Awake

Sermon for Year C, Advent 2

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

December 9, 2012

St. Thomas Episcopal Church; St. Paul’s Indian Mission

Luke 3:1-6

“Awake”

You know how it is each week after we read the Gospel lesson.

In most places, it’s pretty quiet.

Folks generally stand up to hear the lesson

  And they say what’s on the page –

    “Praise to you, Lord Christ” –

  And then they sit down while the preacher gets his or her act together

  And right there, before much else happens,

    You could hear a pin drop.

Any preacher worth his or her salt knows how to harness that quiet moment.

It was in one of those fine moments of sleepy quiet on a blue-sky Colorado morning

  That I once heard a priest start a sermon on John the Baptist

  By slamming his fist down on the pulpit

    And by proclaiming, in a very loud voice, “WAKE UP!”

He let an awkward silence ring in the air between us.

I’m sure that in that moment none of us particularly liked Fr. Rick for doing that!

I’d have thrown my shoe at him if I’d had the presence of mind.

We were offended, but in a way we couldn’t really explain.

Maybe it was because this was the sort of preacher

  Who as a rule didn’t put a lot of screaming into his sermons.

Maybe it was because a lot of folks had put their trust in him as their priest

  After growing up with quite a lot of screaming on Sundays,

    And Rick’s usual way of gentle teaching was seen as a vote for something better.

Maybe – shame on us – it was because we thought church

  Was supposed to be some sort of escape from reality.

But in any event there it was. And I have never forgotten it. He was right.

“WAKE UP!”

(Let it be mentioned that this was a man trying to raise teenagers at the time.

He didn’t need lessons to sound convincing on this point;

  It was a sentiment conveyed with real authority borne of actual, recent experience!)

John. The man in the desert, baptizing and preaching repentance and forgiveness of sins.

Armchair theologians like me enjoy plastering John with all sorts of titles:

  Baptizer. Revelator. Forerunner. Prophet.

I think, though, it might be more accurate to name him for what he truly is.

The cousin of the Christ, who comes before the Christ,

  Must be an Annoyance. An irritation. An alarm clock.

  A bucket of cold water on a slumbering teenager.

John’s job is to relentlessly poke at us –

  Get up … get up … c’mon, get up right now –

  Until at last we rub the sleep out of our eyes

    And find, to our great surprise, that we are standing before God …

      In the holy presence of God! – the holy joy and comfort and judgment of God …

And having made such a realization,

  The next announcement immediately follows on:

  That God is doing something new, and that it’s still time to pay attention,

    And that in this something new that’s about to happen,

      Every uneven thing shall be made even,

      And every crooked thing shall be made straight:

        That the mountains will be sanded right down,

        And the low fields pulled up to the same height;

      That every last little dangerous road that used to be so filled

        With so many curves and switchbacks and falling rocks and thieves

        Will now be a straight shot. A way that is safe to travel.

Translation:

  Pay attention to the One who is to come, this Christ,

  Because God is about to to level the playing field and make things right;

  Bigshots will be humbled, and humble things will be placed in the spotlight.

Now, do you think that that came as good news

  To a people and a culture and a religion

  That had been as perpetually and chronically oppressed as the Israelites? –

  The same small group of people that had been under the thumb

    Of Assyria and Greece and Babylon and Persia for more than a thousand years

      And was now barely scraping by under the harsh and sharp edges

      Of the sword of the Roman regime?

Of course it was good news! Terrific news. Amazing.

The sort of news worth waking up to hear.

As wake-up calls go, this is already the second of its kind in the Gospel of Luke.

We’re only in chapter three, but wake up and look:

  In the very first chapter of this saga,

    An unprepared, frightened girl named Mary has been told that she will be the mother

    Of Jesus, who will ascend to the throne of David,

      And whose reign will be just as great as David’s, even greater, lasting forever.

It will be this young, unprepared girl – already one of the least –

  Whose song about Things Made Right

  Is echoed by John in the desert in substance and in heart.

Hearing this proclamation of the angel about her child, she will sing out,

  God has looked on my lowliness and somehow I am blessed.

“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.”

A level playing field.

Oh, and do you remember Abraham?

The childless one, the one without a legacy,

  Whose disappointed face God turned to the night sky,

  And said, Don’t worry, Abraham; it’s okay; just wake up and live – open your eyes:

  Someday, Abraham, you’ll have more descendants than there are stars;

    Many long years after you’re sleeping in your grave, Abraham,

    You’ll have more children than there are grains of sand on the seashore.

The lowly lifted up once again … blessed beyond measure.

