Stir Up Your Power and Come!

"Advent Moon Rise"

In a time long ago, there used to be a season in the church year called Advent, a word that finds its meaning in the Latin word for “coming.”  It set aside the first four weeks of the new church year to focus on waiting and anticipating the birth of Jesus Christ.

I had always loved that season, but since a Madison Avenue mentality has so completely insinuated itself into our celebration of Christmas – Advent has fallen on hard times.  It frankly never contributed much to the gross domestic product.  Ask anyone to sing an Advent carol and all you will hear is silence. 

Besides with all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals who has time to listen to the stories of ancient prophets who pined for a long-promised Messiah, but didn’t live to see that day.  If you press the point some may push back and say that we already know the rest of the story.  We already live on the other side of Good Friday and Easter.  So – who are we supposed to be waiting for anyway?

But there is still brokenness in this world, and there are twisted hearts that no amount of holiday cheer can fix.  There is a hunger in our souls that no Christmas party or holiday dinner can fill.  The Apostle Paul had it exactly right when he wrote to the Romans in the first century,

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

It is that kind of deep groaning that Advent is meant to assuage.  I like to think of Advent as a season of expectant yearning for the divine banquet that has no end, or the final Advent that is yet to come. 

And while we are waiting there are a lot of things that we could be doing.  Just look around at our world. There is brokenness everywhere.  Maybe while the family is together, the discussion might be centered on what the family could do to make our world better.  There’s time to perhaps open the Heifer International catalog and look for gift ideas.  There is time to set aside a Saturday to go outside and glean a field or two with the Society of St. Andrew and put food on someone’s table this Christmas.  There are lots of things that can be done to help heal this world.

But if nothing else, take some of this Advent time for yourself.  Sit quietly and take the time so that our hearts can hear what God is telling us.  You may want to use the following to open that dialogue:

Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come.  By your merciful protection awaken us to the threatening dangers of our sins, and keep us blameless until the coming of your new day. Amen.
                                                                     Opening  Prayer, First Sunday of Advent       

"Breezewood", our Garden Beneath the Crest

I have recently discovered that my wife has created a beautiful tour of our Japanese garden on her blog.  The tour is not new, in fact she created it several years ago around the time that we opened it up for a public tour by other volunteers at the JC Raulston Arboretum.  I have been so involved in my own orbit that the visual tour's existence remained undiscovered until recently.  As a way to remedy this oversight I am posting the link to the tour below.

Since our garden has always been a "work in progress" and many things have been added in the intervening years I am confident that there will be an update later this year.  I will not miss that posting.  Here is the link, enjoy -----``

Ilene Holmes: Breezewood, our Garden Beneath the Crest

Let Streams of Living Justice ELW 710

I love Lutheran Hymnody.  It is as close to proclaiming the Word of God, without preaching a sermon that you can get.  This was our opening hymn at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church a couple of weeks ago.  Read the lyrics as you listen to the music.  Actually, it was so emotional for me that I had trouble singing them.  How can anyone not believe this and live accordingly and still call themselves – Christians?

Immigrants in the Eyes of God

For the last several days I have been reading a great little book by Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People.  When I was serving as pastor at Holy Trinity, I used this book many times to center myself and reconnect myself to the will and heart of God.  Today, I re-read one of my favorite prayers from that time.  It is one that has taken on a whole new, deeper meaning in the last several days.  Let me offer it to you this evening:

On Controlling Our Borders

Jesus – crucified and risen – draws us into his presence again,
the one who had nowhere to lay his head, 
no safe place, 
no secure home, 
no passport or visa, 
no certified citizenship. 

We gather around him in our safety, security, and well-being,
and fret about “illegal immigrants."
We fret because they are not like us 
and refuse our language.  
We worry that there are so many of them 
and their crossings do not stop.  
We are unsettled because it is our tax dollars that sustain them 
and provide services.  
We feel the hype about closing borders and heavy fines, 
because we imagine that our life is under threat. 

And yet, as you know very well, 
we, all of us – early or late – 
are immigrants from elsewhere; 
we are glad for cheap labor 
and seasonal workers 
who do tomatoes and apples and oranges 
to our savoring delight.  
And beyond that, 
even while we are beset by fears 
and aware of pragmatic costs, we know very well 
that you are the God who welcomes strangers, 
who loves aliens and protects sojourners.

