An Impossible Advent

"For what is religion...if not a love for the advent of the impossible, the unconditional, the undeconstructible, where our hearts long to go with a desire beyond desire and a hope against hope?" -- Phil Snider, Preaching After God

Today, the church enters into the season of Advent, a churchy-word that means just what it means: Advent. Arrival. Coming.

Advent is often mistaken for the prologue to Christmas, but that's not quite right -- the name of the season comes from the Latin adventus, which is in turn a translation of the Greek parousia, a term that usually refers to the traditional Christian belief in the Second Coming of Christ. So Advent isn't a breathless buildup to the "real event" of Christmas day. It's actually a time of slowing down, of paying attention, to the signs of the advent--the arrival--of Christ, not just in the celebration of Christmas, but in our very midst.

But it's hard to slow down and to pay attention right now, to prepare quietly and introspectively to invite Christ into our spare rooms. Hard to imagine readying a space for Jesus in the midst of the injustice, violence, rank materialism, and racism that have [once again] splashed across news feeds and TV screens over the past week. Hard to justify looking for a space for reflection when there is so much to be done, so many calls for action and righteous response.

Not just hard. Almost impossible.

I've been reading a book called Preaching After God, by pastor and theologian Phil Snider. Snider attempts to bring some of the insights of post-modern philosophy to bear on the task of preaching in a congregation where doubt and questions are welcome, where, to use his words, "listeners...believe in God some of the time, or none of the time, or all of the time." And I stumbled on the quote that began this post, in which he calls religion "a love for the advent of the impossible."

Advent is a season of expecting the impossible. And it is exactly against a backdrop of injustice and violence and unrest that we tell the stories of this season, stories of hope stirring in the deep, dark waters of hopelessness.

What impossible things might be arriving in our midst this season? What seemingly absurd hopes might be stirring even now, in the wake of yet more bad news, more infuriating reality checks to the myth of inevitable progress?

What might it mean to observe an impossible Advent?

Over the next four weeks, I'm going to reflect on some of these questions. Some of these little pieces might be explicitly religious; others, perhaps not. Some will be responses to the urgent events of the world, and some will step back from the urgency. Some will be quite concrete; others, perhaps a bit meta.

But I hope that they'll help stir up hope.

Hope in the midst of whatever it is you carry with you these days, whether you "believe in God some of the time, or none of the time, or all of the time."

Hope in the advent, in the arrival, of the impossible.

Impossible Advent -- 5,900 miles

This is part of a series called "An Impossible Advent." It was inspired by this quote from the book Preaching After God by Phil Snider: "For what is religion if not a love for the advent of the impossible?" If that intrigues you, feel free to check out the previous posts.

In September 2007, I arrived in Jerusalem to begin three years of service with Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church. I worked with the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, learning about the struggle of Palestinian Christians for unity and justice in the face of division and oppression.

During my time in Palestine/Israel, I saw houses bulldozed because the families living in them were Palestinian. I saw Palestinian families dragged from their homes, evicted by the Israeli military police to make room for Israeli settler extremists. I saw grandmothers pushed down by soldiers at checkpoints; saw unarmed children arrested, beaten, and intimidated; saw live ammunition fired into a crowd by Israeli soldiers; saw the evidence of blatant and systemic violence with no accountability for the perpetrators. One Palestinian friend was jailed for months with no trial. His crime? Organizing nonviolence in the West Bank.

I came back to the U.S. angry, angry and determined to work for justice, to change the ways in which the U.S. supports this awful situation with money and bullets and guns. Determined to change the ways that our institutions, including our churches, make money by investing in companies that help make this oppressive situation possible.

It's about 5,900 miles from here to Jerusalem. And for the past few months, ever since I saw photos like this ...

... not from the West Bank but from Missouri, the thought that has been rolling around in my head has been:

"Why the hell did I travel 5,900 miles when I could have just hopped in a car for a day?"

Palestinians were even tweeting protesters in Ferguson -- where, as it turned out, the police response was modeled after Israeli military policy -- to give them tips about dealing with tear gas.

5,900 miles away. 

And now, another black man killed by the police...and another...and another.  

5,900 miles.

I'm so grateful for my experiences in Jerusalem and surrounds. I learned so much, not only about the situation and the work of Sabeel and its allies, but about myself, about structures of power, about building community. 

But then, 5,900 miles later, and here are the images of militarization.  Here is the disproportionate violence with no accountability. Here are the immoral investments in racist infrastructure.

