Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
November 27, 2022

Begin at the End
Matthew 24:36-44

Maddie got a Choose Your Own Adventure book for Christmas last year – do you remember these books?  It’s a story with many different plotlines all in one book.  As you read, you decide after each page how you want the story to go: do you explore the underwater cave? Turn to page 40.  Or do you stay in your submarine and continue to move along the sea floor?  Turn to page 45.

I remember loving these books as a child, and reading with Maddie, I saw that she did exactly as I used to do – she would make a choice, but mark the page so she could return to that point in case the story went south and she needed to retrace her steps and go in a different direction.  Many of the storylines do not end well, the main character dies or something else happens to end the adventure.  So invariably, when reading together, Maddie and I will flip back to an earlier fork in the story, to see if we can get to a better ending, by making different or better choices.

How will the story turn out?  This is the motivating question for those of us who read, or watch, or listen to stories.  What’s going to happen?  The end matters!  We want things to work out in the end, for conflicts to be resolved, people to reconcile, for justice to be done; I want love to win.  This curiosity is a great motivator, it’s enabled me to push on to finish more than one book with a meandering plot line.

Today, on the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the church year, we begin with the end.  We start the new year by looking towards the end of time, the promised second coming of Christ and the culmination of God’s work in history.  The question of when Christ would return was a serious one for the early church, because they believed the end of the world was imminent.  This apocalyptic eschatology, a big word our children learned in Sunday school a few weeks ago – this thinking that the end of the world was near, was the dominant worldview in Biblical times.  The gospel writer’s community was growing restless – wondering, is this ever going to happen? How much more time would pass, how much more suffering would they have to endure before Jesus returned to make all things new?

We are living in what seem to be perilous times.  We know that because of climate change and industrialization, we are living through the sixth great extinction.  We know more now than ever before about the epochs of life on earth, the millions of years that our planet has existed, the rise and fall of the dinosaurs and the ice ages, we give them names like the Pleistocene and Cretaceous period and so on.  We can see that earth will likely exist far into the future.  This age of the Anthropocene is just a tiny blip in a very, very long timeline.  If we have read any books from the Left Behind series, it is likely out of cultural curiosity and not because we really believe the end is nigh.  So what do we make of the apocalypticism that we read in today’s text, and the promises of the prophets about the peaceable kingdom to come?

First, the truth: Matthew is right; Jesus is right: we cannot know when the end will come.  Not for us, nor for those we love; and not for our planet, either.  We can only live and know in the present. Right here.  Right now.  In this moment.  So this is the time for faithfulness.  Right here, right now is the time for us to act with compassion.  For us to love one another.  For us to serve our neighbors.  For us to forgive and admit our failings.  For us to seek peace.

The temptation, of course, is to wait… wait for it to be easier, wait for some unknown time in the future when we have more time, or more money, when the need is greater or the path more clear.

Mary Oliver, patron saint of wonder, wrote these brief “instructions for living a life” in her poem “Sometimes”: “Pay attention./  Be astonished./  Tell about it.”[1]

I believe she’s right.  We are called to pay attention – not to sleepwalk through our days, just to go through the motions, but to be present in the world.  Awake, and aware that life is precious.  Precious precisely because it can be precarious, fragile, and unpredictable, even as it is beautiful, and filled with moments of awe and open-mouthed joy.

Two days ago, Dary and I watched the orange of a blazing sunset fade away and a tiny sliver of a moon appear in the night sky over the Blue Ridge Mountains that ring the Roanoke Valley.  It was absolutely ordinary.  To share that moment with him, out of the happy chaotic jumble of our family, was an absolute gift.

I saw a graph the other day that mapped the average time we spend with other people in our lifetimes: how much time we spend with our parents and family of origin, with our partners, our own children, our friends and colleagues.  Time with parents and family peaks, obviously, in our early years, dramatically decreasing after age 18 for most people.  A friend of ours said he tries to hold this in mind when he’s with his family, and his in-laws – how many more dinners will we have together, all crowded around the same table?  Twenty?  He says it helps him let go of the minor annoyances, and to better appreciate what each person means to him.

