Ruth Krall, A Meditation: The Third Sunday in Advent

The photo is by Hans Vivek, who has generously made it available for online sharing at Unsplash.

Ruth Krall has written a beautiful sermon for the third Sunday of Advent, to follow on the one she wrote as Advent began, which I shared here a number of days ago. Ruth writes, 

An Advent Sermon from Ruth Krall on First Sunday of Advent

The photo is by Hans Vivek, who has generously made it available for online sharing at Unsplash.

It's my privilege today to share with you a sermon my friend Ruth Krall has written for the first Sunday of Advent (yesterday, 22 November). Other previous postings on Bilgrimage by Ruth Krall can be found at the label with her name beneath this posting. Here's Ruth's sermon:

"The Immigrant Children…Cannot Be Erased by Shopping Excursions": An Advent Sermon by Wendell Griffen

I'm happy to be able to share with readers a sermon I heard my friend Reverend Wendell Griffen deliver this past Sunday at New Millennium Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. Wendell has uploaded the sermon to his blog site, and has given me permission to share it here, too. Wendell's sermon, which is entitled “An Advent Prayer for Desperate People,” contextualizes Advent and Christmas in a way that Lisa Koop's Advent sermon, which I shared two days ago, also does. Both note the struggle many of us have in finding spiritual foundations and hope in a world in which much seems deeply awry, in which the powerful abuse the weak, with self-professed Christians standing squarely on the side of the powerful and cheering them on. Wendell's sermon follows.

Death of 7-Year-Old Girl in U.S. Custody, a Family Funeral, and the Inexplicable Cruelty of Right-Wing U.S. Catholicism: An Advent Conundrum

Sometimes I follow threads in Catholic discussions on Twitter down rabbit holes. I know I shouldn't do this, because the holes inevitably turn out to be dark, claustrophobic, and stifling. 

Putting Christ Back Into Christmas: The Death of Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin

I Have a Dream: As Pope Francis Announces that Gay Men Shouldn't Enter Priesthood, as Advent Begins — "Leave the LGBTQ Community the Hell Alone"

This is a meditation for the first Sunday of Advent. It has specific reference to what Pope Francis said (or is said to have said: let the Catholic games begin!) in a book released in Italy yesterday, which is being represented widely in headlines throughout the mainstream media like this one today from The Guardian in London: "Gay people should not join Catholic clergy, Pope Francis says." Given that we know that there already are gay men in the Catholic priesthood and hierarchy — galore — this statement will rightly strike people with functioning consciences and access to much information at all as downright silly. As malicious….

Had One of My Church Dreams Last Night: An Advent Meditation

Had one of my church dreams last night. Church dreams are, for me, often painful ones involving tears (the impossibly distant altar I can see from high in the eyrie at the back of the church to which I've been consigned, but which I cannot reach at communion time). Or, they are the opposite, ecstatic ones involving singing and a gladdened heart.

As the Solstice Arrives, Christian Radio Stations in Bible Belt Prepare for Birth of Prince of Peace by Targeting Muslims

As we approach the solstice, the day of the year with least light, a report to you from on the ground in the deep, dark heart of the bible belt, where hysteria about people of a religious persuasion different than our owns appears to be reaching fever pitch as Christmas arrives:

U.S. Christian Leaders Speak Out Against Anti-Muslim Hate Speech: Making Advent Real

Steve and I went yesterday to a local Episcopal church again, as we observed the third Sunday of Advent. Friends have repeatedly invited us to this church, too — one who's a recovering Southern Baptist, another who's the son of a United Methodist minister. One female, the other male; one straight, the other gay; one a former student of mine in a graduate ministry program, the other a longtime friend.

