Advent prayer

Break forth, O beauteous heavenly light,

And usher in the morning;

O shepherds, shrink not with afright,

But hear the angel’s warning.

This Child, now weak in infancy,

Our confidence and joy shall be,

The power of Satan breaking,

Our peace eternal making.

Break forth, O beautiful heavenly light. Break forth around us and illuminate the world in which we live. Give us eyes to see what you see, O Lord: a world broken, rent, in a thousand cross-like ways; yet a world, being reconciled and redeemed by your love—with a million resurrection possibilities.

We come to worship this Advent morning with six days of living on our hearts: 144 hours of walking in the Way while walking in your world. 8600 minutes is long enough to gather a week’s worth of intercessions, our fervent prayers for those we know in need—for neighbors, strangers, lovers, friends, coworkers, roommates … even our enemies. We pray for them now …

Break forth, O beautiful heavenly light. Break forth into the lives of those who are today covered in the darkness of grief, mourning the death of someone they love. We pray for all we know who are shadowed in grief …

Break forth, O beautiful healing light. Break forth into places of struggle and illness. Shine on those in need of healing and hope, cause cells to grow and hearts to heal and spirits to quicken. Shine upon those we name now …

Break forth, O beautiful Christ-refracted light. Break forth into the lives and homes and places of all those who walk in darkness—the darkness of doubt, of despair, of disappointment and dread. From the smallest family to the largest nation, where there is bad blood, bring healing; hatred, peace; resentment, freedom; wreckage of relationships, healing and new life. Shine your light, O Christ, in the places we name now …

How we thank you O Lord that we need not shudder in fear.
How we thank you for the angelic message of purposeful hope.
How we thank you that Christ shares our weaknesses
and makes buoyant our confident joy.

Nothing Accursed

And the one who was seated on the throne said,
“See, I am making all things new.” -- Revelation 21


R. and her husband spent forty plus years in the business of helping people find just the right place—a place for shelter, a place for family, a place for living. After all, as they say: “Location, location, location.” I bet a great many of us occupy our places of habitation because of their guidance and transaction.

This is what I want to say this morning: We who have loved someone and then lost someone … We who have felt the ache of imagining the world without a father, mother, or a loved-one in it ... We who grieve … We are, in our heart of hearts, looking for – longing for – just the right place—a place of refuge, a place of release from suffering, a place for life eternal. We are in the business of hoping. Our hearts cry out to God:

Location, location, O blessed new location.
O for a place, for a time,
where and when God’s creation
and God’s children within it
are no longer threatened
by advancing time,
by encroaching tumors,
by goodbyes, untimely.

It is to those who grieve, to those who ache for another place, to those who struggle with the brokenness of the world that the news of Revelation 21 comes, a sweeping vision a place soon to be unveiled. It is a large, living picture of time soon on its way. It is, if I may, the New Testament’s best property listing. It is a sacred prospectus. It is a glimpse of God’s future, the precise details of which are beyond telling, beyond technical description.

Contra the cable TV preachers, Revelation 21 is not interested in vacating the mystery of how it will be. It is simply interested in the news that it will be. Not because we can explain it, decode it … but because God has promised it.

A new heaven and earth. No more sun or moon: God is the light of all. No more temples or sanctuaries, as handsome and helpful as they are: God is all in all. No more tears: God has remade creation, from top to bottom. In fact, “nothing accursed will be found there.”

No disease,
no departures,
no despair.

R’s baptism is the mark that she is sealed in this vision. Her profession of faith was her own indication that she was confident in this living hope. And so we name today the good news that she is bound up in this sweeping promise; she is already glimpsing the leading edge of this stunning vision; she will, together with all of creation, together with all the saints of God—not by their virtue but by God’s grace—she will be raised up holy and whole. And until then, she is held safe in God’s good care until it fully and completely unfolds.

This bold New Testament faith does not cancel out our grief, or sequester it, or judge it … as if, one either believes the good news or one grieves. Christian hope in the vision of Revelation 21 honors our grief, gathers up each precious tear, affirms every ache of the heart. Because, every lament is a prayer for a new location, every tear is a bold request for a new time, every sign is a plea for a coming time when God will be all in all.

In honor of her roots, we borrow four questions and answers Episcopalian catechism, from The Book of Common Prayer:

Q. What is the Christian hope? 
A. The Christian hope is to live with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and to await the coming of Christ in glory, and the completion of God's purpose for the world.

