AND SO AGAIN THE SEASON COMES

The signature of the season is darkness.  The calling card of the season is ever deepening cold.  Advent is upon us.  It arrives on the wings of winter.  The symbols of the season are more ancient than civilization.  The year is dying out in the night and every symbol speaks of endings.  And so the church begins its liturgical year in the mood of waiting in the cold and dark for the birth of God’s light. 

Of course, this is not just about the weather.  We all live each day throughout the year with cold and darkness and death inside us.  We know our own places of sadness and silence, whispering fears and nameless dreads, where we stand on the brink of the grief of all people.  And in the dark, we wait.  We wait for some word of hope against our despair, for some shout of joy that can penetrate our most enduring hurts, for some shaft of light that can get to the bottom of our deepest wells of gloom.  And what we long for is not just some human word, darkness speaking to darkness; one more word of counsel or advise or rosy reassurance.  What we need is infinitely more than that.  What we need is something transcendent, something eternal, something beyond the reach of all the death and beyond the power of all our fears.

And so the cry of the season is “Come.”  O come Emanuel.  O come thou Dayspring on high.  O come all ye faithful.  O come let us adore.  Come thou long expected one.  Come upon this midnight clear and save us from our long dread night.

This is why this is the most beautiful season of the year.  We juxtapose our deepest aches with our greatest celebrations.  We feel our losses more poignantly while reaching out to others more generously.  As it grows darker, we light up our houses with twinkling trees and strings of light everywhere, with candles and stars.  As it grows colder we warm ourselves with Christmas cheer, with gifts and charity, with hearty laughter and all the family and friends that we can muster.  At a time when we feel ominous silences within us, we fill the air with music of joy and songs of peace.  We deck the halls with all the love that is in us.  We put the children among us right at the center of everything and when their eyes sparkle with wonder, so do our hearts.  We talk of elves and flying reindeer and magic and grace.  We give and give and give. 

God is in this.  This is the way God comes into our lives and touches us.  Somewhere in the course of this season, whether it be in a child’s grin, or in a familiar old song, or in the garish lights on a neighbors house, or in some tale of generosity, or in some quiet moment remembering some Christmas past; it will come to you.  You will hear the angel voices.  Or you will feel the warmth washing over you.  Or you will be blinded by the light or lifted by the joy.  In whatever way it happens, if you listen, if you watch, if you wait, the transcendent moment will come.  Something new will be born in you.  The hopes and fears of all the years will gather in you and God’s joy will sound.  Wait for it.

May all the blessing of this season find there way into your life,

All Saints

In the week of All Saints Day, I’m standing in the sanctuary of our old Congregational church.  It’s a space that it is hard not to love.  The light has a golden glow as it comes in through stained glass and reflects off the aged cherry wood of the pews and wainscoting.  It is a beautiful room.  It was built back when George Washington was still the President.  The people of this community lavished love and attention on this building back then just as we have continued to over the succeeding generations.  As we think about them, it hard not to be awe-struck by their strength and resolve and by their gifts to us.

It is amazing to think about how this building was built.  Dozens of people gave hundreds of hours to the project.  There were no professional builders then, just local farmers, after a week of hard physical labor around their own primitive farmsteads, coming here and hewing and shaping the beams by hand.  Even the local physician was here hoisting beams in his spare time (we know this because when part of the structure of the church tower collapsed during construction, the local doctor was one of the two people killed). 

They went through all of this work and the attendant expense to meet what was surely an important need.  They wanted to create a space that would have the effect of lifting their thoughts from their everyday concerns to something more sublime, more meaningful, more important, more eternal.  They wanted to be inspired.  And so they didn’t just build a utilitarian building.  They aimed for beauty.  They went for a ceiling high enough to contain their dreams and their grandest thoughts.  They wanted this golden light that lifts the heart.  They wanted a place that would touch something in them that was hungry for touch.  More important to them than getting their own houses fixed up, more important than spending time with their families, more important than any of the pressing tasks of their own private concerns, was this communal act of faith: building a place that would sustain the meaning of their lives.  Certainly, these people were saints in their way.

This is a beautiful thing, and a human thing.  When people on the edge of what seemed like a hostile wilderness were trying to carve out a life for themselves, one of the first things they did was to build a church.  They banded together in a community and expressed their spiritual hopes or their dearest beliefs in a building that was nearly monumental in this place at that time.  They were trying to live up to the legacy of faith that was left to them by their forbearers.  And there is something in this that is absolutely essential to what it means to be fully human.  There is this spiritual longing in most people.  There is a need to look toward some higher loyalty, some deeper truth, some grander meaning than what we find evident in the everyday round of our living.  There is a need to stand in the context of some powerful tradition of meaning that came before us and will live on after us.  That, at heart, is the religious impulse.  We look for something behind or above the mundane realities of our days that makes sense of our stories or gives significance to our striving or explains our sufferings.  Our faith meets, or tries to meet, these deep human needs that must find expression and can never be discounted for that reason.