The marching drumbeat of this Advent season is the words “keep awake.”  “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”  In the gospel of Mark, it’s repeated again and again – keep awake!  It is tempting to allow our daily routines to lull us into a somnolent daze.  Easier than ever, really, to be numb to the relentless deluge of news that pours from our televisions and smartphones – somewhere, someone is hungry.  Somewhere, someone is sick.  Somewhere, someone is suffering.  But the message of the gospel is to keep awake!  Pay attention!  Keep at the work of discipleship, trusting that God is at work, that Christ is coming and will come again and again and again.

See, I’m not sure that I believe in a cataclysmic, apocalyptic second coming.  I ascribe to Dorothy Day’s belief that Christ comes to us over and over in the people whom we meet – in those with whom we break bread around the table.  In those whom we serve, and in those who serve and help care for us.  And, when we wake up and pay attention, we can see God’s beauty and the sacred that shimmers right in the midst of the ordinary routine of each day, and the ritual of our traditions.  The reign of God, breaking through all around us.

We cannot know for sure how the story will end.  But we can trust in the promise of the prophet: that one day the weapons of war will be made into garden tools.  When we choose to invest in food security instead of artillery.  We can trust in God’s promise that we will know peace… if and when we wake up to Christ’s holy presence within and around us, coming to us in moments of ordinary transcendence.  Every day.  So we can make choices that lead to the end that is promised.  We can be faithful, here, and now.  We can love one another and work for peace here, and now.  We pay attention and notice the sliver of the moon, be astonished, and tell about it. Thanks be to God.

[1] Oliver, Mary, quoted by Jenna Barnett, “10 quotes from Mary Oliver, Patron Saint of Paying Attention,” Sojourners Magazine, https://sojo.net/articles/10-quotes-mary-oliver-patron-saint-paying-attention

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
November 13, 2022

The Promise of Renewal
Isaiah 65:17-25

When I was serving a church in Birmingham, the Equal Justice Initiative opened their National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The Equal Justice Initiative, or EJI as it’s called, is Bryan Stevenson’s law firm that seeks to exonerate wrongfully accused people on death row, fights to free children locked up in adult prisons, and works for prison reform.  The National Memorial, and the accompanying museum, seeks to memorialize the thousands of people killed by racial terror lynching in our country, and to educate visitors about the impact and legacy of lynching in our criminal justice system, in our culture, communities, families, and more.  EJI has done this work because they believe, “America needs a deeper and broader narrative shift to move from mass incarceration into an era of truth and justice: we need to honestly confront our history.”[1]

In EJI’s offices and at the Legacy Museum, there are jars of soil collected from sites where people were lynched – each jar bearing the name, location, and the date the person was killed.  These jars, row after row of them, lined up on gently illuminated wooden shelves from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, are a collective testimony to the sheer horror of this era in American history – each jar representing a life, and another family, another community torn apart and traumatized by racial hatred and violence.  Some members of my congregation in Birmingham participated in the soil collection project, going early one Saturday morning to EJI’s offices in Montgomery, to meet with activists from across the country, to get a jar, the name of the person, and the location of their death, so they could travel to collect the soil.

Imagine their surprise, their shock, and their shame, when they, this group from First Presbyterian Church of Birmingham, discovered that the young man’s body had been found at the First Presbyterian Church of Tuscaloosa.  His name was Henry Burke.  And he was 19 years old.

They told me that they went to the church and stood awkwardly outside, not sure if they should let someone know what they were doing.  We all knew members of this congregation, knew the pastors, they are us.  And so they knocked on the doors, walking all around the building like you do trying to get into a church on a weekday.  When they finally found the weekday entrance, they told the person who answered who they were and what they were doing.  They asked about Henry Burke – did the church know that this had happened?  Was there some connection?  What was the story they told about it?  The person wasn’t sure.  There was some vague recollection, a rumor here or there – but nothing concrete in the historical memory of the congregation.  Not a story they told willingly to folks on their doorstep.

So the group thanked the woman, and went to the lawn, and dug up some earth, and filled the big glass jar.  Then they prayed, and carried it back to Montgomery, and added it to the exhibit.  Henry Burke.

This work of EJI’s is the recovery of historical memory.  Their team researches and documents the victims of lynching, and partners with community groups to put up historical markers at locations where the murders took place.  This brings the haunted history out into the open, a public commemoration and acknowledgement of the harm done; gives testament to the lives lost, and the courage of the surviving family and community.

