2nd Sunday of Advent

Readings: Baruch 5:1-9; Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11; Luke 3:1-6

They killed without mercy in San Bernardino.
They killed without mercy
fourteen coworkers and acquaintances,
alongside whom they had previously
lived their lives in peace.
They killed without mercy,
seemingly in the name of God,
the God whom the Qur’an invokes
at the outset of every chapter
as “the Compassionate, the Merciful.”

He, too, killed without mercy in Colorado Springs.
He killed without mercy or discrimination
three people who happened to fall
within the sights of his weapon.
He killed without mercy,
seemingly in the name of God,
the God whom he was convinced
would mercifully cover his sins,
no matter what he did.

Some of us reacted
by taking to Facebook and Twitter,
posting and tweeting
our “thoughts and prayers” for the victims;
others of us rebuked these sentiments,
saying that thoughts and prayers are not enough,
that concrete action must be taken
to end such violence.
Many of us simply felt
immense perplexity and sadness.
We huddled,
wrapped in our robe of mourning and misery:
wanting to pray,
but not knowing what to say;
wanting to act,
but not knowing what to do;
wanting maybe simply
to hide and hope it all would go away.

I am not without sympathy
for The New York Daily News,
which responded to the politicians
who sent out their “thoughts and prayers”
with a headline that read
“God isn’t fixing this.”
I’m sympathetic because I too grow tired
of politicians and pundits
who turn prayer into a placeholder
for prudent action infinitely delayed.
I too sense with weary irony
the ambiguities of praying to God
for those who have been killed in the name of God,
by those who probably also prayed to God
before embarking on their merciless missions.

But even my weariness and my cynicism
cannot keep me from calling out,
“Lord, have mercy.”
Aware of the ambiguity and abuse
that sometimes accompanies
talk of thoughts and prayers
I still cannot suppress the primal cry
that wells up
from the depth of my heart:
“Lord Jesus, have mercy on us.”
We should never be ashamed to pray
in response to the horrors of the world,
to beg that God would have mercy on this human race,
a people that has,
as St. Catherine of Siena put it,
“declared war on [God’s] mercy
and become [God’s] enemies” (Dialogue ch. 13).

Yes, we must act to try to curb
the merciless violence
that afflicts our nation and our world,
but we must also recognize
that this violence has roots
deep within our human nature,
a nature that has been devastated by sin.
There are things we can and should fix,
but there are also things wrong with us
that only God can fix.
The large-scale acts of war against God’s mercy
that we witness in California or Colorado
grow from seeds of destruction
that we all have in our hearts:
seeds of resentment and pride,
seeds of spite and selfishness,
seeds of indifference and malice.
I, too, am at war with God’s mercy;
I, too, am a merciless combatant
in sin’s war against goodness.
Perhaps we should not expect God
to fix those situations
that call for the exercise of human wisdom
and political prudence,
but surely I must beg God to fix my warring heart.
Confronted with the darkness around and within me,
I am not ashamed to call out:
Come, God of mercy,
come and bring us back
from the darkness of our exile,
come and take from us
the robe of mourning and misery.

And so we gather together on this day
as God’s people ,
seeking God’s mercy.
And we hear in our Gospel
the voice of John the Baptist,
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths….
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
We hear the voice of the prophet Baruch,
“take off your robe of mourning and misery;
put on the splendor of glory from God forever....
for God is leading Israel in joy
by the light of his glory,
with his mercy and justice for company.”
In this season of Advent,
we light our candles of hope,
visible signs of our prayer that God’s mercy
would bring peace to our hearts and to our world.
We light our candles of hope
because we believe that God has come to us,
that in the life, death, and rising of Jesus
God has, as St. Catherine of Siena wrote,
“[given] this warring human race a way to reconciliation,
bringing great peace out of our war” (Dialogue ch. 13).
Yes, we must act to restrain
the violence that grows
from our war against God’s mercy.
But we must also pray for that mercy,
because in the end
it is only God’s mercy
that will disarm our hearts.
In the face of merciless killings
done in the name of a merciful God,
we light our candles of hope
as a sign of our prayer
that God the Compassionate,
the Merciful,
will one day reign victorious
and that we will find ourselves,
joyfully defeated,
prisoners of war
who have surrendered to mercy.

2nd Sunday of Advent

Readings: Baruch 5:1-9; Philippians 1:4-6. 8-11; Luke 3:1-6

In our first reading, from the prophet Baruch,
we are presented with a vision of the return of the Israelites to the promised land

from their exile in Babylon.
We know from the book of Ezra that the return of the exiles

was not that of triumphant victors,
but of a divided and dispirited people,

plagued by economic woes and threatened by hostile neighbors.
And yet Baruch presents this return as a glorious one.
Indeed, in today’s reading the word “glory” is used six times.
God is glorious, shining forth in mercy and justice,

but the Israelites too are glorious:
indeed, Jerusalem is called to share in God’s glory,
which is like a cloak that she is to wrap around herself,

having put off her garments of mourning.

