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:

We / They: How Refusal to Include Queer Voices in Synodal Conversations Undercuts Claims of Church about Itself as Sacramental Sign of Redemption

“Christ made God manifest by making invisible people visible—the poor, women, all those deprived of their rights.”

~ Dorothee Sölle, "Beyond Mere Obedience: Reflections on a Christian Ethic for the Future," trans. Lawrence W. Denef (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1970), p. 163. https://t.co/0tXvupAKEc

— 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚊𝚖 𝙳. 𝙻𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚜𝚎𝚢 (@wdlindsy) October 26, 2018

In response to a question from Deborah Rose-Milavec of Future Church about how the Youth Synod is dealing with women's and LGBTQ issues, delegate Yadira Vieyra states,

Ash Wednesday Meditation: Ivone Gebara on the Communtarian Dimension of the Cross

Today's Ash Wednesday, a day in which some Christian liturgical traditions limn crosses of ash on the foreheads of the faithful, to challenge them to remember that they are dust and will return to dust. Ash Wednesday inaugurates a liturgical season of remembering the cross and resurrection of Jesus, the central symbols on which Christian faith turns.

Delores Williams on Black Womanist Theology, the Cross, and the Rape and Defilement of Nature

Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993):

Stories That Will Not Be Forgotten: The Easter Message

Life is full of interesting . . . coincidences.

Some of those I remember vividly have been unexpected encounters with former students, in strange places in which I never expected to see anyone I knew, let alone someone I had taught. I remember rushing through the Frankfurt airport once, and suddenly coming face to face with Calvin Washington, whose name popped right into my head the moment I saw him, though I’d never have been able to identify him otherwise, in a picture of his class. Even in a military uniform, Calvin was the same old Calvin, phlegmatic and deliberate in each movement as he had been in his pre-Army days.

And there was the time when I was walking along a street in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C., and heard my name being called from across the street: “Father Lindsey. Father Lindsey!” Randy Johnson, who had insisted on calling me “father” when I taught him, no matter how many times I told him I was not a priest, just an ordinary layman. His name, too, came right to me, as if we were both still at Xavier slogging through another chapter of Shusaku Endo’s life of Jesus.

Yesterday brought Steve and me one of these unusual happenings, as we prepared Easter dinner for our families. We were scurrying about to set the house to rights, dust, shine, make things welcoming. As he worked around the kitchen-den, Steve bumped a mantel clock his aunt had given him last year.

The clock was one of many Steve’s father retrieved from anywhere he could find old clocks needing repair, and put back into working order. John loved clocks. If you called him near the hour, for a solid minute, you’d hear chime overlaying chime in the background.

As he finished repairing a clock, he’d give it away. Each of his eight children and many relatives and friends now have a collection of clocks John repaired and presented to them as gifts. Steve and I have one John bought at a thrift shop on a trip to us in North Carolina. It has those little faux marble columns made of animal horn found on some mantel clocks of the era. In addition to fixing the clock works, John went to the trouble of finding horn and whittling it to the right shape to refit the clock with its little columns again.

This clock is especially important to me, since I have a match to it, which John also repaired. This is a clock that my grandfather bought the day my aunt Kat, his first daughter, was born in July 1914. She cherished it, and I feel tremendously honored (and burdened with expectation) that she chose to give the clock to me before she died.

It had stopped working, and John fixed it, cleaning it carefully inside so that the parts now shine when I open it. The two matched clocks seem to belong side by side on top of the old bookcase in the entryway to our house, with tiny unglazed cherub heads from Latin America, both faces marred by interesting accidents in the kiln, watching over them. Throwaways, like so much else in this house kept by social throwaways—other people's discards that have a place with us, and which we cherish for one reason or other, marred faces notwithstanding.

So here’s what happened yesterday: as Steve worked around the clock that had gone from his father to Steve’s aunt and then to Steve, he bumped it, and it began to chime. And when we looked at the clock face, it was set precisely on the moment at which Steve bumped and revived it. All day long, all Easter day, it chimed right on the moment.

The clock hadn’t been working well, and nothing Steve did to it seemed to set it to rights. It’s a clock with a beautiful deep chime, something like a recording of a church bell. Steve’s father had given it to one of Steve’s aunts who is a nun. As she was retiring last year and moving to a new monastery, she wanted Steve to have it.

