The Wesley Foundation at UVA

Dinner @ 6pm, followed by forum @ 7pm.  Check the “Thursday Nights” tab for specific weekly topics.

Head for the backroom at the Pav for a weekly gathering of Wesley folks. Eat, drink, be merry, and still make your next class.

Worship tonight @ 6pm.

Join us for worship each Sunday night in the dining room at the Wesley Foundation. Dress is casual and friends are welcome.

This is a student-led service, with musical worship team and weekly Communion. Come listen for God’s Word and your call.

Come as you are, leave a bit more.

“Kingdom Come”

Luke 1: 68-79

When I lived in Appalachia one of my favorite places to go camping was a state park in southeastern Kentucky called “Kingdom Come.” Many a weekend I would drive over from Virginia and friends near Hazard, Kentucky, would drive down and we’d spend our nights beside camp fires, telling stories and watching the stars. But the best part of being a park visitor was in the telling – telling others where you were going or where you’d been. As in, “I’m going to Kingdom Come.” Or, “Yeah, we spent all last weekend in Kingdom Come.” Or, “Yep, I’ll be in Kingdom Come by dinner tonight.”

I never heard anyone use the full name: Kingdom Come State Park. Most people just say “Shenandoah,” when they mean Shenandoah National Park. Same thing with Kingdom Come. But of course it sounds a little different to our ears.

I loved that! I loved the folksy, insider way people would say “going to Kingdom Come.” I loved how out of place and poetically jarring that sounded. I loved the idea that God’s Kingdom Come to earth was as close as a drive over the mountain, a place I could get to in an afternoon.

I was thinking about my three years in Appalachia after I went to see the movie, Into the Wild. Christopher McCandless graduates from Emory University, gives his $24,000 life’s savings to Oxfam, and heads west with a backpack full of books by Thoreau, Byron, Sharon Olds, and Tolstoy. He wants to escape the fate he sees as Career Man. He doesn’t want possessions and money and societal status to be rulers in his life. And he is trying desperately to come to terms with his parents. He leaves his family and friends behind and travels for two years without word. He abandons his car in New Mexico, burns the money in his wallet, and re-names himself Alexander Supertramp. After several adventures in the Midwest and southwest, he heads for the Alaskan frontier. He wants to walk into the wild and see what he finds and who he becomes, alone.

As you may know if you’ve read the book or seen the movie, this true story ends harshly. McCandless makes a couple of severe miscalculations and dies alone in the wilderness. Though I felt sad at the movie’s end for this fascinating life gone too soon, I was also happy for him. He didn’t take the easy way, the prescribed way, the way everyone was urging him to take. He was captivated by callings things by their true names. He uses this metaphor several times and then, after two years calling himself Alexander Supertramp, reclaims Christopher McCandless just before he dies.

Watching the movie made me think of my years in Appalachia for a couple of reasons. McCandless and I were born about two weeks apart and graduated from college in the same summer. And while I wasn’t trying to escape my past or my family, I suppose my decision to live on a stipend in Appalachia and work with the poor was my way of calling things by their true names. I wanted to see what it would be like to live out the gospel imperatives of peace with justice. I wanted to see if we could create Christian community with each week’s volunteers and with the families we served. I wanted to see if I could live on $5000 a year and I wanted to explore the ways that, with my middle class upbringing, that sacrifice still didn’t make me “poor”.

There is reason to wish that Christopher McCandless had gotten some therapy for the dark family issues that plagued him. The combination of his energy, enthusiasm, idealism, and naiveté are part of what killed him. Maybe it is the 22-year-old Appalachia-living English major in me talking, but it seems that his hunger for the marrow of life is also part of what saved him. His uncompromising zeal delivered him to the life he had always wanted to live.

Today’s first text from Luke is Zechariah’s song, sometimes called the “Benedictus”. You’ll remember that Zechariah is John the Baptist’s father. Zechariah is very old and his wife Elizabeth is unable to have children when the angel visits to give him the unexpected and happy news. Zechariah has a hard time taking it in and asks how this is to happen. Gabriel, the angel sent to announce all this to Zechariah, punishes Zechariah’s questioning by making him mute – speechless – for the duration of his wife’s pregnancy. As soon as the baby is born and Elizabeth names him John folks start to ask why she has chosen that name, since no one in the family has that name. They go to check this out with Zechariah who writes down “His name is John,” at which point he is able to speak and immediately begins praising God. After this, people begin to ask what and who John will become. (Luke 1: 5-66)

And this song pours out of Zechariah in response, praising the God who turns the tables, the One who chooses to act through an old shriveled couple and to deliver to wayward people like us salvation wrapped in the vulnerable and improbable package of an infant.