So who is right, Baruch or Ezra?
Was the return from exile a glorious one,
or was it really a disheveled band of displaced people straggling home,
beset by troubles and bickering among themselves

and otherwise acting in all-too recognizably human ways?

I am not sure we need to choose.
I suspect Ezra is more or less accurate

in his depiction of the disarray of the returning exiles,
but Baruch the prophet offers us a different sort of vision,
the kind of vision that only a prophet can have,
the kind of vision that can discern the glory of God in the most unlikely of events,
the kind of vision that sees God’s glory
even in the stumbling and all-too recognizably human return of these exiles.
Because Baruch knows that in this event

the most unlikely of things has happened:
God has made a way home for his people.
The prophetic eye can see glory

in the all-too recognizably human struggle of the returning exiles
because it sees that God is present.

What would it mean to look with the same prophetic eye

at our own community here at Corpus Christi?
Like the returning exiles, we too are all-too recognizably human;
even when we are on our best and most self-consciously “churchy” behavior –
when we gather to celebrate the liturgy –
our human limitations seem at times more manifest than God’s glory.
As any liturgical minister will tell you, during the liturgy, stuff happens –

stuff that you hadn't planned on.
You read the wrong reading as a lector,

or mangle the name of some Bronze Age potentate from Assyria.
You drop the host when you are a minister of the Eucharist,
or realize half-way through communion that you've been administering the chalice
with the words, "the body of Christ."
You are leading the the prayer of the faithful and realize in the middle of it
that the carefully thought-out and theologically profound response

you had so carefully prepared
is in fact too long and too quirky for the congregation to remember.
These examples spring to mind because they are all things that I have done.
For me, a particularly memorable moment came last Easter when,
after the gifts of bread and wine has been brought forward

and I had filled the first chalice,
I discovered that the wine was full of ants.
Often such mistakes go unnoticed by the congregation,

though they seem momentous to the minister.
But as anyone who has had a role in serving the liturgy will tell you,
that’s just how liturgical ministry is:

we prepare, we do our best, but sometimes things go wrong,
so we accept our all-too recognizably human imperfections,

and perhaps long for the heavenly liturgy,
where every voice will be in tune,

every word spoken eloquently,

every movement executed gracefully.

Of course, the all-too recognizably human imperfections of our worship

are not limited to liturgical faux pas.
The true imperfection of our worship

is our falling short in faith, hope and, especially, love.
The true imperfection of our worship

is not the mispronounced name,

but the unkindly spoken word;
not the inadvertently dropped the host,

but willfully ignored neighbor;
not the ill-chosen prayer response,

but the hardness of heart that turns us away from prayer altogether.
In short, our worship is imperfect

because we fail to be a people who, in the words of the prophet Micah,
do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before God.
This is why we begin our worship by acknowledging our sins

and asking for God’s grace and mercy.

Yet despite all this,

we believe it is in our limited, imperfect, error-prone liturgical celebrations
that God comes to meet us,

that the glory of Jesus Christ shines forth in our midst,
and we catch a glimpse of that perfect heavenly liturgy.
It is through hands that all too often fail to do God’s will
and voices that all too often fail to speak God’s good news
that we sinners worship the God of grace and mercy.
And this is possible not because of what we do,

but because of what Christ does.
Last week Fr. Rich spoke of the confidence that we can have that,
despite the turmoil in our world and within ourselves,

Christ is with us.
In the liturgy, Christ becomes flesh and dwells among us.
When we gather as Christians for worship and proclaim the mystery of faith

in words both ancient and new,
when we move beyond words and enact that same mystery

through the language of ritual,
we can have confidence that Christ is present,
speaking and acting with us,
speaking and acting for us.

It is this presence that takes from us our cloak of mourning

and wraps us in the cloak of God’s glory.

Julian of Norwich said that

“As the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin,
and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the chest,
so are we, soul and body,

clad in the goodness of God and enclosed in it” (A Revelation of Love, ch. 6).
We – a poor, disheveled and all-too recognizably human band of pilgrims –

gather weekly in this place
and speak our imperfect words of prayer

and make our imperfect gestures of peace and. . .
wonder of wonders,

Jesus Christ stands with us in our midst
and clothes us in the robe of his own glory
and, perhaps for just a moment,

we feel the weight of that glory resting on our shoulders,
and we know in that moment

that we truly are clad and enclosed in the goodness of God.