The stories proclaimed within the Advent liturgies of the Christian tradition recount situations when humanity is most lost in its own greed, tribalism and violence and the victims are those most outside, vulnerable, and powerless  These stories include a remarkable cast of very human characters who played pivotal roles in God’s extraordinary interventions into human history.
 
They are us.  The sacred texts hold a mirror up to the hearer not only urging us summon the courage the be faithful servants, but also challenging us to recognize the villain within ourselves.  These stories call us not only to be watchful and alert, but also to be proactive in the divine plan.  This week, Mother & Child.

Wild Eyes
mixed media
Matt Sesow
2010

On a hot summer evening at an airfield near his home in Nebraska, eight-year old Matt Sesow was struck by the propeller of a landing airplane.  The accident resulted in his left arm being severed and the loss of his left hand.  With the help of family and friends, Sesow learned to excel in both athletics and academics.  It was not until he was working as an adult in the tech industry that Sesow discovered painting.   In the evenings and on weekends he played with painting and ultimately developed his hobby into a path of healing and a mission in life. 
 
"My paintings are the emotional response to a traumatic past, the road to healing, and the confidence of finding a new language to express feelings felt but never shared.  While some people see my paintings as angry or aggressive, many of my collectors and fans (including myself), see my work as hopeful, joyous, and eager to take on the world!"
 
Matt Sesow’s Wild Eyes expresses what any new mother might feel. This wild-eyed mother holds her child close as she looks toward a future she knows will be filled with both struggle and hope.  The child in her lap with a severed hand is more than an autobiography.  Sesow’s image is a universal message of family, protectiveness, and faithfulness.  It is about a journey from brokenness to wholeness. 
 
In what will become her great song of praise, the mother that dominates the Advent stories accepts both the pain and hope of a journey she is destined to take with her child.  Her strength for this task comes from her knowledge of the long prophetic traditions of her faith.  Even at her young age, she knew the stories and songs of a God who empowers those of humble estate (from every generation) to scatter the proud in their conceit and bring the mighty from their thrones.  While this mother knew she was unprepared to be in the middle of this great cosmic drama, she also knew that she would grow into the role as all new mothers or prophets do.  God and family and friends would provide.
 
But maybe more heroically, she understood from these same stories and songs the ultimate cost of this discipleship and this journey.  There would be much sorrow before vindication.  The real courage of faith is simply saying yes to the call to be a player in the divine spectacle of deliverance.  Faithfulness is the place where faith is worked out in actions and where even the most banal of actions and gestures achieves profound meaning and significance. In the actions and gestures of this woman/mother are the aesthetic expressions of an ethical worldview lived out.

“In you the journey is.”  Tony Kushner begins his epic work Angels in America with the funeral of the grandmother of one of the main characters.  In this scene, the rabbi (yes, portrayed here by Meryl Streep) describes this Jewish refugee as “not a person but a whole kind of a person.”  Such a person’s actions motivated by a drive for survival and sustained by faith and perseverance, cultivated the ground from which her descendants grow their own futures.

Mary exclaims that all generations will call her blessed and in doing so she affirms the upside-down character of God’s reign – valleys raised up, mountains made low, a little child leading.  Her blessing does not come from seizing worldly power but rather from relinquishing a safe and normal life to play a pivotal role in Gods divine plan.  This does not mean that she gave up agency or self-worth. On the contrary, she stakes her claim by actively consenting to help overturn the status quo and bring about justice.  As Rory Cooney’s setting of Mary’s song, Canticle of the Turning (sung here by Katherine Moore) proclaims, “My heart shall sing of the day you bring.  Let the fires of your justice burn.  Wipe away all tears.  For the dawn draws near and the world is about to turn.”

What do you learn from Mary's story?  How do you experience the call to participate in God's reign?  How will you respond?

Suggestions for further exploration:

• Read and meditate on the lectionary texts for this week.
• Listen to Steve Thorngate's After the Longest Night:  Songs for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany.
• Practice walking meditation to bring mindful awareness to your movements and actions.  Like mindful breathing practice, walking meditation brings focus and awareness to a common action that is often taken for granted.   Such awareness helps in gaining a greater sense of understanding of thoughts, feelings, and actions and leads to more constructive ways to respond. 
• Watch this TED conversation with Marian Wright Edelman reflecting on her lifetime mission to fight childhood poverty. She says, "The reinforced lesson from (my parents) is that 'God runs a full employment economy' and that if you follow the need, you will never lack for a purpose in life."
• Give of your time and resources to support local organizations that serve women and children. Find out more about The Bedford Christmas Station, Bedford Domestic Violence Coalition, Bedford Community Health Foundation, and Bedford Area Family YMCA.

One of the most haunting verses of devotional poetry I ever encountered was in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Way of the Cross.  In the final station, Jesus’ corpse has been taken down from the cross, the body is swathed according to custom, and laid in a tomb … and von Balthasar suggests that a great and festive liturgy of forgetting begins.
 
So already his unquiet image haunts heads and hearts.
Already the spirit is freed.
Already the Easter question takes shape …
 
But silently.
For tomorrow is only Holy Saturday.
The day when God is dead,
and the Church holds her breath.
That strange day that separates life and death
in order to join them in a marriage beyond all human thought.
 
