On reading the contents of file boxes and the call to stay awake at all times

 Arab women grinding coffee in Palestine

“Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” 

-Matthew 24:41

I went to church yesterday on the First Sunday of Advent with a lot on my mind, given that I've been spending a lot of time recently reading from files left behind when my father died 47 years ago. In those files I'm reading about his religious and spiritual outlook on the world of his day, and it's making me think about my religious and spiritual outlook on the events of today.

In the assembly of the church yesterday we marked the beginning of Advent; a season in which Christians are focused on getting ready for the coming of Christ into our midst at the Feast of the Incarnation. We read from Matthew's Gospel of Jesus telling his audience to keep awake and alert in order to be able to perceive the coming of the Son of Man (his name for himself) into a world which - like ours - was full of conflict and threats to peace.

Recalling the biblical story of Noah’s flood; a cataclysm which took many by surprise, Jesus teaches that God’s coming into their midst will likewise be at an unexpected time and in an unexpected way. Those practicing alertness and preparedness will perceive God’s presence and deliverance, while those limited to routine expectations will be caught unaware. To illustrate this, he offers images of pairs of people engaged in routine tasks: two working in a field, two women working with mortar and pestle grinding grain. One will be aware, one unaware and taken by surprise.

“Keep awake therefore,” Jesus says, “for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

The message of Advent, then, is always “Stay Awake!” Prepare to be addressed by God from unexpected sources and in unexpected times and places.

What follows after this portion of Matthew’s Gospel are a series of parables which drive this point home again and again, and then we come to the parable of the judgment of the nations, in which Jesus offers listeners a huge insight into how his presence - God’s presence - will be known to them.  God will be present before them in the hungry and thirsty, in the foreigner, the unclothed, the sick needing tending, the imprisoned. The shocked and surprised hearers in Jesus' parable hear that in serving them, they were serving him. He was them. These people in distress were him.

The file boxes I'm reading were left when my father (a pastor and Bible teacher) died 47 years ago at the young age of 59. The boxes have been stored for decades, and the room where they now sit open has a faint musty smell. Now that I am retired and have time, I’ve been thinking a lot about my father and mother and my family of origin and seeking to understand my own journey, and to understand my parents' journey so that I can love them better (yes, you can love people who have been dead a long time). The communion of saints, I believe, is real, and death does not ultimately separate us from one another.

In my reading I'm getting a look at how my father inhabited the world of the 1950's and 1960's from within the container of a conservative and fundamentalist and evangelical religion informed by thinkers who claimed - whether rightly or not, I really don't know - the mantle of John Calvin. This was a world of white suburbia and rural areas of overwhelmingly white Oregon. It was a world of those caught up in the Red Scare, of the fear of creeping “socialism.”

In this world, the image of God as Sovereign was key, eclipsing all other attributes that scripture and tradition assign to the mystery of God. This Sovereign was offended by our terrible sinfulness and was full of wrath against us. This Sovereign deemed our race as an offense, justly deserving of eternal conscious torment in hell for our sinfulness, inherited from Adam's sin in the Garden. In this world, the importance of Jesus Christ was that he was the scapegoat for our sins, that on the cross he bore the punishment of God's wrath in our stead. God's wrath was poured out on Jesus so that God's offended justice could be satisfied. In this world I overheard talk of “Sovereign Grace,” meaning that God had chosen some of us - in a mysterious way hidden from our eyes and understanding - to be saved from the burning, while the rest of humanity went to never-ending punishment in the lake of fire and brimstone. Life as a Christian was to be a continual examining of ourselves to see if we had the marks of one of the “elect” who would be saved, and there was no higher priority for Christians than to reach people with this message so that they too might have the chance to be saved and go to heaven when they died.

In this world, there was a general agreement that time was short, that the world was going to end soon and that Christ would return to judge the world. For some in this world, there would be a “rapture” in which the saved would mysteriously disappear into the heavens before a time of Great Tribulation preceding the final return of Christ to earth. My father, formally trained in a seminary which taught this view, held to this view with a twist: he believed that the Tribulation would come first, and then the return of Christ to claim his elect. 

So in his writings I repeatedly have been reading his warnings of a time of persecution ahead for Christians. The world was getting worse and worse, he believed, and we must be ready, he warned, to withstand this persecution. Withstanding persecution would be a sign to assure us that we really are one of those elected from before time by a Sovereign God for salvation, and not one of those whose profession of faith would be proven “empty,” and thus bound for perdition.

