November 30, 2003                                                                                       Rev. Dr. C. DiNovo

WHAT IF JESUS CAME BACK AS A MUSLIM OR A HINDU OR….?           Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

In the spirit of the first Sunday of Advent and this Sunday of hope, I thought I would share some 10 minutes of hope with you.  And, as I was thinking that, some of you will prick up your ears at the sign of hope and some at the 10 minutes – only 10 minutes!

Last week, I came before you and I said that I was felling a little miffed and tired and I thought, “I wonder what I can do other than this ministry stuff?” and I shared with you that my other secret longing is to be a bass guitarist in a funk band and this week I’m feeling much better about life but I still want to be a bass guitarist in a funk band, particularly because Susan, our Office Manager, gave me the best name.  She said, “If you do start your funk band and do learn to play the bass guitar, you should call yourselves the Spice Women,” which I like a lot.  Spice Women.

So, where are the signs of hope in our world?  First of all, where were the signs of hope 2,000 years ago?  That’s a good place to start.

In Luke’s community; Luke, by the way, was written by the same author as the Book of Acts, and this author wrote in Greek and the author wrote in Greek to attract a Greek and Roman audience, that was the language in those days that would appeal to the Gentile crowd.  He wrote in a situation in history and his life when they were being besieged.  Christians met in homes, they were illegal, and they met illegally.  If they were caught being Christians, they would be dragged out and crucified, or worse.  That was what they looked forward to.  Almost everyone in that early Church was imprisoned, martyred and died.  But they met and lived as if they were already living and meeting in heaven!  They met and agreed to love each other, no matter what they did to each other, they met and agreed to share their wealth with each other, no matter how much some had and how little others had.  They met around the communion table because it was a way of sharing food with each other.  Those who didn’t have quite as much food as others.  They met around this feast because it was a way of sharing what they had with each other.

You know, we all die, and they did too but they met knowing that their death would be meaningful and that their life would be lived as if in heaven, therefore, joyously, gloriously, happily.  And they weren’t Utopians, and they weren’t Idealists.  History has proved them right because the Roman Empire’s gone, the Greek Empire is no more but those Christians have spawned an entire Empire, if you will, of Christ around the world.  Their non-violence, their egalitarianism, their Communism, if you like, worked.

I had a priest interviewed on my radio show; this is an unabashed plug for my radio show, if you want to hear it – it’s 1-2 pm on Thursdays, if you want to hear it, on 89.5 fm – he’s going to be on again this Thursday.  A wonderful priest, a non-violent activist from Florida, his name is John Dear, no relation to the tractor company.  He said a number of things.

One of the things he said is, “You know you are the Church if you are following in non-violence.  You know you are following Christ if you are committed to non-violence.”  As a result of those words, he’s been arrested many times.  After all, he lives and breathes and has his being in a very violent place, our neighbours to the South; not that we’re not.

He said also some words of encouragement.  He said, “Christians should treat everyone as if they were Christ.”  This is nothing new to our crowd, we’ve heard these words before.

Then a caller called in and said, “Yes, we should treat everyone as if they were Christ, including Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Wiccans, Atheists, because we have no way of knowing in what form Christ will take and come back into our lives.”   That Muslim might just be Christ.  Christ might be an Iraqi.  So, we should treat them as if they were Christ, just in case, because the Church has no way of knowing – never did, never will – how Christ will manifest.

And some other points of hope were given.  I heard these things the first time and I was amazed because we didn’t hear them, we don’t hear them over the mainstream media.  Did you know that there are conscientious objectors among the American military in Iraq?  That there are soldiers refusing to fight and laying down their arms and leaving Iraq because of their faith, because most of them, who are Christians, say, “This is not a just war.”

Did you know that in Israel there are over 1,000 Refusniks now.  These are soldiers in the Israeli army that refuse to hurt Palestinians.  They say they’re fine with defending Israel, they support the right of Israel to exist but when it comes to hurting their neighbours, they say they’re not on board with that, they’re refusing to do so.  They took out a full page ad in The New York Times to say so.  Signs of hope in dark and troubled times.