As usual, much more articulate people than me are writing about this. Rev. Amy Butler, my preaching professor and now the senior pastor at the Riverside Church in New York, traveled to Ferguson to learn from the protesters and wrote about her experiences -- even as protests in her new home of New York erupted over the Eric Garner (non)verdict -- here. My seminary colleague and friend, AhnnaLise Stevens-Jennings, wrote about her own experiences as an African-American woman engaged in conversations about race here. At American University, students organized a protest and faculty and staff stood in solidarity with them. And the most powerful theological response I saw yesterday was from Rev. Jeff Hood:

"I keep thinking about Eric Garner saying, 'I can’t breathe.'

It made me think -- that’s what Jesus is saying in this culture. Jesus is fundamentally connected to the marginalized and right now Jesus is saying, 'I can’t breathe.'

I think the church should be saying the same thing -- that we can’t breathe in this culture and we have to change this culture in order for us to have breath and exist in this society."

So I won't repeat things here that are being said, more eloquently and powerfully, by others.

What I will say is this:

We are in the season of Advent. And for many in the church--and I would include myself in this--Advent has a tendency to be a warm and fuzzy time, a time of nostalgia and decorations and hot cocoa.

And yet the stories of Advent are stories of a place 5,900 miles away, in an occupied land groaning under the weight of oppressive political structures, violent policing, and economic injustice.

We sing "O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see the lie;" but last time I was in Bethlehem it was anything but still: fighter jets thundered overhead, practicing for an assault on Gaza.We sing "In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan," distancing ourselves from the actual land from whence our Christian narrative emerged. We sing "O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel;" and I'd challenge you to travel 5,900 miles and witness those who are locked in captivity, often with no trial, right now.

Our first gospel reading in Advent (Mark 13:24-37) tells of Jesus speaking to his disciples while sitting on the Mount of Olives -- where I lived in Jerusalem. The second gospel reading is John baptizing in the river Jordan, calling for repentance, in an area now under complete Israeli military control. John the Baptist appears again in the third gospel reading, being challenged by religious authorities from Jerusalem. And then the fourth reading, an angel visiting Mary--Mary, who far from a wilting maiden, is the voice crying out to a God who "brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly"(Luke 1:52) -- in Nazareth, now a majority-Arab city in the state of Israel whose growth is restricted by racist zoning laws.

This is where Advent happens. This is where gospel happens. This is where we look for Jesus.

And then I glance at my news feed, 5,900 miles away from that place, and there it is, in the U.S., in our cities, and in our neighborhoods.

This is where Advent happens. This is where gospel happens. This is where we look for Jesus.

Jesus who is saying, "I can't breathe."

Ask people where they have seen God in a particular day, and they are likely to tell you that they saw God in a beautiful sunset, or in the kindness of strangers, or in a moment of quiet reflection. And those are all good and true and beautiful places to see God.

But, as impossible as it seems, in Advent we look for God in the midst of the blood and the tears, in a world aching for justice and wholeness.

We are looking for Jesus there. Here.

And if faith is about hoping for the advent of the impossible, this impossible Messiah who comes to "lift up the lowly" and "fill the hungry with good things," to use Mary's words ...

... then maybe folks like me, who sound a lot more like the "proud" and the "powerful" and the "rich" of Mary's song, ought to be a bit less cozy and a bit more uncomfortable about celebrating this season of impossibility.

Impossible Advent -- the impossibility of blogging

This is part of a series called "An Impossible Advent." It was inspired by this quote from the book Preaching After God by Phil Snider: "For what is religion if not a love for the advent of the impossible?" If that intrigues you, feel free to check out the previous posts.

I have been entirely delinquent in my commitment to blogging during Advent, and honestly I'm not feeling particularly bad about it.

As it turns out, finals week followed by a week of traveling, visiting with family, and getting to see the beautiful farm where Leigh and I will get married in September, hasn't left me with much time for tapping away at a computer, and I am quite content with this fact.

Maybe this will read as a somewhat thin justification, but nevertheless I think there is some truth in it: it seems to me that one of the main lessons of Advent, and all of the metaphors that tend to associate themselves with this season, is that the effort and striving and production of humans is not, in an ultimate sense, the main event. This is a season in which we talk about waiting, about birth, about the dawning of the sun after a long night. All things that, while they might require our alertness, or our care, or our intention, are not really about us, but rather about important things happening in us or through us or around us.

So I'm deciding not to be too concerned that I haven't produced much content here over the past week and a half or so. Advent isn't really about my content, anyway. Not about what I write or make or do. Certainly not about what I blog.

Advent isn't about our flurry of activity and frenzied preparation for five church services on one night (which I am blessedly spared by working with a campus ministry).

Advent isn't about me, or about us.

Which is good news, indeed.

