Dear Readers,
I am delighted to offer this daily devotional for Advent (PDF). I am blessed to have many collaborators for this project — this year more than half of the meditations were written by lay members of the congregation! My thanks goes out to all of them, and I hope that this devotional will be an inspiring companion to you this Advent.
In Christ’s peace,
Jonathan
Filed under Uncategorized
My first day of divinity school was September 12, 2001. The train ride into Boston that morning was silent. Usually the Wednesday morning commute was a lively affair: people chatting about the latest Sox game, friends sharing stories about their weekends or commiserating about grind ahead, newspapers rustling. But now a veil had descended. Still burning with the images of yesterday’s chaos and horror, my eyes felt unfit for reading. Looking others in the eye gave a kind of comfort, an assurance that we were not alone in our confusion, our fear, our soul-weariness. Mostly I just looked out the window, content to watch the world go by, relieved to be going somewhere, anywhere, with some sense of purpose. But this gave no respite, offered no escape, invited no daydreams. As we drew nearer to South Station, I saw the Hancock and Prudential towers and instinctively scanned the skies, worried what new sorrows might fall.
When I arrived at my New Testament Greek class, the professor introduced himself and immediately started teaching us the Greek alphabet. His voice broke from time to time, but he did not say a word about what had happened the day before. I did not blame him. What words were there? We took refuge in our textbooks, and in the alien letters of an ancient world. There was a way to escape from our world, after all. Fifty minutes was not long enough.
I don’t recall the subject of my next class. I was shopping around, mostly because the professor was famous. He bravely ventured a few words affirming our feelings of common loss, and then pressed play on a portable CD-player that he had brought from home. We listened together to part of Mozart’s Requiem. Some wept. After ten minutes or so, he turned it off and handed out the syllabus. I don’t think I paid much attention to what followed; I wanted to listen to the rest of the Requiem.
Ten years later, I still don’t know what to say, any more than my professors knew what to say on that day when the dust was still in the air. I feel compelled to say something, but in my heart I recognize that this urge arises more from a desire to make sense of things, to create order out of chaos, than from any new wisdom gained over the last decade. God is the one who creates, who breathes over the dark void to bring light, who causes dry land, our terra firma, to appear with a word, the foundations of the earth fashioned by a word. Our words cannot attain such lofty heights. Our powers are not sufficient for such profound purposes. We find ourselves standing beside the psalmist, singing softly, “O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother . . .” (Psalm 131:1-2a).
Our faith teaches us to be wary about our own powers, and with good reason. Nations are quick to exercise their powers in the service of order — recall the President’s swift judgment that “We are at war” and the resulting transmutation of international sorrow into national pride. The problem is that while sorrow speaks the language of prayer, keeping us close to the divine heartbeat, pride leaves no room for God to breathe, no ground for compassion to take root, no place for love to abide, no place for hope to blossom. The bloodshed of the past ten years has not saved us from our sorrow; it has only brought us farther from the cross, where Jesus taught us that the world cannot be redeemed by violence.
With what words, then, might God’s people mark this tenth anniversary? I will never forget what a friend, a retired pastor, told me after I conveyed a sense of despair about the future in the wake of September 11th and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He smiled, in that deep and joyful way that faith alone knows, put his hand on my shoulder, and told me that “There’s always hope at the foot of the cross.” As I think of this now, I realize that the psalmist ends her prayer in a similar way: “O Israel, hope in the LORD, from this time on and for evermore.” (Psalm 131:3) A prayer for today. And tomorrow.
—Jonathan
Filed under essay
In heav’n there is reserved a special place
for souls who wear each week a smiling face
despite the fact that lessons went awry
and paint and glitter glue refused to dry,
and scores of papers fell upon the floor
when bouncing hungry kids ran out the door
to fill themselves with cookies and éclairs
before the congregation came downstairs.
These teachers now we bless with grateful heart
and praise God for their pedagogic art.
And to this prayer our spirit adds one more:
A blessing for the kids we so adore.
The kingdom, Jesus said, belongs to such
as are so used to hearing “Do not touch!”
and “Quiet down!” and “Not until you’re grown!”
At church they learn the truth that Christ has shown,
that every person, whether big or small,
is precious and beloved of God, who made us all.
So on this Pentecost we lift a thankful prayer:
praise God for little children everywhere!
–Written by Jonathan Hauze for Pentecost Sunday (the end of the Sunday school year) 2011.
