BLOGGING-THOMAS

The Sunday Salon (each week at 10 a.m. between the two main worship services) focuses on the Gospel Lesson being read and preached-about that day.

To help you get ready for Sunday, here’s the Gospel Lesson for Advent Three, also known as The Third Sunday in Advent.  It’s followed by the Rector’s notes on the lesson from the current issue of The Phoenix, plus some suggestions for your prayer and reflection time during the following week.

Gospel Lesson for Advent Three - December 14

John 1:6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. 10He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. 14And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

15(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) 16From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

19This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” 20He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” 21And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” 22Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” 23He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said. 24Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. 25They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” 26John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, 27the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” 28This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.

Surprisingly we find ourselves in the first chapter of John’s gospel this week, the first 28 verses. John is assuring us that a significant moment has arrived in all of history, bringing change and change’s companion – challenge. How do we prepare the way for his coming? Prayer is an essential part of our Christian vocation.

During next week, December 15-20, pray daily that God would come in the midst of our most menial tasks of love and the costliest struggles of survival. Expectant prayer is an attitude of life, a focus on God’s presence in the here & now. It’s our collective crying out in the face of human need and a position of trust that shouts hope. (The Rev. Dr. Nancy Lee Jose, Rector - from The Phoenix, December 1, 2008)

There are almost as few things for sale with an Advent-theme as there are Lenten-collectibles.  Lent, of course, is focused on the events leading up to the end of Jesus’ life at the age of thirty-three.  Lent is a hard sell, and few people try to make a living off of Lenten trinkets.

But it comes as a surprise to many of us that one of the central themes of Advent is the final judgment.  Advent, we are jolted to learn, isn’t just about waiting for the baby Jesus in the manger, but also our anticipation of the end of all things at the last judgment when Christ comes back on ‘the last day’ as the Lord of all of creation for all time .

No wonder that both seasons - Lent and Advent - are ‘hard sells’.  They are, after all, periods for introspection about “the time of this mortal life” (BCP, 211), and thus have a certain ‘penitential’ quality to them - a tone of giving-up or turning-loose of our attachment to ‘things’. So ’selling Advent’ sounds like an oxymoron, if not just in bad taste.

As a result, we are left with Advent Wreaths and Advent Calendars for the most part, although personally I can never find where I put the four-candle-styrofoam-form last year for my wreath, and I always get to about December 15th before I realize that I’m ten days behind with my calendar already, and give in to sloth.

So it’s been interesting to think about whether there are actually any ‘consumer goods’ out there with Advent themes that are worth considering even in an age of recession. The trick, of course, is how not to fast-forward to Christmas, even when trying to celebrate Advent — like this Nativity Advent Wreath I found for sale online this week.

In protest you could wear an “It’s Only Advent” button while you’re out doing your Christmas shopping.  Or you you could be less self-righteous than I tend to be and look at a wonderful website and blog by the artist Jan Richardson to see some of her fabulous Advent art and to buy one of her Advent books - Nancy and I own Night Visions and have just ordered The Advent Door.

Here’s someone who’s been captivated by Advent, and her art can unleash a whole new set of associations about this special season.

Spend some time looking at her Advent Hours Series of Greeting Cards, or one of her fantastic prints, like “Wise Women Also Came.”

Advent is such a curious season for so many Christians because it invites us to entertain the possibility that God chose to be in our midst precisely because creation is one of God’s favorite places to be.  God took flesh, became incarnate, because our flesh was worthy of bearing God … then … and still is now.

It’s hard to sell Advent because we’ve been so thoroughly taught that our bodies are bad that we can no longer even imagine they are good enough to be God’s place to dwell.  So we wait in Advent for this miracle to become ours again  … althought it is already, if we were only awake enough to see it.

Leave it to the BBC for trivia you can count on:

“The first advent calendars appeared in 19th-Century Germany, when various methods of counting the days between the start of Advent and Christmas Day were used. Starting on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, or simply on 1 December, the Protestant Christians would keep track of the days by making marks on their doors with a piece of chalk, which would then be rubbed off one by one as Christmas approached. Other practices then developed, including burning a candle or putting up a small religious picture to mark each day.

There is some disagreement as to when the first printed advent calendars appeared, although it is clear that they were first produced at some time in the 1900s. There are claims that a Christian bookshop in Hamburg produced a ‘Christmas Clock’ in 1902, and a newspaper in Stuttgart is known to have included an advent caldendar in its pages in 1904. However, the first mass producer of advent calendars is thought to have been Gerhard Lang, who worked at the Reichhold & Lang printing office in Munich. He released his first advent calendar in 1908 and had a steady business going which produced over thirty patterns of calendar until some time in the 1930s. The calendars would usually have 24 doors, but tended to be better-decorated than modern versions.