The humble brought up, and the mighty humbled.

It is an old, old story in the Bible, and very good news indeed.

We just have to be irritated from sleep and to wake up long enough to be able to hear it.

Every time we worship:

  Every time we bow our heads, pause, give thanks …

  Every time we acknowledge God’s presence and power in our lives …

  Every time we come into this building to take Christ’s body and blood …

  Every time we hear a lesson of God’s unlikely power and providence,

    It is as though we’re pushed to wake up just a little bit more,

    Build up the capacity to pay attention just a little bit more,

      Increase the chances we might hear the message just a little bit more.

It’s easy to succumb to sleep;

  But that’s not why we’re here.

We’re here because Christ has called us here,

  Because we need to wake up

    So we can hear the good news

    That the One who is coming into the world

      Is going to show us what the world looks like

      When the humble are lifted up and the proud are scattered.

Jesus will do that with his life time and again, leaving us countless lessons,

  And then he will do it in his body –

    Being humbled and lifted up, upon a cross which is also a throne –

    The seat of God’s holy judgment and comfort and joy and presence.

First, we awaken. Then we see and we get the message.

Thanks be to God. Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.

Messenger

Sermon for Year A, Feast of St. Mary Magdalene

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

Saint Thomas Episcopal Church

July 22, 2012

John 20:11-18

“Messenger”

This morning we celebrate what little we know of the life of Mary Magdalene.

We give thanks for her.

We also, as always, will ask ourselves what she has to do with us.

To begin with, she has a common name,

  And is easily confused with other women called Mary,

  Most notably Jesus’ mother Mary –

    But is not her, of course;

  And although the name Mary is given at other points in Scripture,

    Referring to other Marys, as we shall see,

    The name of Mary Magdalene is reserved for something quite specific.

She was from the town of Magdala, right on the shores of the Sea of Galilee,

  Thus her name is a designation of where she was from –

  Joe Siouxcity, Bobby Newyork, Tammy Reno.

(By the way, never play cards with people with those names.)

So, all that really means we know, is that her name was Mary.

The name of the town Magdala is a conflation of ideas: it literally means “fish tower,”

  Referring to its two most salient features:

    One, it must have had some sort of prominent tower,

    And two, it was where fish from the sea were processed and packed in salt.

Magdala also had a natural springs and plenty of quack doctors,

  Which meant people liked to come and soak their troubles,

  And that meant all sorts of other recreation, including, I’m sure, prostitution,

    So Magdala was known in its region as a place of ill repute.

All that, of course, before it was tragically sacked by the Romans.

Luke and Mark say that Mary was healed by Jesus of “seven demons.”

Another Mary of Scripture, Mary of Bethany, broke a large bottle of expensive perfume

  Over Jesus’ head as a kind of preparation for his burial.

But a tragically mistaken homily dated September of the year 591,

  Pope Gregory the Great put those biblical episodes next to the reputation of Magdala

  And he preached that, quote, “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman,

    Whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom

    Seven devils were ejected according to Mark.

  And what did these devils signify, if not all the vices?

  … It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent

    To perfume her flesh in forbidden acts.”

From that point forward, Mary Magdalene, for Christian history, is a prostitute.

She’s rendered by artists therefore as a woman with long, red hair –

  Long, as opposed to hidden away. Red, as opposed to something plainer I guess.

Not virtuous, in other words.

A reputation she didn’t earn, mistakenly foisted upon her.

Everyone has to be from somewhere.

Still, how would you like to be remembered and painted for the next two millennia

  As the scapegoat

  For all the least desirable things your hometown had to offer at one time,

    Whether you had anything to do with it or not?

Based on the whim of a pope who took the pulpit almost 500 years after you died?

My point is that even though it can be hard to separate

  What we think we know from what we really do know,

  We need to be able to do just that.

We think we know a redeemed prostitute; really, we have almost no idea.

All we have is this:

  Mary Magdalene is the first apostle of Jesus, thanks be to God.

She’s one of the very first witnesses to the resurrection,

  And in Luke and John, respectively, she is asked in no uncertain terms,

  “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” and “Why are you weeping?”

She’s reminded that Jesus has promised this is precisely what would come to pass,

  And Lo, it has,

  And Go, run and tell it,

    And she’s faithful to the task.

Even though Mark tells us she and her companions

    In a rather sizeable group of women are all seized with terror and amazement,

  Still, they go and they run and they tell.

They go to the other disciples, the men,

  Bearing for them the most amazing news from the central moment in all history –

  The first anywhere who will tell a piece of news that will be told and retold

    Until it becomes synonymous with the term “Good News”! –

    Listen to the most incredible thing that God has accomplished through Jesus!

