Community and etymology

So first off, here is a good song for Advent, when we look towards a promise and a world that seems too good to ever come true.

I didn’t make it to the midweek Advent service this week, because Sleepy (Grouchy) Children. But I did have a wonderful conversation with Pastor Elaina over coffee about building community, which is a way we can see, dimly and imperfectly, a bit of that promised world. Specifically, we talked about eating together.

Remember the story “Stone Soup”? Where everyone was afraid they didn’t have enough, and so they hid and hoarded it, until finally they were persuaded to share, and suddenly there was abundance. In the church newsletter, Pastor Elaina wrote about this contrast between our fear of scarcity and the abundance of God, in which 2+2 doesn’t equal 4, but 100. And when we each bring our little bit and pool them all together, suddenly there’s more than enough. Like loaves and fishes.

In many cultures, the role of the host of a feast is deeply significant--remember the panic at the wedding of Cana, when they ran out of wine? It’s a matter of honor to be able to provide for your guests, and the guests in turn are expected render honor to the host (hence Sir Gawain’s infamous quandary in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Our modern English words “lady” and “lord” are derived from Old English “hlaf”--loaf. Lord comes from “hlāford,” which in turn came “hlāf-weard”--bread-keeper. Lady comes from “hlæfdīge”--bread-kneader. Basically, the most prominent members of the community were those who provided food for the others and hosted the feasts.

So what happens when we all feed each other, at a potluck or pitch-in? When we each bring a little something, and lay everything out on long tables--casseroles and chicken wings and salads and the bag of chips we grabbed on the way because we didn’t have the energy to cook--the feast multiplies, and so does the honor we owe to each other.

Later in the day after that coffee conversation, I came across this post--it’s mostly about current political events, but I was struck by the repeated phrase “the kindness of cooks”--this conviction that there is something inherently generous in the act of cooking for someone else, and that this is reflected in the character of those who make a habit of it, that they are the kind of people who won’t support hatred or discrimination. Obviously this isn’t necessarily true, but it tells us something about the power of feeding our neighbors with the best we can provide for them.

There’s a reason that Jesus told so many parables about parties and feasts to describe the Kingdom--wedding feasts, celebrations of finding lost sheep and lost sons. Eating together, feeding each other, sounds like a good place to start when it comes to (re)building communities in a time when we’re fractured and broken.

Afraid of hope

Tomorrow begins the second week of Advent, the season when we wait, peering into the darkness for the quiet, secretive entrance of the light. During the midweek Advent service on Wednesday, the Gospel reading was Luke 1:5-20, about Zechariah’s encounter with Gabriel while he was offering incense in the Temple. Instead of a sermon, we took time to reflect on the story with the help of some questions in the bulletin.

The first question was “What do you think Zechariah was afraid of?” The congregation’s discussion afterwards focused on Zechariah’s very understandable terror when Gabriel first appeared (if it were me, I would have been afraid I had been caught inadvertently offering the incense wrong or something), but my mind immediately went to the next part of the story.

It seemed to me that fear was also the reason that Zechariah doubted the angel--fear of getting his hopes up. Because he and Elizabeth had experienced decades of disappointment already--hoping for a baby, then being crushed. Over and over, with every randomly nauseous morning or late cycle, until they just couldn’t take it one more time. And now that they were old, perhaps it was almost a relief to have put it behind them and know for sure that that particular door had really and truly been locked and sealed shut, and they never had to think about it again. And then God took him by the hand and led him back to that bricked-over door and said, "No really, I'm going to open it." No wonder he didn't welcome the promise. To be disappointed one more time would have destroyed him.

That’s Advent, though. Sitting here in the dark, where we’ve been squinting into the blackness so long, imagining that we see the first glow of dawn when it’s really only in our own eyes, that we can no longer believe that light will actually ever come. Zechariah and Elizabeth were living under an oppressive foreign government, waiting for God to fulfill the promise to free them and restore the true king to the throne, but all they had was a puppet king. Just when we start to hope that maybe love and community and honest efforts to listen to our neighbors really might be more powerful than fear and violence and willful ignorance, we’re crushed to discover that disgust and ignorance are winning out again. We were promised that Jesus would return and bring in the kingdom of God and restore everything that has been broken or lost, but it’s been a couple millennia now.

The darkness is so heavy it can leave you speechless sometimes, because you can’t bring yourself to repeat those promises of hope that have been made to look like lies so many times before. I sometimes think that the silence imposed on Zechariah was a gift, because he couldn’t try to argue about it or make up justifications or excuses. He just had to sit there in the dark and listen.