It’s a meaningful gift, because Steve’s aunt gave the clock to him within a week before his father’s death last summer. So he now associates the clock and the gift with that important passage time in his family’s life.

And this, of course, made its chiming all through Easter day (it has now stopped again, as mysteriously as it started), all the more meaningful to us.

Coincidences like this have been on my mind lately, as I’ve thought about something that happened to me in my last year of high school. I recently read a book that mentioned Catullus. Catullus is a name that always immediately brings me back to Latin classes in high school—both because I liked his pithy (and often obscene) lyric poems, and because my Latin teacher, Sallie Chambers, gave me a copy of Catullus with side-by-side Latin and English versions of his poems, a surprising gift, since the translation did not in any way seek to evade or bowdlerize the dirty bits.

I do not know what might be made today of the choice of an elderly lady to give such a book to a young pupil. I only know that I saw the gift as an act of kindness and of mentorship, and it strikes me as a sad measure of the distance we’ve fallen from real culture, that people today might look askance at such an act of kindness in today’s classroom.

And culture was what Sallie Chambers was all about, in the best, non-stuffy sense of that word. We were lucky to have her as a teacher, as we were lucky to have several other lady-teachers of her generation and background—well-educated, dedicated, widely read and tolerant, brookers of no nonsense and no sloppy preparation: outstanding teachers of a sort colleges and universities no longer produce, and which most universities nowadays would chew up and spit out, if they applied for faculty positions. They would see through the cant and venality of most college administrators in a heartbeat—the money-grubbing that is the machine of the educational enterprise today—and would not hold their tongues.

We enjoyed making just a tiny bit of genial fun of Sallie Chambers, even as we knew that we were fortunate, indeed, to have this skilled classicist with a master’s degree from Tufts University (something she never let one forget) teaching us. She had a Roman nose and wore her hair in a low-perched bun, and with her erect carriage and way of posing her head as if in cameo, she looked for all the world—or so we told ourselves—like the writers whose texts she drilled into our heads in class each day. A dead Roman, live in our Latin class . . . .

But the coincidence: there was a day, that fourth year of Latin, that Mrs. Chambers gave each of us a small book to read, and on which to write a report. Each was a book written in Latin. All were books she had bought at one or another used bookstore at some time in the past.

I don’t recall the title of the book that landed on my desk, or its title. What I do recall was that I opened it up, looked at the flyleaf, and saw my great-aunt’s name written there: Frances Tucker. She had owned the book prior to her marriage to my grandmother's brother John Batchelor. Without knowing the connection, without knowing anything about the previous owner of the little book she placed in my hands, Sallie Chambers had given me a book that had belonged to my great-aunt, who had been a Latin teacher half a century before that date, in a different community.

How the book had come to hear, Mrs. Chambers could not tell me. She thought that she must have bought it at a used bookstore. And, of course, the moment I identified the signature, she wanted me to have it. And I must still have it somewhere, unless I have given it away in several fits of donation in which I’ve boxed up most of my books and have passed them on to libraries that seemed to need them.

Wherever the book is, this coincidence will continue to live on in my mind. As will yesterday’s Easter chorus from John’s clock. As does the message of Easter itself, of a poor, powerless man crushed by injustice, whom the powers-that-be intended to put to death once and for all, so that his strange teachings about God’s salvific presence breaking into the world and his way of acting out those teachings as he sat at table with sinners, would be forever silenced.

It didn’t happen. Not as they planned. And therein lies the hope that those of us who try to remember this man and his legacy find at the very center of our faith.

Angels Unaware: Musings Towards Father's Day

I thought yesterday was father’s day. Which shows how far removed you can get from these greeting card-driven holidays when your parents have died, or you don’t have children. We live in cultural worlds only tenuously connected to those of others, to the extent that we have not yet found connecting points to bring our worlds together.

Even apart from father’s day, I had been thinking of my father since I read last week that 6 June was not merely the day of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, but D-Day.

My father never talked of his experiences in World War II. He did speak with obvious relish of his time at Pearl Harbor—even of the day of the Japanese surprise attack, when he was awakened by the sound of bombs falling and was slightly wounded by shrapnel when one hit the ship on which he was serving.