Soon enough, calendars were being designed with little doors or pouches which contained small religious pictures or bible extracts. Better still, some of the calendars also contained sweeties in order to keep the attention of young children. The practice escalated up until the Second World War, when paper and cardboard were rationed and advent-calendar production ground to a halt. Once the war ended, though, the production began again, pioneered by Richard Sellmer in 1946.

The introduction of the advent calendar to the USA was aided by ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, whose grandchildren took a shine to the idea. The calendar was soon adopted in other countries too, and in the UK chocolates began to appear behind the little doors as soon as rationing would allow. By the end of the 1950s, chocolate advent calendars had appeared, and by the following decade they had become widespread. They still exist today, with hundreds of different varieties appearing across the globe.”

Three of the best online are the Full Homely Divinity Advent Calendar — the Episcopal Diocese of Washington’s fifth annual 2008 Advent Calendar — and the BBC’s wonderful, musical Bach Christmas Calendar.  Bookmark each of them (or just your favorite) and check each day for a new surprise.

There are two seasons in the church year that ask us to wait.

During Lent we wait for the pivotal stories of Holy Week, and Good Friday, Holy Saturday …. and Easter.  Forty days we wait, with a growing sense of the immensity of what lies ahead, and our own insufficiency in the face of God’s time of need.

During Advent, the season beginning the fourth Sunday before Christmas, we are also asked to wait.  But now the waiting has an entirely different flavor.  It is the waiting, to use Shakespeare’s phrase from the Merchant of Venice, “With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness.”  It is the waiting for God’s entrance into our home, this place earth.

It is long enough for us to be admonished to “keep awake” — for it will come as a surprise, “in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn.” We are admonished, too, to “Prepare the way of the Lord.”  Yet there is no doubt that the point is for us to be ready “to greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer” (BCP, Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent).

Our waiting for the child in Bethlehem is “Advent anticipation” - the expectation of the unexpected.  We cannot imagine what form God is already waiting for us to experience, as we, too, discover our own flesh as capable of bearing Christ into the world.  We wait in anticipation that this year again, God will make our flesh God’s own “proper habitation” (Richard Hooker).

I blew it.  I was so sleepy Wednesday morning that it never occurred to me to go invest in history and plunk down 50 cents for a Washington Post.  I’m told I could have found one until about 10 a.m., had I looked hard enough.  The problem was that I didn’t think about it until 7 p.m. last night.

I needed to go out to walk for exercise anyway (as my spouse reminded me!), so with audacity I put on my navy HOPE hooded sweatshirt and pants (from the college, not the campaign), and loped on over to Georgia Avenue NW, which angles through my neighborhood.

It’s a sort of liminal zone between two economic, although not racial, worlds — on both sides live mostly “people of color” (predominantly and historically African American), although the colors represented now are salted with caucasians here and there.  Economically, however, the divide is more stark.

The neighborhoods on the side of Georgia Ave where I live manifest different levels of hope … and fulfillment.  But for everyone, hope is a plausible proposition.  When you look at the dc.gov website’s crime statistics, though, the little circles marking crime sites in the past year litter Georgia Avenue itself.  Even lots of NE (Northeast) DC is now “on the way up” — but Georgia Ave has blocks and blocks of tiny neighborhood stores notable for their bullet proof plexiglass cages for the cashiers and burglar bar coverings on every inch of explosed glass.

Last night, these were the establishments that called my name.  I went out cruising about twenty blocks of Georgia Avenue looking for the most elusive commodity in Washington, DC: an “Obama Makes History” edition of the Washington Post!

Which led me to the only establishments that were open (besides a couple of drug stores, a smattering of fast food restaurants, and two tiny, sad liquor stores) — those little markets that usually don’t look all that inviting even when the chain-link is off the windows and the lights are on and the doors are open.

Last night, however, I was a man with a purpose.  Four quarters in my sweat pants pocket, I tried the first one I came two.  Two Hispanic men looked up as I asked, “any newspapers left?”  Then seeing a rack with El Tiempo Latino and La Nacion, I added, “Washington Posts”?  At which point both men smiled, saying almost in unison, “Obama?”  “Si, Obama” I squeezed out. “No, no, no,” they replied, and then an avalanche of Spanish I didn’t understand.  I smiled back, waved goodbye and went on my way.

