Sunday, November 30, 2014

Homily: Advent 1B - St John's Convent - November 30, 2014

Homily: Advent 1B St. John’s Convent, November 30, 2014
  Sr. Constance Joanna, SSJD

 Isaiah 64:1-9  /  Psalm 801 Corinthians 1:3-9   /  Mark 13:24-37

In the name of God, to the Glory of God, for the love of God.  Amen.

Advent is the season of the church year when we wait for the coming of the Christ, the Messiah.  It is a liturgical way of expressing the deep human longing for God. Even those who don’t know or believe in God long for whatever gives meaning to life.  They long to be free of anxiety, of family strife, of the pressure of competition in the work place or school.  They long for peace and fulfilment.

And don’t we all?  The passage from Isaiah gives expression to our deep longing for the end of terror and sadness.  The prophet sounds as if he could be talking about our own time:
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name,
or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us,
and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
There is such poignancy in those verses – such grief, and yet such hope.  God is the potter, and we are the clay.  We trust that God will not abandon the work of the divine hand, from the stunning splendour of the cosmos to the delicate beauty of human life – my life, and your life.

We can so easily get discouraged because we don’t see results.  But everything good comes from waiting, and Advent is a time of waiting.  It takes seeds time to germinate, babies nine months to mature so they can safely be born, years for the first flush of infatuation to deepen into true love.  Even a good baked potato takes enough time in the oven to soften, to develop flavour and texture. And we too need time as we learn to trust in the work God is doing in us and among us.

Advent is like a womb, or an oven, or rich soil where this can happen.  It is a sacrament of waiting, and that is the beauty of the liturgical year.  We get to start over again, become pregnant again, wait for that child again – the God-child who wants to be born again and again in us.

And in our world.  The readings this morning seem gloomy and frightening.  And that is because the only way to let the God seed in us come to maturity is to let go of what we are deeply attached to and that we allow to take the place of God in our lives – like our need to control our own lives, to protect ourselves from other people, to acquire more and more stuff, to fill our rooms and homes and offices with things that we think we need.  It takes time to recognize that God wants to be born in us, and then it takes time for God to woo us away from our attachments and addictions.  It takes even more time for God to be born in our world, where all the same destructive tendencies are acted out on a global scale in the form of addictions to power and control, to violence and anger, to self-protection and fear.

Jesus was only too aware of this human suffering, too aware of where his own life was leading.  The thirteenth chapter of Mark’s gospel draws heavily on the imagery in Daniel and other Old Testament and apocryphal books that described visions of the end times.  People took the imagery of cosmic destruction literally, and there was good reason.  Forty years after Jesus’ death Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the entire city of Pompeii under molten lava and ash.  Earthquakes devastated the Greek peninsula. There was war and famine and so much terror that the Roman historian Tacitus said that the gods seemed to be bringing vengeance rather than salvation to the Roman Empire – not unlike the mood of the reading from Isaiah, but without the hope

And so using this imagery, Jesus says to pay attention to the signs. Just as the fig tree tells you that summer is near, so cosmic events will be a sign of the second coming.  Just as the landlord going on a trip provides for someone to take care of his house, so we too are enjoined to be prepared, to be ready.

Two thousand years later we still wait.  We see warning signs in environmental destruction, climate change, cosmic disturbances.  But even more we see the signs in attitudes of our culture that are quieter and more subtle and insidious.  What images would Jesus use if he were here today?  I fantasize that he might say something like this:
From the economy learn this lesson: when you see people standing in line from midnight till 6 am to get the bargains on Black Friday, then you know the end is near.  When you see ads promising a Black December, with bargains promised right through Boxing Day, know that the end is near. When you see people sleeping on the streets in one of the richest cities in the world, you know the end is near.  When you see celebrities and politicians brought down for drug use and sexual assault you know the end is near.
I think Black Friday is a far more prophetic term than we might at first think.  I read somewhere that the phrase was coined in Philadelphia back in the 1980s because of the chaos that the shopping frenzy caused in the city on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The term later came to have a more positive interpretation because it was the day when merchants got their books in the black after eleven months of being in the red.  But to me Black Friday is an appropriate sign that our culture has succumbed to the belief that all our problems can be solved by money and material things.  It is a black time in human history when we should believe such things.