Filed under Poem
There’s a powerful scene in the movie Witness that offers a sharp contrast between the human understanding of “justified” violence and the gospel demand of nonviolence. First let me set the stage. Harrison Ford plays the role of Captain John Book, a detective with the Philadelphia Police who uncovers evidence of police corruption — including murder — that endangers his own life and leads him to believe that the life of an Amish boy, the sole witness to the murder, is also in danger. Here the story shifts away from the city and into Lancaster County, where Captain Book moves in with the boy’s family to hide out from his corrupt colleagues and to keep the boy safe while they wait for the trial. The film builds to an almost unbearable point of tension, but along the way there are lighter moments as we watch the city cop adjust to his new life as an incognito Amish.
The scene that I’m thinking of might be regarded as one of those lighter moments. Book has gone into town with some of the Amish men, and while they are stopped in traffic a couple of loutish young men walk up to the buggy to taunt them. Ostensibly they are locals who are looking to blow off some steam by harassing some people who can be counted on to endure abuse without retaliating. The hooligans do not count on Harrison Ford being among their number, however, and it’s not long before they receive their comeuppance from the business end of the action hero’s fist.
For the typical American audience, myself included, this scene delivers a satisfying emotional rush by trading on two bedrock rules of our national life. Rule Number One: “everybody loves an underdog.” Rule Number Two: “bad guys deserve whatever they get.” Throw in the timeworn wisdom that “a man can only take so much before he snaps,” and you’ve got yourself a trifecta of cultural relevance. It’s a great scene.
But if we look at it from another angle, from the perspective of the Amish, who live and die by the New Testament mandate to love our enemy, and to bless those who curse us, and to forgive others as God forgives us, we may not want to cheer so much. In the eyes of one who becomes humble for the sake of Christ, enduring abuse and humiliation and forgoing the assumed right of reprisal, this scene is not so much satisfying as it is saddening. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples, “Do not resist an evildoer” (Matthew 5:39). Peter pointedly uses the same word, evildoer, in his first letter to the churches in Asia Minor, writing, “Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:12).
The Amish refusal to retaliate against an act of violence, we see here, is much more than a blind obedience to an inscrutable command, but a vital act of Christian witness, a living testimony that not only demonstrates the new possibilities for human life in the kingdom of God but invites others — even enemies, most importantly enemies — to receive the peace of Christ and to take up a new life of praise in response to this gift. Captain Book’s act of reciprocal violence may satisfy our deep-seated desire to see the weak defended and justice done, but for his Amish companions this act must be viewed with dismay and disappointment. Not as a judgment against their defender, who can hardly be expected to understand their commitment to nonviolence, much less practice it himself. No, their dismay would more likely be in the form of a lament — lament for a lost opportunity, for a broken witness, for a damaged ministry — lament that Captain Book has put on the clothes of an Amish man but neglected to “clothe himself with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience” (Colossians 3:12).
This last part is a quote the Apostle Paul, and it brings us back home to this morning’s epistle reading, where a fellow apostle encourages the Christian community to bear the scorn and abuse of those outside the church with humble hearts, urging them to “rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ,” he writes, “you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.” If this sounds familiar, it is because Peter echoes the words of Jesus, who says in his Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
We are not talking here about suffering for the sake of suffering, as though the Christian should view pain itself as a redemptive experience. Instead, it is offered as a reminder that life will not be easy for one who refuses to obey to the law of an eye for an eye, who refuses to dance the O.K. Corral two-step, who refuses to be held captive to the domination systems of the world — life will not be easy, because the world will not understand, and the world will push back. “Beloved,” Peter writes, “do not be surprised . . . as though something strange were happening to you.” This is simply what the church should expect when it follows the example of Jesus.
When Peter goes on to talk about the temptations that bedevil the church, we should not assume that he is merely referring to the inward loss of hope or the weakening of the spirit. More likely he is talking about the snare of human anger and frustration, the rising tide of emotion that is likely to spill over into acts of violent reprisal, acts that will fatally compromise the church’s mission to be a light to the world and the embodiment of God’s new kingdom. Peter’s description of a wild and ferocious tempter points to this interpretation: “Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.” Here the tempter is not a subtle whisperer sowing the seeds of doubt, but a fierce beast that lurks in the corners of the heart, waiting for that moment when the will to love has been weakened to the point of breaking, waiting for that moment when the way of the lamb clashes with our longing for justice, waiting patiently for that opportune moment when the way of the lion may conveniently present itself as the righteous, unavoidable, even necessary choice.
