bleeding out loud

Sermon_ _When the Roll is Called Down Here_ (Romans 16) – Fred Craddock

A genius sermon. Wish I had been there when it went down.

In the book of Revelation, the apostle John has a vision of heaven. He describes it this way: “I saw the Holy city, the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.”

It’s fascinating to me that when John tries to put language to the heaven that he saw, he chooses this moment, when a bride comes down the aisle to her groom. The bride is a picture of heaven. The groom waiting to receive her is a picture of heaven.

We live in a cynical world, and when I got married, I heard all kinds of lighthearted jabs about “the old ball n’ chain,” about “the honeymoon being over,” and about “having the same kind of cereal every morning for the rest of my life.” But those images stand in sharp contrast to the way the Bible talks about marriage. According to John, it’s a picture of the new heaven and earth coming together at the restoration of all things. I think that’s worth remembering. That’s not to say that marriage is all angels on clouds playing harps, but, in my experience, it’s the things that require everything of us that are the most precious to us in the end.

But marriage isn’t just a picture of heaven. It also seems to be a picture of God. Deuteronomy 6:4, a passage known as the Shema says, “Shema Israel, adonai elohenu, adonai echad.” “Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” The Hebrew word for “one” is echad. If you don’t spit on someone when you say it, then you’re saying it wrong. It means a unity with plurality. Many, yet somehow, at the same time, one.

As Christians we believe that God is three yet one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In one of his final prayers in the gospel of John, Jesus prays for his followers saying, “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”

Genesis 2:24 says, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. It’s the same Hebrew word echad. When two people join their lives together in marriage, they enter somehow into this mysterious unity with plurality, two yet somehow one. This is why the destruction of a marriage is so painful, because it’s the tearing apart, the ripping in half of something that has been bound together.

So it seems to me that the hardest part of marriage is the tending to, the nurturing, and the maintenance of oneness. C.S. Lewis described it as a “second kind of love.” He said, ““being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. And no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.

And in fact, whatever people say, the state called “being in love” usually does not last. If the old fairy tale ending “They lived happily ever after” is taken to mean “They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,” then it says what probably never was nor ever could be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships?

But, of course, ceasing to be “in love” need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense-love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced in Christian marriage by the grace that both people ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other, just as you love yourself even when you don’t like yourself. Being in love first moved you to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables you to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”

There are moments in a marriage where it’s virtually impossible to understand your spouse. There are moments when what she wants makes absolutely no sense. There are moments when what he wants just seem flat out dumb. But if it’s true that a marriage creates one flesh out of two people, then you don’t get to dismiss one another’s feelings or perspectives because by the definition of Christian marriage you are one and the same: If she feels it, then so do you. If he senses it, then so do you. This is the hard work of marriage, of oneness: to mutually submit to and partner with one another.

One of my favorite bands is a husband and wife duo called Over the Rhine. Several years ago they were on tour when their marriage started to fall apart. So, they canceled their tour and went home, and did something unexpected and profound. They bought a case of wine and agreed that every night, they would put a bottle of wine on the table and wouldn’t leave the table until the wine was gone. They did this every night until they’d drunk through the entire case, and, eventually, they saved their marriage and wrote their next album Drunkard’s Prayer.

I don’t tell that story at weddings because I think it’s cute, or to sentimentalize how hard marriage can be. I tell it because what people are charged with when they become one flesh is the maintenance, the protection, and the nurturing of their oneness. “The moment you sense a crack, a fracture, a tearing,” I tell them, “Go get a bottle of wine and sit around a table, and don’t leave til’ it’s gone. You might need several bottles.” It strikes me as a kind of communion, to be at a table where there is wine and bread and reconciliation, and for those who ask for and receive the grace of God, they don’t come to the table alone, but they come to the table where there is more than just wine but blood, more than just bread but body, and more than just marital peacekeeping, but the reconciliation of all things. So get some wine. Nurture your oneness. Take communion. And may God surprise you along the way.

