Travelers, a brief announcement

Over the loudspeaker at the airport you might hear, Your attention please, Flight 312 arriving from Amsterdam will no longer be arriving at Gate 30, but will now be arriving at Gate 33. I repeat, Flight 312 from Amsterdam will now be arriving at Gate 33.

This type of announcement is expected, common, borderline mundane if you are familiar with airline travel. For a vast number of reasons, gates get changed, we are not typically told why on the ground, but we are basically told, Move! You are in the wrong spot. Your expected guest is arriving somewhere different than where you thought. This sort of announcement at the airport is strictly informational and not meant to startle or surprise or incite a riot or change the world. It simply tells family and friends that there expected travelers will be showing up at a particular time and particular location and it has changed. Go over there and they will meet you at the end of the hallway. Stay here and you are going to miss them.

Sort of like Jesus? You know the whole world was waiting for Jesus. At least the whole world that we study in Scripture. That whole world in scripture is Isreal and they were waiting for the Messiah. Waiting for a gate change. I imagine they were waiting for someone like David, or someone from a past war. Maybe a prophet like Elijah or Elisha. Maybe they were waiting for Moses.

A baby? Not a baby. In Bethlehem? Not in Bethlehem. In a Virgin's Womb? Beyond imaginable. Way beyond a simple gate change.

As the Tobacco Trail Church prepares to celebrate Christmas, we might start with this announcement over the loudspeaker at the airport:

The angel Gabriel has the mic, and says to Mary (I guess she represents the friends and family who wait at the wrong gate), Do not fear, Mary, you shall conceive and bear a son and give him the name Jesus. Great will be his dignity and he will be called Son of the Most High... Lk. 1

There were others at Gate 30, moving toward Gate 33. You and I, we are like shepherds, bumbling down a path, traveling from Gate 30 to Gate 33 in hopes that we will see him.

I'm not so sure the world sees Jesus very clearly these days. What he came for. How he came to declare peace among the nations. How he came to disarm rather than to mobilize. He did come to inspire our work and our rest and our families and our calls. He did come so that we might praise him and his father through his spirit. And when I say the world doesn't see him very clearly, that's not some other guy or gal I'm referring to, that's me, a Shepherd in this story. That's you, one of the Maji. That's your cousin, who plays Joseph in the play. That's some person from high school who wronged you, you think she is your enemy, but she's really just one of the angels making a difficult announcement. Telling the world something difficult to chew on. It will be a baby. It will show up in a nowhere nothing place like Bethlehem. The baby grew in Mary's womb. Who's Mary? We say. Right, nobody you've ever heard of.

We think we've figured out who everybody is in any story, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Let's be honest, I or you are the good guy. The other guy is Herod. No the other guy is just the innkeeper, trying to take care of his family. He didn't know he was denying the savior of the world a warm bed.

I want to see Jesus more clearly. I want to be more generous with my neighbors. I want to do these things this December thanks to this particular announcement, that He's coming and will be called Son of the Most High. I want to find him along a long and winding road to Bethlehem and at the end of it. I want to see him in a manger along with others stars in the creation drama, the creation musical. Those stars, seen by you and me, the intruding paparazzi, trying to catch a glimpse and a fame-filled photo that we can hold onto and share with others, those stars will be lowing cattle, and sheep, always sheep, maybe a donkey, three camels with kings who come to lie down, bow down, before the King.

I want to start with a walk today and begin to imagine seeing all these things. Accepting the announcement, waiting for the traveler, and then living with the truth. Let's take a walk.

*reflection before an Advent Walk on the American Tobacco Trail, December 3, 2017, the first Sunday in Advent.

and...A River Runs Through It

I love this movie and book, inspired and written by Norman Maclean. I remain ever fond of the quote below:

Until now, I had never really thought of this quote in light of Revelation 22:1-2. Here is the King James version of the Revelation text, which would have likely been the working text for Maclean and is one of mine for today:

And he showed me a river of water of life, bright as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the midst of the street thereof. And on this side of the river and on that was the tree of life, bearing twelve manner of fruits, yielding its fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

Quite a few images come to mind at this juncture from Maclean within the context of scripture. We have imagination around creation and those first words from Genesis, some of the last words in Revelation (above), and the flood words from Genesis' sixth chapter.

