Texts: Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Luke 2:22-40

Growing up we had an Advent tradition in our house that is probably familiar to many of you as well.  A few weeks before Christmas, my mother would have us clear off all the clutter that had been accumulating throughout the year on the hutch near the main entrance to our home.  Once that was done, she would pull down from the attic a big box full of smaller unmarked cardboard boxes.  One by one we would then carefully move the small boxes out onto the kitchen table.  I think the fact that my brothers and I could never seem to remember after a whole year which unmarked box was which gave this normally mundane task a real sense of the mystery of ritual. 

Finally, with the utmost care, one of us would open the first box, carefully sliding out the Styrofoam casing or bubble-wrap and exclaim something like, “I found an angel!”  Or perhaps less excitedly, “I got a sheep.”  Once we freed the Precious Moments figurine from its box, we’d place it on the cleared-off spot on the hutch where we thought it should go before returning to see what treasures the other boxes held.  I think it became a sort of competition to see who would find the baby Jesus, but secretly, I thought finding any one of three kings was way cooler. 

By the time it was all over, the entire familiar cast of characters was present.  Of course we had Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus.  We had the sheep, a donkey, a couple camels, a cow who was undoubtedly lowing (whatever that means), a couple angels, some shepherds, the three kings, and the little drummer boy also made an appearance every year.  The scene was rounded out with a couple evergreen trees…

Texts: 2 Samuel 7:1-11; Luke 1:26-38

On this final Sunday of Advent, we eavesdrop on conversations between a king and a prophet, a peasant girl and an angel.  After settling into his own royal house, the mighty King David wishes to build a house for the Lord, a temple.  The prophet Nathan initially affirms this move, but then has a dream in which he hears a message that David is not the one to build such a house.  Instead, the Lord will build David a house, a dynasty, and establish his kingdom forever.

As significant a conversation as this is, it is overshadowed by Gabriel’s visit to Mary, inviting her to be the one to give birth to one who will inherit the throne of his ancestor David.  If you’ve hung around the church for any length of time, this is a story you’ve heard before, and it seems there are two different ways we can encounter it.

The best analogy I can think of here is inspired by the fact that our family has been immersed in the Harry Potter series for the latter half of 2014.  One of the enchanted objects in this series is a tent that Harry and the Weasely family stay in during the Quidditch World Cup.   The tent is quite small on the outside, but after watching Weasely after Weasely walk into the tent, Harry enters and is amazed to discover that the tent is much bigger on the inside, with a kitchen and bunk beds and plenty of space for the whole family.

I thought this was something entirely out of the imagination of JK Rowling, but last week while skimming something completely unrelated came across a reference to the 1960’s science fiction series Dr. Who, which I know nothing about, except this one thing this…

Texts: Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-11  

One of the things I like to notice when I read a book is the opening lines.  I’m interested in how writers choose to introduce what they have to say.  How does it set up the rest of the story?  How does it draw us in as a reader and make us a part of what follows?  What clues does it give about what we’re about to read?

One of the books that will forever be on my ‘pick up anytime and be delighted’ list is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  It’s one of the few books I’ve handled so much that the cover has torn off.   It’s best read in small portions and digested over long periods of time.  It starts this way:  “I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.  I’d half awaken.  He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood.  Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk.  And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.  It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm.  I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp.  What blood was this, and what roses?  It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth.  This sign on my body could have been…

Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark 13:24-37

How do you feel about disruptions?  You’re settled in for the evening, reading a book on the couch, and there’s a knock at the door.  Your day is going pretty well until you get a phone call that a family member has just been hospitalized.  Or maybe you are that family member hospitalized.  You’re driving along with a friend having a great conversation and you come to the top of an exit ramp where you are confronted with the person with the sign that says some version of: “Hungry and jobless.  Anything helps.”  Disruptions.

Or: Another kind of disruption, which happened to me a little while ago at home: the girls were playing and laughing and having a good time together and I turned up the volume on NPR to better hear the news.  Then I realized I was most likely committing some kind of grievous sin by drowning out the laughter of children to listen to the sorrows of the world.  I turned the radio off.  It was a welcome disruption, all things considered…

When the Advent planning group got together and pondered the scriptures for this season, the theme that emerged was the singular word of Disruption.  As a person fully at home in the modern Western world of clocks and scheduling and Google calendar, I admit that disruptions can be disorienting.  As a father of a two year old who still doesn’t regularly sleep through the night, I admit that some disruptions can be really disorienting.  As someone who has experienced enough disruptions to know that they often pull me out of my narrow focus and challenge me to rethink my priorities, and as a person of faith who notices that throughout scripture and history God seems to be a really big fan of…

Text: Matthew 25:14-30

After a long time away, we’re back to the lectionary this week – although this passage might as well have shown up in October in the Difficult Passages series.  The Parable of the Talents is one of the more familiar parables of Jesus and is an important one for us First World Christians to ponder.  Although we now use the word talent to refer to one’s aptitude, ability, and natural gifts, the term originally referred to a unit of money.  A very large unit of money.  One talent was worth 15 years wages, so in this parable even the person who was given one talent was given a massive sum.  If a decent wage in our time is $40,000 a year, that makes one talent worth well over a half million dollars.   The person with five talents was basically given a lifetime supply of wages all at once.  But all three of the servants won the lottery that day.

In the parable those who use their talents to make more talents are richly rewarded and the message seems pretty clear: Those who have been given much, those with privilege, those with money or skills or resources of any kind, are responsible to use it in a way that multiplies the wealth.  The one servant who buried his talent in the ground and sheepishly handed it back to his master with no gain to show for it has his talent taken away, and is punished.  Punished quite severely.  He is called wicked and lazy and worthless.  He is thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.  In its context in Matthew, the parable seems to serve as an allegory for how to manage one’s resources in the present time before the coming of the end…