That’s the world I grew up in, and amazingly, I’m still a Christian by persuasion. That’s because I’ve been offered the opportunity to learn from others whose witness as to Christ’s work among us was ignored by people in my world. A lot can be said from Scripture and tradition to refute this narrow and cruel view of God’s purposes for us revealed in Jesus, but for today’s purposes I’m focusing on what I understand that we missed in our immediate environs while preoccupied with these doctrines. We missed seeing a great deal of what Jesus was talking about in these texts from Matthew, and particularly the parable of the judgment of the nations in Matthew chapter 25.  We missed what one of the prayers of my tradition calls Jesus’ “redeeming work.”

O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

During this time of the 50’s and 60’s, a lot was going on in the world around us. The Civil Rights movement, to name one revolutionary event, was going on around us. In my reading of documents in those files, however, I see no expression of concern to understand and join what God might be doing in the midst of that great movement in which a people cried out for and stood up for justice, at great cost to many. I see no acknowledgment that God might be present and sympathetic with those protesting Jim Crow laws, racial bigotry, lynching, segregation.  I’m ashamed to say it, but I see written evidence in those files that Martin Luther King Jr. was simply seen in our world as a trouble-maker. In this world of my upbringing, as evidenced in these files, we apparently didn’t consider the struggles of the Civil Rights movement as an expression of Jesus’ “redeeming work,” even though the motivation for so many heroes of this movement was precisely their hope and trust in Jesus, seen against the backdrop of the Bible’s story of Moses leading the children of Israel from captivity to Pharoah.

In reading the documents in these files I see reflected the culture in which I was raised; a culture in which religion was focused not on the Great Commandment to love God and one’s neighbor, not on the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount, but on a system of apocalyptic teachings of the end of the world supported by a pastiche of biblical texts organized into a system which became a lens through which the Bible was read. I see evidence in those files of a dismissive attitude toward figures in society who were calling for peacemaking. Those who urged policies and practices that sought to make this world a better place were said by people in my world to be deluded. Nothing was to distract us from the mission to fill the lifeboats with those escaping this world for the next one.

As I read those files, feelings arise. Feelings of sadness, frustration, embarrassment, regret. I now see that all around us at that time were events and occasions in which Jesus’ solidarity with people in need of God’s love and redemption and reconciliation and justice were abundantly evident. We just didn’t see them, focused as we were on some other agenda for God.

I’ve come to know God as Love, thanks to the witness of many wise and faithful followers of God that people in my world either didn’t know about or actively ignored. The God I aspire to worship  is the God of Jesus’ solidarity with sufferers and outcasts, the Jesus of compassion and ultimate self-giving who rebukes the powerful and smug and gives a hand up to the humble and meek and suffering, who is continually crossing cultural boundaries that separated people of his time. The image of God in my heart is being healed and shaped by scriptures that speak of God’s love for the world, of God’s intent to redeem and reconcile the world. It is being healed and given hope by early church writers who wrote confidently of God’s intent to save the entire human race. It is being nourished by the stories of saints whose tireless efforts met practical human needs, whose prayers and contemplation opened up vistas of Divine compassion. My heart is being healed by artists in music and literature and poetry and the visual arts who reflect back to the world the beauty and complexity of God’s continuous creative activity to sustain the world and fill it with life and beauty and all manner of wondrous things. The hope of my heart is sustained by people in my world and your world who are actively doing works of justice and mercy.

Because Jesus shows us God as transgressive and profligate love, I can love my father, despite my dissent toward much of what he taught. I can and do love my father because I perceive him as the object of God’s undying love, a love that is even now being worked out in my father’s favor wherever he is in the mysterious beyond.  I can and do rejoice in what I can intuitively know of this gracious work of God. Yes, I'm a sinner, imperfect. But I'm loved and given grace to turn and start afresh.

And I love Jesus. Imperfectly and haltingly, of course, but consistently that’s my response to what I see in his redeeming work. He’s a lover. His love sometimes manifested as ferocity, such as when he overturned the tables of the moneychangers, but it’s love nonetheless, and on the cross, we’re told, he asked for his tormentors to be forgiven.

This Advent, I’m called to be alert and aware of what the risen Christ is doing among us to redeem (to get out of prison and bondage) us.  I’m called to be ready to greet him in a new and deeper appreciation on the day we celebrate his Incarnation as God’s face shown to us in human form.

This Advent, God is calling us to behold Christ in all his redeeming work, and in that beholding him to learn how to discern the times and places where he is showing up.

If we want to recognize Christ coming among us now and at the end of all things, we look at what Christ did in his first coming among us as the Incarnate Son of God.  That helps us wake up, to be alert.

So by all means, let’s stay awake.  Let’s be alert!

Arab women grinding coffee in Palestine., from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59364 [retrieved November 27, 2022]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Coffeepalestine.jpg.