So much of what we have been given in our religious tradition represents some of the best of our human history.  Our religious tradition is filled with beauty.  There are stories of people making great sacrifices in the name of love.  There are great works of art and some of our most extraordinary pieces of music.  There are generations of charitable work and whole communities made better by the outreach of people of faith.  There are beautiful moral aspirations and profound yet subtle ideas.  It is hard not to be in awe of the sweep and grandeur of the whole tradition in which we stand. 

I have long been seduced by its power and promise.  I have given much of my life to it.  So much of what is good grows out of it.   I have believed that our best hope for changing our world’s injustices and evils must lie within the power of our religious ideals and in the potential of our faith communities.  Surely, people worshipping a God whose primary attribute is supposed to be love must be able to live out that love in acts of kindness and grace.  Surely, people worshipping a God whose love extends to all of humanity must be able to fight for justice and equality.  Surely, people who’s God is beyond all human borders and limitations must be able to transcend the dangers and wars of nationalism and the boundaries of race and class.

But, of course, history doesn’t confirm all of this hopefulness. Our religion has also been at the heart of some of the very worst moments of our human story.  Our religious tradition carries with it superstitions that can make progress, both moral and scientific, almost impossible.  Our religion has been used to rouse the most primitive and violent emotions of whole peoples.  The divisions between religious traditions have subdivided humanity in even more dangerous and volatile rivalries than tribalism or nationalism.  Different visions of what is true and ultimate, when seen as final and immutable, put people into separate and often irreconcilable moral universes that exacerbate every possibility of misunderstanding.

And so it is a mixed legacy that we have been handed. Our saints from the past are broken saints.  And so we need to honor the gifts of our tradition.  We need to remember the sacrifices and labors of those who have given us this place that we share, the ideals that we cherish, and the timeworn words and songs where we continue to find inspiration.  We stand in debt to all those who worshipped here, built here, cried here, celebrated here and died here.  We are their legacy.  Our community is simply the continuation of theirs, and so, on it will go when we are gone.  But the legacy is mixed.  And so it needs our contributions as well.  We must seek to bend our tradition further in the direction of love and understanding.  We must be the witnesses for God’s grace is our times beyond the limits of our forbearers understandings.  We must be the ones who break down some of the barriers and prejudice that our own faith tradition has created.  We must leave our own legacy of faith behind us—a faith that moves into God’s future.  Where we have been left a tradition that divides, we can help overcome divisions.  Where we have been left a set of beliefs that excludes, we can open the doors of our community.  Where we have found narrow prejudices, we can stretch the limits of our souls.  That way, we become the broken saints that future generations can look back and both admire and transcend.  We too are building something that we can proudly leave behind us.

Theology is Story

Theology is largely autobiography.  To reflect on God is basically to reflect on ones experience of God and that means to reflect on one’s own life.  Our theologies grow out of our stories.  Some do that reflection within the confines of a tradition, a religious heritage that outlines a history of God’s revelation to a particular people.  But even there, the acceptance of one religious tradition or historical witness over another is mostly a matter of one’s own life story.  If your parents provided you with a childhood steeped in the life of a Baptist Church, then that Baptist tradition will always shape your way of thinking about God (positively or negatively).  If you are raised as a religious Jew, the stories from the Torah will always form a basis for your reflections on God.  Our life stories and our faith stories are one.  Our God is revealed truly, only as we tell the tales of our living.

When I was nearing graduation from college, I was anxious to pursue studies in comparative religion.  I went to see my professor in that field, Dr. Kenneth  Morgan, looking for advice and a recommendation on pursuing further study of other religions.

“I won’t recommend you,” he said, much to my dismay and shock.  “You have no business nosing around in other people’s religions until you know what your own is.”

At the time, I was floundering through one religious experiment after another.  I had started college as a devoted atheist.  Life later gave me some glimpse of God, but I still had no idea what that meant in terms of tradition or religion, sect or community.  I had flirted with Hinduism and, with Morgan’s help, had experimented with Zen.  I had studied mysticism, Tibetan Lamaism and Sufi practices.  In it all, I still wasn’t sure that I was anything but a soggy agnostic looking for any kind of solid ground.

I protested to Morgan that I wasn’t sure I wanted to have any single religion.  If I were religiously neutral, it would make it possible for me to study world religions more dispassionately, more objectively.

“Everybody has to stand somewhere,” he said.  “It’s better for everybody if you know where it is that you’re standing.  When you look into a religion, you had better know whether you’re a scholar or a pilgrim.”

“What if I’m just an atheist,” I said.

