The readings for Advent 2 seem to emphasize our needs for repentence, a plea for God's foregivenss, and faith in his salvation and peace,all against the backdrop of eternal God's glory. To ask the question,"How can we help God's hopes" seems to put the shoe on the wrong foot. We are the ones who hope, based on our repentence; then God will reveal his true glory, compassion, and righteousness.

The readings ask me to repent of all that stands in the way of God's glory and salvation in my life. This is a liturgical season of sober inner reflection to prepare for God's coming in humility as a babe and in glory at the Second Coming. If I use Borg's emerging paradigm and approach this metaphorically, I might ask the question, where to I need to be more humble in my life : where do I need to take more time to appreciate and commune with the magnificent Glory of our creator,redeemer, sustainer God?

Email: mhlandlbl@msn.com

I think God does hope and my easiest way to talk about it is to share my message today at Covenant.

David A. Ryan, Covenant Mennonite Fellowship, 12/04/05

A Later Helper - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1848
It was Thursday, July 13, 1848 in Waterloo, NY. Thirty two year old Elizabeth Cady Stanton was sitting at tea with three neighbor wives and a Quaker visitor from Philadelphia, fifty four year old Lucretia Mott. Encouraged by Lucretia, Elizabeth decided to pour out her outrage over the role and status of women in their male dominated culture. The tea party became the real version of “Desperate Housewives.” They decided to convene a Women’s Rights Convention the following Wednesday and Thursday, July 19-20, 1848 in Seneca Falls. Elizabeth was responsible for writing the Declaration of Sentiments that the Convention would discuss, amend, and sign. Elizabeth’s husband helped her write it but left town before the Convention to avoid embarassment. Elizabeth’s father, a judge from Boston, came to Seneca Falls to see if Elizabeth was still sane. One hundred people, thirty two of them men, signed the Declaration to insist that women “have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges that belong to them as citizens of these United States.” Creatively Elizabeth patterned her Declaration after the Declaration of Independence of 1776. The Oneida Whig newspaper described the declaration as “the most shocking and unnatural event ever recorded in the history of womanity.” Read opening paragraphs.

An Invitiation to Be God’s Helper: Decide as God Hopes
Our invitation today is to Decide as God Hopes as one way to Love God’s Others, a big part of what it means to Be God’s Helper. Does your God hope and, if so, how? Two universe Christians in our midst who are drawn to Marcus Borg’s earlier paradigm or vision explain God’s hope in the literal salvation history of the Bible. Others who feel more comfortable with Borg’s emerging vision see God’s hope in more metaphorical terms and more integrated with the best of human hopes. One universe Christians in our midst use God’s hopes as a synonym for the best of human values which draws us to hope. And to those in our midst who feel that the term God is too misleading, I would invite you to Decide as Earth Hopes. Whatever our life explanations, we can all focus on the importance of making decisions that contribute to helping actions.

My first point is that God hopes that our personal life mosaic of decisions will reflect helping. Let’s imagine that each day every decision we make is represented by an inlaid stone or building block. Some are small and some are large. Some are pretty and some are ugly. At the end of the day the mosaic for that day dries and it is fixed forever. Our lives then become a series of fixed mosaics of our decisions. God’s hope is that our personal mosaics of decisions will reflect helping.

The idea of a daily mosaic of our decisions that is fixed forever when tomorrow comes is discouraging to many of us. We can spend a lot of time trying to change the mosaics of our yesterdays. We try to polish some inlays, paint over them, and even try to replace them with new decisions. The best advice I have for myself and that I can offer to you was voiced in a television show in the 1960's called “That Was the Week that Was.” It was political humor much like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. They sang these words, “That was the week that was. It’s over let it go.” And so we can say, “That was the day that was. It’s over let it go.” Letting go of yesterday frees us to concentrate on the present moment, the only time when decisions can actually be made. “Today is the day that is. It’s now don’t let it go.” The only time we can build helping decisions into the mosaics of our lives is in each present moment as it arrives before us. John the baptizer in our reading today was urging people to look at the mosaic of their lives and to make a decision in the present moment to live differently. God hopes that our personal life mosaic of decisions will reflect helping

My second point is that God hopes Covenant will help increase our helping decisions. Participating in a helping community can increase our own helping actions. Helping communities can be formal or informal, large or small, religious or non-religious, political or social, recreational or educational. What I like about Covenant is that we focus not only on doing helping actions and creating meaningful experiences but also on sharing the life explanations that bring meaning, motivation, and purpose to our lives. It all starts with individual decisions we each make about Covenant. Today we each made the decision to be here. If we all had decided otherwise, Covenant would not have existed here today. Coming to have our own needs met is very important. But the very fact of the presence of each of us is a helping action for many of us. I am helped by each of you if you do nothing more than show up. Let us not underestimate the power of that simple helping action, showing up.

Although our individual decisions about Covenant are significant, I also want to focus on our collective decisions by Covenant. Those decisions also represent a mosaic of decisions over Covenant’s life time. We each make personal decisions to participate and then we make collective decisions about priorities and programs. Our Fall Retreat was such an occasion. We made significant decisions about our organizational process. Some highlights from our strategy survey were these. All but one person thought we should continue our Be God’s Helper strategy at least until June. If you are that one person, I hope you will share with me your reluctance. You may see something we need to change. The 18 people who decided to participate in the survey were asked to divide 100 points among our 4 printed priorities with an option to give weight to other priorities. The results were as follows: 35% of our emphasis should be on doing helping actions; 22.5% should be on creating meaningful experiences to increase helping actions such as our worship today; 20% should be on sharing life explanations that increase helping actions; 17.5% on identifying with the Covenant/Anabaptist vision; and 5% on other elements. Although I was pleased that doing helping actions was the number 1 priority with 35% of the weight, my own weighting would give it at least 51% so there would be no doubt that doing helping actions is so important that it exceeds everything else combined. God hopes Covenant will increase our helping decisions