But I also think of signs of hope a little closer to home like, for example, I was here on Friday and I was feeling tired and I’d been here a long time and I’d been working for the church a long time and Friday is supposed to be my day off so I was feeling a little beleaugured and Marianna (Adams) came into my office.  Many of us know who Marianna is and she’s probably; there you are!  Stand up Marianna.  This is Marianna.  Marianna came into my office on Friday and she said she was having the best day!  I asked her, “Why are you having the best day Marianna?”  And she said, “’Cause I get to be at church all day!”

God promises to meet us in the dark moments.  Always.  Always.  Always.

I read a story also on my radio show last Thursday that I wanted to share with you too.  There’s a golfer named Don Vincenzo and he’s one of the best Argentinian golfers and apparently he played a tournament – this is a true story – and as he was leaving the tournament with his cheque in tow and a woman came up to him and told him that her baby was sick and dying – they don’t have health care down there – and she had no money to pay for her baby’s hospitalization and because he believed all those vows that he made, he signed the cheque over to her, just gave her the entire cheque, walked away. 

A week later one of the officials that was part of that tournament just came up to Don Vincenzo and told him, “You know that woman that you gave that money to.  She was a total fraud.  There was no child.  She just ripped you off.”

Don Vincenzo said to him, “So you mean there is no sick and dying baby?”

The official said, “Yeah.”

Don Vincenzo said, “That’s the best news I’ve had all week!”

I love that story.  Just a little bit of a shift, a little bit of a shift is all it takes to see the rays of God’s grace in our lives. 

When I was a young parent and with my first born, who was extremely colicky, and I had been trained that this was supposed to be a hallmark moment and it wasn’t at all, it was a moment of hell.  I remember being exhausted and at the end of my wits and with very little support around me and I thought, really, “So this is it and this is gonna be it forever,” you know, first time parent. 

I got a call from somebody in my Lamaze class who had just lost their baby.  Their baby had just died about a week or two after its birth and I remember in that moment of darkness hearing my daughter cry from the next room and really, for the first time, I heard that cry as the voice of God, as an absolute blissful moment.  I felt so blessed.  Nothing had changed.  I just felt so blessed and I knew somehow that I could get through this thing.

Friends of our family are police people in Chicago and I remember a story that one of them told me.  I tell it because it’s an Advent story.  They were used to working in the worst ghettos of Chicago and Cabrini Green, which is a public housing project there, was notorious for being a place where the ills and evils of poverty and drugs meet and there were always shoot outs and people being killed so it was never a happy place to go for them.  In fact, a lot of police officers didn’t even want to walk into the buildings.

And it was in the season of Advent that they walked into an apartment after a shoot out and there were 3 policeman, I remember my friend telling me this, “The 3 of us, we walked in and there were bodies everywhere.”  And then they heard this sound coming from a back room and it was the sound of a baby crying and they went in and there was this beautiful, healthy newborn baby completely untouched by all of the gunfire that had happened in the other rooms.  This friend of ours said, “And there we stood around this crib,” – and these were hardened police officers – and he said that there wasn’t one of them that didn’t have a tear in their eye as they picked that baby up.

He said, “You know, we weren’t from that far east.  We were only from the northeast suburbs of Chicago,” but he said, “There we were, 3 men, holding this baby and we suddenly got it that this indeed was the nativity.”

We are, all of us, pregnant with the Divine at this time of year.  We are, all of us, called to be Mary, to give birth to holiness in our midst, all of us and the promise is we don’t do it alone.  It will happen in the darkest times, from the darkest times, God will be there.

Hiedeger, who was perhaps this century’s greatest philosopher, said something that I think is on his tombstone.  He said, “Only a God can save us now.”   And I thought that the answer to that, from people of faith all around the world, is this one, “And God will save us now.”  Let us pray.

Dearest God,

You gather us together as a family, a holy family, a royal family at this time of year.

You gather us together in love.

You gather us together to remind us that in our darkest and most despairing times, You will be present to us.  You will come as a visitor.  You will stand before us.  We will see You face-to-face.

In the name of the One who came to stand before us, Jesus, the Christ, our brother.  Amen.

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