The Gospel writers recognize the persistent, seductive nature of this temptation. We see it again in this morning’s reading from Acts, when the disciples have been learning from the risen Christ for forty days and yet still do not understand the alternative shape of his lordship. “Lord,” they ask him just before his ascension, “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” They have been waiting for someone to challenge Roman domination. They have been waiting for another David to load his slingshot and go up against Goliath. But this son of David shows them another way, and establishes another kind of kingdom, and offers them another sort of peace, such as the world cannot give.
Jesus promises his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” This power will not look anything like the power claimed by Rome or by any oppressor, because it comes from an entirely different place. The power that will come upon the church through the Spirit not the power to harm but the power to heal, not the power to kill but the power to forgive, not the power to control but the power to consecrate.
And so it is entirely appropriate that the disciples should receive this promise in a spirit of prayer. So it must be with us. We must learn in prayer to resist the temptations of anger and violence. We must learn in prayer to wait for that power that is borne of the Spirit. We must learn in prayer to place our deepest trust in the “God of all grace, who has called us to his eternal glory in Christ, and who will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish us.” To God be the power forever and ever.
-Jonathan Hauze
Last fall, when Charlie was born, Liza shared a maternity room with a lovely young woman, a first-time mother who was determined to breastfeed her newborn daughter. It wasn’t easy. The baby seemed to have a hard time latching on. The mother was worried about her milk coming down. It seemed that every time she tried to feed her daughter something went wrong. Her determination soon turned into discouragement.
She turned to Liza for support, and Liza assured her, “Don’t worry, she’ll get the hang of it;” “You’re doing great, it just takes time;” “Don’t give up, it’s always hard at the beginning;” “She’s wonderful, she’s perfect, some babies just take a while to catch on…” Her husband, who was just giddy about being a Dad — a beautiful thing to behold — was abundantly supportive.
By the second day things were improving. But then her family came to visit. Her mother and aunt watched her struggle through a difficult feeding and voiced their opinions: “Why in the world are you trying to do that?” “That’s the most unnatural natural thing that a woman can do!” “Just put some formula in a bottle . . . it’s so much easier.”
While Liza quietly seethed on the other side of the curtain.
I share this story not because we are militant about breastfeeding — we aren’t — but because it shows how Peter* could not have chosen a better metaphor for the struggle of the church to persist in following Christ in a culture where convenience comes first. Every time a Christian thinks about taking up her cross by choosing the path of servanthood, the path of sacrificial love, there is a legion of voices in the room urging another way.
Listen again to the beginning of our reading: “Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation — if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
If you think that Peter is being bold by suggesting that his audience is a bunch of babies, consider the scandalous nature of the rest of the metaphor. Here the paternal image so often applied to God gives way to a strikingly intimate picture of a mother God who feeds and nurtures her children at the breast. And yes, you heard it right, Christ is the mother’s milk. There are few scriptures that capture with such vivid, shocking clarity the promise of the Gospel that we are truly children of God, more beloved and precious and closer to God’s heart than any creed can convey. If you want to know what God’s love is like, look no further.
I know that my maternity room story isn’t a perfect fit for Peter’s metaphor, since the roles are reversed — alas, the search for the perfect sermon illustration continues — but maybe it can still help to illuminate the larger purpose of the epistle. Peter isn’t just writing to keep in touch. He writes to remind a worn and weary church that they have been called by God to bear a special witness to the world. He writes to embolden their resistance to a dominant culture that values power more than people. He writes to give them courage for a radically different way of living, a way that will seem strange and even dangerous in the eyes of the world. I’m talking, of course, about the life-giving, debt-forgiving, peace-building, liberation-seeking, neighbor-loving, cross-bearing way of Jesus Christ.
How do we begin to live such a life? How do we sustain the spiritual strength and the moral imagination to stay on a path that is always unconventional, often unpopular, and sometimes totally illogical? Paul counseled the Christians in Rome to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). But how can our minds be renewed when they are bombarded with some 5,000 advertising messages a day telling us what we should buy, why we deserve it, and how our lives will be the better for it? After a while, once we’ve watched enough TV and played enough Xbox and consumed enough Coke and taken enough trips to Disney and seen enough product placements in the movie franchise du jour, can we help the fact that the Holy Spirit might not be the only thing shaping our sense of what is good and acceptable and perfect?