Q. What do we mean by the resurrection of the body? 
A. We mean that God will raise us from death in the fullness of our being, that we may live with Christ in the communion of the saints.

Q. What is the communion of saints? 
A. The communion of saints is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise.

Q. What, then, is our assurance as Christians? 
A. Our assurance as Christians is that nothing, not even death, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Out on the (Holy) Periphery

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them … -- Luke 2

Who doesn’t enjoy the Christmastime tale of the sheep-herders abiding in the fields, and who hasn’t dressed up a child in a bathrobe and towel for herding in a pageant full of cardboard sheep? The shepherds of Luke 2 are a holiday staple. Hearing their story again brings a sense that all is right-side-up with the world.
Yet God is turning the world upside down.

It must be so, if we are to believe Luke’s account that it is to shepherds, of all people, that the messengers of heaven make their explosive appearance. “God’s chosen fellow has come!” they sing out. Only, let us observe that this choral anthem is delivered, not from the choir loft of the downtown temple, or from the steps of the royal city hall, or on the stage of the popular amphitheater. The song rings out in the outskirts of town, out in the fields, on the periphery of the world’s typical attention. The first hearers of God’s gospel: third-trick sheep-tenders whose names we are never even told. Not preachers, not priests, not theologians. Shepherds. Sideliners.

It could be that one of the body’s finer attributes is the eye’s peripheral vision—the ability to notice the sidelines, what’s afoot off center. “Who’s that coming up behind me? Is that my turn there? Watch out … here comes a fast ball out of nowhere!” There is a lot happening on the margins of our existence, and, similarly, it is the account of Luke more than any other gospel that summons us to imagine God busily at work in the margins of the world.

Consider Luke’s cast of characters. Father Joe: a first-century Jewish everyman. Mother Mary: an otherwise unknown teenager from the lower ranks of society. She herself gets the joke inherent in God visiting her, of all people (Luke 1:48). Fisherman. Tax collectors. Hemorrhaging women and leprous men. In this tale, old women get pregnant (1:18) and even dependent children are welcomed in to the fellowship of those of follow God’s unlikely messiah (18:16). Luke presents us with a shepherd willing to risk the safety of the centered hoard to secure the protection of one stuck in the margins (15:4). This is God, out on the holy periphery.

So then, insists Luke, Christmas is a time for clearing our tangential vision. Rub your eyes and pay attention all-around, because if God is whimsical enough to dispatch a sky-splitting singing telegram to a band of third-shift animal wrestlers out on the edges of reality, then this God is just as likely to be up to something marvelous and life-altering out along the margins of your life, too.

Some stranger speaks truth. Some coincidence smells of providence. Some impossible dream will not go away. Some forgotten piece of your story jostles for attention. Some summons to serve keeps popping up in the oddest of places. Some hint of resurrection tickles your imagination. Each could be dismissed as the ordinary weirdness of the world; each could be embraced as the movement of God. Meanwhile, all the Bible knows how to do is to demand that you your seatbelts are fastened and your tray tables are locked, because one is never quite sure what improbable, peripheral means God might use to invade and heal the world, and your life in it (1 Corinthians 1:28).

So have the merriest of Christmases. He is born in Bethlehem.

Oh, and watch your flank.
We serve a sneaky God.
(Just ask the shepherds.)

Burst the Bubble

Come, ye thankful people, come,
raise the song of harvest home;
all is safely gathered in,
ere the winter storms begin.
God our Maker doth provide
for our wants to be supplied;
come to God's own temple, come,
raise the song of harvest home.
-- Henry Alford, 1810-1871

November. Turkey and stuffing cometh. Thanks be to God.

Families differ, of course, on their habits and hang-ups around the Thanksgiving table. But in one form or another, there is often a kind of bubble that hovers over the big meal: a certain pressure to keep the conversation light, keep it general, keep it not-about-us in ways other than who is hoarding the potatoes. After all, there is national politics to debate, football losses to thrash out, workplace woes to deconstruct.

(No bubble over your table? Then thanks be to God. No need for what follows.)

