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Sermons and Reflections: Wednesday after
1 Advent
[and] [and] [and]
Does that break your heart or what? I mean, if you've read or listened to the news at all lately? "Jerusalem--built like a city that is at unity with itself." Jerusalem: "Yerushalayim" -- city with "shalom," peace, in its name. City that has never known peace. David wrested it by force from the Jebusites, and who knows who had it before the Jebusite conquest. City humiliated by Babylonians, restored under Persians, desecrated by the Seleucids under Hellenistic authority, trashed by Romans, jewel of the Byzantine empire, treasure of the Turks, prize of the crusaders, centerof national pride for both Israelis and Palestinians--and it is not over yet. "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem." "Shah-ah-LOO shah-LOHM yuh-roo-shah-LYE-ihm."
That opening house blessing that we did -- it could have been very satisfying. Picking up on the holy place imagery of the first lesson and psalm. Recognizing that God's house is a house; that the table has something to do with a meal; that the ambo has something to do with reading. And besides that, getting us as a community to speak to each other and move together. And you know, it felt pretty much like an Advent thing to do too. "Make your house fair as you are able, trim the hearth and set the table." What better way to make God's house fair than to bless its various functions? But the blessing would have worked better for me before I ever visited the Holy Land, back when Jerusalem was to me a city of the past and the future. I knew its history as the capital of the davidic kingdom, as the site of the temple, as the city outside of which Jesus died and was buried and rose again. I knew, too, the promise of a new Jerusalem pure and holy, coming down out of heaven from God. If I spoke or sang Psalm 122, it would have been remembering the glory of ancient Jerusalem and anticipating the promise of the eschatological Jerusalem. The problem is, I've been to Jerusalem. Now, the present gets in the way of its illustrious past, its utopian future. The first time I went to Jerusalem was during the first intifada. Jerusalem was a divided city. I theoretically knew that before the visit. I knew about the old city, modern Israeli West Jerusalem, Arab East Jerusalem. I'd learned about the green line between East and West. And yet, today's psalm: "Jerusalem--built like a city that is at unity with itself" in my own overly literal version--would not have struck me as particularly ironic. Our group was staying in a Christian hostel in East--that is, Arab--Jerusalem. We had scheduled conversation with a Jewish Israeli man who was a holocaust survivor. He would not meet with us at our hostel, because he was afraid to come to Arab East Jerusalem. One of our guides was a Palestinian Christian, and she was afraid to go into Jewish West Jerusalem. We met at a church, just barely in West Jerusalem but near to the Old City, where both Israeli Jew and Palestinian Christian felt relatively safe. Later on that same trip, we had an afternoon off. I chose to spend it at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. I got to the museum by bus, but was ready to leave a bit late for the buses, and so went to the row of taxis outside the museum. None of them was willing to drive me to my hostel, which was about 2-1/2 blocks inside East Jerusalem. They wouldn't even take me to the Damascus Gate, the gate of the Old City that exits to East Jerusalem. And the Palestinian taxi services couldn't pick me up in West Jerusalem. It took a while to get back. "Jerusalem: built as a city that is at unity with itself." Psalm 122 never seemed more irrelevant than it did that night.
