worship
The Season of Uh-Ohs
Today is the second Sunday of Advent and it is also the Sunday we remember World AIDS Day. Both are holy with opportunities to remain awake to Immanuel, God with us. Both call us to “Be not afraid”. But do pay attention! Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s last sermon before his assassination began by telling the story of Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep seeing a sign of King George and awoke to a sign of George Washington. He had slept through a revolution. The story, said King, tells us that “one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution." What if we looked at social change as God’s living Word? How glorious to watch God working in, with and through this world. Has anyone here ever read any of Robert Fulghum’s books. Probably his most famous book was Everything I needed to know about life I learned in Kindergarten. The one I enjoy the most is titled simply UH-OH. UH-OH is what we say when something surprises us. UH-OH is a frame of mind; a philosophy. You could say it is a way of living. It says to expect the unexpected. As people of faith it suggests being delighted whenever God bursts onto the scene-something God does frequently when we pay attention.
Uh-OH is a good attitude to have for Advent!
Surely, there is an Uh-Oh in today being both the second Sunday of Advent and World AIDS Day. Uh-Ohs call us to go deeper, meditate, reflect, and find the connections. Just as each advent season draws us into the story of Jesus’ birth and coming reign, World AIDS day draws us into a renewed claim on the sanctity of life and community. Both turn our hearts to God. In that last sermon of Martin Luther King he also said, “whenever anything new comes into history it brings with it new challenges and new opportunities." HIV/AIDS certainly qualifies as bringing with it challenges and opportunities.
In those early years of HIV/AIDS, I lived in California. In fact I lived two blocks from the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. Even in the upper market area, nearly all my neighbors were gay. Almost as quickly as the stories began to travel and people began to speak of the “gay cancer” not yet named AIDS, my friends began being diagnosed. Death made visits all around me.
One Saturday night my friend Alan and his partner George helped move me into a new house. We ended the evening tired and hungry, treating ourselves to Pizza for dinner. We laughed. We whined about moving all the boxes up those stairs, oblivious to the predator that stalked us. That very next Tuesday, George called to say that Alan was in San Francisco General Hospital, diagnosed with AIDS.
Alan told me his body was failing before his eyes and it felt like having a ringside seat at his own demise. Less than six weeks later we buried Alan. A greyhound bus driver, he is forever depicted driving that bus into a beaded sky on the quilt panel I made in his memory.
For me Alan was the first to die, immediately followed by my innocence. Over the next months and years, you and I buried too many friends, sons, parents, colleagues, partners, lovers, pastors, and leaders.
Through mind-numbing losses we persevered as a community and taught the world how to manage the largest health crisis the world has seen in 700 years. When the world looked away, we stood proud, taking leadership roles in a wilderness journey no one had bought a ticket for. I think some thought this would level us for sure, but we resisted the script of being brought down by this thing called AIDS. AIDS threw all of us into a collective wilderness, rich with pain and rich with opportunities for transformation.
Our Gospel reading today from Mark tells us a little about wilderness theology. The wilderness was a place of rich imagery and meaning for the Israelites. It is the place of wandering, the place of God’s presence with his people. In the wilderness, the between time, we often encounter God. The wilderness is the place of salvation. John’s appearance there authenticates him as a true messenger of the God who brings salvation in the wilderness.
John proclaims repentance and forgiveness. Does that have anything to do with Advent, with World AIDS Day? Uh-Oh.
The word "repentance" means to turn around and retrace one’s steps. This is a significant image for the wilderness where it is easy to become lost, and retracing one’s steps hopefully gets you back to a starting point rather than more lost!
Advent too is about retracing our steps. World AIDS Day is about retracing our steps. Both call us to re-enter the story of our lives, remembering who grounds and sustains us and who lives among us. Immanuel. Past tense. Present tense. Future tense.
Finally the world is edging towards the understanding that AIDS is not a liberal cause, nor a conservative cause, rather it is a human cause. The big Uh-Oh is that today AIDS is galvanizing a world, not just a community. As in Advent, God has indeed burst onto the scene. AIDS is drawing faith communities together, faith beyond walls.
Let shift gears a bit and tell you about someone else who, like our community, had the courage to resist the limits of their script. His name was Norman and he was five years old. This story is from Fulghum’s UH OH book.
A kindergarten teacher was asked to have her class dramatize a fairy tale for a teacher’s conference. The children got to pick the story. After much discussion the children achieved consensus on the old favorite “Cinderella”. Cinderella was a good choice from the teacher’s standpoint because there was a lot of room for the discretionary padding of parts. Every child could be in the play.