Imogen Heap has a nice little ballad about a child at the feasting table that keeps hoping (praying?) that her family will steer out of its predictable skid of holiday arguments and tensions by actually naming their love for one another. The chorus, her prayer:

It's that time of year
Leave all our hopelessness's aside
If just for a little while
tears stop right here
I know we've all had a bumpy ride.
I'm secretly on your side

My simple November charge is to burst the bubble, whatever it may be. Take the lead and take a moment to name the goodness and greatness of God you have known in your life this year. “Raise a song of harvest home,” Alford might say. Don’t worry so much about whether others will follow suit, or how they will feel about it. Just worry about whether you can trace the lines of God’s generosity in your own continually-unfolding narrative of baptized faith. And for that matter, go ahead and trace the lines of your love for those around your table. Sure, they already know how you feel. But they need to hear it, and we need to name it.

Bubbles remain intact in families because, by and large, we worry too much about honoring old habits of silence or protecting familiar discomforts. To be sure: No one is suggesting a diatribe, or a lecture. Merely a little testimony: that blessed first-person singular song of gratitude whereby at Thanksgiving one surpasses turkey-passing for a little truth-telling—the truth of God’s way with you, how it is that “all is safely gathered in” in your life this very year.

Raise a glass. Raise of song of thanks to God. Burst the bubble.

Remembrance

Speaking not as a preacher but as a son, and on behalf of my two older siblings — to whom I have looked up all my life – it is an honor to offer for my family words of remembrance about our dear father, now departed.

And, of course, there is only one appropriate way to begin: To make a long story short …

Indeed, the old man could tell a story — lots of them, and they could spring forth at any given moment. If you asked John to turn on the light switch in the living room, inevitably you would become the beneficiary of a 20-minute recounting of the time he visited the Thomas Edison Museum. “110 volts, 60 hertz!” he would explain, with that gleam in his eye. Even if you couldn’t care less about Mr. Edison’s preferred voltage, you had to admit you had a good time learning just a bit more about it.

Repetition was such feature of his storytelling that we often threatened to number his tales (1, 2, 3, and so on) thereby saving everyone a great deal of time. “You remember, number 14 …” and we’d all laugh. “That’s a good one.” Now, amid the silence, I suspect we’d give anything to hear him tell one again, in full.

Dad was a masterful storyteller, not by any formal training in the craft, but simply because he paid attention to the world around him—especially to people, and the funny things we do, our endearing folly.

His stories reveled in the everyman, because he was one himself, and he knew it. Everyday fellows like Otis, our grandfather’s yardman, who when told by his boss to “take the handle off the lawnmower and put it in the trunk” for servicing across the lake, Otis did just what he was told. Dad always said: “The joke was on Papa. He arrived in New Orleans, opened the trunk, and found – what else? – the handle!” Dad loved that story.

He also loved to tell about the man who called the local Cleco office with an electrical problem. “Mr. Hawkins, your company is sending too much electricity to my house and you’ve ruined my electric blanket.” “How do you know this?” dad asked. “Well, when my wife and I get into bed at night we get a big shock.” (This is a true story.) “Don’t believe me? You should come by and experience it for yourself.” (Incidentally, through a process of elimination, Electrical Engineer Hawkins determined that the culprit was not Cleco, but fuzzy slippers on shag carpet—plain ole static.)

Then there was the story about the two teenage girls at a Covington Presbyterian Church picnic years ago. “Mr. John! What kind of ice cream are you making in your ice cream machine?” Without missing a beat, the old man said: “Spinach.”

He told tales about the past, about his beloved New Orleans during the war, about presidents he remembered hearing on the radio, about the Army in Kansas and atomic bomb tests in Nevada. He had an insatiable appetite for history, biography, politics, and street-level philosophy. Jack and I spent an evening with him in St. Tammany hospital this summer, and all he wanted to do was talk about the 700-page biography of Winston Churchill he was reading … again. This hunger to learn all he could about the world around him has been bequeathed to his daughter in the form of a strong academic rigor and a fierce curiosity of the mind.

He told tales about machines: boilers and Buicks and Baldwin locomotives. Hear him recall the story of getting a stubborn substation back online after a hurricane and you’d swear it was a page torn from Homer’s Odyssey. He liked machines, and how they work, and why it matters. In the care of his eldest son, he has left an impressive mechanical aptitude, and a passion for it, and with those gifts: a strength of character to keep the whole matter of machines quite human.