Impossible Advent - "The Impossible Will Take a Little While"

This is part of a series called "An Impossible Advent." It was inspired by this quote from the book Preaching After God by Phil Snider: "For what is religion if not a love for the advent of the impossible?" If that intrigues you, feel free to check out the first post to see where I'm coming from. 

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help
  and you will not listen?
Or cry to you 'Violence!'
  and you will not save?
Why do you make me see wrongdoing
  and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
  strife and contention arise.
So the law becomes slack
  and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous --
  therefore judgment comes forth perverted.
                       -- from the writings of the prophet Habakkuk


I haven't really known what to say about Ferguson.

Or, to be more accurate, I haven't really known what to say that wasn't already being said, in one form or another, sometimes fiercely, sometimes eloquently, often both, by many other people with quicker reaction times and deeper wells of experience than me. (If you're looking for some of those deeper wells, might I suggest the Theology of Ferguson page?)

Posting this quote from Habakkuk on Facebook was about all I could muster last week, but of course a few verses on a Facebook wall does not deep, lasting change make.

I always have this struggle -- this feeling that others are already saying what needs to be said, better than I could. I'm not trying to excuse myself here: walking across campus today and seeing the students gathered in front of the student center in a "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" pose reminded me of how important it is to speak up:

Students at American University chanting "Hands Up, Don't Shoot"

So these verses from Habakkuk keep echoing in my mind, these words of a prophet who seems at the end of words, who exists in what Howard Thurman, in his commentary on the book, calls a "mood of despair." Justice is perverted, and I don't know what to say, and by not saying anything I'm complicit.

God answers Habakkuk's despairing plea; but as I've reflected on elsewhere, it's hard to be content with God's response:

"Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay."

Not much comfort for those who are sick and tired of waiting.

Dr. Thurman is, as usual, helpful: "The reason for this necessity [of waiting] is made obvious....The vision may not come to pass as quickly as is expected. Here we are face to face with the ever-present problem of timing in relation to ends. The acuteness of human need at any moment may cry out for immediate release, immediate action at the point of urgency. Because the help does not come in accordance with our own timetables, we seem driven to conclude that it will not come at all--or if it does, that it will be too late." In contrast, Thurman describes what he calls "the waiting in anticipation": "Such is the waiting of the righteous, so the prophet insists. It is alert, charged with expectation. It is on tiptoe."

For Thurman, waiting has nothing to do with passivity. It is, to paraphrase the words of Jesus from yesterday's lectionary texts, a quality of alertness: alert to the impossible possibilities stirring under the despairing surface. Or, in Twitterspeak: #StayWoke

The author and activist Paul Rogat Loeb, in the introduction to his book The Impossible Will Take A Little While, writes; "History...shows that even seemingly miraculous advances are in fact the result of many people taking small steps together over a long period of time." Loeb is right. The impossible does, indeed, take a little while. So there is, to again quote Thurman, "the quality of relentlessness, ceaselessness and constancy" to the type of waiting that God calls Habakkuk to take on.

I haven't known what to say about Ferguson, as I often don't know what to say when the violent systems that often operate invisibly--at least, invisible to me and to others who are shielded by our privilege--reassert themselves in overt fashion.

But I am reminded by Habakkuk, by Loeb, and by Thurman, that if the impossible does, indeed, take a little while, that it is likely to start with small, seemingly futile steps:

Students standing together and chanting.
The slow work of creating safe spaces.
The steady growth of boundary-breaking empathy.
Owning my own silence.
Writing --
    -- if not a vision --
         -- then something, at least.

--
References to Howard Thurman are from his exposition of Habakkuk in The Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1956), 979ff; and from Deep is the Hunger (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United, 2000). Reference to Paul Rogat Loeb from The Impossible Will Take A Little While (New York: Basic, 2004). References to Jesus are from the Gospel of Mark. 

Impossible Advent -- On Vision, of the tunnel, 20/20, and prophetic kinds

This is part of a series called "An Impossible Advent." It was inspired by this quote from the book Preaching After God by Phil Snider: "For what is religion if not a love for the advent of the impossible?" If that intrigues you, feel free to check out the first post to see where I'm coming from.

In November, in honor of my 30th birthday, I decided to launch a little fundraising page for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. My goal was to get 30 people to each donate $30.

39 people donated a total of more than $1500, and I am feeling immensely, incredibly, impossibly grateful.

It would be hard to overstate how amazed I am. Just three years ago, my parents were picking me up at the end of a several-month stay at a hospital in Connecticut -- a stay that came at the end of several previous months of bouncing in and out of various psych wards. It was a very, very difficult time. And three years later, here I am, smiling in gratitude as I check the fundraising page that will do a little bit to support other people clawing their way through very, very difficult times.

