God in our Midst

God Is Here

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(part of the “Waiting on the World to Change” Advent Series)

Zephaniah 3:14-20

14Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! 15The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more. 16On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. 17The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing 18as on a day of festival. I will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach for it. 19I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth. 20At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you; for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes, says the Lord.

So, in case you haven’t figured it out, I’ve tried to at least try to line up with our lectionary texts from Year A.  But, since there’s only three Scriptures plus a psalter each week, writing daily calls for some “fill in”.  This passage is normally read in the third week of Advent during Year C.  We actually only read from the book of Zephaniah three times throughout the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary, so we’re probably not experts on it.  The book is probably set during the time of King Josiah.  It was a time of indifference by the people.  Maybe they were tired; perhaps they were just a bit too comfortable; or possibly they just forgot who and whose they were.  They have been hearing an ongoing foretelling of a time of destruction, a time of divine judgment. (I guess that would make me tune out too!)  But then we come to this passage.  It is a voice of hope, foretelling salvation rather than destruction.  And it proclaims, “the Lord, your God, is in your midst.”

Think about what that means.  We’ve talked a lot in this series about waiting for the world to change, about what we do while we’re waiting, about ways to wait and ways to change.  And a lot of our Advent waiting is couched as waiting for God, waiting for the coming of God into our midst.  But this passage says that God is here.  What do we do with that?  So, if you’ve been waiting for a God that is “out there” or “up there” or somewhere “up ahead” waiting for us to catch up, this throws all of that off.  God is here.  God is with us.  God is here, waiting with us now.

I often wonder what the Old Testament prophets would say to us today.  I often think it’s possible that they would be shocked and disappointed that we haven’t come farther than we have, that we still operate out of weakness and fear, that we still allow our leaders to pursue power over justice, that we still do not offer care for the lame and outcasts, that we are still desperately waiting for the world to change.  Go back and read this.  How much of Zephaniah’s words apply?  Probably most of them, as much as I hate to admit it.  But then we read that God is in our midst.  God is here.  God is here now.  So, don’t you wonder what God thinks of our world?  Don’t you think God is sometimes frustrated with us, maybe even angry at times?  I mean, we haven’t come that far from those to whom Zephaniah spoke.

God is here.  Imagine God there with you, sitting with you, experiencing what you are experiencing, rejoicing in your joy and suffering in your sorrow.  When we do not welcome the immigrant, God is here.  When armed troops march into our cities to purge the other, God is here.  When we kill survivors clinging to boats, God is here.  When we do not provide food to the hungry or healthcare to the sick, God is here.  And when our world rocks with war and power struggles and desperation, God is here.  When our public rhetoric becomes wrought with exclusion and racism and xenophobia, God is here.  God is here.  God is not waiting until the world changes.  God is here now.

It reminds of W.B. Yeats famous poem, “The Second Coming”.  He wrote it at the end of World War I and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, when the world was in chaos, when there was a fear that a new and brutal era would emerge.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And God was there.  The Scripture we read ends with a promise, a promise of a gathering in, of a homecoming.  It ends with the promise that the world will change.  And God is here, in our midst.  We’re not waiting for God.  God is here, waiting, waiting for us, waiting with us for the world to change.  God did not come when things were perfect.  God waits with us, waiting with us for the world to change.  God comforts us and soothes us and, if we listen, WHEN we listen, will also give us ways to get closer to the vision that God holds for us all.  The Lord God is in your midst.

Bidden or unbidden, God is present. (Desiderius Erasmus, 1466-1536; also attributed to Carl Jung, but this quote was supposedly posted above the door at his house in Switzerland)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

What It’s All About

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resurrection-lightEarly on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”… 

 11But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20: 1-2, 11-18)

These hours have been such a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions.  But in this moment, I am beginning to see what it was all about.  I want to hold her and comfort her and explain it all but Jesus’ young friend Mary is running around with a mix of hysteria and excitement.  Maybe she, too, is beginning to understand.  I always knew who he was, knew from that surreal night when the angel came.  I probably would have thought I was losing it but Joseph had had a dream too.   Oh, that seems so long ago and yet, I remember it like it happened just a second ago. No one really understood.  No one ever understood.  But we did.  We knew who he was.  But not until this moment did I really grasp it.