In the end, however, the stories that loomed the largest in his imagination turned out to be from the Biblical narrative, and he studied the scriptures with an engineer’s precision. Just last week, his life ebbing away, he told me he was looking forward to teaching again the woman’s Bible study one more time. (Hey, my father was no fool.) He especially loved the Old Testament. He was fascinated by King David and loved to read about the old patriarchs – their blessings and their curses.

This summer, after a brief but endearing visit with dad in the hospital over Father’s Day, I found myself writing about Laban – an obscure Old Testament family head, remembered mostly for his final blessing.

Allow me to finish with these words, honest as they are about dad’s recent health struggles. I offer this episode as a testimony to dad’s best legacy for his children and theirs – a living faith in Christ Jesus.

- - -

June 22, 2009

My father has every reason to be self-centered these days.

His legs no longer move him from here to there. He is fifty pounds less the man he was just a season ago. His bones press outward under his dermis like knobby sticks in a pile. He cannot put on a shirt without ready assistance. He is dying, adagio.

If ever there were a time for self-absorption, for pity and loathing heaped on his own head, this would be it. And yet.

We all held hands around his hospital room — an impromptu sanctuary consecrated amid hoses, drips, and medicinal odors. The bubbling water in the little tank on the wall provided our only prelude music—its watery gurgle, a baptismal reminder.
We were all there, but it was drawing to a close, and it seemed good and right that we pray. I was all set to do my part as the family preacher, when suddenly a sacramental query fired across my brain: What if the victim here was instead the host?

“Dad, will you pray for us?”

No hesitation. He cleared his throat, moistened his tongue with a sip of water. The way he dropped his head to pray suggested that he would have fallen prostrate, would his body have allowed him the ancient gesture. His voice was strangely high-pitched, high up in his throat, as if suddenly he was in a different way, a holy way.

“Dear Lord, we just want to thank you, for your love in our lives.”

“Lord, you have been so good to us, blessed us in so many ways.”

“Father, we thank you for our family, for being here with us now.”

I broke the old rules and opened my eyes, looked up and across the room. The words came forth from his broken-down frame like a Sunday song, in an artful cadence not to be expected from a man who spent his life working square electrical equations and smiling on objective facts. They were not those overly pious words born of denial, those prayers we sling to God in order to convince ourselves. His words were more solid than that, more substantial. It was as though they had been waiting to be spoken for some time.

Midway through this Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, he turned the tables on us. He began praying for his children and grandchildren, including those not present. He blessed each one of us, by name, and by his grammar it was not clear if he was talking to his family or to God. I remember thinking that this was prayer at its finest imprecision. Over his grandchildren, he prayed:

“May God give you good health, help you make good grades, and work that matters in the world. May the Lord bless you as you raise your own families with love and faith. May God guide you in the way you should go. May you trust in the Lord always.”

This went on for some time.

The length was not so much because the old man was rambling—a preferred mode of speech, as we all know. No, he went on and on because he could, because there was time to take, because it was his time to take it. If not then, when? If not there, where?

It was a thing worth getting right, this prayer. It was one last equation to be solved. It was fastidiousness born of love. It was his Christ-shaped shot across the bow his stubborn demise.

It was his blessing, on the cusp of departure.

Genesis 31:55 says, “Early in the morning old Laban rose up, and kissed his grandchildren and his daughters and blessed them. Then he departed and returned home.”

Ironic, really: Because of our concern for him, we had gathered to his bedside. But because of who he was – who he had become, by God’s grace – he chose to make the moment about us.

Goodbye, Laban. Go in peace. Thanks for the stories.

You looked sharp, you stayed tight.
You did good.
You got it right.

Legacy

A resident of Covington, Louisiana, since 1979, John C. Hawkins, Sr. was the beloved husband of Lucile (Puddin) Smart Hawkins. He is also survived by his children, Dr. Sarah H. Ross (Dennis), John (Jack) C. Hawkins, Jr. (Diane), and The Rev. Ralph W. Hawkins (Elizabeth); grandchildren, Andrew Ross (Miriam), Ainsley Ross, Michelle Hawkins, John Hawkins III, Lonnie Hawkins, Ella Hawkins; sister, Mary Hawkins, M.D. of Flora, MS; sister-in-law, Lane Smart of Covington; and many cousins, nieces, and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, Ralph and Pauline Hawkins.