Diane Ackerman writes of those going through such difficult times: "But suicidal people have tunnel vision--no other choice seems possible. A counselor's job is to put windows and doors in that tunnel."

Looking back, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, I can see just how right she is. During those 6 months in and out of hospitals, I remember how lonely I felt, how isolated, how convinced I was that nobody would care if I was gone, that in fact being gone would be better for the people that I could vaguely remember loving.

I was blessedly, decisively wrong. I was surrounded, during all that time and the years after, by the best support system that anyone has the right to ask for. Friends, family, and faith communities have lavished me with love and affirmation. I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I just couldn't see it at the time.

At the time, my vision was a tunnel, and I couldn't see any light at the end.

Without making too light a comparison, I wonder what this human capacity for tunnel vision says about how we, as a species, view our world. I wonder how much we are all susceptible to that tunnel of despair, that tunnel that makes it impossible to imagine alternatives, or choices, or a better ending to our story.

I wonder if a hopeful vision of the future--the kind of vision spoken of by the prophet Habakkuk--requires exactly the sort of windows-and-doors imagination that Ackerman refers to in her work with those grappling with suicidal feelings. The cultivation of an imagination of what seems, in our tunnel-vision reality, impossible.

And perhaps some day, when we have lived into this sort of seemingly-impossible vision, we will look back on our tunnel vision days and, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, wonder aloud to ourselves:

"How could we not see it, way back then?"

--

The Diane Ackerman quote is from her essay in Paul Rogat Loeb's book, The Impossible Will Take A Little While (New York: Basic, 2004). 

Impossible Advent: Remembering to breathe in the world of "I Can't Breathe"

This is part of a series called "An Impossible Advent." It was inspired by this quote from the book Preaching After God by Phil Snider: "For what is religion if not a love for the advent of the impossible?" If that intrigues you, feel free to check out the previous posts. 

Over the past week, I've been telling a lot of people to take deep breaths.

I double-dip stress around finals time. I work with college students, and I'm a seminary student myself, so there's a lot of anxiety happening for most of the people I spend time with on a day-to-day basis. Not to mention that for church folks, Advent--which was supposed to be a season of preparation and contemplation--has turned into a season of over-programming. All of us students sort of need to take care of each other around this time of the year.

The advice rings differently in my own ears this year, though. "Take deep breaths," I say. "You can do this."

"I can't breathe," a voice echoes in my head.

"I can't breathe."

Eric Garner said it 11 times.

I tell people to breathe. To take deep breaths. And I wonder if for millions of people in this country, including friends of mine, colleagues, professors, pastors, those words sound like a sick joke. How do you breathe when the system is designed to choke you? How do you breathe in a world of "I can't breathe"?

My position is one of privilege. And so I write this, not as condescending advice to the righteously angry, but as a reminder to myself: that holding my breath does not help Eric Garner get his back. That holding my breath won't amplify a single voice.

I've got to remember to breathe.

I used to think that I could force my voice out, that if I buckled down and tried harder I'd be a better person, a better activist, a better Christian. I forced that voice out, and before I knew it I was trying so hard that I was gasping for air, holding my breath to try to make it through.

Even in the world of "I can't breathe," I've got to remember to breathe.

Leigh recently posted this article called "The Activist as Contemplative: Resting for Social Change." What with all its talk of burnout and campus ministers, I have a sneaking suspicion it might've been a bit of a...targeted...post. But it's a powerful reminder, and well worth the read: prayer and rest are not the opposites of action. They are essential to it. They are the fertile ground out of which it grows.

It seems like an odd contradiction, perhaps even like an excuse. But then again, there's an intuitive link between the inner stillness and the outer activity, the deep breath and the loud protest. There's an oft-quoted scripture verse, from Psalm 46, that is often offered as a comfort to people in times of stress: "Be still, and know that I am God." It's a reminder to still the racing of thought and heart and to relax back into the presence of God. But look at the previous verse, and you'll see this: "Come, behold the works of the LORD; see what desolations God has brought on the earth. God makes wars cease to the end of the earth; God breaks the bow and shatters the spear; God burns the shields with fire." Only then, after all the desolation and the breaking and the shattering, does the psalmist declare, "Be still!" There's an exclamation point. A more recent translation says, "That's enough!"

"Take a deep breath" sounds like lame advice. But it's a bit of a gentler way of saying, "That's enough!" "That's enough of the interior monologue of anxiety and insecurity, enough of the feelings of inadequacy! That's enough of the self-hatred! That's enough injustice"

"Be still." "That's enough!"
"Take a deep breath." "Let him breathe!"