We wait for justice a lot!  It seems to us that we hold our breath many more days of the year than this one solemn and holy-Saturday.  Our world seems to endlessly churn out events in which we question the existence of a god or we feel ensnared or helpless or lost.
 
Portiuncula Guild offers the following images and prayers as a rumination for the coming days.  These four images were created by profoundly insightful local artists.  We bring together as a tiny Triduum exhibition.  Our simple aim is to juxtapose these images with the prayer of the church and give us an opportunity to think about the causes, situational factors, and consequences of so many negative emotional experiences that surround us at this moment.
 
During these holiest of days … art and prayer and politics collide in narratives of the passion, death and resurrection.  Tyrants and priests, apostles and unbelievers, history and current events, faithfulness and betrayal, partisans and zealots all become characters or themes in a great cosmic drama set within a regional struggle for political power, religious belief and economic control.
 
If the Easter question can take shape amid that narrative … maybe, just maybe we too can hold our breath … and wait … and believe that in our current situation there is the possibility of resurrection and new life.

The writer of the Book of Daniel often begins his moral or ethical folktales with a historical marker situating the story in actual human history;  “in the first year of the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon,” “in the second year of the reign of Cyrus, King of Persia.”  These tales of human courage and faithfulness are set within the clash between the human will for the survival and the human will for self-destruction.  In each story, the interplay between the reigning tyrant and a faithful hero sets-up the narrative’s plot and ultimately the tale’s moral and ethical lesson.
 
Both Chapter 6 and Chapter 11 begin with the historical marker “in the first year of the reign of King Darius the Mede.”  This installation draws on elements from these two chapters – a song in Chapter 6 after Daniel’s trial and deliverance from the lion’s den, and the sweeping 250-year overview of human history found in Chapter 11.
 
The world history outlined in Chapter 11 presents a sweeping drama of armies and kings at war in all corners of the ancient middle east.  A tapestry of blood, anger, greed and self-serving tyrants from the Babylonian Empire, through Egyptian, Persian and Macedonian conquest, all finally culminating in Syrian control under the rule Antiochus IV Epiphanes.  A real-life biblical Game of Thrones describing two and a half centuries of human vanity, greed and sinfulness that brings about an ongoing legacy of death and destruction.
 
Hovering over this global chessboard are the words to a song voicing the central message in the Book of Daniel.  This liturgical canticle in Chapter 6, remarkably, does not come from Daniel but rather comes from the mouth of King Darius after Daniel’s miraculous deliverance from certain death.  The words to this song give the reader an alternative way of thinking about life together in this world, as well as the certainty that God will win in the end over the destructive powers of oppression and violence.  Ultimately the events of history are not ordained by God but are rather the result of free human choices centered in greed and selfishness … humanity’s ever-present sin of desiring more than it needs at the expense of its neighbor’s life and livelihood. 

The various folktales of the Book of Daniel were brought together at one of the lowest points in Jewish religious and cultural history.  The stories served to give direction and hope to a people of faith caught in the middle of extreme cruelty and oppression.  The writer weaves together a rich sampling of hope-filled Jewish stories during a time when religious practices were outlawed, Torah scrolls were being burned, children were torn from their mothers, and the temple was being desecrated with images of foreign gods and the sacrifice of unclean animals. 
The writer gathers stories of faithfulness and interweaves them with the various kingdoms from human history to remind the faithful that the struggle for survival in the time of tyrants is not new.  This is an ongoing struggle within the history of all people seeking to live in covenant with their god and neighbor but find themselves caught up in some seemingly beyond their control.  While the stories highlight the interplay between a faithful hero and the powerful (and often witless) tyrant, the target audience of the writer’s work are the simple people of faith who need a road map for what to do next and how to respond to evil in their midst. 
 
Interestingly, many other unsavory characters emerge in the storytelling.  The legions of sycophants who surround the king and his court plot and manipulate in order to gain favor, protection and prestige from the tyrant.   Likewise, a host of compliant religious leaders who choose to ally with the king for many of the same reasons.  For the writer of Daniel, the tyrant, the sycophant, and the compliant religious leaders put their faith in people or powers or systems that ultimately cannot save.
 
But maybe more interesting, the writer also calls the simple religious folks to accountability.  In a lengthy prayer after his deliverance from the Lion’s den, Daniel first recounts how God has delivered his people in the past and describes a God whose steadfast love is both renowned and dependable.  But then Daniel’s words become penitential and he declares that the faithful have also sinned and done wrong, been wicked, and rebelled.  They too had forgotten how to live in right relationship with god, with each other, and with their world.  The path to wholeness begins with their own confession.
 
Over the past three centuries, the folktales of the Book of Daniel have had an honored place in the shared canon of both Jewish and Christian revelation and imagination because humanity has too often found itself in this same pattern of death and destruction.  Today, many of us find ourselves needing a roadmap for responding to evil in our midst and a world dangerously out of control.  We too live in a world of saber-rattling madmen surrounded by cheering sycophants, evangelical religious leaders that equate their own economic security with god’s blessing, global economic systems that are enthusiastically endorsed but benefit the very few, extreme nationalism disguising itself as patriotism, and an intentional policies of inhospitality directed at those most vulnerable and needy among us. 

The community that Daniel was writing for two and a half centuries ago would have understood our dilemma and responded … God will triumph.