But of what happened after that, I never heard a word. I know he was in the Pacific theater during the war. The only observation he ever made about those years was once when he was drinking and burst into tears, exclaiming, “No one will ever know how that war scarred the men of my generation!”

So when I hear of any World War II anniversary, my mind automatically turns to my father’s war experiences, and all I do not know. Because my nephew Luke became interested in the war when he was a boy, I tried to obtain any information I could, a copy of my father’s military records. The hunt was largely unsuccessful, though my aunt kindly gave Luke a valuable scrapbook she and my grandmother had kept during the war to record the movements of her brother and half-brother, insofar as they knew of these through hints in letters they obtained.

So much about my father’s life is a blank to me. Family stories I have, since we are a family of storytellers. These suggest that he was the wild boy, the bad seed, of a family of “good” children—the one whose suspenders my grandmother had to tie onto tree trunks as she did outside work like gardening, to keep an eye on him and keep him from wandering away.

My father had his own stories. He was a skilled fabulist who wrote an account of his years growing up in south Arkansas that his college English teacher (this in a semester he did at Marquette while in the CCC) encouraged him to publish. My father’s yarns were tall tales of one lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Being at the bombing of Pearl Harbor was one in a series of such happenings.

On the day Bonnie and Clyde were shot, he was at the house of one of the informants who turned them in. He was thirteen at the time.

Growing up, I knew nothing of Bonnie and Clyde. I had never heard a peep about them until the 1967 movie starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty came out. When I saw it and came home asking how two people could be shot without benefit of a trial in the U.S., my father exploded. They were criminals! They were known criminals. They got what they richly deserved. You don’t have trials for known murderers.

It was then that he told me the story of his having been at the house of one of the informants earlier in the day on which they were shot. According to his story, after they were shot, they were laid out on the kitchen table of a nearby house and people paid admission to see their bodies. He paid his coin and he looked.

And then there was the Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, which my father also happened to hear, and about which he often laughed—at the gullibility of those who hadn’t realized it was fiction, who thought that the world was being invaded by aliens. It was a laugh similar to his ironic laughter about those who thought Huey Long was a demi-god, or that Orval Faubus (my father called him Mr. Faybus) was a hero and not a grandstanding demagogue.

I have always wondered what other stories there might be to hear, had my father lived longer. I last saw him just after Thanksgiving in 1969. Earlier in the month, he had informed my mother that he intended to divorce her for a younger woman, one he had met in his native state of Louisiana.

My mother’s response was to leave immediately, taking my brother Philip with her. Simpson and I were away at school, Philip finishing high school. She returned to Little Rock from south Arkansas to be near her siblings, all of whom save one lived there.

When we gathered at my mother’s new apartment for Thanksgiving, my father asked to see us three boys. He wanted to explain what he was doing and why he was doing it.

This interview was, needless to say, full of pain, recrimination (of my father against my mother, who was not there), and anger (mostly mine against my father; Philip and Simpson were silent). My father informed us he did not intend to offer alimony to my mother.

I challenged him. I told him that my mother had been nothing but a good wife, a hard-working one, who had kept house for him and his three sons for over twenty years. It was her work that put him through law school. She often maintained that she had actually earned his law degree; she had done the research for and had written his papers. As my father left us that day, he shook my brothers’ hands. When he came to me, he said, “I won’t shake your hand. You have opposed me.”

Those were the last words he ever spoke to me. Several weeks later, he ran his car off the road, driving drunk. Because the doctors providing care for him did not detect a broken rib that had punctured a lung, he died within days of pneumonia. I received a letter from my mother on 12 December telling me he had had an accident but was expected to recover. The next morning, she called to inform me he had died suddenly.

There are times when, as many of us do, I feel an intense weight of what-if regarding my parents. What if they had lived longer and we might have had a chance to say to each other all the things we hid in our hearts and were afraid to say?

What if I had understood that they were, after all, only human as I am human? What if I had been more forgiving of their shortcomings? What if they had grown up before having children and had not been emotional adolescents in adults’ bodies? What if they had not drunk to excess?