The next time I came to Jerusalem, it was during the flush of optimism in the wake of the Oslo accords. We stayed in East Jerusalem again, this time even closer to the Damascus Gate and the Old City. We were not afraid moving from East to West. Peace was in the air. We did want to get together with a former student. She was a really sharp African-American studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. That would be West Jerusalem. Look, this was an AME woman. In the US, she was a very keen interpreter of racist assumptions. In Israel, she had experienced racism toward African Jews: she told of walking into a deli and being ignored, until she spoke and people heard her US accent, at which point she was moved to the head of the line. This race- and racism-sensitive woman was afraid to walk one block into Palestinian territory to visit us at our hostel. "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem": shah-ah-LOO shah-LOHM yuh-roo-shah-LYE-um. You hear all the lovely liquid sounds: shah-ah-LOO shah-LOHM yuh-roo-shah-LYE-um. Even the words sound peaceful, don't they? But then the next line: "May they prosper, those who love you": yish-LYE-oo oh-hah-VYE-ich. Starts out with more of those liquids, but then we're into the harsh gutturals, as though we're trying to spit out that gorgeous peacefulness that we'd just been singing. It's the saddest line in the whole poem. Because I think I know what it means to most of the people of Jerusalem--whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian -- and I know what I want it to mean, and the two aren't even close. "May they prosper who love you." I want it to mean: everyone who loves you. But for too many of the people of Jerusalem, it doesn't mean that at all. It means: "Those who love you in the same way that I do." May they prosper. As for those who love you differently: may they be cut off from you, exiled from you -- and if that can't happen, beloved Jerusalem, I am willing to see you walled into ghettos, burned to ashes; I am willing to strap explosives to my waist and blow up myself with you -- rather than share you with people who love you in the wrong way. This is what frightens me about this psalm. It is open to a narrow tribal reading. It is what worries me too about the sweet house blessing we did at the beginning of this worship service: we call this God's house, but it is the worship place of our tribe. What would happen if we could read this text beyond our comfortable tribal consciousness? There are at least two possibilities that occur to me as canonically realized. One is Psalm 137, in which the consciousness stays tribal but the possibility of shalom is gone. By the rivers of Babylon Many of you know that I imagine Psalm 137 as a kind of inversion of Psalm 122. I imagine that in the mind of some exiles in Babylon, Psalm 122 was how you sang the song of Israel's tribal God in the holy land; and Psalm 137 -- with its harps hung up, its aching memory, its longing for vengeance that extends to the shattering of little ones against the rock--that's how you sing God's song on foreign soil. There must be another way. What if the love for Jerusalem endures, but the consciousness does not stay tribal? What if the consciousness encompasses all creation? What I mean by that is: what if we mean it when we address God not just as Lord of the church or God of Israel but as ruler of the universe? What if the source and goal of all creation is not only bigger than the ELCA (even with our ecumenical partners) but than the three "religions of the book," bigger than the concept of religion itself. Creation and new creation--not our tribe--is what Advent is about. That's especially important this Advent, because our country is at war, because we in the US have been singing our own tribal songs. Creation and new creation: if this is our Advent hope, we do not live Advent directed toward a Christmas candlelight service or a lovely creche or a children's choir. What we are hoping for, whether we dare express it or not, is the change of the eras, the end of this world and the beginning of the world to come. Or, as we heard it in our first lesson: In days to come, the mountain of the Lord's house
This Isaiah passage, like Psalm 122, sees Jerusalem as haven. But Jerusalem is no longer our cozy little enclave, loved for the sake of our relatives and friends. Rather, it has become the locus of eschatological unity, the place where all nations stream to learn not war but God's Torah. That the tension of Advent. Tempted toward the sweet sentimentality of creche and candlelight--tempted to bless the house where the holy tribe tries to domesticate the divine presence--we are pulled to a vision of the last days, the hope of the world. We hear about this vision as we are living toward the end of the semester--some of us toward first call, some of us through illness, some of us through grief, some of us through simple dumb overwork. In the midst of all the stuff of our lives, Advent can look like one more set of obligations. Christmas is coming. There are presents to buy and wrap, cookies to bake, sermons to write, anthems to rehearse. Before long, we may get so wrapped up in the season that we'll begin to imagine that what we hope for in Advent is Christmas. But that's a lie. I want to warn you about it now, before it happens. Because once we are living in the lie, we may think we are happy. And if I were to tell you then for the first time, you might think me foolish or mistaken. So here's the warning: what we are hoping for in this holy season is not going to come true on Christmas Eve. The deep longing in our hearts will not be answered by a manger and a baby (whether crying or not), by angel choirs or frightened shepherds, by astrologers on pilgrimage or holy parents in flight. Even after Christmas--just you wait and listen, if you don't believe me now. Unless Jesus comes back in the meantime, all creation will still be crying, "Come, Lord Jesus." Because what we are waiting for is not something that happened 2000 years ago; what we are waiting for is God's future. This year--what if you don't pretend that the pile of stuff under the tree is everything that you've been longing for? What if you insist that your dream won't come true
That's the day that will answer our Advent longing. Until that day, the Spirit and the Church will continue to cry out COME, LORD JESUS! All we who await Christ's coming will pray, COME, LORD JESUS! The whole creation still pleads, COME, LORD JESUS. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.
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I
rejoiced when they said to me: