NOTICE TO ON-DEMAND WORSHIPPERS

In order to expedite posting the worship services here on our website, we are reducing the transcript to just the scriptures used and the message. Union Grove UMC in partnership with Southland Books & Cafe, began holding Second Sunday Community Church in January 2023. Second Sunday Community Church takes place at 3 p.m. ET the second Sunday of every month, meets in-person at The Bird & The Book, and is also live-streamed on Facebook.  Holy Communion is offered at every Second Sunday service. If you are worshipping on Second Sundays online whether during the live-cast or through on-demand viewing, you are encouraged to have bread and juice or wine available as you watch the service and to participate in communion just as if you are present with us.

 

SCRIPTURE READINGS

God, open us to hear and receive your scriptures today as you would have us hear them, understand them as you would have us understand them, and to act upon them as you would have us act upon them.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

*Scriptures this morning are from the NRSV.

Isaiah 64:1-9

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence – as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil– to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.

From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.

You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself, we transgressed.

We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. 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 Holy Parent; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.

Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.

Mark 13:24-37

“But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.

Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.

So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.

Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

“But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.

It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.

Therefore, keep awake–for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.

And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

L:  The scriptures of God for the people of God.

A: Thanks be to God.       

Message – Our Shocking Hope*

Rev. Val

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing to you, O Lord, my rock, and my redeemer, and may you see fit to use me as a vessel from which you pour out your Divine Word.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

How is everyone? I hope your holiday was peaceful with as little trauma and drama as possible. I know for some, holidays are those things we know are coming, and tend to get anxious about one way or another. We wait, we imagine how we’d like it to go or how we think it will go. We make decisions based on what we know and, to some degree, what we anticipate. And then we wait … we wait for the holiday or event or whatever is coming or that we think is coming or that we hope is either coming or would pass quickly. We wait.

And then wham! It sneaks up on us and hits us like a ton of bricks. “Yikes, it’s … insert the relevant holiday or event!” And we begin scrambling to get everything ready, all the details worked out, all the running back and forth done so we can get through whatever it is with as little stress or pain or panic as possible.

That’s where we are right now in our church year and, to some degree, where we are as a church … that, “Yikes, it’s Advent!” And in our case, “Yikes, we got our building back and Rev’s getting asked when the mission will reopen and … and … and …”

Maybe we’re not as ready as we thought. Lord knows we have too much to do, limited resources to do it, our lists keep growing longer, our accomplishments seem to be fewer and further between. For everything we check off, six more tasks slip onto the list. Why is this happening? Who is doing this?

I’m pretty sure this is where the whole legend about elves got its start: folks found their holiday to-do lists growing almost before their eyes and the only possible explanation was mischievous little elves adding to those lists while everyone else was asleep. We’re just not ready.

Which is precisely why we need this season called Advent – not just here at church, but in our lives outside the church … our Monday through Saturday lives as well. The originators of the Christian calendar knew that we all would need a swift kick to get the new year started. So, Advent begins with a call to get ready. Because we aren’t ready. Worse than that, we’ve forgotten that we have anything to get ready for. Or we thought that what we are supposed to be getting ready for is a celebration of the past. We are preparing for a historical observation of something God did at one time. And we are still grateful for it; we are still defined by it; we still try to live differently because of it. But it is, to an extent, old news. It is a case of “been there, done that” when it comes right down to it, isn’t it? Same story, different year?

Or is it?

What is it that we are waiting for? What are we looking for? The first reading for this first Sunday of Advent … that passage from Isaiah … reminds us that what we long for is not a historical remembrance but a new reality, a new encounter.

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” (Isaiah 64:1a, NRSV) is the plea. We know you are present; our faith tells us that you are here. But we need to know it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Shake us up so that we can be certain again. We’ve begun to wonder; we’ve begun to doubt. So, do it again, Lord. Do it again.

This is where our historical observance … our trek back to Isaiah comes in. This is where telling the story becomes so important. Not just so that we can look back with a sigh and long for the good old days, not so that we can wistfully wish for the blessing that they had back in the day, but so that we can learn to recognize it when it comes again.

That is the task of Advent: to pay attention to what is and what might be, not just to look back at what was. The people of God were in exile; the foundations of their nation had been shaken; their comforts were taken from them. The human institutions that they had constructed no longer held the security that they had begun to take for granted. So, they began to look elsewhere, and they realized that their faith was shaky as well. They needed a boost. So, they looked backward and forward at the same time. The mountains of our society were shaken, so shake the mountains, O Lord. The foundations of our nation were shaken, so shake the foundations, O God.

They needed an Advent upside the head! They needed a hope that shocked them. We remember, they claimed, we remember how you used to deal with us, and we want that again. We want to remember as you remember. Their words seem like they were reminding God, but really? They were reminding themselves. The look back was not just to give them a warm feeling about what once was, but also a way to spur them to live differently in anticipation of what could be … what they hoped would be.

Advent is a reminder to get out of our sense of complacency. It is hard to be complacent when things are difficult. When all is going well, though, that’s when we need the two-by-four of Advent to wake us. Advent becomes like a prayer, a reminder to hope.

Andrew William Smith, a … in his own words … “teacher-preacher sober creature; DJ poet Wharf Rat & music superfan; author “Broken Megaphones” 2023,” wrote about another wakeup call of sorts he’d received through the late Bishop Carlton Pearson:

“Those “NPR moments” are probably right up there with yoga & pumpkin spice as an ultimate sensitive-progressive-white-person cliche, but this was one.

I actually remember the day well, around the winter holidays, almost 20 years ago. We were on a long drive with my parents, coming back from Georgia to Tennessee, if I remember correctly. Though I am not a huge “This American Life” listener, we were that day, as we stumbled quite accidentally on the “Heretics” episode, featuring former Christian superstar, the Bishop Carlton Pearson, & I was moved to my core & quite beyond myself.

Pearson’s “heresy” was simple: there is no hell. This “revelation” cost him cash, status, real estate, & reputation, but he held onto more humanist, more loving, more flexible, & more radical theologies right until his death from cancer, at the age of 70, on November 19, 2023.

Pearson’s profoundly compassionate yet provocative “Gospel of Inclusion,” coming from a black, then-conservative, evangelical, Pentecostal place in the red-dirt heartland reverberated across the culture & foreshadowed the contemporary spread of Christian universalism among white mainliners & even some evangelicals, marked later by such books as “Love Wins” by Rob Bell & “That All Shall Be Saved” by David Bentley Hart. .

The now well-known public-radio episode spawned a huge response & even a Netflix movie called “Come Sunday,” several years later. At the time I heard the episode, I felt profoundly tugged back toward the Jesus I knew as a child & teenager. At the time that I heard the episode, I was a 30-something neopagan, even heathen, but also struggling with yet-to-be self-diagnosed addictions & alcoholism.

Now I want to say I don’t observe anything objectively wrong with being a heathen or a pagan or even with drinking or drugs per se (or abstinent or Buddhist for that matter), but for me at that time, the maniacally medicinal path wasn’t working. In my case, I was on a hedonistic trajectory for personal trauma & the reported rock-bottom of so many addicts’ journeys.

An attractive, subversively merciful, nonviolent Jesus who spoke in Zen-like riddles & metaphors drew me like a magnet. Someone with the honesty, backstory, & charismatic fire of a Carlton Pearson only pulled me in more. Around the same time I first heard this episode, I was also enchanted with the lyrics on U2’s 2004 album “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb,” lyrics that implied religious universalism, lyrics like, “blessings not just for the ones who kneel.” There’d be a few years between first hearing that episode (or that album) & my full-blown reclamation of my baptismal vows, but teachers who taught with such uninhibited & truly unconditional love really called to me.

Among some circles of the religious, without the possibility of punishment, religion or even morality have no point. The logic goes that such a radical, loving, non-coercive Christ who wields no carrot-&-stick threats of torture can’t sell tithes or fill the pews. We’d all be raving rapists, murdering maniacs, & lusty losers, the argument proceeds, without a God whose plan for eternal infernos of incarceration eclipses any cosmic correlation for sweet salvation. Who needs generosity & goodness without cosmic cops to coercively chain-up the bad? Sadly, it’s often people who promote that human beings are irredeemably depraved who choose such despicable descriptions of the divine!