We can’t be saved by money or things or power or public acclaim.  We can only be saved by accepting our baptismal challenge to help bring about the reign of God in the way Jesus models – to heal the sick, visit those in prison, serve the poor, help the hungry and homeless, bring hope to the despairing, and pray for those overcome by the addictions of our society.

And above all to keep alert, to watch for the signs of hope. Tend the God seed in you.  Stay awake, Jesus says – not because I am going to destroy you if you are in the middle of a shopping frenzy when I come again, but because you might not recognize me.  Stay awake so that when I show up in your life – as that quiet inner voice, or that friend who consoles, or that new opportunity – you won’t miss me.

“And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake”!
- Sr. Constance Joanna, SSJD


Saturday, November 8, 2014

God and Mammon

God and Mammon
 St. John’s Convent, November 8, 2014


I sometimes feel that I should preach homilies that are more pastoral and less political. And then the lectionary goes and throws things like today's Gospel. Because really, one of the things we perhaps don't acknowledge often is that the Gospels are overall more political than they are pastoral; especially if we understand political in the larger sense, as being about the great questions of how we organize our common life. Besides which, I've recently been meeting with a national church task force trying to develop resources on the theology of money, so it's not a good day to try to dodge this challenge.

“You cannot serve God and wealth.” The old translation, “God and Mammon,” though a bit obscure, might actually take us closer to the meaning, because, by using the name of a minor Roman god of wealth, it makes it clear that what Jesus is talking about here is that core sin of idolatry. We may not consciously worship money, not quite – but we do, for the most part, allow money, the systems of finance, to govern our lives, to make our choices for us, to tell us the way in which we should go. I feel reasonably sure that the average Christian, and the average congregation, think and talk about money far, far more often than they think and talk about God. And in many – most? -- of our churches, a platter full of money sits on the altar through the eucharistic prayer, along with the bread and wine, along with the body and blood, and we think that this is a good thing.

But there is little point in blaming individuals. We are all enmeshed in a gigantic, global economic system from which there is very little possibility of escape. Every choice we make is made within the boundaries of an unjust economic order, built on debt and interest and speculation in imaginary wealth, built on cheap consumer goods and slave labour and hunger, built on an endlessly turning wheel of false desire and fear. I participate in it constantly and unconsciously by having money in banks which invest in socially and environmentally destructive projects, by buying a harmless cookie which contains palm oil, the production of which is devastating the rainforests. There is no easy way out.

We need to look back at that very weird bit at the beginning of the Gospel passage, though. I have no idea why the lectionary editors did this, but they've attached, at the start, a throwaway and obviously sardonic comment which Jesus uses to conclude one of his strangest parables, the story of the unjust steward, whose cleverly devious financial manoeuvres save his job and his life. The story, in fact, of someone trapped inside a system of injustice, compelled to play by the rules of injustice, who, for reasons which are not particularly good or worthy, finds himself undermining the system and accidentally driving it towards grace. He doesn't get out of the system; but he bends it a little, faithful – really entirely despite himself – in this little thing.

It would be better if we were a bit more consciously faithful. And we can be, to some degree, even while acknowledging our inescapable complicity. This Sisterhood is actually an outstanding example of the degrees of escape which are possible, a community which foresakes the principles of individual ownership and endless consumer desire upon which our system is built, a community built on a rethinking of human nature more radical than it may, on the surface, appear. And, because you are a community, you can do more than most individuals can to, say, generate some of your own electricity, reorganize your investments, all those things which you are doing. It is not very dramatic in the terms of the world, and it does not solve our great problem of being enmeshed in Mammon's world; but it is that little escape from idolatry which can let the rest of us know that some escape is possible.


Mammon isn't getting out of our lives, or our churches, any time very soon. But accepting that we can only be faithful in relatively little does not mean that we settle for being faithful in as little as possible. At the very least, those of us who are not part of this Sisterhood should be more mindful of the real and important challenge the Sisterhood poses to us. Pray, and choose, and renounce, and care. And allow ourselves, little by little, to be welcomed into that great community, before which all the values of the world fall down.
- Maggie Helwig