A Righteous Branch

Lectionary reflections for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost (C)

By Carter Heyward

CHANGE FONT AND INDENT

Readings for Pentecost 25, Proper 29, Year C, Nov. 21, 2004

Jeremiah 23:1-6

Psalm 46

Colossians 1:11-20

Luke 19:29-38 (39-44)

We do not simply “wait” for the birth of Jesus; we expect God to come, to be born among us, again, as God always is, in the most unlikely places. And how we need this kind of “Advent spirituality” in the early winter of 2004, a few weeks after The Election in which . . . the hopes and dreams of progressive folks were buried beneath a rubble dubbed “moral values”!

Advent is almost upon us – a time of waiting, but not in passive mode. Indeed, our Christian vocation at this time, a call we share, is one of collective expectation. We do not simply “wait” for the birth of Jesus; we expect God to come, to be born among us, again, as God always is, in the most unlikely places. And how we need this kind of “Advent spirituality” in the early winter of 2004, a few weeks after The Election in which, if you believe most of what you hear these days, the hopes and dreams of progressive folks were buried beneath a rubble dubbed “moral values”!

But wait. The season we're about to enter alerts us to the fact that hopes and dreams, if they are of God, are never buried, never gone, never lost, but rather are seeds being sown by the Spirit who will blow where She will blow when She is ready. O come, o come, Emmanuel!

Through the mouth of the prophet Jeremiah, God has harsh words for those “shepherds” who “destroy and scatter the sheep,” leaders who, boasting of their religiosity and righteousness, divide the people and capture them in fear. Both the prophet and the psalmist offer assurance to God's people that the day is coming when this situation will be undone. “The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; God utters his voice, the earth melts,” promises the Psalmist. “He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear.” Indeed, says the Lord, Woe to the shepherds who destroy my sheep! “You have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil ways . . . The days are surely coming when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch . . .”

Now, of course, the religious people currently in power in the United States of America believe themselves to be The People of this “righteous Branch.” They no doubt would read these biblical texts very differently than most readers of The Witness . For the “religious right,” we progressives are simply getting our payback for decades of such moral debauchery as civil rights, nonviolence, feminism, gay-lesbian-queer activism, environmental endeavors, and other un-biblical, un-Christian, radical acts (especially everything remotely or suggestively sexual). So who's right, and who's to say?

At the end of Psalm 46, after descriptions of mountains trembling, kingdoms tottering, and desolations being brought on the earth, God speaks and says to the people, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Can we be still enough to know God?

If we can be still in the midst of the chaos and crisis all around us, and if we can see and hear the Sacred in the Spirit of the prophet and the psalmist, we will surely know the wisdom in Paul's admonition that we must “endure everything with patience” (Colossians 1:11).  

Far from suggesting that we are to make peace with oppression or resign ourselves to injustice, Paul – like all true prophets – sees, albeit through a glass dimly, God's presence at work in creation, and among us in history, from the very beginning.

It is not that God comes, first and only, in the baby Jesus. This same God has been with us all along – through every war and election, through every generation and nation, through every journey and century, through all time and beyond time – the same Christic Spirit of God, creative, liberating, and redeeming, has been with us: loving the world that She has made. And She is with us now, about to be born, again, in the manger; ready, once more, to ride the colt into Jerusalem, ready to be celebrated and, yet again, scorned, mocked, crucified, and yes ready to rise again. This is what we Christians can, and should, expect.

Blessed are they who come in the name of God!

Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven! (Luke 19:38)

Be still, and know that I am God.

The Rev. Carter Heyward, Ph.D., is the Howard Chandler Robbins Professor of Theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., where she has taught since 1975. She also serves as liturgical coordinator for the Brevard Episcopal Mission in western North Carolina, and is the author of more than a dozen books. Carter may be reached by email at carterheyward@aol.com .