As always, we feel the tension 
and the slippage between the deep truth of our faith 
and the easier settlements of our society.

We do not ask for an easy way out, 
but for courage and honesty and faithfulness.  
Give us ease in the presence of those unlike us; 
give us generosity amid demands of those in need, 
help us to honor those who trespass
as you forgive our trespasses.

You are the God of all forgiveness. 
By your gracious forgiveness transpose us 
into agents of your will, 
that our habits and inclinations may more closely
follow your majestic lead, 
that our lives may joyously conform 
to your vision of a new world.  

We pray in the name of your holy Son, Jesus.

And I say – Amen.  AMEN.

Sending Prayer

It has been nearly 24 hours and I find myself still strangely moved by the Sending Prayer and Blessing at the end of yesterday’s worship service at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, here in Raleigh.  Maybe it is the fact that it was Martin Luther King’s birthday, maybe it is part of the anxiety and foreboding that I feel about the next four years that our nation faces but I cannot put it down.

Let us imagine, with God, a circle of compassion,
      No one standing outside that circle.
We move ourselves closer to the margins
      So, that the margins themselves will be erased.
We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied.
      We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless 
      and the voiceless.

At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out.

     We stand with the persecuted 
     so that the persecution will stop.
We place ourselves next to the disposable.
     So that the day will come 
     when we stop throwing people away.
And may the grace of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit
Bless us in this work.

Thank you God, for giving me this New Year’s resolution reformation.  Let it shape my life, so that through me the lives of others will be transformed this year and all the years of my life.

Laboring in My Father’s Vineyard

Robert Mondavi Vineyard, Sabbatical 2010

The title might make you think that this is my latest devotional, and that is exactly what it started out to be; but then I got caught up in telling a story so the devotional will have to wait for another day.  If it is spiritual food you are looking for you will have to look elsewhere or come back for a later post.

I grew up in the wine district of western New York.   In every direction of our home you could not drive far before passing a commercial vineyard.  The only connection that we had to any of them, was one of my mother’s brothers who worked long hours and many years tending a large vineyard where the grapes were used to produce altar wines.  So, when my father decided to devote five acres of his land to a vineyard, no one batted an eye.  

The first winter after that decision was made, my father and I spent many weekends deep in a woods that belonged to one of his friends, cutting locust trees to be used for the posts to hold the wire that the grapes would grow on.  I remember that winter clearly.  The snows were heavy, which made even walking among the trees laborious.  While dad felled the trees I would clear the branches into piles away from the work site.  One of the first things, we did when we arrived was to build a fire where we would sit on stumps to rest and warm ourselves throughout the day.  There was something special about that winter, working next to dad.  I had him all to myself.  He was never a teacher in the formal sense of the word.  I never remember him telling me, “Son, this is how you use an ax.”  Or, “this is how you build a fire in the middle of winter to keep warm.”  He would just do these things and I would learn through observing him.  By the end of that winter I had taken over the task of starting the fire, but I was still too young to use the ax.  That would come years later for me.

I wish I knew how many trees we cut and trimmed that winter; but my father was undaunted.  Despite the fact that he knew that in the spring he would have to cut them into 8’ lengths, split them using a maul and wedges, and then haul them all back to our property – he kept cutting.  He somehow knew how many he needed.  When he had enough he hired a friend to haul them back to our farm.  Once they were on site, each required a hole to be dug in the rocky New York soil which was the main reason it was grape country.  Thankfully I was too young for the task of digging the holes; but without any hesitation my father began the arduous task of planting a post every ten feet in long parallel rows eight feet apart.  I don’t know how many rows we had, but the work was never ending.  Grapes are not like seasonal crops such as wheat or oats where you prepare the soil, plant the seeds and then sit back and let them mature until they are harvested.    Once a vine is planted, one is committing to tend that vine for the rest of its life if it is to be fruitful.  Actually the planting was the easiest part.  Once they were in the ground the ongoing task of weed control began.  In time each vine needed to be trained to grow on the wires.  They really took to that.  In no time, we had row after row of leafy vines growing everywhere.  Within a few years and every Fall thereafter, we had more than enough grapes for our own use and every hobby vintner for miles around. 