Advent: Meditating About "The Humorless Puzzle of Inequality and Hate"

Another Advent offering for you today from a log of quotations I've kept over the years as I've read: as with yesterday's set of illuminations, all of these feature a certain word about which I propose that we think with concentration these days, whether we're meditating as members of a religious tradition or are not connected to or hostile to religion: 

Advent: "Darkness and Death Take Different Forms in Every Generation, But the Challenge of Gathering the Forces of Light and Love to Oppose Them Remains the Same"

An Advent offering for you, continuing the themes of the meditation I posted yesterday: illuminations from many different books and poems I've read over many years, and have recorded in my quotation log: 

An Advent Meditation: The Struggle for Hope As Dark Rises and Light Shifts, and Churches Become Trivial Cultural Adjuncts of Affluent Values

It's that time of year in which the waning of the light really does put us into a new — a different — space emotionally and spiritually. We wake these days to bleak darkness, and long before bedtime, the sun has vanished below the horizon. During the day, it comes into the house at new, and sometimes challenging, angles as it moves itself to the southern side of the sky.

John Pavlovitz on Outgrowing American Christianity: "Feeling Estrangement from These Things Is a Good Thing"

John Pavlovitz writing today at his Stuff That Needs to Be Said blog about his emancipation from American Christianity, which he realizes he has outgrown:

Fruitcake Making, Home, and LGBT Folks in the Church: An Advent Meditation Noting the Total Silence of Pope Francis About LGBT People in Uganda

A brief report to all of you on a dreary post-U.S. Thanksgiving weekend in which we've had enough rain to warrant two arks instead of the single one that Noah built: I've made the weekend brighter by remaining true to my grandmother's tradition of baking her Christmas fruitcakes on or by Thanksgiving weekend. Her rule of thumb was that fruitcake for Christmas needed to be baked by the last week of November, since it required a month in a sealed tin in a dark closet, wrapped in cheesecloth and laved repeatedly with sherry or bourbon, to mature it for eating at Christmas time.

Christmas and the Empty Crib: Recent Catholic Commentary on the Broken Church

What am I doing as Christmas approaches, besides baking cookies, fruitcakes, and cheese straws, you ask? And keeping the house running and in decent order as Steve and his brother hammer and nail at their building project (you don't want to put a hammer or a nail in my little bumbling hands). Thank you for asking.

Rachel Maddow, "This Is an Aspirational Dog"

Well, Advent is about living in hope, isn't it? The graphic is a screen shot from a short clip of Rachel Maddow talking about an aspirational dog, which is a teaser for a longer one in which she reports on the brouhaha caused by misreporting about a papal statement re: dogs and heaven recently.

Advent Arrives: My Fellow Catholics Debate Immigration, and I Watch Appalled from the Sidelines

Advent's here now, and I'm once again in one of those watching-appalled-from-the-sidelines moments in my spiritual journey, as I look at how many of my fellow Catholics are responding to the debate about the immigration issue now roiling the American public square. As the national holiday of giving thanks ended (a holiday, let's not forget, featuring a mythic story about immigrant Puritans relying on the mercy of native peoples to feed and keep them alive), at several National Catholic Reporter discussion threads dealing with the immigration issue (e.g., here and here), things got so bad that multiple comments had to be deleted and the threads locked down.

Rachel Maddow on Lawrence O'Donnell's Report re: the "Mistake" Made by St. Louis Assistant Prosecutor in Ferguson Grand Jury Hearing

In a news segment yesterday, Rachel Maddow noted the importance of Lawrence O'Donnell's hard-hitting questions about the mistake St. Louis assistant prosecutor Kathi Alizadeh made in the Ferguson case, when she gave grand jurors a 1979 law declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1985. I discussed this story a few days ago, linking to O'Donnell's commentary about this incident. 

Pope Francis, Anti-Gay Clobber Texts, and Hope: An Advent Meditation

Advent's my season, in some ways. As a gay Catholic who hopes and believes that my church might eventually decide to treat me and others like me with basic human decency, I have long lived in hope, believing in the substance of things unseen. 

Marilynne Robinson on "The Great Narrative" of Wondrous Love in the Gospels: An Advent Meditation

I posted this excerpt from Marilynne Robinson's essay "Wondrous Love" during Holy Week 2012. I'm of a mind to publish it again now as an Advent meditation. I love its insistence that what Christians think and say in the name of Christ--what they profess as the teaching of churches called into being to remember Jesus and transmit his memory--has always to be normed by the "great narrative" of the Christian gospels.