Probably the only thing I'm worse at than being an activist is being a contemplative. But in this season, I am remembering: we have to breathe.

For the sake of a world where "I can't breathe" becomes unimaginable:

We have to breathe.

Impossible Advent -- "INCONCEIVABLE!"

This is [a somewhat questionable post in] part of a series called "An Impossible Advent." It was inspired by this quote from the book Preaching After God by Phil Snider: "For what is religion if not a love for the advent of the impossible?" If that intrigues you, feel free to check out the previous posts!

I got nothing today, so I'm just gonna leave this here:

Impossible Advent -- "Tomorrow's Child" by Rubem Alves

This is part of a series called "An Impossible Advent." It was inspired by this quote from the book Preaching After God by Phil Snider: "For what is religion if not a love for the advent of the impossible?" If that intrigues you, feel free to check out the previous posts.

Finals week means not much energy for blogging, but I did want to share this beautiful poem that I stumbled across while madly skimming a book for a final paper:

"Tomorrow's Child" by Rubem Alves

What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination
is more real and reality less real than it looks.
It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality
of facts that oppress and repress us
is not the last word.
It is a suspicion that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
That the frontiers of the possible are not
determined by the limits of the actual;
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection –
but the two, suffering and hope
must live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair,
But, hope without suffering creates illusions, naivete,
and drunkenness
Let us plant dates
even though we who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
It is a refusal to let our creative act
be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience
and it is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints,
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.
They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.

Christmas Eve: Rejoice, Mary's Song, and "Why I Stay"

This Advent I've been blogging along with the themes we've been exploring at Crossroads. We started with "Look," then "Prepare," then "Proclaim," and this past Sunday the focus was "Rejoice."

Our text at Crossroads for this Sunday was Mary's song in Luke's gospel, when she meets her cousin Elizabeth, both of whom are pregnant. You might be used to hearing the song set to soaring music by Bach or Vivaldi, but it's actually pretty gritty stuff:


 "And Mary said,‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.  Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things,   and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’"

Did you catch all of that? That's a lot of subversive talk for a young pregnant woman in occupied territory. A lot of scattering of the proud and bringing down the powerful and sending the rich away. A lot of lifting up servants and the lowly and the hungry.

It's Christmas Eve, and soon I'll be off to church services with Leigh and her mom; and I'll be thinking of friends and family scattered all over the country, doing the same thing or maybe enjoying an evening at home. It's a night for rejoicing, and tomorrow the same (whether that means presents or prayers or Chinese food and a movie).

But I'll be thinking about Mary as I rejoice tonight. About joy not only "in the middle of" but actually "in the face of" the struggle and oppression and violence of the world. In the face of. As in, right up in the face of, staring it all down. Rejoicing, and making the brokenness blink first. 

---

Last week I wrote a bit of a rant about the UMC and church trials. And after I wrote that, the UMC once again got itself some national headlines for the final verdict in our latest inquisition. (I mean, it made headlines in little known newspapers, like, say, The New York Times, so I guess it's not so big a deal). 

I've seen friends and colleagues recently posting "Why I Stay" reflections, about staying in the UMC. And others have posted reflections about why they're not staying, why they're joining the ever-growing exodus out of a church that seems committed to judicial enforcement rather than, I don't know, grace or love or any of that baggage. (If only we had some sort of scriptural precedent to guide us in discussions of law and grace...)

For those who have left or are leaving the UMC: peace and love to you. I don't question your decision, nor do I question whether the Spirit continues to move in and through you and in all sorts of ways outside of the UMC. 

Here is why I stay: Mary's song. 

I am no Jesus, and no Mary. Far, far from it.

But I do try, in my own small way, to follow a paradoxical Savior who is born homeless, who constantly points our heads in the direction of strife, because that's where the message of Peace needs to be lived out. 

I do try to sing along with Mary, and to rejoice right up in the face of the madness. 

For some, that will mean leaving the UMC, because it has just become impossible to be honest and live out their calling in the context of this particular denominational construct. And it is that--a construct. Not an immortal or immutable truth. 

But for me, at least for now, it means staying. Not just because of all the things that I love about the UMC--things like our Wesleyan theological heritage and our tradition of commitment to social justice and our hymnody and our diversity and our global reach (and yes, I will also go to bat for the appointment system and the ordination process).

Not just all of that. But because of the stuff that drives me crazy. The division and the church trials and the politicking and the ladder climbing. The broken stuff. I want to try, to take a shot at, singing a song of joy right up in the face of all of that.