Of course all the little girls and probably a boy or two wanted to be Cinderella. Soon everyone was assigned a part, except for Norman. Norman was a quiet young man who didn’t talk much. Norman thought talking was a waste of time unless you had something to say. Concerned, the teacher asked, “Norman, what character would you like to be?”
Norman didn’t hesitate. “I would like to be the pig” he declared. “PIG?” the teacher said bewildered, “Sweetie, there is no pig in Cinderella”. Norman smiled and said, “There is now!” And so it was.
Norman designed his own costume. Pink long underwear, a paper cup for a nose and a pipe-cleaner tail. Norman the pig followed Cinderella everywhere she went and became a mirror of the action on stage. If Cinderella was happy, the pig was happy. If Cinderella was sad, the pig was sad. One look at Norman and you knew the emotion of the moment.
At the end of the play when the handsome prince placed the glass slipper on Cinderella’s foot, Norman the pig went wild with joy, dancing on his hind legs and breaking his silence… by barking.
In rehearsal the teacher tried to explain that even if there was a pig in Cinderella, pigs don’t bark. But as she expected, Norman explained that THIS pig barked. And the barking, she had to admit, was very well done.
The presentation was a smash hit and guess who received a standing ovation? Of course. Norman the barking pig. Who, after all, the real Cinderella.
This is a great story, and there is a lot to like about Norman. Norman was stubborn, impervious to intimidation, and refused to be molded by others’ expectations. He resisted the limits of the script. He refused to believe he had no place and doggedly (well, maybe piggedly) insisted on being himself. Rather than being limited by it, Norman found a way to enhance the script, to add life and laughter.
There is a sense in which Norman was like Jesus, who in his single-mindedness for the kingdom of God was stubborn and impervious to intimidation. He refused to be molded by others’ expectations and resisted the limits of the script. There was a set script for the Messiah that folks expected to be followed, but Jesus wrote his own script.
Doesn’t that sound like our community, time and time again? When HIV first came on the scene our community was vilified, then like Norman, we became the surprise heroes of the day. We did not give up. We led and we lived.
When Jesus announced HE was the Messiah, the Pharisees and others screamed “There is no Jesus in the Messiah script. Messiahs do not hang out with losers. Our Messiah does not break all the rules. Our Messiah does not question our leadership or threaten our religion or act so irresponsibly. Our Messiah does not disregard his reputation or frequent the haunts of questionable people.”
Jesus’ reply? THIS Messiah does!
Despite the abundance of playwrights in the church who are more than anxious to announce, “There is no place for you in Christianity if you wear an earring, ask too many questions, swear, are in the wrong ethnic group, have pink hair, are gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender or have HIV.”
Jesus apparently believed that Messiahs find places for those who have no place, and as a result he invited every Norman he could find: bully tax collectors, psychotics, centurions, fishermen, and outcasts.
Robert Fulghum writes, “Churches are not glistening cathedrals filled exclusively with beautiful Cinderellas. Churches are noisy, rollicking madhouses filled with yelping, dancing, barking pigs who follow the REAL Cinderella wherever he goes. Churches are not AWE inspiring, they are ODD inspiring. Churches have extraordinary stain glass windows with ordinary fingerprints”.
As members and allies of the glbt community, we resist the limits of our script daily. We didn’t listen when the play writes of the day believed AIDS to be God’s curse. We knew that in Christ Jesus we all claim full membership benefits to the family of God. Period. That time, we told the world, “Be not afraid”.
Being a disciple of Christ means that throughout advent and especially on World AIDS day, we pause to look for and live fully in the joy of that extraordinary relationship. We prepared the way for social change. During Advent, we remember Jesus coming as an infant in a manger and we anticipate his coming as the culmination of the kingdom of God. We reflect on God's past, present, and future redemptive acts in history. That is what sustains us in a world that makes no sense. As we await that ultimate reign, we are called to live as if it were already here. We are called, as Walter Brueggeman said, to be "a community rooted in energizing memories and summoned by radical hopes." We have the memories of the child born in the stable, and the hope of a new earth. We believe that in this in-between time, we are to live like Jesus, work for justice, work for peace, and create a new community. Preparing for the coming of God means beginning to live and work as if it were already here. Advent and World AIDS Day are something of a revolution. Let’s continue to teach the world how to stay awake and prepare the way of God. Be NOT Afraid. Uh Oh