Why has this merger never occurred to me? I have preached this quote. I have watched the movie more than ten times over. Here's my trouble up to now: I was mostly thinking of fishermen, disciples, and images such as Matthew 4:19 -- And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

Also from Maclean's pen:
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

You may appreciate from the weight of this fishing motif how Maclean's visions previously had me thinking solely of the works of man, inspired by God, but nonetheless the works of man. You would not have to know me long to learn that the intersection of ordained ministry and some other activity, fishing in this context, is the basis of my own theology and practice. But it is for that reason, why I had been closed off to a broader brush stroke offered here by the poet, Norman Maclean. 

Here we can delve beyond the works of man, those who choose to follow and drop nets and become disciples bearing the fruits and blessings that spring forth from such choices. We are into creation, redemption, and big big waters.

I think of a river that runs through a giant tree.

When the great Flood came to pass
is it possible that Noah scanned from atop the waters 
the splitting of a giant tree, 
the tree of life,
and it grew closer and closer
seemingly sucking his craft toward it in a great wave 
yet Noah and his crew, 
expert surfers on this epic tide like none before, 
saw the tree(s) at a frightening pace as they screamed headlong through the fissure, 
wondering if they would hit either or both sides of the tree with their prostrate tree, the floating wooden craft he and his had built and now clung to for life?
Did they continue on their journey downstream, 
far away from the place where the river split the giant tree, 
only to one day return,
descendants, generations later 
now from the eyes of John of Patmos, 
they cruised again down the river observing the tree on both sides now?
Even more forceful as all things now merged.

Searching for images of rivers that have split trees leaves this author dissatisfied. Here is the best of what I can find in order to keep the imagination flowing, a split California Redwood, but it is far from all I want.

We often think of Noah's Flood as water coming up solely from below, from the ground, rising up, but maybe it came in all ways imaginable and unimaginable -- Tsunami's and Class VxV rapids. That'a a Class 25 rapid as multiplication tells us, which is bigger than my imagination. For those who can locate in their minds a basic washing machine rapid known as a Class V, well a class VxV is beyond human imagination in terms of destruction and transformation. Basically, it's a Tree Splitter, A Tree of Life Splitter.

I have left out hokey Sunday School renditions of Revelation 22, for they typically do not lift up my imagination. I don't want to think of a gentle babbling brook that is divided by a tree. It's not just about what I want, but think of the rest of the book of Revelation. Four Horseman and Seven Heads invite us to imagine a Class 25 Tsunami here as we draw near to the end.

I hope some artist will draw this scene, maybe in a tradition such as Transcendentalism, but we need Super Transcendentalism. A rapid with a black hole piercing through it at the speed of sound splitting the largest tree the world has ever seen.



Think of MacLean's language, all things merge into one... 

That's a lot of things,
All Things
Certainly, all things
mean
a lot of water
And a big ole' tree

I leave you with a ruptured imagination.

Class VI rapid, barely navigable, just scratches the surface of what we are after.

from 5th Stanza of "Intimations of Immortality"

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had else where its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily from the East
Must travel, still is nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid,
Is on his way attended.


Genius from William Wordsworth, offered most recently in David Whyte's "The Three Marriages"

Grossula Sport

She rests lazily on the sill

What is there to do, really?

It’s April and sun beats down, but not too hard

Temps are barely 65 and 40s in the pre-dawn

Oh Spring,

Praise to the Maker

But flow and flow and flow some more

IS what she does

But that’s only the flipping branch

Like mama’s hair two score and five ago

The rest of the strands stand erect

They’ve not found their flow

Or their in a flow, but blocked

Pleasing the sun and the roots

Only north and south

Up and down

They dare not live outside the pot

Only the one branch lives outside the interior safe place

She curls up and over and

She is showing a pinkish strand

Is it a flower?

Praise to the Maker

Her budding branches grow faster than all the rest

Even though she is furthest from the core of nutrition and the center of the root

Even flow is not what is seen here

No

It is uneven flow

We are not all in the same flow

Some branches flow in ways they do not know

We do not know

And yet they go and go and go

The Wild Roses

Blooming
they can't be contained
never thought they would
unleashed
revolting from dormancy
no one can stop them
no one can contain them
they bleed on a green backdrop
no matter that I see them behind black iron bars
that's just a fence
with a gate for me
but for these buds
they will grow through if they so desire
perhaps even clinging and wrapping
becoming one