--

You reading this might not give a fig about the UMC, which is fine. But whatever it is that you do care about, here's my Christmas Eve offering for you: get up in the face of the broken stuff, and sing. To do that might mean leaving a broken system. Or it might mean staying in the thing and fighting the good fight. We are different people and are lives call us and pull us in different ways.

But wherever you are, whatever you are doing, whether you are staying or leaving:

Do it singing.

Do it singing. 

Prepare (a sermon about waiting and visions)

I'm blogging for Advent, following along with the themes that we're focusing on at Crossroads. I talk more about why I'm doing this in an earlier post. This week's theme is "prepare."

This is a sermon I preached in class on Nov 19 and was supposed to preach at AU on Nov 21. I ended up scrapping it for the AU service because it felt a bit more put together than I was feeling at the time, but same general themes and ideas.

I'm posting it here because I think some of the ideas of waiting and the true meaning of patience connect well with this week's theme of preparing a way for God.\

The text is Habakkuk 1:1-4 and 2:1-4.

"Still a Vision"

This past weekend, 10 of us hopped in the Metropolitan church van and headed to New Jersey to help in the continuing rebuilding efforts after last year’s devastating Superstorm Sandy. We had an incredible time. I could tell you stories about it all night, but here’s one quick one: We were working in the home of a man who lived right across the street from the wall separating Atlantic City from the bay. Our host was really encouraging, and completely hilarious. At one point, he had us all laughing, and he said: “You gotta laugh at this stuff. If you don’t laugh, you cry. And Lord knows I’m tired of crying.”

            Our host has had plenty of reason to cry. His house filled with four feet of water a little more than a year ago when Sandy made its landfall. Bay water, ground water, and sea water formed a toxic mix that rendered much of his house uninhabitable. More than a year later, he’s still rebuilding, and he’s not alone. This weekend we learned that 40,000 people in New Jersey still have been unable to return to their homes in the aftermath of Sandy. And that’s just in New Jersey.

            “O LORD! How long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?” Our passage from Habakkuk starts with a cry—a shout! God—how long are you going to let this happen? How long are you going to wait before you act?

This semester that cry has been resonating with me. I mean, I’m exhausted. Here in DC we’ve had government shutdowns and shootings and healthcare snafus. This past few weeks we’ve seen a monstrous typhoon pound the Philippines and killer storms in the Midwest, and our New Jersey team was made aware of just how long it can take to rebuild after natural disasters. Not only that, but we heard how human-made systems exacerbate the effects of disasters—disasters that are, perhaps, not as “natural” as we think of them. It’s worth noting that, two days after the storm subsided, the Atlantic City casinos were open for business, while people crowded into shelters and hotel rooms or returned to survey devastated houses. The economy in Atlantic City relies on these casinos, but the jobs they promise are low wage, low benefit, and low security.

 In Atlantic City a year ago, you could gamble; but you couldn’t live.

“So the law becomes slack,” says Habakkuk, “and justice never prevails.”

            In the Philippines, the destruction of the typhoon itself intensifies the reality of systemic poverty, structural inequalities, and government corruption. And the massive resource extraction projects of transnational corporations have not only threatened the rights of indigenous peoples in the Philippines but have also contributed to global climate change, which in turn has its most disastrous consequences in poor coastal areas and small island nations already struggling with economic inequality.

“How long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, ‘Violence!’, and you will not save?”

            Of course, maybe you came here tonight, thinking not about hurricanes or typhoons but about the personal storms battering your life. Perhaps you have your own reasons, not of national news interest but nevertheless of vital personal meaning. Depression. Anxiety. Sickness or death in your family. Your own storms that do not simply disappear because you have essays to write and articles to read. Your own reasons for yelling, “How long, God? How long?”

            If, tonight, you have some questions for God—if, tonight, you, too, want to yell “How long?”—if you have ever felt angry or confused or hurt—then you are not alone. Habakkuk, the prophet we heard from tonight, is just one in a whole line of biblical voices—including patriarchs, prophets, psalmists, letter writers, and Jesus Himself—whose faith is deeply connected with lament and complaint. In our worship together and in our prayers to God, anger and doubt are not only allowed—they are necessary. It is with lament and complaint that Habakkuk comes to God, and it is only by challenging God with difficult questions that Habakkuk is able to develop trust in God’s justice and faithfulness. “Why?” and “How long?” are not questions that we need to answer and “get out of the way” in order to go back to believing in God. They are foundational questions for our faith. Honest lament is, I believe, preferable to feigned piety.

