The Wesley Foundation at UVA

Final worship of the fall semester — 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.

“Streams in the Desert”

Isaiah 35: 1-10, Matthew 11: 2-11, and Luke 1: 46b -55

I’ve been thinking about streams in the desert.  You can see how this might come up in my thoughts.  We’ve got Isaiah and then Matthew both talking about wilderness this week and we were with John the Baptizer in the wilderness at the Jordan last week.  We’ve got this Advent time of waiting, a penitential season in which we pray for reign, r-e-i-g-n, and anticipate the joy that erupts with Christmas…

Before we traveled to Israel and the West Bank two years ago, when I heard “wilderness” I always pictured terrain more like what I have encountered backpacking in the Appalachian mountains.  Wilderness for me meant a place to get lost, a wooded place where it might be hard to see the trees for the forest, a place to hide out when it rains or when bears come too close.  A place removed from civilization – which can be freeing and terrifying at once.  Whenever I read about biblical wilderness, I definitely saw it in my mind’s eye as a large thicket.  I had it wrong.

When I traveled to the Middle East I realized that wilderness and desert are the same.  It’s not Appalachia, but Arizona.  There is no place to hide, unless you find a cave or sit on the shadier side of a large rock.  No thicket, just miles of exposure.  Sand, sun, searing.  It’s a place where water is scarce, highly valued, and absolutely necessary for life.  It’s also a place where water can be terrifying when it finally shows up.

You’ve probably seen a movie scene set in the American Southwest, if you haven’t been to a place like this is real life.  The ground is cracked open, yawning upwards for any drop of moisture and there are wide flat areas that – at first, to a Virginian – don’t seem all that different from the rest of the desert floor.  It’s all hard, parched, baked, and tan.  But when you come across a wide flatter area like this you often see a sign designating it as “a wash.”  When the weather changes you find that these are dried riverbeds.  These are spots where – when it finally rains hard – the water comes so quickly the ground can’t absorb it and it runs off in great washes of tempestuous flowing water.  You don’t want to be parked in a wash or sleeping in your tent in a wash.  There is no time when you hear that loud roar washing your way.  In movies this is a terrifying scene and I suspect that’s pretty true to real life.

So, I’ve been thinking about streams in the desert.  Usually when I read this passage from Isaiah I focus on the joy and rejoicing – and surely that is here.  Surely, in this season of promise and anticipation, we know that the slaking of our thirst with living water will bring rejoicing from the desert-like places in our own lives.

Usually when I read this passage I think about the blessing water is, especially in the desert.  Imagine: streams will flow in the desert!  What a gift!  What cause for joy and singing – even for crocuses!

But this time when I read the passage, I was remembering my trip and the re-defining the word “wilderness” went through for me.  This time I was not only picturing a really hot place where it sure would be nice to get some more rain soon.  This time I was picturing the washes.

Isaiah proclaims that “[t]he wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom” (Isaiah 35: 1) and he writes “waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert (v.6).

Imagine what it would be like to be there when “waters break forth in the wilderness and streams [break forth] in the desert” (v. 6).  Would joy be your first response?  Would you be dancing and rejoicing or trying to get out of the way?

Have you ever prayed for something so long and so hard and then, when your prayer was answered you weren’t sure you had prayed for the right thing?

Imagine praying for water in the desert.  Imagine being an East-coaster praying for water in Arizona or the West Bank.  Day in and day out, the same prayer.  The same hope.  Some days are harder to keep up hope and to believe in the efficacy of prayer.  But you do it and you envision what it will be like.  Maybe you are thinking of building a dam to get you through the lean times of low rainfall.  Maybe you are anticipating a sensual drenching in it, dancing in the mud and getting wet through your clothes to the skin.  Maybe you have all your bottles and buckets lined up to catch it when it comes.  In any case, soon there will be rejoicing and celebration.

And then one day it does come.  But it hardly comes from the sky before you feel it on your feet, rising in your house, rushing past your door, creating havoc with those neatly aligned bottles.  It is out of control, too much too fast, not safe for swimming in, muddy from the rough-and-tumble way it’s careening by.  What would you do?