My whole walk went like that.  I’d walk in a store, point at the empty newspaper rack and say “Obama?” and almost before I could get out “Do you have anymore Washington Posts?” either the clerk or other customers would smile and say, “Obama!” followed by sad “No, no, no’s” about the newspaper and then cascades of laughter and banter in several languages I honestly couldn’t identify — maybe Korean in one store, and finally English in at least two or three — but always happy, sometimes boastful, othertimes self-congratulatory, never inhospitable words about the miracle of their new President: “Obama!”

I know it won’t last.  Just remember the shift from 9/11 to the anniversary of “Shock and Awe” and it’s clear that this honeymoon won’t last forever.  Things will happen that will dim the memory and tarnish the glow a bit and re-insert suspicion into our exchanges with even our neighbors.

For a few days, now, though, I can walk down the sidewalk in 16th Street Heights, or stand at the 14th Street bus stop, or get off the Fairfax Connector in Herndon, VA, and my neighbors, fellow commuters, and even Ziggy, the middle-aged Coptic Orthodox Ethiopian engineer who I often visit with as we walk from the bus to our respective places of employment — all of us, with the utterance of just one word, smile, and are joined together: “Obama!”  And there’s a story to tell.

And there’s hope!  Hope that change really is on the way.  Hope that we’re all up to it.  Hope for what we share, not what in many cases still obviously divides us.

No.  I never found a Post.  But in the spirit of full disclosure, I just read online that the Post is printing 350,000 more commemorative-edition copies that will go on sale in the morning.  I’m headed to Georgia Avenue first thing tomorrow morning, this time to the CVS Pharmacy, which is listed as a Post distributor for these treasures.  And … this is hard to admit … just in case, I just bought a copy from Cafe Press for $9.95 + postage and shipping.  “Obama Makes History.”  And I admit I want a piece of it while it lasts.

It was a long and at times unbelievable ride last night - at one moment I wished I was in Grant Park, then I was glad I could trundle upstairs and go to bed at 2 a.m. instead of trying to get on a CTA train with 100,000 other people.

It made me think of the sermon Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Washington National Cathedral, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”  On the one hand, last night I felt “fired up, ready to go.”  And on the other hand, my deep fatigue reminded me how hard it is going to be as we move forward to remain awake, and carry through the revolution that lies in front of us, not just the one we can see in the rear view mirror.

I thought it was very fitting to find this morning that bloggers already had begun posting prayers for the new president, not just congratulatory accolades.  For in Peter Baker’s words in today’s New York Times: “No president since before Barack Obama was born has ascended to the Oval Office confronted by the accumulation of seismic challenges awaiting him”

We woke up today understanding a little better what poet Audre Lorde meant when she wrote that “revolution is not a one time event.” It isn’t a one-act performance, but a very long play. The danger now is that, tired out from the exertions it took to get us here, we will lie down, doze off, and sleep through the real revolution that still is to come.

If the debacles of the past eight years were a forest fire, at 11 p.m. last night we were reassured to find it is now 52% contained.  The dangers are not past — a still sinking world economy, Americans fighting in two wars, Russia thumbing its nose at the West, and a country where 46% of us, voting figures tell us, woke up today less hopeful, rather than vice versa.

Still, the majority of us declared on Tuesday our intention to seek to move beyond the bitterness, divisiveness, polarization, demonization, and greed that have run amok for so long.  As Kevin Merida said in today’s Washington Post, “The magnitude of his win suggested that the country itself might be in a gravitational pull toward a rebirth that some were slow to recognize. Tears flowed, not only for Obama’s historic achievement, but because many were happily discovering that perhaps they had underestimated possibility in America.”

But we must not doze off.  While California was electing Barack Obama, it also was voting to ban gay marriage, as did Arizona, which went for John McCain, and Florida, which went for Obama.  Arkansas was voting to deny gay couples the right to adopt children.  Nebraska and perhaps also Colorado voted to end affirmative action.  Electoral College maps can obscure the extent of the enduring divisions between urban and rural, young and old, rich and poor.  We are united, but still not yet fully capable of providing  equal access to the the American dream for each and every person in our land.

Enlightenment, the Buddha discovered, was simply the ability to stay awake and fully mindful of the reality of the world around him, when all others grew distracted, disinterested, and forgetful.

Our work has just begun. Together we can do it, “yes, we can.” But only if all of us stay awake for the revolution, as participants, not couch-potato spectators.  Then when someone one future day says with a yawn, “I dozed off … what happened?” we can say: “I can tell you. We remained awake for a great revolution. I was there when we changed the world.”