Today is the final Sunday in the Christian year. We call it “Christ the King” Sunday or “Reign of Christ” Sunday. It’s a full circle moment for us as Christians, as we are about to plunge into Advent next week, and with it our next year. It’s the culmination of the liturgical year, where we start with promise and birth, move through life, death, and resurrection, and then spend a long season of Ordinary Time trying to embody it all. Reign of Christ is both a theological statement and a theological hope, just as it is when we pray together the Lord’s Prayer each week. “They kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This is that already-not yet character of God’s kingdom – the reign of God – that can be inspiring and frustrating at the same time. God’s reign is at hand, already happening, already redeeming and transforming all of creation into a new creation. There are moments when we perceive ourselves as new creatures….But there are others when we know we have not yet, as John Wesley would have said, “moved on to perfection”.

God’s reign is already here and is still to come it its fullness. We can taste it in moments feasting at the Table, in opening ourselves to relationships that challenge us and the status quo, in working for peace and justice.

We can also taste how much more of God’s reign we still need. We leave the table forgetting what we have just taken into our bodies and spirits, consumed again by the next thing on our “to do” list. We open up a little bit and then clamp shut on a relationship that may require too much of us. We bring cans for the food bank but get uncomfortable when someone asks why people are hungry in the first place.

Advent begins next week and, besides the incessant commercials and pleas to shop, shop, shop, you’ll be reminded of that humble manger and that unspectacular birth that brought the infant Jesus. With all the fuss, it may be harder to hear the words about Jesus’ second coming. But listen for them.

Maybe that’s why Reign of Christ Sunday comes just before Advent: to help us remember to look forward as well as back. And to look around us! Thy kingdom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Where is that happening now?

What are you doing to bring about the kingdom in its fullness?

Where are you being called to call things by their true names?

How will you hear the Advent promises this year, especially in light of this Christ the King Sunday?

He’s not just the baby Jesus; he’s the Lord of Life. And he isn’t born into the fullness of time only in December. Every moment, every facet of your life is infused with this Presence. Can you feel it?

Living like this is as close as this moment, as real as this room, as abundant as this feast. You don’t have to live in Kentucky to make it to Kingdom Come.

Thanks be to God!

© 2007 Deborah Lewis

Nothing going on here tonight.  See you next week!

Head for the backroom at the Pav for a weekly gathering of Wesley folks. Eat, drink, be merry, and still make your next class.

Worship tonight @ 6pm.

Join us for worship each Sunday night in the dining room at the Wesley Foundation. Dress is casual and friends are welcome.

This is a student-led service, with musical worship team and weekly Communion. Come listen for God’s Word and your call.

Come as you are, leave a bit more.

“Ordinary Time”

Isaiah 65: 17-25

Today marks our last Sunday in Ordinary Time. “Ordinary Time” is what the church calls the seasons in between the special liturgical seasons. The colors of paraments and vestments – green for ordinary time – help us keep track of where we find ourselves in the cycles of the Christian year. Next Sunday, Christ the King (or Reign of Christ) Sunday, the color is white. The Sunday after that Advent begins and we’ll have four purple Sundays before Christmas white. And on it goes.

The “juicy” parts of the Christian year begin with Advent and end with Pentecost. The story of Jesus from incarnation to resurrection is retold each year in that swath of time between Advent and Pentecost. It’s a good half of the calendar year and it starts with the incarnation cycle of Advent-Christmas-Epiphany, then there’s a small blip of green ordinary time in there sometime in January or February, depending upon the year. After that blip then it’s Transfiguration Sunday (white) and the transcendence cycle of Lent-Easter-Pentecost beings. We hit Ash Wednesday and it’s purple again all the way through Lent until we reach Holy Week, where we get black on Friday and then Easter white. The several Sundays of Easter are all white, too, and then it’s red for Pentecost.

At that point in the Christian year, except for an occasional day like All Saints when we pull out the white again or the occasion of someone’s baptism when we bring back the red, it’s green, green, green all the way to Christ the King. This coming liturgical year the Ordinary Time green starts on May 25^th and lasts through November 16^th.

The church also designates Ordinary Time by referring to how many Sundays a certain Sunday is after the preceding special season. So, for instance, today is also referred to as the 25^th Sunday after Pentecost. (And those blip Sundays in the winter are referred to as the 1^st Sunday after Epiphany, etc.)

But I like “Ordinary Time.” Actually, it may be my least favorite liturgical season, but I like calling it what it is: the ordinary, week in and week out, passage of time.

But we all know that there is nothing ordinary about this time, don’t we? The interesting, frustrating, soul-filling, confusing, holy thing about the church’s liturgical year is that it does not conform to any other version of the year. We don’t start with January 1^st and we don’t start on an exact date each year. We start four Sundays before Christmas. We start with waiting on a promise.