            So we heard, tonight, from Habakkuk, who grapples with questions. Who challenges God, and who refuses to quit: “I will stand at my watchpost,” he tells us, “and keep watch to see what God will say to me.” I will stand here and wait.

            And God answers Habakkuk! But if you are anything like me, you don’t find his answer particularly satisfying. “There’s still a vision,” God says. “Wait for it. It will come.”

            All of the suffering that Habakkuk sees. All the violence. All the injustice. And God says:

Wait.

A year after Sandy and you still don’t have housing?

            Wait.

            Two weeks after Typhoon Haiyan and you still don’t have access to drinking water?

            Just wait.

            Centuries of race-based oppression? 

            Just wait.

It’s 2013 and a United Methodist pastor can still be brought up on church trial for presiding at his son’s marriage because his son is gay?

Just wait.

            I can’t help but think of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote a letter while jailed in Birmingham for his campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience. Responding to a group of white clergymen who had criticized the timing of the Birmingham campaign, King wrote: “For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied.”[i]

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            So is that all that tonight’s scripture has to offer us? Justice delayed? Is that all God has to offer Habakkuk? I think not. I think the text points to something much deeper than that.

            To understand the text, we need some sense of who this Habakkuk character is, and what is happening in his world. Scholars know very little about the person Habakkuk. He is a prophet in Jerusalem, probably associated closely with worship in the temple. His ministry of preaching occurs sometime in the late 7^th or early 6^th century BCE, when the rise of the Babylonian empire in the East has begun to threaten the safety of his homeland, the kingdom of Judah. It’s a time of great violence and anxiety, and yet many of the residents of Habakkuk’s beloved city of Jerusalem believed themselves to be immune to harm—after all, God was dwelling in their midst, in the great temple.

            But Habakkuk sees through the charade. He sees the injustice and structural violence perpetuated by the elite of his society. He sees the advancing Babylonian armies and knows that the myth of Jerusalem’s impregnability is a lie. In fact, in the section of the text that we skipped over reading tonight, we get a vivid description of the destruction that the Babylonian forces would bring to Jerusalem. And so Habakkuk cries out to God. Cries out in response to the corporate sin of his people. Cries out against God’s unsatisfactory answer:  that the catastrophe of invasion could somehow bring justice. Cries out, I think, in despair. “I will stand at my watchpost,” he says, perhaps evoking the doomed walls of the temple that he has served so faithfully. I will not give up, God. I will keep crying out until you answer.

            God’s response to Habakkuk’s lament seems cryptic. “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and it does not lie.”

God tells Habakkuk to write a vision.

            So what is this vision? What is Habakkuk supposed to write? And what are we to say, in the midst of a world that seems so broken, so wrought with violence and suffering? What is our vision?

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            I do think we have a vision to hold up. A vision of a God who is still at work, in the midst of all the mess, to redeem a hurting world. And we need to be reminded of that vision, because I think when we walk around this city and we see cracks in the façades of power, when we see our unhoused neighbors shivering on the streets, when we read the news of disasters and when we talk to our friends who are struggling with mental illness and depression and suicide, it is easy to feel despondent. It is hard to imagine a better world, a world in which mercy and justice and faith rule the day instead of cynicism and violence and despair. We have to hold on to a vision. We have to lay claim to a missional imagination that truly believes that God is at work, and that we have a role to play.

            We need a vision because justice and mercy and faith are long-term propositions. American University is often ranked as the most politically active campus in the country. That makes this a really exciting place to be in ministry. I love that there’s always people tabling outside of the Mary Graydon Center. The other day I scored free fair trade coffee and chocolate, learned about domestic violence and what groups on campus are doing to stop it, and bought ice cream to support a school in Honduras. You in the United Methodist Student Association[ii] host interfaith events, plan discussions on creation care, and organize service trips to New Jersey. There is so much important ministry going on here.

            But in the hectic world of Washington, DC—and you know as well as I do that American University often serves as a mirror for that hectic world—burnout is common and anxiety reigns supreme. And so I want to challenge our community to be, not solely standard banners for particular causes, but bearers of a vision. Not to fall victim to the temptations either of apathy or of a cynical sort of strident societal criticism, but ministers of reconciliation who lift up in our collective imagination the hope of a better world. Many of my colleagues complain of burnout, of what we call “compassion fatigue.” If we’re going to participate, in the long term, in God’s healing work in this world, than we need to have a vision, a dream, that can sustain us and keep us focused.