My third point is that God hopes we each will decide to influence institutions to be more helpful. A famous child psychologist was well known for his books and tv show that advocated a very successful patient process with children. His neighbors were pleased to have such a loving and helpful person to influence their children. One day he returned home to see if his new concrete driveway had been poured that afternoon. He was horrified to see that his new driveway had been finished but all the neighborhood children were writing their initials and drawing pictures on the still soft concrete. He tore out of his car screaming at the top of lungs to stop or he would kill them. The children were petrified and ran home screaming. The shocked parents of the children came running out of the houses and said, “What happened, we thought you loved children?” He calmed down and said, “I love children in the abstract but I can’t stand them in the concrete?” This humorous distinction between the abstract and the concrete took a more serious form for me during the civil rights movement. Racism for many people was how they related to African Americans in a concrete one on one situation. What I learned was the greatest racial evil occurred in the abstract or what people called “institutional racism.” It was the laws, policies, and traditions of institutions at all levels of American society that were the most harmful.

There are many people who can only be helped by our decisions to influence institutions. There are millions of people around the world who are being helped and hurt by the foreign policy of our country. Each of us will decide whether to try to influence that policy or to accept it as is. Here is the problem that most of us face. The problems of our world seem so great. The institutions that affect our lives and the lives of others seem so entrenched. And we seem like a single grain of sand on the endless beach of life. But without those single sands there would be no beach and the beach’s ability to contain the forces of the ocean would be lost. No one can do everything but almost everybody can decide to do something. To avoid despair I turn to the final sentence of the Declaration of Sentiments: “Firmly relying on the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.” I doubt that Elizabeth Cady Stanton could have imagined the impact of their decision on July 13, 1848. During the 157 years since that day many of the abuses that women felt from men have been corrected. In 1920 seventy two years after Seneca Falls, women got the right to vote. Immediately the leaders of the movement proposed to amend the Constitution of the United States with these simple words: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” It would be almost 50 years before Congress approved the amendment. Thirty five of the thirty eight states required for passage approved it. Our state, Florida, did not pass it but there are new efforts to pursue it. Some day on women’s rights there will be the final triumph of the right and the true. We can take Second Isaiah’s image as our own. Every valley of injustice shall be raised up. Every hill of undeserved privilege shall be made low. And the highway of God’s hopes will be fullfilled. God hopes that we will each influence institutions to be more helpful.

Loving God’s others as a way to be God’s helpers requires attention to our decisions. Your God or Earth has hopes for you. God hopes that our personal life mosaic of decisions will reflect helping. God hopes Covenant will help increase our helping decisions. God hopes we will each decide to influence institutions to be more helpful. Today I invite you to decide as God hopes, for you.

Email: d2mryan@verizon.net

Thanks, David, for posting what I didn't get to hear this morning!

Email: mishnu3@yahoo.com

Parenthetically, David, a couple of months ago, I visited the National Park--for that is what it is--celebrating the emancipation of women in Senaca Falls, New York. There is a fine museum and water wall with inscribed thereon the ladies' variant of the Declaration of Indep;endence. It is a place well worth a visit.
Here I am at a veritable watershed moment of "two-universe-ness" (ie Advent), dialoguing with a bunch of one universe people! It seems to me that you are the literalists, parsing Scripture literally and by so doing rendering it absurd for modern people. I have no trouble with Borg's metaphorical and symbolic parsing of the same texts. And, like symbol and metaphor generally, they are meta-physical in that they point beyond the material to something "more."
Whether the Annunciation actually happened or not is immaterial to me. The lesson I took from what I heard yesterday in church was that every miracle begins with and is contingent upon one three letter word. YES! Saying yes, as did Mary, to the possibility of the impossible sometimes brings miracles in its wake. Imagine if she had said no!
To how many possibilities do one universe people say NO? It seems that all prophesy and mystical experience and angelic annunciations are, for you literalists, nothing more than schizoid delusions and voices in the head without benefit of Renolds Wrap headgear.
I don't mean to rehash what we've already been over, David, but this whole season, for me, doesn't permit of being squeezed into your one universe paradigme.

Email: rclarsen@optonline.net

This season is going to be hard for me, the first Advent in 30 years without my partner Alex. And I allow myself plenty of ambiguity with regard to the “more”. I don’t think it’s so much about saying “NO” as it is about deciding how much speculation can I live with. And I think this varies. Right now, I can live with more “more.”

Eugene, my heart aches with genuine empathy for you. The loss of love, through the finality of death or even from tragic break-up or divorce, is wrenching, and particularly when this time of year brings floods of memories and non-stop, almost forced and painful conviviality. One feels alone in the midst of it all, even surronded by throngs of loved ones and friends.

If the intuition of "more" comes as a grace and comfort, don't say NO to it.

I am keeping you in my thoughts.

Email: rclarsen@optonline.net

DAvid, I appreciate your taking the time to copy your sermon on the Forum. Ofcourse, I agree with you that being helpful is of prime importance. And I like the freedom you give your listeners to adopt whatever "Paradigm" is most comfortable for them.However, as you know from previous conversations with me, I do agree with Bob's point of view concerning the meaning of Advent. The "More" is most important to me.It brings a sense of Glory, Splendor, and sacramental reality which heightens the meaning of life for me. Like Bob, I very much empathize with Eugene's sense of profound loss at the season.ANd it is the sense of "The More" which brings me a great sense of comfort in this season also. I wonder if there are other participants in the forum who consider themselves believers in the two universe Paradigm?

Email: mhlandlbl@msn.com