Have you ever been locked out? Standing outside of some impenetrable space? Perhaps you had bags in your hands. Or maybe it was cold or foggy; or perhaps it was oppressively hot. You are caught on the wrong side. Perhaps you felt rage, Perhaps sadness or loneliness. There was probably a moment, or an hour, when you felt resigned to your state. You knew there was nothing to be done about it, all you could do was wait.
There are times when we are really and truly locked out. You forgot your key, nobody was home, and there you sat on the porch in the rain. And there are times when we are systematically locked out. Moments and lifetimes when the structures and biases and injustices make cages you can feel but barely see. Holding us captive, devastating hopes and dreams, hindering generations. There is another kind of locked out. The metaphysical, emotional and deep type of being locked out, or, as the case may be locked in. Caught in the sins and fears that will not release us, bound by the mourning that can turn this season of glee into gloomy ruins.
For all its celebration, todays Psalm is rooted in trauma and imperial oppression. Can you hear it? Can you hear that its desire for restoration comes from the place of weeping? Its fortunate hope, its dreamy consolation, this isn’t the song for those who are satisfied. It is the is a song of a Blue Christmas, a song that can imagine the fullness,yet you know it is a long long way from here. It is a song that starts from being locked out, or perhaps, locked in.
You might have noticed a tension in the tenses of the verbs. Verb tenses in Hebrew are not simply translated, and in poetry such as this, the path is not clear-cut. If all of the tenses are future focused, those who go out weeping will come again with joy. A future tense makes it a prayer for help, a tension that starts from emptiness and burden. If the lines are past tense…when the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion then we were like those who dream. Then this past tense makes it a thanksgiving psalm, praising God for all that he has done. You might notice that it is translated here, and almost always, in both future and past tenses. This unsettled timeliness invites us into the tension of the possible, draws us into a porous overlapping of God’s time. This Psalm 126 demands that we not lock ourselves up in the past, or the present, or even in daydreams of the future.
Here we are in the downslope, or upslope, of Advent, with this earth spinning toward the darkness of winter solstice, and with us preparing to welcome the Christ, the light of all people. Perhaps you have noticed that the news of this fragile earth is not conforming to the rush of good cheer. We are being shocked into paying attention to the complexities of inequality and discrimination and privilege and distrust. It feels troubling. Locked in, locked out, locked down. Can you feel it? Is our own captivity being exposed? It may be that we are all blind and captured by the pressures of politeness and platitudes. What if all our niceness is just shiny wrapping paper? What if we are as deeply selfish and unforgiving as we are portrayed to be? Is that our story?
Our true story isn’t about reindeer noses. Forgiveness is our true story. Our story is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, our story is exile and return, our story is enslavement and exodus. Forgiveness isn’t as simple as making a list or a one day suspension of disbelief, or a whitewash. Believing in forgiveness means that even our worst failures and devastations: these cannot lock God out. Our ruins are a place where God meets us. Believing in forgiveness also means believing in repentance. Repentance isn’t about feeling depraved, it is about freeing ourselves from the locks we have created for ourselves.
Yet this holy restoration and radical forgiveness, it is not a human project, it is God’s gift. This gift is possible because he is one for us, because he became one of us: Emmanuel. Affirming our faith in the forgiveness of sins is not to claim that injustice and oppression and hatred do not matter. Nor is it to claim that the way forward is sweet and easy. Believing in repentance and forgiveness, is tough, and it is difficult, but it is freedom. There is no grief or trial or devastation where God’s presence cannot bring liberty.
For all who feel that God has forgotten his promises, Christ comes. For all who wonder if they have forgotten their promises, Christ comes. Our readings today invite us to see the world as the prophets see it. To see past and present and future, bound together in the heart of God. Are you a prophet? John today, he says no, he is not. Perhaps you are right there with him. Are you a prophet? Most of you are thinking, heck no. Yet that doesn’t stop John from seeing the world as a prophet sees it. Prophets see the world as God dreams of it. God dreams of a world that is not divided into locked in and locked out.
What would you see if you saw your life as God sees it? What would you say and do, who would you be if you saw the world as God sees it? From his Nazi prison cell theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers this.
Who am I? They often tell me I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a Squire from his country house.
Who am I? They often tell me I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly, as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me I bore the days of misfortune
Equably, smilingly, proudly, like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectations of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all.
Who am I? This or the Other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, you know, O God, I am thine!
Advent 3b RCL
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla
Washington, USA
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