            Earlier I quoted Martin Luther King’s letter from prison: “Justice delayed is justice denied.” But King knew, better than anyone, the need for patient hope. One of King’s mentors, Howard Thurman, the dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University during King’s time there, writes eloquently of the need for patience: “Paradoxical as it seems, patience is an important technique for accomplishing difficult tasks, even in matters having to do with social change….Some things cannot be forced but they must unfold, sending their tendrils deep into the heart of life, gathering strength and power with the unfolding days.”[iii] Thurman continues: “Patience…is only partially concerned with time, with waiting; it includes also the quality of relentlessness, ceaselessness and constancy. It is a mood of deliberate calm that is the distilled result of confidence. One works at the task intensely even as one realizes that to become impatient is to yield the decision to the adversary.”

            For Thurman, in other words, the art of waiting is not passivity. It is active, steady engagement. To be patient, to be persistent, requires us to be grounded in the hope of the living God. It requires us to be alert to the vision of an appointed time, a time of peace and of justice. We need that hope and that vision because, in the words of author Paul Loeb, “the impossible will take a little while.”[iv] One doesn’t need to be theologically trained in order to get this at a gut level. Our New Jersey host, welcoming us into his home, making us meatball subs with his favorite local bread, and keeping us laughing, knew that to be in this for the long-term, you have to find ways of tapping into hope.

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            Tonight’s passage ends with a verse that is, for congregations and denominations that are in one way or another daughters of the Protestant Reformation, very familiar. Chapter two, verse four, tells us “the righteous live by their faith.” Paul quotes this verse in his letter both to the Romans and to the Galatians, and the anonymous author of the letter to the Hebrews quotes it as well. It has become part of the collective Christian conscious as a reminder that nothing we do can earn us the love of God; that our faith in the grace of God made available to us in the person of Jesus Christ makes the difference in our lives. Yet in its original context, it appears to me that the faith to which God directs Habakkuk is not an individualized intellectual assent to a set of beliefs but is rather trust in a God who is at work, even and perhaps especially in the midst of violence and hopelessness, to bring about a reign of justice and peace.

            For Paul and the author of the Hebrews, “faith” meant faith in Jesus Christ. For Habakkuk, “the righteous live by their faith” would of course have had nothing to do with a man from Nazareth who would not walk the earth for another 600 years. And yet the God who Habakkuk grapples with, the God who he finds at work right smack in the middle of violence and chaos, is, I would argue, the God who Christians meet in Jesus Christ. Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber writes of God at work in the midst of suffering. She says, “God is not distant at the cross…but instead God is there in the messy mascara-streaked middle of it….We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.”[v] The vision that God wants Habakkuk to write is a vision of a world in which we get God’s presence, right smack in the middle of it. For Habbakuk, it was right smack in the middle of Judean corruption and Babylonian violence. For the early followers of Jesus, it was right smack in the middle of crucifixion and persecution. And we look for that presence, and we proclaim it today, right smack in the middle of hurricanes and typhoons and church trials. That’s the vision. That’s the dream.

            Now, this is a service of healing. I don’t know what struggles or concerns you bring to this place tonight. You might be hurting in mind, or body, or spirit. You might be struggling with depression, or with despair, or simply with stress. But I am lifting up Habakkuk tonight because I think that one thing that needs healing is our ability to vision. The scope and frequency of national and international disasters, the seemingly intractable disputes that paralyze our government, the specters of anxiety and cynicism and mental illness, all conspire to impede our vision, to make it difficult for us to dream. So as much as our bodies and minds are in need of healing, our dreams are in need of healing as well.

             As a community, I think that one of the ways we are called into ministry is as bearers of a vision that can sustain and uphold our life together. Bearers of an imagination of a different sort of world, made possible not because of our hectic efforts but because of the healing work of Christ.

Friends, take that vision with you. Make it plain in the tablets that are your lives. In your friendships. In your studies. Make it plain on the quad, in front of Mary Graydon Center, in TDR and the Tavern and the Berks and the dorms. Make it plain in the places of our collective life where people cry out, “How long?,” and where people are told, “Wait.” Because even in places of lament, even in the storm-shattered lives of the people of Atlantic City and the people of the Philippines and the people of Washington, D.C., there is still a vision. There is still a dream. And that is good news indeed.

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[i] Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” 16 April 1963. Originally published as “The Negro Is Your Brother, The Atlantic, Vol 212 No 2, 78-88. Available online: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

[ii] For more information about the United Methodist Student Association and the American University Methodist-Protestant Community, visit http://www.aumethodists.org/

[iii] Howard Thurman, Deep is the Hunger (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press, 2000; originally New York: Harper, 1951), 53-54.

[iv] Paul Rogat Loeb, The Impossible Will Take a Little While (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

[v]  Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix (New York: Jericho Books, 2013), 86.