I can imagine being terrified by this, rather than full of joy.  I can imagine wondering how I am supposed to use and enjoy this unpredictable and lurching water.  I can imagine wanting to run away.  I can imagine questioning God’s gift of water like this.

But here it is in the leading-up-to-Christmas liturgy.  “Waters shall break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes” (Isa. 35: 6-7)  And it is read as good news.

Mary knows good news when she hears it – and even though it defies all semblances of good news.  A pre-marriage baby born to a poor teenager.  A carpenter willing to stand by her though he isn’t the father.  Not what she was praying for.  And yet she sings!  My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of this servant.  Surely everyone in all generations to come will call me blessed! (Luke 1: 46b-48).

Later, John the Baptizer wants to know, from deep within his prison cell, if what he is hearing can be believed.  Are you the one I’ve been preaching about and baptizing for?  Are you here at last or shall we keep waiting?  (Mt. 11: 2-3).  Jesus tells the messenger who comes asking, Go and tell John what you hear and see:  the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame leap, the leapers are clean, the dead live, and the poor know good news at last (Mt. 11: 4-5).

The texts for this season are powerful and poetic and often very familiar to us as they weave back and forth between promise and fulfillment, resounding in both testaments of the Bible.  When we really read the texts for this season they can be hard to take.  If the poor are receiving good news, what are the rich receiving?  Mary sings that they are sent away empty (v. 53).  If streams break forth in the desert is that the answer to our thirsty prayers or a drowning, new, terrifying problem?

God’s promises can be trusted.  This is awesome and terrifying precisely because God doesn’t make trifling promises.  What happens when one of God’s promises is fulfilled in your presence?  When what you have been praying for shows up how will you react?  Will you make room for the guest in your home or out back in the shed?  Will you sing when it looks to others like you are crazy?  Will you recognize Jesus even if he comes naked and cooing rather than riding in as a king?  How will you trust the promise, when what you are expecting is a lake but what you receive is a thunderous charging stream in the desert?

May you be offered such a gift along with the grace to receive it.

Thanks be to God!

© Deborah Lewis 2007

Dinner only tonight, no forum. Good luck on exams!

This is our last Thursday night dinner until spring semester.

“I’m baptized.  Now what?”

Matthew 3: 1-12

Who better than I to demonstrate to all the world the strangeness of God?  People think it’s the locusts and honey, the camel’s hair clothing.  It scratches.  It’s not what most folks are wearing and eating.  But this isn’t really what makes all this so odd.

Other people think in terms of real estate.  Sure there’s a waterfront view, but the desert –the wilderness – is where our people have languished and left before.  We’re not usually clamoring to come back out here.  That’s, of course, why I came.  To get away from what we were all expecting.  To let God show me the enormity of what I might expect, if only I would listen.

Who better than I to demonstrate to all the world the strangeness of God?  The way God bursts into time and places we least expect, hardly ever looking the way we assume.  Take my family, for starters.  My dad was arrogant enough to laugh at the news that my old and barren mother would give birth to me.  He had nine long silent months to think about that laugh.  He always told me he saw how funny it was only when he was forced to be quiet so long.  He would say, “John, God’s good news always sounds like a joke but it never is and we always miss the humor anyway.”  He’s said that my whole life but I didn’t completely get his meaning until I found myself wearing this camel’s hair robe, scrounging for locusts, and calling people to repent.

That one trips a lot of people us when they hear it.  Too many televangelists, I think, mussing up the meaning and confusing seekers.  Repent.  You know, with God there is always room for talk about sin, but we often use the wrong words when we start that conversation.  Repentance isn’t about getting bogged down in what we’re doing wrong and what we should do right.  It’s about the turning around, turning away, turning upside down and inside out.  It’s the poor who are blessed – just look at them!  The hungry know God’s blessings and so do those who grieve.  Woe to those of us who think otherwise, who like the order we have created for ourselves, the world the way we envision it and structure it.  The house of cards we keep propping up.  Repent!

It’s about the turning around, turning away, turning upside down and inside out.  My aunt Mary put it really well, “God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.  God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1: 51-53).  The kingdom of heaven has come near (Mt. 3:2) and it’s like those days out here on the sand when the heat waves make ordinary things look strange and beautiful.  Sometimes water seems to appear in the sky.  Upside down and inside out.  Only God’s way is no mirage.