My father had been given a large wine press by an elderly woman who with her husband had raised their family of nine from the sale of bootlegged wine during the Prohibition.  This meant that dad had to dismantle the press hidden in the basement of her barn.  The vat was about six feet in diameter with an eight inch solid steel screw in the center that was buried in four feet of solid concrete.  To this screw a plate was threaded that would be screwed down against the grapes using a twelve foot pole.  To say the least it was a pretty impressive piece of equipment that was reconstructed in our wine shed.   Thus began my father’s annual homage to the god Bacchus.  Every fall and winter our house was filled with the smell of about three hundred gallons of wine fermenting in our basement.  My father’s wine was legendary in our small rural community.  Everybody loved receiving bottles of wine as gifts.  In fact I remember clearly every winter after the first heavy snow, my mother would wait patiently in the kitchen window for the county plow to come down the road.  As they passed the house she would raise a couple of bottles of wine and wave them to the two men in the cab.  They knew immediately what she was offering.  They would promptly raise the plow, back up to the beginning of our long driveway and plow it out with the county truck.  When they reached the garage, my mother would run outside with the bottles of wine and hand them up to the men through the window.  This ploy worked every time and was repeated as needed throughout the winter.  Wine became the way we bartered in the community.

Someone has said that it was madness that possessed my father to take on the task of planting a vineyard.  After reading this story, I too can see the reasons for the comment.  But having lived with him and possessing many of those same qualities that drove him to create a vineyard with his own hands, I understand that beyond the work there was a great feeling of satisfaction.  I can only imagine how he must have felt on those evenings when he would sit back in front of his fireplace and sip a glass of his wine.  For him it must have been priceless.  

Spiritual Formation

– therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.  He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. 

Genesis 3:23-24

For years this verse and an image of it haunted my memory.    As an adult I began to question where this image in my mind had come from.  Why was it so clear?  I could see an angel with a flaming sword driving Adam and Eve, cowering in shame and guilt, from the garden.  Was it a famous painting that I had viewed somewhere in a museum?   Was it a plate that I remembered from an art book that I had read?  Whenever I remembered the verse, I always felt the pain of loss that Adam and Eve must have felt as they were being driven from their home, the garden, where they had walked with God. 

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees. 

Genesis 3:8

Although there was no definitive proof that God was in a habit of visiting Adam and Eve to share an evening walk with them, I could not accept that the Lord God, who had created them in his own image and loved them, would have first come to them after they had sinned.  So I could feel their loss.  The pain – as the consequences of their sin crashed down around them.  How desolate they must have felt as they looked over their shoulders to see the gates to the garden close behind them.  My view of sin and all its ramifications were formed around these verses and this image in my mind.  To have God seek us out to take an evening walk suggests closeness, and fellowship.  I always liked to imagine that this happened often, perhaps daily at the time of the evening breeze.  But this time, this time, they hid themselves.  Oh the pain, the shame, the terrible loss they felt.  The terrible loss of intimacy with God.  Sinner that I am, I know that feeling.  I know it all too well. 

But, thanks be to God, we know the rest of the story.  

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, 

so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, 

but in order that the world might be saved through him.  

John 3:16-17  

And may I add, walk with God once more in the cool of the evening.  Indeed, thanks be to God.

How central this image has been for my faith formation, and yet I could not place it.  Then in 1998, I walked into my home church following my father’s casket for his memorial service.  It had been a long time since I had walked through those doors.  I had come here almost daily with my parents to worship God, until after eighth grade when I left to begin my seminary training in a Franciscan monastery.  As the procession stopped just inside the doors to the nave, and the priest encircled my father’s casket with incense, my eyes followed the rising smoke and I looked out into the church of my youth, past all the people who had come to say good by to my father and there I gazed at the pew on the right side aisle, two rows from the front, where I had worshiped so many times with my family.  It was our place to encounter God.  As these memories came flooding back, my tear filled eyes looked up above that pew where I had knelt so many times, and there in the wall was a glorious stained glass window – the image that I knew so well.  How could I have forgotten where I had seen it.  

As a young boy I must have sat there for hours gazing at it.  It is no wonder I knew that verse so well.  I knew at a young age what the cost of sin was -- that it alienated us from God.  A God that desires to be in a loving relationship with me.  A God that comes again and again looking for me.  A God that in the end sent His Son to live and die for me.  To live and show me how to live.  And to die to open once more the gates to the garden so that I can once more walk with an all merciful, forgiving and loving God in the cool of the evening for all eternity.