the counter-cultural blessing of feast days and community...

The clouds that shroud these hills in a grey perpetuity between October and April are a bit shy this morning: small patches of blue peak through and a ray or two of sun has showed up, too. Such is the promise of St. Brigid's day when light begins to prosper again and the whole of creation rejoices. Honoring feast days like this are vital for us. They give us times to practice celebration in an era hellbent on disappointment. What's more, they reinforce the blessings God has placed within us all since before there was time. 

On this Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, my heart delights in the appointed readings for worship: they are wildly counter-cultural. And in all my days I can't think of a season when living into the promises of these counter-cultural practices mattered more for people of privilege like myself. Not only do these practices transform our hearts, they change our lives so that we might live boldly in solidarity with the least of God's family. The wounded and forgotten, the rejected and disgraced, the poor and violated, the imprisoned and oppressed, the discarded and broken. Indeed, these practices create the possibility of kinship with every person and thing that does not fit into our white, bourgeois, utilitarian society. Feast days give us a taste of God's Beloved Community. They are a tender ray of light in the darkness, a quiet,a  gentle embrace when we're discouraged, a sip of cool water when we're parched. The poet, Maya Angelou, captured the essence of our feast days when she wrote, "Continue."       

My wish for you
Is that you continue

     Continue

To be who and how you are
To astonish a mean world
With your acts of kindness

     Continue

To allow humor to lighten the burden
Of your tender heart

     Continue

In a society dark with cruelty
To let the people hear the grandeur
Of God in the peals of your laughter

     Continue

To let your eloquence
Elevate the people to heights
They had only imagined

     Continue

To remind the people that
Each is as good as the other
And that no one is beneath
Nor above you

     Continue

To remember your own young years
And look with favor upon the lost
And the least and the lonely

     Continue

To put the mantle of your protection
Around the bodies of
The young and defenseless

     Continue

To take the hand of the despised
And diseased and walk proudly with them
In the high street
Some might see you and
Be encouraged to do likewise

     Continue

To plant a public kiss of concern
On the cheek of the sick
And the aged and infirm
And count that as a
Natural action to be expected

     Continue

To let gratitude be the pillow
Upon which you kneel to
Say your nightly prayer
And let faith be the bridge

The rhythm of authentic spirituality, you see, involves feasting and fasting as well as songs and silence, dancing and acts of compassion, community and solitude. The first reading for today comes from Micah 6:  

With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?  Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Learning to think and live in solidarity with God's mercy begins with doing it in real time. In small ways. They mystics said that we do not THINK our way into a new manner of living, rather we LIVE our way into a new way of thinking. We get out of our heads and into our bodies so that God's words become flesh within us. We taste and see the goodness of the Lord. It is so incarnational and sacramental, this good news of feasting and fasting, and we have rendered it so abstract!  Thanks be to God that Fr. Richard Rohr wrote this in this morning's meditation:

St. Francis loved God above all and wanted to imitate Jesus in very practical ways. Action and lifestyle mattered much more to him than mentally believing dogmatic or moral positions to be true or false. Francis directly said to the first friars: “You only know as much as you do!” Franciscan alternative orthodoxy has never bothered fighting popes, bishops, Scriptures, or dogmas. It just quietly but firmly pays attention to different things—like simplicity, humility, non-violence, contemplation, solitude and silence, earth care, nature and other creatures, and the “least of the brothers and sisters.” These are our true teachers.  (NOTE: the Center for Contemplation and Action begins a 6 week online introduction to practicing Franciscan spirituality. Check it out - and join me!)  

Today's first reading reminds us that we are always being humbled as we move between the polarities of justice and mercy (or compassion.) We evaluate our actions within this journey. We understand our politics and economics through it, too. I suspect that this is why the second reading for today is taken from St. Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth. It is all about living as an embodiment of the Cross:

The cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being made whole, it is the power of God... for has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? Some have demanded signs from God while others want rational explanations, to which we say: look at Christ crucified. He is a stumbling block to some and an absurdity to others, yet for those who have hit rock bottom Christ has become both the power and wisdom of the holy God has chosen what looks foolish and absurd to the world to shame the powerful; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

At the core of the Cross is an experiential truth: God comes to us in the most insignificant and small ways. When we have failed. When we are lost. When we cannot make sense of our lives. When we have tried everything - including using our minds to their fullest and still come up empty or hit rock bottom- then God shows up within our emptiness. This is the testimony of our Lent/Easter practice of fasting and feasting: Lent asks us to let go of our control. The emptier we become - the more we engage with the brokenness of the world - the more we accept our need to trust God. To rest in God. To listen and search for God in the smallest and most obscure places. In this, the journey of Jesus from the periphery to the center becomes our journey, too as we practice giving up control in love and die to the world. It is in our weakness that God becomes our strength. It is in our emptiness  that God fills our hearts. It is in our surrender that God shares serenity. As we accept those things we cannot change, change those things we can, we discover the wisdom of the unforced rhythms of grace born of knowing the difference. Micah speaks of it as the humbling polarity between justice and mercy. Paul speaks of it as the humbling polarity between trusting ourselves and trusting God. And Jesus brings it all together in the Sermon on the Mount - the third reading for this day's worship in St. Matthew 5 (and Peterson's reworking) - saying:

You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought. You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. God's food and drink is the best meal you’ll ever eat. You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for. You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.

Jesus says this to his community - not to a random group of individuals who will never see one another again - but to a people bound together in a covenant of love. If I have learned anything since departing from the church, it is that we cannot consistently live into counter-cultural grace all by ourselves. We need one another for encouragement, accountability, humor and solace. Jean Vanier put it like this:

Let us not put our sights too high. We do not have to be saviors of the world! We are simply human beings, enfolded in weakness and in hope, called together to change our world one heart at a time. (We do this in community when...) members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets. Community is only being created when they have recognized that the greatness of (each person) is to accept his or her insignificance, our human condition and this earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness. The beauty of our humanity is in this fidelity to the wonder of each day.

Community is profoundly counter-cultural. Solidarity is counter-cultural. Making a commitment to mercy and justice and openness is counter-cultural. And our culture needs all the countering we can muster.