    He is not where we laid him, but he is raised to new life!

And Luke reports the response of the men in this way:

  “These words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

“… an idle tale …”

With the dawning of morning still hanging fresh upon her,

  Mary Magdalene has moved from disciple to apostle.

She is doing the one thing she has been asked to do –

  To tell this amazing news!

And she’s entrusting it to the ones who should know precisely what to do with it.

Only to be dismissed as a daydreamer and a storyteller –

  Someone with a big imagination, maybe –

  Someone a little hysterical, strung out from the stresses of the past few days.

Don’t forget that the men to whom she goes

  Are pretty strung out themselves:

  A gaggle of guys locked in a little room in a very large city

    That is brimming with people who would like to get their hands on them.

If I’d been preaching this 20 years ago,

  I’d’ve said the room was choked with cigarette smoke.

Since it’s 2012, I’ll just say they’ve all had way too many espressos

  For it being this early in the day.

They’re pacing the floor, indulging all their nervous tics.

Peter is a notorious knuckle-cracker when he gets anxious;

  James bites his nails; Nathaniel blinks more than usual; Jude rocks back and forth;

  Philip just keeps saying, “We gotta make a plan, guys. We gotta make a plan.”

Thomas … well, Thomas is the type to go take a walk,

  So he isn’t in the room just now.

He tends not to be in the room when interesting things happen,

  And then he has to play catch-up.

But then Mary Magdalene breaks into that nervous energy with her good word:

  She positively infiltrates the room with the news she’s been entrusted.

We don’t look for the living among the dead, boys! We no longer weep!

She hasn’t been asked to make them believe – only to tell them the news.

Tell she does.

It doesn’t mean she doesn’t have her own doubts or fears;

  It just means she follows through with her assigned task.

Now, dear friends, think about the world we live in:

  A world of anxiety, deadlines, constant decision-making;

  Everything, it seems, is suffused with a nervous dread and fear:

    A fear of making the wrong decision, offending the wrong person,

      A fear of getting caught and living with the consequences.

There’s no better metaphor for this feeling this morning than the unfortunate apartment

  In Aurora, Colorado, that was carefully booby-trapped on Thursday night

  And left hanging with livewires and explosives by James Eagen Holmes

  Before he entered a movie theater and started shooting,

    Killing twelve and injuring seventy before quietly submitting to arrest by police.

No better metaphor than this horrific circumstance

  Playing itself out on our TV and computer screens.

Things feel anxious and uncertain in this world of violence and corruption,

  Where we feel terrible for the whole thing – helpless, but terrible –

  And we feel even worse that we’ve come to the point

    That we already know how it’s going to play out.

We feel uncertain about ourselves when we’re confronted with the tragic,

  And yet there is a very real part of us that has already seen this before:

  A part of us that knows that it’s going to happen again.

We do all the things we do every time this happens –

  Saying the prayers and watching the footage and reading the paper –

  Do all the things we’ve done before,

    Only we do them with just a little less pain this time,

      Maybe even a little less pain the next time,

    Because we know how much it hurts to look with our hearts completely open,

      And wouldn’t it be easier not to be torn to shreds by it all again,

      If we can at all afford to turn away a little faster each time.

If this sounds a little confused, it’s because it’s confusing.

Senseless violence makes the common mind a jumble.

If it sounds like an attempt to convict you,

  Believe me: it’s only because of how badly I myself need to be convicted.

What we need this morning is what we always need.

It’s what we’ve always needed.

It’s what we will require for as long as we shall exist.

We need to hear the news again.

We need Mary of Magdala back in the room, stirring the pot.

We need something that takes us out of our small selves

  And asks us to put on a higher mind.

Mary and the other women burst into a room of men

  Stinking drunk on uncertainty and anxiety

  Burst in, with a word designed to cut through the chatter and the clutter:

    Jesus Christ is risen. See what God has done.

    Somehow in this world of tragic and inexplicable violence,

    Good has prevailed; Love has prevailed; A better way has been shown.

Jesus Christ is always rising from the tomb. See what God is constantly doing.

Sometimes you’re the messenger of this word.

Sometimes you’re the one who needs to hear it.

Either way: resurrection didn’t just happen once; it happens all the time.

Jesus’ life is pointing to that bigger reality.

Let’s give thanks, then, to our good and gracious God, host of this eucharistic feast today,

  For Mary Magdalene.

May we strive to emulate her by doing all that

  We have been commissioned to achieve.