About a month ago I agreed to teach at an Advent service, and as I’ve been preparing for it over the last week I’ve come to the realization that I don’t really have any idea what Advent is about.

Oddly enough, the church I attended growing up celebrated Advent every year, but as far as I knew Advent was a kind of code word meaning, “There are four more weeks until I get a pant load of gifts.” So each week leading up to Christmas someone in the church would do an awkward Scripture reading about hope, peace, or joy or something like that and then they’d light a candle. Not incredibly stirring to say the least. Truth be told, advent was something to be politely tolerated and I did so by thinking of it as a kind of countdown, like the ball dropping on New Year’s. When the wrapping paper started flying, that was the sign that the real arrival had happened.

So over the last few weeks I’ve been reading up on Advent trying to understand what it is. It turns out that the idea of Advent has been around a long, long time. The word Advent comes from the Latin word adventus which means coming-the coming or arrival of something extremely important and long awaited for.

“One of the earliest longings of mankind is the longing for God to appear on earth.” There’s a story in the book of Acts about Paul and Barnabas healing a crippled man in a town called Lystra. When the locals saw what Paul had done, they shouted, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” They called Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes and the priest of the temple of Zeus brought wreaths and bulls to Paul and Barnabas for the people of city to make sacrifices to them. Advent is about the deep longing for God to show up, and it was a longing the people of Lystra were very familiar with.

The Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Romans all put the longing for advent to use for political purposes. “When Pharaoh Thutmosis III took the throne he summoned an imperial assembly and proclaimed, ‘The god of heaven is my father. I am his son. He has begotten me, and commanded me to sit on his throne.’ In Assyria, when a king ascended the throne it is told that ‘there began for his peoples an age of salvation; Days of justice, years of righteousness, plenteous rainfall, good prices for merchandise. Old men leap for joy, children sing. The condemned are acquitted, the prisoners set free. The naked are clothed, the sick cured.’ Roman emperors celebrated the advent of their rule often minting coins with phrases like, ‘The genius of the Roman people has entered the capital of the empire.’ Emperor Aurelian was celebrated as ‘god and lord from birth.’ A coin celebrating the advent of emperor Carausius reads expectate veni which means ‘Come, thou longed for one.’”*

After Julius Caesar was assassinated, the Roman poet Virgil said, “The turning of the ages is near at hand. The iron age with its terrors is nearing its end. The destined hour of world history is approaching. The divine king of salvation, for whom mankind has awaited since the time of the Pharaohs, is on his way. He will as last fulfill the promises which have not ceased to be heard among the Roman people since the days of the Sibyl. He will annihilate the evil of the past and free the peoples from unceasing fear. He will establish a universal empire of peace and lead in the golden age, for the blessing of a renewed humanity.”

Advent is about longing, specifically the longing for God to show up. It’s the longing for things to be made right, for things to be the way they’re supposed to be: peace where there isn’t any, joy where there isn’t any, hope where there isn’t any.

In the book The Longing for Home Frederick Beuchner says, “The word longing comes from the same root as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us.” Part of celebrating Advent is coming to terms with our own longings, those things that we yearn for that feel a long way off and that we feel we belong to and that belong to us. But in a way, advent is also about coming to terms with the ache we feel of longings that go unmet.

The more I understand Advent, the more I can identify with those pagans in Lystra-Their longing and ache for God to show up, the sense of anticipation and watchfulness for God to do just that, and their readiness to throw a party when it happened, even though it wasn’t the god they were expecting at all.

The invitation of Advent is to wrestle with our longings, to name them, to understand them. It’s the invitation to pay attention to the ache of living in a world that isn’t quite right, and to watch and wait for the coming and the arrival of the long expected one who has been “anointed to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

All quotes taken from Christ and the Caesars by Ethelbert Stauffer

The most recent sermon. Colossians 2:15.

Special thanks to Frederick Buechner, Paul, Jesus, and Eminem.

Watch/Listen to the sermon: http://bit.ly/9eTrML

Earlier I mentioned doing a part deux post regarding the pure in heart. I figured instead of posting a lengthy note that I’d just link to the sermon.