It might be nice if we could schedule Advent to being after exams are through or to never have spring break fall in the season of Lent. For those of us who hike up Humpback Rocks for our Easter Sunrise worship it would be convenient if the “spring forward” time change never happened on Easter weekend.

But here we are in our last Sunday of Ordinary Time, simultaneously getting ready to go home for Thanksgiving….and dreading all that looms on the other side of that holiday. It may be Ordinary Time but there is nothing ordinary about it!

Ordinary Time began in June this year and I suspect that, contrary to the season description, these months have been some of the most extraordinary of your life. Some of you have begun college and some began their final year of college. Some of us are struggling with sickness and loneliness. Others are wondering about sexuality and what it means to be attracted to someone else, to be really attracted to a certain someone else. You have experienced deaths this year during time called “ordinary.” You have wondered about your own usefulness in the world and where God is calling you to study or work or live. You have loved and struggled with your parents. You have stayed up all night for a good grade and you have wondered if grades matter as much as everyone says they do. You have probably felt ordinary a lot but there have even been some extraordinary moments. But these last few months, “ordinary”?

The words we read from Isaiah 65 were written about 2500 years ago for Israelites returning from the Babylonian exile. And they were written for us. But they can be hard to decipher. I can’t explain why God’s words “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth” seem to be taking a long time to come true (Isa. 65: 17). Does it make sense in 2007 to read that weeping and cries of distress won’t be heard in Jerusalem (Isa. 65: 19)? With prayers that seem to go unanswered, how can we read “before they call I will answer” (Isa. 65: 24)? “They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity” (Isa. 65: 23). Would you like to read that with the mother of a solider stationed in Iraq? These beautiful, inspiring, confusing, maddening, poetic, prophetic words were written 2500 years ago. And they were also written for us.

Gene Tucker, a biblical scholar and retired seminary professor, advises that the worst thing we can do in our biblical study is to reverse the miracle at Cana (New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 6, p. 27). You remember, that’s the one when the wine runs out at a wedding and Jesus helps the celebration continue by turning water into wine. Tucker says that when we read a passage of scripture – even as we are straining for its meaning and learning about its context – we must be careful not to turn wine into water. Let it be complex and hard to explain and poetic and enigmatic and alluring and frightening all at once! The wine of God’s Word is there for us to enjoy and drink from deeply, not to water down.

So I’m not going to try to explain away the hard places in today’s text. I’m not going to try to recast it all so that you can “really see” how all this prophecy has come true. All I’m going to do is try to imaginatively restate it, to help you hear this more as the exiles did, as God might speak to you today…

For I am setting out to create new heavens and a new earth. Completely new life for you! Transformed so that it barely resembles what you now know. All those things you want to forget you will no longer remember or be able to bring to mind. What you have done before is all in the past. What you have failed is over. Even now, don’t focus on those things, but know that I am setting out to create my people as a joy and a delight. Weeping and cries of distress will cease and no one will recognize their sounds. No longer will you grieve for those whose lives are over too soon. From now on, when hundred-year-old people die they will still be considered “young”! Parents, grandparents, family, and friends will live long lives of joy. No longer will you grieve over broken relationships, lost loves. No longer will you fear giving yourself to love. No longer will you fear the taste of Thanksgiving turkey because it reminds you of the end of the semester crunch. You will study for exams and pass them easily; you will pick the major you love and find fulfilling work in that field. You are my chosen and you will enjoy the work of your hands, the calling for which I made you. Your work, your love, and your life will not be in vain. From each one blessings will flow. Before you form a prayer in your mind or before you can call out my name, I will answer your prayer. The whole world is being created as new. The worst enemies – Hokies and Hoos, Israelis and Palestinians, American soldiers and Al Qaeda soldiers – these will break bread together and sit at my table like family. There is nothing you fear, nothing you flee, no place you have failed where I am not creating life and abundance. You are part of this creation that I am renewing and I take delight in you.

With God, no time is ordinary. The interesting, frustrating, soul-filling, confusing, holy thing about God is that God does not conform to our notions of time. The time is at hand and the kingdom is very near. We believe in the already-not yet of Christ’s reign. We’ll taste it here in a moment even as we long for the full feast to come. It’s both at once, it’s maddening and inspiring and it is the God who never changes working transformative, miraculous change in each of us and in the life of this world. All time is ordinary and extraordinary at once. And we start with waiting on a promise.

Thanks be to God!

© 2007 Deborah Lewis

Dinner @ 6pm, followed by forum @ 7pm.  Check the “Thursday Nights” tab for specific weekly topics.

The Administrative Board meets tonight at 6:30pm.