When I get going like this, they start using the “m” word:  messiah.  Tongues cluck and fingers wag.  Maybe some are hopeful, maybe they’ve heard the beginnings of something they are trying to listen for.  Do I think I’m some kind of messiah?  Are they really listening?  “…One who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals.  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”  I say it every day, standing in the Jordan, calling God’s children to upside down expectations and life cleaner and newer and more profound than they could ever have known.  But it’s not I who can give that life.  I simply point it out, point the way.  My voice cries out in the wilderness:  “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Mt. 3: 3).

I love the days when I can find even one person awake and listening.  We stand there with our toes in the sand and silt, skin glistening in the sun with water.  We give ourselves up to it, letting God wash over us, wash away our proud imaginations and wayward ideas.  We let the Wind take us and topple our houses of cards.  I love those days.

But I have to send these on at the end of the day because it’s not me calling but God.  Baptizing them is only the beginning.  It’s the answer to the first sounds of the call.  It’s a strange call with upside down expectations and it comes at unexpected times.  It’s a strange God, I tell you.  This clothing, this honey, this river, this wilderness – this is my calling, but it’s not theirs.  It’s not yours.  We cross paths here and I stay.  Where is God calling them when they put their sandals back on and start back on the road to town?  Who is God calling to meet me here next?  Where is God calling you?

Who better than I to demonstrate to all the world the strangeness of God?  Well…Who better than you?

Thanks be to God!

© Deborah Lewis 2007

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.

Dinner @ 6pm, followed by Worship in the sanctuary of Wesley Mem @ 7pm.  Come prepare your heart and mind for Advent.

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.

“Peace on Earth Sounds Great”

Matthew 24: 36-44 and Isaiah 2: 1-5 and Romans 13: 11-14

I heard it twice this week.  Amid all the loud, battery-operated, you-simply-have-to-have-this-this-year television commercials, this one stood out.  It’s from Walmart.  Maybe you’ve noticed that Wal-Mart has started upping the ante on its commercials recently.  Gone are those annoying bouncy yellow smiley faces slashing huge cartoonishly written prices.  They have toned down the blue and yellow.  People in the ads are wearing less flannel and whereas they used to be clearly working class or lower middle class they seem much more solidly middle class and even upper middle class now.  Marketers and MBAs and advertisers would probably all say this is a good thing – broader appeal, bigger dollar consumers, etc.  I’m not so sure.

The new ad campaign also comes with the tagline “Save money.  Live Better.  Wal-Mart”.  This was at the end of the commercial I saw twice this past week, the one I want to tell you about.  It features a woman in her 30s with small twin boys.  The whole commercial focuses on the fact that, of course, she must buy two of everything in order to keep the peace at her house.  There are shots of the boys wearing the same outfits and playing with the same Spiderman action figures.  Everywhere they go they have identical clothes and toys and belongings.  Obviously, the ad is meant to show that if you shop at Wal-Mart then even this situation is more bearable.  Things are so reasonably priced at Wal-Mart that buying two isn’t too much of a sting.

Well, fine.  I can be a cynic about marketing and advertising.  I don’t have a soft spot for Wal-Mart.  I really don’t have a soft spot for incessant and consumer-oriented Christmas commercials.  These are my normal gripes and annoyances with the commodification of seemingly everything.

But here’s where smoke started to come from my ears.  We go through the whole commercial showing the two-of-everything theme and, of course, there are snowflakes and red and green and lighted Christmas trees galore.  Then, after the mother has said how economical it is to be able to buy two of everything, she says (and I quote), “Look, peace on earth sounds great…but it’s not happening at my house unless there are two of everything.”  Then the tagline:  “Save money. Live better. Wal-Mart”.

Let me say right now that, against my usual inclinations and personal desires, that this sermon is not about hating Wal-Mart.  It’s also not about how much I hate the hyped up version of Christmas that is sold to us, offensively and aggressively, beginning in early fall.  It is not even about our misguided notions about gift-giving.  Here’s what it is about:  our impoverished, un-Christian, wimpy, bland, anyone-could-do-it idea of “peace”.  That’s what I can’t stand about that commercial.

