Submission: Let it be with me According to your Word

Readings: Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year B

Advent is a season of waiting. For us in the 21st century it is a season of waiting for Christmas. For those of us so fortunate, we wait to put up the outdoor lights, to put up the Christmas tree, to eat the feast, to sing carols with friends and relatives. For those of us who have lost or maybe cut off our ties to society and family, we wait for a chance to get near a warm grate in the sidewalk or to get a handout from a passer-by. But we are not waiting for Christmas to turn our world upside down, to stand our dearest cultural values on their heads.

But that is exactly what the birth of Jesus was about to do to first century Palestinian Jewish culture. An already ancient, patriarchal honor/shame culture was about to have its values inverted by a woman and her baby. The event was not without preparation, however, as our Old Testament Reading shows.

There King David observes that he is now enjoying a higher material standard of living than Israel's God. David lives in a house of cedar, while God still lives in a tent with the Ark of the Covenant. David implicitly wonders whether he should build an equally grand house for God.

Then his prophet Nathan tells him that God says that David has it backwards. David has no power to build a house for God. Rather, God is building a house for David - and not a merely material house of cedar, either. God is building an entire Kingdom for David and his descendants, that will be home for all Israel, forever.

For now, for the Ark of His Covenant, a tent is all God wants. The same tent that covered the Ark whenever the Israelites halted on their trek from slavery to the Promised Land. When God wants something different, He will say so.

But God goes further: In Psalm 89 He declares that His faithfulness to his Covenant with Israel and the way His love shall support David will compel David to cry out to the Lord, "You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation!"

God is declaring that He is greater than the material trappings of honor in an honor/shame culture. That God is greater than honor itself. God is so great that God can dispense with honor.

And so God sends his angel to talk to a young woman. To get some feeling for the radicalness of such an idea, imagine that these events are taking place not in the Nazareth of ancient Israel, but in present-day Nazareth in Muslim Palestine. Let us use Arabic names. The woman's name in Arabic is Maryam. And even though she is second-class, virtually the property of the man to whom she is about to me married, the angel Gibreel does not come first to her husband-to-be, or even to her father. He comes directly to her.

That gesture itself conveys meaning: Allah is greater than honor, Allah is greater than social convention. Allah can have dealings with a woman, and even cause her to become pregnant. By this gesture of sending Gibreel directly to Maryam, Allah is saying," You are not your husband's, nor your father's, nor your society's, you are your own. But first and foremost, you are Mine. And this is what I will do with you."

Now Maryam becomes indeed her own, an individual. Allah permits her to question Gibreel. Gibreel's answer that her child will be called Issa, and the Son of Allah, amazes her. And this is crucial: she is not forced, she is not coerced. Instead, she freely gives her consent, her submission, "Here am I, the servant of Allah, let it be with me according to your word."

We should all be astonished. Young women found to be pregnant before they are married can be sent back to their families. But family honor, and in particular the honor of the head of the family, is everything. A man without honor will soon be a man without wealth, friends, livelihood, or even protection, for himself or his family. It is not uncommon for a daughter so dishonored to be killed by her father and brothers. It even has a name, "honor killing." Honor killings have been done by Muslim immigrants in Europe as recently as this year.

By consenting to what Gibreel has spoken, Maryam has just set herself up to be killed. She now depends for her life on the mercy of Allah, and His further intervention on her behalf.

That, friends, is Faith.

Faith that Allah will continue in His move to stand the honor/shame duality on its head, faith that Allah will persuade Yusuf to accept her and go through with the marriage.

Later, when it is clear that Allah has followed through, and Yusuf has accepted her, Maryam practically launches into song (Luke 1:46b-5). Indeed, our alternate reading forms the basis of J. S. Bach's Magnificat. And again we read about the inversion of honor/shame, the humbling of the proud, the powerful brought down from their thrones, the hungry (spiritually and physically) fed.

We can only say in English, Praise the Lord! In Hebrew, Halleluyah! In Arabic, Allahu Akbar!

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. - John 3:16

That whosoever follows him should be unbound from the shackles of Honor/Shame and freed to follow path of Humility. The path of Faith. You bet your Life. And your Life in the World to Come.

Now may Allah bless you and keep you, may Allah make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you. May Allah look upon you with favor and give you peace. Amen.

Leia Mais…

Advent: The Christmas Truce of 1914

Readings: Any Sunday in Advent, Years A, B, and C
and "Christmas in the Trenches," John McCutcheon, 1984.



Advent, from the Latin adventus, means "The Coming," or "The Approach." Once recognized as a holy season of the Christian Church beginning four Sundays before Christmas, it was specifically about the coming of Christ — in our past as the baby Jesus, and in our future as Redemptor Mundi, the Redeemer of the World. Now it is submerged in the tide of holiday shopping that fills the void from Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving, when many retailers finally turn a profit for the year) to Christmas Day, the distribution of the loot.