There’s the rub. As disciples of Christ, we are called into a world of suffering as agents of peace and healing, we are called into a world of bondage to work for the liberation of the oppressed, we are called into a world where the fear of scarcity reigns so that we might proclaim the inauguration of a new kingdom of abundant life. Our calling leads us into the world, not away from it, but without some serious strategies for renewal the church can very easily become afflicted with a kind of Stockholm syndrome, a kind of spiritual amnesia that leads us to think that we can follow the Crucified One and seek out the American Dream at the same time.
Mercifully, the epistle offers some guidance on this point. It is interesting to note, for example, that Peter does not simply say: “do this” and “don’t do that.” There is a good deal of that kind of language in the letter. But the careful reader is also rewarded with a more nuanced analysis of the problem. Listen yet again to the second and third verses: “Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation — if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
Here he uses the language of desire — “long for the pure, spiritual milk” — to show that faith can’t be reduced to a simple rejection of the world, to show that the life of the faithful person is more than a matter of what they don’t do, and what they don’t say, and what they refrain from buying. These practices of renunciation are some of the fruits of a robust faith, to be sure, but they are not the ground from which faith grows, because there is nothing about any of these practices in and of themselves that will nourish our humanity and deepen our communion with mystery. It is a dour religion, devoid of Christ, that defines “spiritual” things solely in terms of self-denial, negation, and refusal. And sadly, this is the version of Christian commitment that many people have been handed, so that many people both in the church and outside of it have this idea that you can’t belong to a good Christian unless you divest yourself of every human desire. (If you’re wondering why we Americans are so neurotic about sexuality, this is a big reason why.)
But Peter isn’t afraid to use the language of desire, the language of longing, because he understands that the problem is not that we desire but what we desire. This is a helpful insight, because it gives us something to work with. Rather than just saying that we should try harder, or that we should have better willpower, or that the proper posture of Christianity is to say no to everything that the world has to offer, the text helps us to develop creative strategies for renewal by inviting us to look within ourselves and consider the desires that drive our intentions and actions. Do we long to be rich by becoming poor like Jesus, or do we long to be wealthy in the way that Donald Trump defines wealth? Do we long to share in the victory of Christ who becomes humble for the sake of others, or do we long to be winners, Charlie Sheen style? Do we long for the body of Christ, the mother’s milk, or do we believe that Snickers really satisfies?
This is a much more responsible way of looking at things, because instead of casting ourselves as innocent victims of a fallen world we begin to recognize within our own hearts the need for conversion, transformation, metanoia. The Christian life is not meant to be easy. One doesn’t just wake up in the morning and say, “I think I’d like to follow Christ today.” It takes work. It takes practice. It takes a community of mutual support and encouragement.
Here we begin to see that the ancient Christian practices such as prayer, silence, solitude, sabbath, fasting, the celebration of the sacraments — some of which we sometimes call “disciplines” — are given to us as gifts for our nourishment and growth as children of God. Far from being electives for people who have the time and the inclination, they are the core curriculum of the Christian life, the things that can help us to train our hearts on Christ. (And please be assured that I am not moralizing here, since I am as guilty as the next guy of choosing a cup of coffee and the box scores from last night’s games over an intentional time of silent prayer in the morning.) At the end of the day, we realize that we cannot go it alone, that we need each other, that we need to bear each other’s burdens, to call each other to prayer, to lift each other’s hearts, to remind each other of the promise.
Are we tired? Are we discouraged? Have we grown cynical? Has the church lost its way? Courage, Peter says, courage. However great our despair or disorientation, however much we may falter or flounder about, nothing can cancel the covenant of God’s love made known to us in Christ. We are a chosen race that subverts the category of race altogether, we are a royal priesthood serving at the altar of God’s self-emptying love, we are a holy nation of exiles and aliens — Peter’s words, not mine — bearing the good news that God’s salvation does not stop at the border but reaches to the ends of the earth. We are God’s own people, in order that we might be witnesses to the marvelous light of God that makes all things new. Courage. Courage. Whoever believes in Christ, whoever longs for the mother’s milk, will never be put to shame.
—Jonathan Hauze
*The author of this epistle was probably not the apostle Peter but an elder of the Church in Jerusalem in the second or third generation of Christianity. To avoid awkward prose, however, I follow the convention of referring to the author by the name tradition has given him.