The mother says, “Look, peace on earth sounds great…but it’s not happening at my house unless there are two of everything.  (Save money. Live better. Wal-Mart)”.  The completely misappropriated use of and misunderstanding about what constitutes peace on earth!  The gall!  “Peace on earth sounds great”??  Can you imagine saying to Jesus, “Look, new and abundant life sounds great and all, but my life is already really abundant – I just got a flat screen TV!  Anyway, I was on my way to Damascus, so would you mind stepping out of my way”?

“Peace on earth sounds great”??  This is a new low – even for Wal-Mart!  The idea that someone would equate the peace on earth echoed throughout the Bible – and in this week’s readings from Isaiah to Romans – with the “peace” of twin brothers who are not arguing with one another is truly stupefying.  We’re talking about lions and lambs lying down to nap together, completely overcoming their predator and prey relationship for something unforeseen and unimaginable.  That’s peace.  We are not talking about a temporary lack of noise and frustration, a “peace” brought about by satisfying self-centered desires of immature children (or adults).

Some of you may be wondering if you can still head out to pick up a few things at Wal-Mart this week.  Or maybe you are wondering what bee flew into my bonnet.  Perhaps it seems that I am giving too much attention and influence to a commercial.  I’m not out to get you off Wal-Mart or to start an anti-media campaign or anything like that.  But I will say that I think I am paying just the right amount of attention.

Today is the first Sunday in Advent, the first Sunday of the Christian year.  These four Sundays of Advent we prepare for the coming of Jesus, both as an infant in a stable, remembering those events from so long ago, and also as Lord of all coming again to finish this new creation.  This is a time to pay attention.

When Ernie, Tom, and I were preparing our liturgy for tonight’s worship, Tom mentioned that today’s texts feel socialist or communist to him.  He said he can’t hear the passage about beating swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks without thinking this (Isa. 2: 4).  We had a good time joking about this but it’s not really a whole lot better than Wal-Mart.  If socialism and communism or Republicanism or Democracticism are the best examples we can think of for the kind of radical reordering of society and the real and lasting peace Jesus is bringing, then something is wrong in the Christian imagination.  We aren’t paying attention.

People often read the passage from Matthew as apocalyptic literature, designed to talk about eschatology or the end of all things, also what we call the second coming of Christ.  That is certainly a faithful Advent theme but I think we miss something if we focus, Left Behind style, only on the rapture.

Matthew reads, “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.  But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.  Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” (Mt. 24: 42-44).  This sounds terrifying!  The Son of Man is a thief who comes in the night and, if we could know in advance when and where he was coming then we’d try keeping him out, all the doors locked up tight.  Because this thief is coming to break in.  That’s what it says.  Christ is coming when we aren’t expecting it, in the dark, possibly when we are asleep and vulnerable, to break in.

This is the season of the unexpected hour.  This is the season of dark nights and vulnerable moments.  This is the season for the in-breaking of God’s Word into the fullness of time.  That is the incarnation we remember and celebrate at Advent and Christmas and it is what can happen in this unexpected hour.  The in-breaking of justice rolling down like the waters and peace like a mighty river, carrying us to a place we can scarcely imagine or grasp.  Watch out.  Keep awake.  Pay attention.  Because Christ is not done being born yet and is not above breaking and entering.  This is the season for the in-breaking of God’s Word into the fullness of time, bringing a peace that requires thievery and smashed windows.

It’s the kind of peace that overturns all other notions of peace.  The kind of peace that makes a simple lack of war seem silly.  The kind of peace that violently transforms all that came before it.  It’s so close and still a little out of reach, so unimaginable that we prepare this feast each week to remind ourselves in anticipation of the taste and feel of it.  Each week we put down our swords and our shopping lists and our busy schedules and our fears and doubts and our inadequate commercials.  We put down our own visions and versions of peace and pick up – for a few Spirit-infused moments – the simple elements through which God reminds us to pay attention and to get ready.  We take and handle the broken pieces that bring wholeness.  That is a step towards living better.

Thanks be to God!

© 2007 Deborah Lewis