Advent is anticipation, a building of hope and feeling as we prepare to celebrate Christmas, the anniversary season of Our Lord's Birth as one of us. The Twelve Days of Christmas. Twelve days of inspiration, generosity, gratitude , good will, familiar songs, and peace.

So it was on Christmas Eve, 1914, in the trenches of World War I in France and Belgium. The men on both sides were waiting, mostly for another attack by the other side. Instead, an informal truce was struck by ordinary soldiers on both sides, beginning with the singing of Christmas carols. There was even a soccer game, until the ball got punctured on barbed wire. Instead of an attack, the men got a few days — a moment, in the scheme of things — of grace.

At first, the truce was welcomed by their officers as an opportunity to bury their dead. Some of them had lain rotting in the No Man's Land between the trenches for months. But as the British and German troops mingled and got friendly, the officers got frightened. This sort of thing could end the war. Orders were given against fraternizing with the enemy, with dishonorable discharge or death the penalty for disobedience. What ended was not the war, but the peace.

And the rest, they say, is history. World War I led to a defeated, broken and sullen Germany, which led Germany to fall prey to Hitler's ideology of National Socialism (Nazism), which led to World War II and the slaughter of 50 million people, including the systematic genocide of 6 million Jews, and the subsequent mass migration of the survivors who had nowhere else to go to what became the nation-state of Israel, which has endured almost continual war with its neighbors. Defeated along with its ally, Germany, in WW I, the Ottoman Empire was partitioned into many of the countries that form the Middle East today. Some like Iraq, were taken over by Baathism, which is little more than an Arabized Nazism, and many have made themselves enemies of Israel. Weakened by WW I, Russia was overtaken by Communism under which Stalin killed millions to force the collectivization of farming, which inspired many other such takeovers including China with its massacres under Mao Zedong, and provided the ideology that led to the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Killing Fields of Kampuchea under Pol Pot. The foundation of Israel combined with the loss of the Ottoman Caliphate became some of the principal grievances used by al-Qaeda to recruit the perpetrators of the 9/11 and other attacks. And of course, WW II was ended by the invention and use of nuclear weapons, which together with the Cold War led to "Weapons of Mass Destruction," becoming a common phrase.

Need I go on?

If we humans had had the Faith to trust in and sustain what happened on that Christmas Eve in 1914, we might have avoided most of the bloodshed of past century. In other words, what was at stake was not just World War I, but World War II and all the wars which followed from them.

We were not punished for our failure by a vengeful God. No, God offered us a way to build a better world, and we chose instead the familiarity of business as we usually do it. We have not endured a punishment — we have endured the world we were already making for ourselves.

To tell the truth however, the men involved didn't expect the Christmas Truce of 1914 to hold. They took it as a very much wanted, but unexpected opportunity for a few days relief from the drudgery and stress of slaughter. They would have liked more time, but it didn't occur to them that they could take it. Their common Christian heritage — the Gospel — offered them a moment of Grace, but they did not dare ask a lifetime of Grace for themselves, or a history of Grace for the world of us who would come after them.

The men knew the personal risks of war. Odds were that most of them would make it back home, unhurt, with honor. All you had to do was keep your head down. Poison gas was not yet in widespread use, and nobody expected the influenza of 1918. But the risk of peace — if everybody acted together you might be hailed as a hero or a saint, but if not, you might be branded a coward or a traitor. Or you might be taken prisoner. Or you might be shot — by the enemy troops or your own.

That's the thing about these moments of God's Grace. They catch us by surprise. And if we want them to last, we must have the crazy audacity to ask for more than we ever dreamed possible, and to commit ourselves completely, body and soul. Because God's Grace, the Gospel, offers us new selves to become, with new futures. Too often, as in 1914, we turn away, blinding ourselves to the possibilities, trudging our familiar path into the darkness. Because, ironically, it seems less scary to us. Or worse, as in Nazi movement of the 1930's, the Communist revolutions, or the present Bin Ladenist movements, we allow our capacity for that audacity and committment to be perverted to evil ends.

Advent. Waiting for the coming of God's most radical Grace. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. We are always waiting for moments of Grace, as each Advent we wait for Christmas, a season of Grace, mindful that the original Christmas was also a moment of hope and fear. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

Few moments of Grace in recent history have been so powerful, so pregnant with possibility as Christmas in the Trenches in 1914. But they do come. Let us be thankful for the triumph of Solidarity and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the non-violent collapse of Communism in 1991. Let us be thankful that India and Pakistan decided not to go to war in 2002 when Pakistan-based Islamic terrorists bombed the Indian Parliament building.

Now whenever our moments of Grace come, small or large, personal or international, may God give us the the audacity to ask for more abundant Grace than we have ever imagined, and the courage to commit ourselves to its path. Or to use more old-fashioned words, may God give us Hope, may God give us Faith.

This Advent may you approach Christmas in God's Grace.

Leia Mais…