The Sauntering Pilgrim

“What happens to a dream deferred?” The question Langston Hughes posed in his poem “Harlem” at the threshold of the civil rights movement is as relevant during this season of expectation as it was 2,000 years ago when the Jewish expectation of a messiah was reaching a climax. Every year during Advent we rehearse our expectation of a messiah’s coming; during Christmas we celebrate the messiah’s arrival; then in January the world packs it all up and settles back into this life’s familiar though not always comfortable routine as if the messiah we await had never arrived. The dream gets deferred again.

Last week as we observed Gaudete Sunday, Advent’s Sunday of rejoicing, others were observing the thirteenth anniversary of the killing of twenty children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history. That same evening at least fifteen people were killed at Australia’s Bondi Beach. That followed two killings and the wounding of several others at Brown University the day before. The unthinkable has become not only thinkable but expected, and madness is part of the fabric of our lives.

Today we are more divided and set against one another. (Where is evidence of the gospel of reconciliation?) We hear of wars and rumors of wars. (Where is the Prince of Peace who will beat swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks?) We live under a government that disenfranchises the marginalized whom we are called to lift up, displaces and dispossesses the sojourner whom we are called to welcome as one of us, and works to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a privileged few. (Where is the one who brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly?)

Before the Christianity that waited comfortably for another version of a messiah in the distant future, there was Jesus. He stood for the inherent worth of every human being. He denounced the religious lie that humankind was separated from God and told people to find heaven within themselves. He proclaimed another world was possible and was already present, if we would just take hold of it. He chastised people for sitting around waiting for God to save the world, and he challenged them to wake up and save it themselves. He rebuked those who tried to make a religion out of him, and insisted that everyone is a unique version of the anointed one. He proclaimed that the hope of the world is not floating up in the sky at the end of the age but is present in our own hearts.

Long ago I served a church in Union City, New Jersey, across the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan. The people there lived a hard life, barely eking out a living. The park across the corner from the church was notorious as a place where drugs were sold and lives diminished. So on my first Christmas Eve there, as I stepped out of the parsonage for the short walk to the church next door for the 11:00 candlelight service, I expected to find little of Christmas in the closely packed apartments around me.

But as I stepped out of the door, I heard Christmas music everywhere. It came to me from the park at the corner, the houses across the street, the shuttered shops on Bergenline Avenue a short block away. It was everywhere, filling the dark streets and darker windows and doorways. Where was it coming from, this hopeful music that surrounded and startled me? Then it dawned on me: the Christmas music that came from the dark emptiness of the city was an echo of the music playing from the steeple of the church. The city gave back in echoes the music we sent out as an offering to our neighbors.

It’s been said, we don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. Maybe we see too little of the messiah in the world around us – and if it’s true, it’s a hard indictment – because we present too little of the messiah to the world, because we embody too little of the messiah who has come. Maybe we don’t really get what the messiah’s first coming was about, so we wait for another at the end of the age. We let God do the heavy lift. Do you want to see the change wrought in the world by the messiah? Then be the change you want to see. The world looks to us, the body of the risen Christ, and asks the question John asked last week, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”