblical love is about matters of life
and death, implicates God’s saving power, then we also need to
define the too often simplistically defined word of “salvation.” The Biblical definition of salvation is
closely tied to liberation. “Salvation,”
in Hebrew, literally meant to set aside some space for community life, to make
a broad place where the community might thrive.
Or “salvation” meant a liberation from confinement, containment or
restriction for a community’s life and conduct.[5]
In
the Scripture passage we read today, hear this promise of salvation in that God
tells the people to, “Enlarge the place of your tent; Stretch out the curtains of your
dwellings, spare not; lengthen your cords and strengthen your pegs. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left.”[6] In Isaiah 54,
salvation is being ordered for the Jewish people.
Hear also in those definitions of salvation the
saving acts of God to bring the Jewish people out of oppression, slavery, and
occupation of the Exodus and Exile into the liberation and freedom of the
promised land. In the Exodus, the first
thing Moses is to ask Pharaoh is for a three day trek into the wilderness, some
time and space set aside, so that the Children of Israel might hold a festival to
honor God.[7] The dream of the Jewish people coming out of
the Exile, given voice by the third writer of Isaiah[8]
and the prophet Micah[9]
is that the Jewish people would no longer be beholden to a foreign power. Saved
so they might construct homes that they themselves live in, grow food that they
themselves might eat, that each Jewish person might be able to sit and rest
underneath their own olive tree.
Salvation is physical space set aside for thriving and rest.
Imagine, for a moment, if Christians around
the world spent their days focused on these particular, gritty, material, and
big definitions of love and salvation to talk about God’s activity in the
world. What if God was not so interested
in discerning and judging in terms of heaven and hell, and spent time trying to
create a space in which communities and nations might thrive and rest. In love, God is primarily invested in providing
the material bases of life for the well-being of the community.
How
does that translate into human terms? A
story that I have shared with some of you.
As
a New York Times war correspondent, Chris Hedges saw some of the worst parts of
our world, the deep, dark waters of our worst world. Hedges writes about a time during the
Bosnian War in what used to be Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995. The Bosnian War was fought between Muslims,
Croats, and Bosnian Serbs—sometimes between people who had been neighbors
before the war began. In a world where
so many people are drawn to war, when war is one of the primary forces that
gives our life meaning, Chris Hedges believes there is only one force strong
enough to counter it—love. He tells the
story of Fadil Fejzic to relate what he means by the word “love.”
Though Rosa and Drago Sorak would like to tell you how
evil the Muslim people are, they cannot because of Fadil Fejzic. Rosa and Drago Sorak are a Bosnian Serb
couple who lived in the Muslim village of Goražde when their ethnic group, the
Serbs, began shelling the city and cutting off daily necessities. Though the couple refused to throw their lot
in with those who bombed the city, the Muslim police in Goražde took their son,
Zoran, away for questioning. And Zoran
never came back. Their second son was
struck by a car and killed. Muslims in Goražde
harassed the Sorak family, came to their apartment looking for them, to kill
them.
Five months after their oldest son’s, Zoran’s
disappearance, Zoran’s wife gave birth to a baby girl. The mother was unable to nurse the
child. Food shortages in Goražde were
killing infants, the infirm, and the elderly in droves. The baby, with only tea to drink, began to
fade.
With the baby close to death, Fadil Fejzic, a Muslim man
who had been milking his cow at night to avoid the shelling, brought them a
liter of milk. Fadil came day after day
for 442 days until the Sorak daughter-in-law and their granddaughter left town
for Serbia. Milk was a precious
commodity in a time when salt was going for $80 a kilo. Fadil refused their money. All told, Fadil gave the Soraks around 221
liters of milk.
Fadil was told by fellow Muslims to give his milk to
their people and let the Chetnik children die.
He did not say a word.[10] He loyally, persistently, steadfastly,
relentlessly delivered milk to people who were not like him but were part of
his community. He helped create a space
for thriving and rest.
If Christmas is about the birth of love into our world,
then Fadil Fejzic was about incarnating the practice of God’s love and
salvation in Goražde.
Please understand.
No question that there are times when I want love to be the romantic
idyll of “Love Actually” in a beautiful Christmas carol and the gathering love
of family and friends. Or I want love to
be the kindness that does the daily tasks at work or at home that shows care
and respect for me. But there are times
in my life, as I imagine there are in yours, when in the worst parts of our
lives, we need a God whose love is big enough, is persistent enough, and gritty
enough to bring about our salvation.
This Advent we enact a story to once again say that
though we begin with a starless night, dawn comes with the love and salvation
of God. When leaders and mentors and
friends and partners betray us and we find ourselves cold and broken on the
floor, we affirm through our story that God steadfastly seeks us out in
love. When all we knew that was true and
right and holy lies in rubble—job, family, meaning—and we have no idea how to
get back, how we might rebuild or replant, we affirm through our story that
God, again and again, tears down and lifts up, so that, in love, a path is made
home for us. When goodness and promise
are nowhere to be found, and it would seem, God is nowhere to be found, and we
feel lost in the world, God is once again strapping up Her work boots, not
worried about the dirt underneath His fingernails, and heading out, in love to
find us, looking for us doggedly, persistently, relentlessly.
Again and again we tell this story so that we know we are
not left alone. The world is not left
alone.
Relentlessly, persistently, steadfastly, Fadil joined the
Beneficent and Merciful God in love. We
would do well to join them and quicken the coming dawn. Amen.
[1] “Carrie Newcomer—A Conversation
with Music,” On Being, November 26,
2014. http://onbeing.org/program/transcript/7053#main_content.
[3]
Christina Cleveland, “Advent/Dark,” November
28, 2014, http://www.christenacleveland.com/2014/11/adventdarkness/.
[4]
http://www.biblicalheritage.org/Bible%20Studies/hesed.htm; http://www.hesed.com/heseddf.htm; http://truegrit.weblogs.us/2007/07/19/hesed-a-strong-mercy/; “loving-kindness,” The Harper Collins Bible Dictionary, ed. by Paul J. Achtemeier (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p.
627.
[5]
“salvation,” The Harper Collins Bible Dictionary, p. 960; Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 175ff.
[6] Isaiah 54:2-3
[7] Exodus 5:1
[8] Isaiah 65:21
[9] Micah 4:4
[10] Chris Hedges, War
Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York:
Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 50-53.
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