What if they had not had the weight of their own histories bearing down on their shoulders, their own unresolved issues with parents, the thwarted economic circumstances of the Depression—a particularly cruel experience for young people with keen minds and ambition, who lived in small Southern towns where opportunities for education and fulfilling jobs were few even apart from the Depression?

Several years ago, when I was in the middle of one of these what-if moments, I stopped to do a bit of shopping at a thrift store. As I rummaged through racks of shirts, I noticed an elderly man eyeing me.

He seemed, in fact, to be following me. This unnerved me. One doesn’t talk to a stranger in a thrift shop. I don’t talk to a stranger in any shop. I’m intensely shy. I sometimes deal with the fear of exposure or rejection in public places by encapsulating myself in a cloud of unknowing. If seeing makes one responsible for what one sees, then perhaps it’s better not to see.

As the man eyed me, I sidled this way and that. Still, the man dogged my steps.

Finally, he spoke to me. I don’t remember what he said. It seemed a little off, a tiny bit nonsensical. I was all the more alarmed.

Then he said something that made total sense. Again, I don’t remember what. I decided this was a “moment,” one of those times when we’re supposed to stop and encounter the stranger we have tried to keep at bay. I believe every moment is such a moment. But I often do an abysmal job of embodying what I believe.

We talked, my new-found “friend” and I. I do not know what about me had attracted the man’s attention. Perhaps he simply needed someone to talk to. He was eminently sensible, a sharp and interesting observer of the world around him.

As he talked, he mentioned that he was 84. That would have been my father’s age. I had just been thinking about him, about what he would be like had he lived, about what it would be like to talk to him now, with my adolescent father-son dynamics no longer in play.

They man then told me he had been in the Pacific theater in World War II.

The coincidences were remarkable. I had walked into that store down-hearted. I was down-hearted because I realized that, much as I would like to have the opportunity to talk to my father one last time in an adult conversation, this was never going to happen.

I had entered the store in dark spirits only to find myself pursued by an elderly man of the same age as my father, who had been in the Pacific theater in the second war, as my father had also been . . . .

The man was gentle, sweet, fatherly in all the best senses of the word. He was also black.

My father was a complex man, a tragic one in many respects. He was an ideological segregationist. He could spout the most astonishing nonsense about “the races,” nonsense that I often challenged at the dinner table, resulting in my being sent from the table before supper was over.

Yet in his interpersonal dealings with black persons, I never saw him do or say anything that was not exceedingly humane, exceedingly kind. Any sign of condescension or cruelty on the part of his sons to a black person—or to anyone who was down and out—and he’d react swiftly and mercilessly.

Though I bear (and will always bear) wounds from my relationship with my father, he was not a monster. I learned many good things from him. He gave freely of his legal services to those who could not pay. He shared with me his keen appreciation for nature. My father would take us sons for long walks in the woods, teaching us to read the signs of animal or human presence, to spot edible plants.

We’d go nutting in the fall, gathering chinquapins and wild pecans. On one occasion, as we picked up pecans, he pointed out to me how to spot where an old farmhouse now long gone had once stood. He showed me precisely where the house’s well should be found. And when we looked, it was there, though he himself had never been at this place before.

My father taught me the arts Southern men consider manly, essential for their sons: hunting and fishing. And to his consternation and that of others, I, the proverbial sissy boy, was good at both—far more than either of my brothers. I could bring down birds in trees so far away other hunters couldn’t even see them. And I could bring them down with a single shot—though I had no stomach for the killing, when I saw the evidence of it splayed in the dust and leaves beneath the tree.

Angels? I wonder. Maybe we encounter them more often than we know.

I have no doubt that on my day of painful meditation about my father, myself, our lives, I met an angel. I met a version of my father now, a version of my father had he lived: a man the same age, who had a similar military career, who was coincidentally (but not at all coincidentally) also black. Had my father had his druthers, I doubt (but how do I really know?) whether he’d have chosen to appear in my life at just this time of need in the form of an African-American man.

And that was part of the message to me, the hope that redemption reaches not just forwards but backwards—back into our lives and sordid histories. The angel I encountered that day was my father distilled into the best possibilities of his biography.

We do meet angels unaware. And they almost never look like who we think they will be, when we encounter them.