Contrary to this cheap doctrine with its devil-fetishes & divine fascism, the mystic & revolutionary Jesus story is still truly strange & scandalous, no matter how familiar some of its traditions & trappings might be. Since my recent deconstruction journey began in 2020 (after serving as a pastor in the PCUSA denomination!), I have bounced around between different churches & different ideas about my own doctrines or theologies. I have had profound existential moments of the “eff-its,” which reminded me of my drug-addled departure from the church when I was 20-years old. I have also had fiery, Holy-spirit moments that have soothed my sore heart & sought me with infinite compassion.

The last few years, my cravings to “come home” are triggered by the changing seasons & the start of a new Christian year, which on the calendar begins in Advent, late November or early December. Frequently, I am knocked over by certain events or even a series of events or by certain mystical experiences, sometimes triggered by intentional spiritual practices. Sometimes simply listening to an album on my headphones while walking will knock me out & turn me around. An understanding of universalism with its infinite mercy & endless forgiveness, this fits for a season of recursive & repeated deconstruction & reconstruction.

It was at the conclusion of just such a recent walk when I learned about the passing of Carlton Pearson. It hit me with such a gust of wind, such a punch to the guts, such an aching appreciation of everything Bishop Pearson did & said & with profound pull to the bosom of our brother Jesus, the cosmic & universal Christ.”

The passage from Mark today is another one of those Advent-style two-by-fours, those reminders to stay hopeful … the call of Jesus in that passage … to wake up, stay alert, get ready, stay ready. It is a call to hope. But a shocking hope, a hope that startles, that shakes us to the core if we’re thinking about it. But a hope, nonetheless. We sometimes must listen hard to hear something hopeful in these descriptions, but it is there. Underneath sometimes, but still there.

But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. … “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. … And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” – Mark 13:24-26, 32-33, 37, NRSV

Nervous? Well, yes, because there is much to do and a deadline to meet. But at the same time, we hear the promise that the master is near. Not as a threat, but as a promise. We are not alone. What we see in front of us is not all that there is. History is heading somewhere. We may not know where exactly, except that it is someplace called the Kingdom of Heaven. Or as Jesus was fond of describing it, it is Life. And that is what we long for in the end, life. Life in all its fullness and meaning, life in all its joy and promise. That’s what is coming; that is what is promised.

And we forget every now and then. We forget that we are looking for anything, that we are hoping for anything. Until Advent comes and knocks us upside the head with a not-so-subtle reminder: Watch! And I would add, “Don’t stop hoping.”

As I mentioned briefly, while we started Advent a week early, today is also Reign of Christ Sunday, so let me close with this from Chris Harbin, Pastor at Wingate United Methodist Church because it speaks to both the Reign of Christ and how to wait productively, actively, remembering backward while hoping forward, all the while living in the now and not-yet:

“Popular Christianity is still waiting for Jesus to return to establish God’s Reign upon the earth. Jesus said we would see God’s Reign within the life of the generation hearing his words. We somehow neglect that. When John and Jesus spoke of God’s Reign as near or at hand, we brush past those words like they are code for millennia.

We are already living in reach of God’s Reign. What we miss is that it is reality alongside the political realities of the world around us. It was present in the early church described in Acts 4, where all had everything in common and met one another’s needs accordingly. It is present as we allow God to reign in our lives. It is present when those who do not know God still follow the very principles of God’s Reign that Jesus preached, sharing love, grace, mercy, and acceptance to others based on their need, not their “worthiness.”

Do we yet await a fuller reality to come? Sure, but not to the exclusion of living into God’s Reign right now. It is already time to give evidence of that Beloved Community we so desperately need.”

Rev. Harbin also shared the following quote from Riccardo Dablah in his post – a quote that reflects both the universal Christ and the commonalities of many of the world’s various faiths, all of which also wait and hope:

“- Indians have been waiting for Kalki for 3,700 years.

– Buddhists have been waiting for Maitreya for 2,600 years.

– The Jews have been waiting for the Messiah for 2500 years.

– Christians have been waiting for Jesus for 2000 years.

– Sunnah waits for Prophet Issa 1400 years.

– Muslims have been waiting for a messiah from the line of Muhammad for 1300 years.

– Shiites have been waiting for Mandi for 1080 years.

– Drussians are waiting for Hamza ibn Ali for 1000 years.

Most religions adopt the idea of a “savior” and state that the world will remain filled with evil until this savior comes and fills it with goodness and righteousness.

