Advent 1
12.01.13
Holden Village
Micah 4:1-5
Matthew 23:24-33
Grace to your
from God, our Creator, and peace from our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ who
will come and steal your friends from the fields and snatch you up like a thief
in the night.
This is it,
this is always it. Every year the church
year begins with readings straight out of the left behind series. Apocalyptic scenes fill all of our readings
for tonight, apocalyptic visions and predictions of what the end of time, the
end of the world as we know it will look like.
According to Isaiah it’s unfathomable.
I find it unfathomable because Isaiah says that all nations – every
single nation that currently is building boarder walls, wrongfully detaining
foreigners, every nation with refugee camps and exiles, every nation with tribe
hurting tribe or gang hurting innocent by-standers, every nation with
corruption and homelessness and oppression of their weakest citizens – every
single nation will find itself quiet and faithfully scrambling up God’s
mountain…together.
There on God’s
most holy mountain will they learn from God, they will be guided in a different
and new way of being nations and holy miracles, they will learn war no more.
If Scripture is
inviting us into a choose your own apocalyptic-ending adventure book…I choose
this one!
Another option
is the ending offered in Matthew’s gospel and it is alarming. There are people side by side, two by
two. Jesus first brings up the Noah
story and rightly sets it in the apocalyptic frame of endings and death where
it belongs, instead seeing cute little animals on the toy shelf or on the
boarder around your baby’s nursery. Two
by two creation marched through that apocalyptic story and two by two they are
in the field, one is kidnapped. Two by
two the women are in the kitchen, one is taken suddenly.
Like a thief in
the night, Jesus breaks in.
We could easily
make some assumptions about the texts here – and many faith traditions and a
well-selling book series certainly have made some assumptions about the text
here. We could assume that one of the
people in the fields was bad, the other good…naturally, the bad one was left to
work endlessly in the field. We could
assume that one woman in the kitchen had faith and the other not so much…obviously;
the faith-less-one was left behind.
The text is
mysterious and puzzling, and that could be exactly the point for us. The assumptions we love to make, the
conclusions that are easy to jump to…they are not here, they are not a part of
the story or of Matthew’s gospel.
The hope here,
the pin point of light that we get to gaze upon this night is as Socrates once
said, “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.” We do not know when, we
do not know where…that is for God’s understanding so far above our own.
Like a thief in
the night, Jesus breaks in.
The openness of
not-knowing carries us back to Isaiah’s mountain too. In order for the nations to come together on
that mountain, in order for them all to begin the hike towards God the nations
had to admit to not-knowing. Leaders of
nations, citizens of nations had to cough up the difficult reality that their
ways of governing, their ways of winning, their ways of living and being loyal
to borders was not working, not even close.
Isaiah does not
paint the scene before the nations get to the mountain, but I imagine it had to
include some confessing, some realization that there could be better ways of
living and executing justice instead of people.
So, in that
spirit of un-knowing the nations gather on God’s mountain. Not knowing what they will learn, not knowing
who they will be after the mountain – yet step by step they approach God in
humility and peace.
We know plenty
about not knowing and I’m afraid the time of not knowing is not quite over.
Even if you’ve been coming to the village for decades or if you are still one
your first trip up this mountain, you did not know what construction season
would be like. We did not know what the ramp down from construction season
would be like. We did not know what a
guest-less Thanksgiving would feel like, or how it would work to invite friends
and families of villagers and contractors alike. We do not know what the next three weeks of
no guests and all staff all the time will feel like. Many in the room do not know what guest
seasons feels like or how quickly the new construction seasons will come riding
around the corner.
And for most of
everyone in this room, the trip down the mountain – be it this month, next year
or sometime after that, we do not know where we are going, we do not know the
time or the place or the hour.
If the village
is good at anything right now, we are brilliant at not knowing.
There is
freedom in the unknown. Wide open spaces
for creative newness to being to stir and move and take on new life. If we can
follow up a new mountain like the nations in Isaiah, if we can claim that our
ways of living are not always life-producing, in fact they are often
destructive and harming…if we can stare in the mirror and name that difficult
truth – then there is room and possibility and something new already swirling.
If we can hear
a gospel word like the words from Matthew and imagine Jesus, the crook,
stealing away beings and bringing them to God…and then believe in the God who
is also in the field with the working one, also in the kitchen with the woman
gone and the woman remaining…then we are imagining a God who works in
mysterious and unexpected and delightful ways.
Like a thief in
the night, I pray that Jesus is always and constantly and forever breaking in
to our lives.
Shane Claiborne
is a Christian author who leads a new-monastic community in inner-city
Philadelphia. Shane and his community read the words from Isaiah, and imagined
new things. Their work and living is so inspired to hear about it is to see the
finger prints of the Holy Spirit all over everything. In the not knowing something new
emerges…listen to Shane describe one aspect of his life and ministry in Philly…
“It doesn't get much cooler than beating an AK47 into a shovel. We
are starting to make a habit of it.
Our first weapon-conversion was on the 10th anniversary of
September 11th. A welder buddy of mine took an AK 47 and transformed it LIVE,
into a shovel and a rake, as part of our "Jesus, Bombs, and Ice Cream
Event". It was so much fun we couldn't stop. I even finagled a free
welding lesson from my pal, thinking I might we might keep the sparks flying.
And we have.
A year or so later we heard about a group of blacksmiths who had
also started melting down donated guns to make tools, after being troubled by
the fact that some of the metal from the Twin Towers was used to make a
battleship. Inspired by the prophets' vision of "beating swords into
plows", these Mennonite metal-workers started turning guns into garden
tools. They call themselves RAW tools (turning "war" around and
forging peace) - www.rawtools.org.
Before long we had all teamed up... with the prophetic juices
flowing, dreaming of what we could do with the next donated handgun or
semi-automatic. Folks started sending in their own creations from around the
world - weapons disarmed and turned into art, or tools, or guitars.
Now we use one of the hand trowels from that AK47 in our garden
here in Philadelphia... where we tragically see nearly one gun death per day.
It just feels good for the soul each time we beat a gun into
oblivion... it feels like the world is a better place with one less
semi-automatic.”[i]
Advent the time
of preparing for the Christ child. The
time for waking up to something new. To claim not knowing in the face of old,
old problems leaves space for another voice, another way of being. To claim not knowing brings silence for God’s
voice, for walking up the path to the mountain to learn God’s way.
And there, in
our greatest unknowing, in our befuddled beings is Jesus…breaking in like a
thief in the night ushering us into the loving ways of God.
Thanks be to
God for the thieving, conniving ways of the coming Christ. Amen.