“If you’re an atheist,” he answered, “you are a Christian atheist.  If you’re an agnostic, you are a Christian agnostic.  Look to your own roots.  You stand in a tradition of some kind even if you spend your life pretending otherwise.”

Even if you start life outside of any obvious religious tradition, as I did, roots (cultural, family, experiential) are profoundly powerful.  For most of us, God has a shape, a taste, a feel, a scent, and a sound that grows out of our pasts like a plant from seed.  Another way of saying it is that God comes to each of us in ways that we can understand and to which we will respond.  Just as God may come to different cultures in ways that are resonant with each cultures expectations.  John Robinson once wrote that if the religion of Jesus had traveled east rather than west, the same Jesus would have been worshipped as an avatar of Brahman.  The differences aren’t in God, they are in us.  Xenophanes wrote in the fifth century B.C.E. that “the Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair.”  It is not that we create God in our own image, but that we find God, discover God, amidst our own set of cultural and personal predispositions.  We know the face of God that we need to know, because, most of the time, that is the only face of God that we are able to see at all.

WEDDING PLANNING

While I would like to write a pastoral reflection on some topic that would make us all feel better about life, there is something more pressing on my mind today.  I got a call from someone this morning who would like to get married next spring.  She was excited and anxious and full of questions as brides so often are when they make their first contact with us.  We scheduled the wedding, talked about counseling, discussed fees, and went over a dozen other questions.  Unfortunately, there was another level of anxiety on this young woman’s mind.  Depending on the outcome of the voting in November, she may not ever get to have the wedding of her dreams.  She may not get to walk down the aisle of First Parish.  She may not get to say “I do” or see her mother’s tears of happiness or get cake smeared all over her face.  The reason, of course, is that the person that she loves more than anyone else in the world; the person who makes her happy and around whom she wants to build her life is another woman.

We’ve spoken a lot about this issue this fall in the First Parish community and our conversations are not over yet.  However, a few weeks back someone in the church asked me a question that was bothering him and I thought it might be helpful to share my response with all of you.  The question I was asked was this: “How can we reconcile same-sex marriage with our biblical understanding of marriage?”  Because so many conversations around this subject for people of faith always seem to end up with vague references to marriage as the Bible would have it, some response is crucial.

The short answer is that we can’t reconcile same-sex marriage with the biblical version of marriage at all.  In fact, we can’t reconcile biblical marriage with any of our modern ideas about what constitutes marriage.  Marriage as we understand and practice it, as a partnership between two people based on love and equality is not a biblical idea. 

In the Hebrew Bible, polygamy was the norm.  David had at least seven wives and numerous concubines.  His son Solomon, who tended a little to excess is said to have had 300 wives and 700 concubines.  The idea was to have as many wives and children as one could afford.  Most of these marriages were not in any way based on love, they were business arrangements, usually carried out as a deal between the groom and the woman’s father with or without her consent.

In the New Testament, polygamy was less commonplace but marriage as a financial contract between a man and a woman’s father was still very much the norm.  People seldom considered issues of love or even affection as an issue in deciding to marry and women were essentially property to be exchanged.  The wife in the relationship was strictly a second-class citizen bound to obey and serve her husband.  None of these “biblical notions of a traditional marriage” have anything to do with the way most Americans view marriage today.

For us, marriage is about a bond of love and commitment between free and equal adults.  This is not biblical.  It is not traditional.  It is not some dictate of our religious dogma.  It is a relatively new idea.  Marriage and how we understand it has evolved.  Even a couple of generations ago, brides promised to “obey” their husbands and divorce laws differed for each gender.  Today, most of us embrace the idea that two people enter the covenant of marriage as equals and that their love for one another is at the very heart of the arrangement.  Understanding how far our ideas of marriage have come may help us to embrace this next step in the evolution.

I believe that the ability of two people to enter into a life-long covenant deepens and strengthens the bonds of love and companionship between them.  This makes their life a better and a richer thing.  This is a gift that allows someone to put this bond of love at the very center of every part of his or her life.  The ability to makes those commitments in the context of family, friends, church, and state is crucial to the fullness of who we are.  How can we celebrate that so fully for some and then deny it to others?  How can we say to people that their love for another person is not appropriate or sanctioned because the person they love is not of the gender that we prefer?

The next time I speak with the young woman whose wedding is scheduled here this spring, I do not want to hear the disappointment in her voice or see the pain in her face that would come if her fellow citizens here in Maine denied her the right to have her love and commitment celebrated, consecrated and recognized as a full and equal marriage, bearing all of the beauty and power of our long but evolving tradition of holy matrimony.  I want to be there to see the tears of joy and to eat the cake and to bless the day and to celebrate the greatest gift that any of us can receive; the gift of someone to love for the rest of our lives.