Maybe our problem on this planet is that people expect someone else to come solve their problems instead of doing it themselves!”

I know that probably sounds odd … aren’t we supposed to trust in God, let go and let God, just wait for God to handle it all? Isn’t “man” deciding to control things a lot of the problem? I think the answer is, it depends on what man tries to control and the reasons for that control.  We can decide the world is filled with and will remain evil and not so patiently “wait” for the Second Coming to fix it all for us. Or …

We can live into the Reign of Christ and work to build the kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven the way Christ taught us to by following him, by heeding his teachings, and by applying them daily to our lives and our interactions with others. We can love God with all our hearts, mind, soul, and strength, and we can really, truly, work hard at loving one another. And in doing so, our hope will not only be sustained, but it will also be fulfilled.

Here’s something I hope for in this season of Advent … to strengthen and continue to build the beloved community here at Union Grove and at our Second Sunday Community of Faith, because … well … because waiting is easier when you have someone to wait with, and building is easier when you have other hands willing to help and Community is what makes God visible… that “Preach the Gospel. If necessary use words,” thing.

And I know building community is hard work but, as Henri Nouwen says, “Nothing is sweet or easy about community. Community is a fellowship of people who do not hide their joys and sorrows but make them visible to each other as a gesture of hope.  

In community we say: “Life is full of gains and losses, joys and sorrows, ups and downs—but we do not have to live it alone. We want to drink our cup together and thus celebrate the truth that the wounds of our individual lives, which seem intolerable when lived alone, become sources of healing when we live them as part of a fellowship of mutual care.”

Community is like a large mosaic. Each little piece seems so insignificant. One piece is bright red, another cold blue or dull green, another warm purple, another sharp yellow, another shining gold. Some look precious, others ordinary. Some look valuable, others worthless. Some look gaudy, others delicate. We can do little with them as individual stones except compare them and judge their beauty and value. When, however, all these little stones are brought together in one big mosaic, portraying the face of Christ, who would ever question the importance of any one of them? If one of them, even the least spectacular one, is missing, the face is incomplete. Together in the one mosaic, each little stone is indispensable and makes a unique contribution to the glory of God. That’s community, a fellowship of little people who together make God visible in the world.

I think I can make this whole actively waiting, building a community, and living into the Reign of Christ thing a little easier for you, or maybe at least a little less stressful … a lot more hopeful.

Richard Rohr wrote early this morning, “       

It All Begins with Union   

 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

—Romans 8:38–39

We are already in union with God! There is an absolute, eternal union between God and the soul of everything. At the deepest level, we are “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3) and “the whole creation … is being brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God” (Romans 8:21). The problem is Western religion has not taught us this. For most Christians that I’ve worked with as a priest, God is still separate and “out there.” Most people are still trying to secure God’s approval. Our ego over-emphasizes our individuality and separateness from God and others. We limited God’s redemption to the human species—and not very many individuals within that species!

Daily contemplative prayer helps us rediscover our inherent union and learn how to abide in Presence, trusting that we are already good and safe in God. We don’t have to worry about our little private, separate, insecure self. Jesus taught, I am one with you and you are one with your neighbor and we are all one with God. That’s the gospel! That’s the whole point of Communion or Eucharist; we partake of the bread and wine until they convince us that we are in communion. It seems easier for God to convince bread and wine of their identity than to convince us.

Believe it or not, we’re not here to save our souls. That’s already been done once and for all—in Christ, through Christ, with Christ, and as Christ (see Ephesians 1:3–14). By God’s love, mercy, and grace, we are already the Body of Christ: the one universal body that has existed since the beginning of time. You and I are here for just a few decades, dancing on the stage of life, perhaps taking our autonomous selves far too seriously. That little and clearly imperfect self just cannot believe it could be a child of God. I hope the gospel frees us to live inside of a life that is larger than the one our small selves have imagined. The larger life of the Body of Christ cannot be taken from us. It is the very life of God which cannot be destroyed.

As Thomas Merton wrote in his journal, “We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

 I don’t know about you, but that sounds incredibly hopeful to me!     

And all God’s children said, Amen.

Credits:

  • Unless listed below, all works cited within the text above.
  • *Adapted in part from “Our Shocking Hope” Preaching Notes, Discipleship Ministries Worship Planning Series, December 3, 2023.

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