Voting for the first time in a new neighborhood, I arrived at my polling place this morning at 6:30 a.m. to find a line down one side of the block and halfway up another. Just in front of me was an octogenarian African American matriarch, dressed to the nines, and proudly refusing all offers to move up in line or to sit down in someone’s folding chair.

I took my place in line at the same time as a twenty-something young man, who with the air of entitlement that only youth can fully muster, loudly complained: “How long ago did this line start, anyway?!”

“Honey,” the elder in front of me replied, “…This line began a looooong time ago … way, way, way before even your mama was born!” “Speak it, Sister” somebody further in front of us chimed in, in response to which the sage of Farragut Street added her parting shot to all who would listen: “You need to know that I can remember when we couldn’t even be in line to vote! So don’t you mouth off about the line being sooo looong! All you had to do was show up!”

Baby boomer child of the deep south that I am, I suddenly realized with a bit of existential horror that I, too, remembered when African Americans couldn’t vote in my home state of Mississippi. Beginning in 1890, the state Constitution had required anyone who wished to register to vote to be able to read, write, and provide an interpretation of a section of the state Constitution selected by a local white official. A grandfather clause had effectively exempted illiterate whites, but not blacks, from the literacy test by relating qualifications to whether one’s grandfather had voted before a certain date. Furthermore, poll taxes, based on the number of heads in a voting registrants’ family, made it financially impossible for most blacks, many of whom had large families, to qualify to vote anyway.

It wasn’t until the 24^th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1964 that these poll taxes were finally outlawed in federal elections. And when the next year the federal Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, still less than 7% of blacks in Mississippi were registered to vote.

A great many of these owed their voter registration to the tireless and fearless work of Fannie Lou Hamer, who in 1962 was a 45 year old former sharecropper from Ruleville, MS. After learning for the first time that year that blacks had a constitutional right to vote, on August 31^st she was part of a group of 18 blacks who traveled by bus to Indianola, my home town, to register to vote. All failed the still-required literacy test. I know because my mother was working as usual across the hall from the voter registration office that was administered by the white Circuit Clerk of Sunflower County, who was the father of one of my classmates. 

Ms. Hamer failed again in December 1962. Then on her third try in January 1963 she passed and was registered to vote. Then she really got to work.

For the next 14 years until her death in Mound Bayou, MS, in March 1977, the year I began my Ph.D. at Emory University, Fannie Lou Hamer was a constant thorn in the flesh to all those whites who stood in the way of black voter registration.

During those years my mother was the Deputy Chancery Clerk in the Sunflower County Courthouse and best friends with her counterpart in the Circuit Clerk’s office across the hall, who knew firsthand what these literacy tests entailed. Although I have no certainty about my own mother’s precise role in the disenfranchisement of black voters, I know that she and my father knew full well what was going on there, and like other whites, at the very least condoned it with the silence of the collaborator. 

Fannie Lou Hamer’s favorite Bible passage was Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Ms. Hamer was known not only for her fearlessness and perseverance but also her sharp wit. My favorite was a line she is said to have used often during the Voting Rights campaign: “Whether you have a Ph.D. or No D., we’re in this bag together. And whether you’re from Morehouse, or Nohouse, we’re still in this bag together.”

When my neighbor this morning exclaimed, “This line began a looooong time ago,” my eyes suddenly teared-up in realization of the debt we all owe to Fannie Lou Hamer. I learned again how precious a thing it is that “We’re still in this bag together.” And I was so proud to be there in line, and so humbled that for all my life, all I’ve had to do is to show up.

This past Saturday, November 1st - All Saints’ Day - four members of St. Thomas’ Parish - Tim Johnson, Topher Bengtson, Aaron Adkins and David Park - were among the 245 persons confirmed or received into the Episcopal Church at Washington National Cathedral.

Bishop Chane was assisted by two retired Bishops - Mike Creighton (Central Pennsylvania) and Allen Bartlett (Pennsylvania). Bishop Bartlett is pictured at left with our four confirmands, plus The Rev. John Dwyer (Asst. Rector) and The Rev. Nancy Lee Jose (Rector) and Wayne Floyd who led the confirmation class for the group.

This was the largest contingent ever confirmed and/or received in a Diocese of Washington service, which included a historic number of Spanish-speaking Episcopalians, many of whom came from three Hispanic congregations in the Diocese of Washington.

Another Confirmation Class will form in the winter to prepare people who wish to be confirmed or received at the Spring Confirmation Service at the Cathedral.