I hope that the world does not take this as a do-over of some sort.  Because it is all part of it—everything up to this moment and everything that comes to be.  All of time and all of space and all creation points to this and is illuminated by it.  All of those generations that carried the story to me and the generations that stretch out beyond where I will ever see are in this moment.  I now understand that that strange brilliance that led us to Bethlehem and then stayed with us through the night that he was born has been with me always.  And he showed me that.  But I didn’t understand until now.

The memories come flooding back to me now—more than three decades of memories.  They will take several days to process.  But now they are not memories wrapped in grief.  I understand that they are the story—his story, my story, Joseph’s story, the world’s story.  God came into the world and walked with me.  God invited me to dance with the Divine, to touch, to love, to hold the Godself.  There was nothing special about me.  I have always been so ordinary.  But now I see that my life is an incredible mix of the ordinary and the sacred.  God has come.  And now I understand that God was always here.  And will be forevermore. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.  Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.”  I do feel blessed.  I pray that the world will begin to understand.

There was, indeed, something I had missed about Christianity, and now all of a sudden I could see what it was.  It was the Resurrection!  How could I have been a church historian and a person of prayer who loved God and still not known that the most fundamental Christian reality is not the suffering of the cross but the life it brings?…The foundation of the universe for which God made us, to which God draws us, and in which God keeps us is not death, but joy.  (Roberta Bondi)

FOR TODAY:  Begin to make room.  There’s more to the story than you thought.

Peace to you in this often-hectic week,

Shelli

God is Here NOW?

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Standing in God's Presence(ADVENT 3C)

14Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! 15The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; (Zephaniah 3: 14-15a)

When I was little I used to lay in bed and try to imagine God looking at me. I didn’t really understand what that meant, but I had been told in Sunday School that God was with us. It was odd to me. So I shut my eyes tight and opened them to try to actually see God peeking from behind some cotton-candy cloud, I suppose. I wondered, though: Did God have time to watch me sleep? Did God watch me take a bath? Did God know when my brother and I fought? (I don’t know if Donnie was as concerned as I was with that!) I think many of us still struggle with that. I mean, really, doesn’t God have better things to do than to watch us all the time? So somewhere along the way, we convince ourselves that God is out there or up there or somewhere down that road that we’re on. After all, why would God spend a bunch of time in the muck of this messed-up world. But then we read that “the Lord is in our midst.”—not out there away from us, not up there over us, not down that road patiently waiting for us to catch up. God is in our midst. God is here…among us….with us.

The Lord is in our midst—not coming, not waiting to appear like some top-billing star of the show hiding behind the curtain waiting for the big entrance, but here, now. Here we were desperately looking for God in our life and this little unsung hero of a book wedged in between all those Minor Prophets had it there all along. God is with US. No wonder we couldn’t find God! We weren’t looking in the right place! So all this time that we’ve been waiting for the Lord, God’s been here, waiting for US to notice. All this time that we’ve spent trying to figure God out and figure out what God wants and figure out how we can get to God when we should have been rejoicing. And the passage says that the Lord has taken away our judgments, just smoothed them right over, I suppose. (Actually, I think that’s called forgiveness.) The Hebrew Tanakh translation talks about it as God “soothing us with love”.   I love that, the thought of being soothed with love.  I mean, I guess it would be uncomfortable for God to hang around with us and continue to pick us apart at the same time and why would God hang around at all if it wasn’t for love?

So in the midst of a world that makes no sense, in the midst of a life that is sometimes riddled with questions and heartache, in the midst of the way we hurt each other and judge each other, God comes. God comes right there into our midst. You see, God didn’t wait for the world to be right. God didn’t wait for us to stop fighting with each other or arguing over who belongs here with us. God didn’t wait for terrorists to quit attacking innocents. God didn’t wait for us so-called innocents to quit attacking those who we think MIGHT be terrorists. God didn’t wait for us to feed the hungry or shelter the homeless. God didn’t wait for us to figure out what it means to be made in the image of God. God just came. God just showed up, really sort of uninvited because frankly sometimes we forget to do that. I don’t think that matters to God. God is not waiting for us to invite God to show up. God is waiting for us to notice that God in our midst. Maybe THIS Advent, we’ll notice. Rejoice! The Lord, your God, is in your midst! Hmmm…maybe we should get ready NOW!

 

Bidden or unbidden, God is present. (Erasmus)

 

Grace and Peace,

 

Shelli