Born in New Orleans on September 26, 1933, he served in the US Army from 1952 to 1954 and took part in the Upshot-Keyhole Atomic Test in Nevada in 1953. After discharge as an E-5, sergeant, he was a member of the American Legion Post 16 in Covington. He graduated with a BSEE from LSU in 1958 and an MAS from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1975. Employed for over 40 years in the electric utility industry, he retired from Cleco in 1998. He was a registered Professional Electrical Engineer in Louisiana and five other states.

He was ordained as an Elder at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Huntsville, AL in 1965 and repeatedly served on the Session of Covington Presbyterian Church. He also served on the Committee on Ministry for the Presbytery of South Louisiana for five years and acted as Commissioner to the General Assemblies of 1977 and 2002. In 2004 he was Lay Supply Pastor at the 3rd Presbyterian Church, New Orleans. He also served at various times as Moderator of the Sessions at Carrollton, Berean, and Gentilly Presbyterian Churches in New Orleans and 1st Presbyterian Church in Ponchatoula.

Relatives and friends of the family are invited to attend the funeral services on Friday, October 2, 2009 at 11:00 AM from at Covington Presbyterian Church, 222 Jefferson Ave., Covington, LA 70433; visitation AT THE CHURCH will begin at 9:00 AM on Friday.

Graveside services with Military Honors will follow at Pinecrest Memorial Gardens.

The family would prefer donations to Covington Presbyterian Church.

Dazzling Difference

Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. – Mark 9

When the motel alarm blasted its harsh news at four in the morning, I immediately began second-guessing my ambitious plan to be on top of the mountain for sunrise. My spouse had no second thoughts on the matter, mostly because she had concluded from the get go it was a fool’s errand. Still, like groggy recruits at boot camp revile, we rolled out of bed and filed out to the car. At the top of Cadillac Mountain, now 4:40 a.m., I was astonished to discover three score of tourists strewn along the eastward rocks of the parking lot. Turns out we were not the only wearisome pilgrims.

We found an unclaimed boulder and settled in for the show. It was chilly, with a blanket-worthy breeze moving across the pavement. We must have looked a bit disheveled from the hasty ascent, as the man next to us held out his large open yellow box and inquired, “Cheerios?” (Nothing like toasted whole goodness at 1500 feet.)

All around us people were waiting, chatting about this or that: When should we swim today? Popovers at Jordan Pond? Did you call the kennel now that we are staying one more day? … the stuff of middle-class vacations. Each little huddle: a little world unto itself.

And then it started.

It’s a funny thing: I spent at least a week anticipating being “one of the first in the nation to see the sun rise,” and when it finally commenced all I wanted to do was look at the faces all around me. Those illuminated faces. Everyone, awash in the purest pinkish-orange I have ever noticed. Even my own little flesh-and-blood—already so vital in her toddler years—looked more alive than ever. And no one said a word, awash as we were in the stunning newness of another day.

What a difference the sun makes.

I like to imagine that the disciples in Mark 9 were not keen on making the hike up the high hill with Jesus. Indeed, when the goal is to seek the Lord, we are not always motivated to move upward either. First, there’s the hike itself, arduous and bumpy. But there is also the real possibility that we will be changed by the encounter—“bleached by light” as Mark suggests. That’s enough to keep a pilgrim down below, on the solid ground of “normal.”

Even so, at the summit, everything was made new again for Peter, James, and John—Jesus’ “Three Amigos”. Sacred solitude, up above the world. Engulfing light. Changing garments. And by the end, the divine voice of reaffirmation and summons (verse 7): “This is my beloved. Listen!” It must have been the case that the view from the top of this mountain affected their view of life back down below. Surely the vision of God’s beloved—illuminated, reaffirmed, sent forward—affected the way these fellows led their lives in the days that followed. Surely the bright light of God’s glory on their faces retrained their eyes to see God’s glory awash in the world. A new day.

What a difference the son makes.

It is for each of us, and together as a congregation, to know the grace of higher ground, of transfigured perspective. Let us regularly get up to a higher place—for prayer, for peace, for perspective. The hope is not merely for a reorganized to-do list, or that we would later put our shoulder more boldly the grindstone of life. The hope—indeed, the promise—is for illumination. We look and long for the bright light of the risen son, casting its gaze upon all our laboring, loving, and living.

Ready to climb?