People who research trauma tell us that giving voice to painful memories is often a necessary part of the healing process.  Traumatic experiences fracture our memory; they get imbedded in our psyche deeper than our thinking, speaking brains can go, way down in our lizard brains, our limbic systems.  This leaves us in a constant flux state of fight – flight – or freeze, and can cause painful memories to reemerge when triggered by a sound or smell connected to the trauma – what we know as PTSD.

But, when we speak about the harm we’ve survived, bring truth out of the shadows and shine a light on our wounded places, a path opens up to healing.  The past stays past – we aren’t doomed to repeat it.

This is the intention of the National Memorial of Peace and Justice, commemorative markers and soil collection project.  Their work is inspired by the truth and reconciliation commissions in South African following the end of apartheid, and in Guatemala at the conclusion of the civil war there.  We must name the truth of the past as we’ve experienced it, to honor the memory of those who died, and to ensure that we never repeat it.  This remembering enables us to heal.

All of this to say that the words of the prophet Isaiah strike a strange chord for me today.  Particularly the promise that the former things shall not be remembered, nor brought to mind.

Isaiah paints a beautiful vision of the world to come, a new heaven and a new earth!  The peaceable kingdom!  And yet, one of the things that makes us human – that enables us to form lasting relationships, to learn and grow and build community – is our memory.  One reason why dementia can be so painful, so difficult.  When we forget, it erases our memories of who we are, where we’ve been, and how we are connected.

Why is this erasing of memory part of Isaiah’s vision of the new creation?

The prophet was writing to people who had survived the trauma of exile.  He’s writing in Judah, after his people have returned to the home of which they’d dreamed for so long.  But they discovered it was not as their parents and grandparents had remembered.  Devastated by war, and generations of enslavement, they do not flourish back in their homeland.  They eke out a living, barely scraping by.  Hence the promise of the day when they will build houses for themselves and live in them – produce food that they themselves will be able to eat.  Reminds me of the bitter irony that in the rich, coffee growing regions of Guatemala and Mexico, farmers often drink Nescafe instant coffee, because they cannot afford to drink coffee from the beans they grow.

The prophet offers a vision of human flourishing – people able to build and produce for themselves, without exploitation, with enough for everyone.  Safety, health, a life to old age without fear of harm.  Peace.  Trauma theory aside, perhaps the promise of a clean slate, where the suffering of the past will not need to be remembered or come to mind, is what these families who have returned from exile need to be able to go on.

There was a Presbytery Gathering yesterday, and I had the pleasure of presenting two candidates for ministry on behalf of the CPM so that they might be certified ready to seek a call.  One of them wrote in his statement of faith that a central task of the church is that of remembering: remembering who God is, and who we are – remembering that we are loved, and remembering the promises of God; remembering that as we wait for the fullness of the kindom, we are called to the work of forgiveness and healing, justice, and reconciliation.  Remembering, after all, is part of what we do each week – remembering the promise of grace at the font. And when we gather at the table, we remember the words and the work of God in Christ; when we break bread together, we physically re-member his broken body, becoming the body of Christ in the world again.

Can you remember when you first learned to ride a bike?  All of the different directions you had to pay attention to, the balance, the speed, how to move the pedals, how to brake, how to turn, where to put your hands on the handlebars.  But once you got the hang of it, you really didn’t have to think about it anymore.  It just became second nature.  Your body remembered, so you didn’t have to – now you just hop on and go.  Maybe this is the kind of knowing, this deep, embodied knowledge, that the prophet is talking about.  We don’t have to work to remember the former things, they don’t even come to mind.  Because deep down in our bones, we know the fundamental truth – that God is the ground of our being, whose love holds us no matter what.

As far as I know, there is not yet a marker at that church in Tuscaloosa, bearing the name and story of Henry Burke.  Not yet.  But he is remembered.  And I have to think that this hard work of remembering is what sustains us and carries us forward in this in-between time, as we long for the fulfillment of God’s promises of healing, and wholeness, and peace. And the recovery of historical memory, telling the truth of what has happened to us and others, acknowledging harm done and seeking to repair it, is how we make space for healing now, as we look towards the time when we won’t have to remember anymore – we will just know the truth of God’s love, the abundance of God’s grace, the embrace of the whole holy family.

[1] Equal Justice Initiative, https://eji.org