Scripture: Mark 13: 24-37
I guess if you didn’t know it already, you’ve figured out by now that this is the first Sunday in Advent, which in the church is a time of year with its own particular themes and purposes, not just the Christmas season. I need to ask you to be patient with me this morning. I will eventually get around to talking about Advent, but I confess that I’m not really into this yet—thinking about Christmas—or Advent. Let me begin with something that’s more immediate to me.
Before Ava joined me for a long weekend in the Williamsburg area last weekend, I attended a meeting of the Virginia Council of Churches as the Shenandoah Association representative to that organization. The meeting was held at Samaria Baptist Church in a rural area of Charles City County between Richmond and Williamsburg. It was held there because Samaria Baptist Church is a congregation consisting predominantly of people of native American heritage, specifically of the Chickahominy tribe. It sits on land owned by the Chickahominy on a site that was once an Indian school.
The reason the meeting was held on this site was that the major theme of the meeting was the 400 year relationship between Christianity and the Church and the Native Americans of Virginia, or maybe I should say the 400 year interaction. “Relationship” sounds like a bit too pretty of a word to describe what happened. In any case the meeting was devoted in large part to reflecting on that 400 year history, and to lifting up the current effort of the eight Virginia tribes to be recognized by the federal government, an effort that is supported by the Virginia Council of Churches, which is in turn seeking support from individual denominations and congregations throughout Virginia.
The recognition that is being sought by the Virginia tribes is in one sense a very concrete and practical matter. It involves conferring a certain legal status on the tribes that might offer them or their members certain opportunities or certain rights they might not otherwise have. Indian law in this country is complicated and I cannot claim even a basic knowledge of what recognition would or could mean from this legal standpoint, nor is this the place for such a discussion.
What became quickly clear, however, in discussion with several of the chiefs is that for them recognition has a much deeper significance than whatever specific advantages might be connected with it. Recognition has always been a problem as between Europeans and Native Americans.
The fact that there were people living on the land that Europeans claimed when they first landed here was not recognized as being of any great significance. Europeans acted like they were entering a land that was empty, as though no one, at least no one who counted, who deserved to be recognized, was really there.
The fact that Native Americans had a very deep spirituality that was expressed in words and in rituals was not recognized by Europeans who considered the natives heathen and saw their spiritual lives as a vacuum that Christianity was meant to fill.
Treaties with Native American tribes have not been recognized as binding, or indeed as very important, typically being honored only as it has been convenient to do so.
The culture of native American tribes has not been recognized as worthy of being preserved, and in fact Europeans have most often done their best to wipe it out, teaching Indian children in so-called Indian schools not to be Indian, and prohibiting native people from practicing native customs, speaking their native language, or having native names. Through most of the 20th century it was illegal in the state of Virginia for a person to claim to be Indian. It was not recognized that there was any such thing. That changed in the 1970’s when the state of Virginia recognized the existence of 8 tribes with a meaningful identity and heritage, but so far the federal government has still not followed suit so far as the Virginia tribes are concerned.
And so now the question of recognition for those tribes involves not only whether the tribes will have a specific legal status but also whether the humanity, the culture, and the history of those tribes will be recognized as a separate, non-European reality that should be preserved and not assimilated out of existence. One of the chiefs described assimilation as the third way in which Europeans had attacked native people, the first two being guns and germs.
I have no hesitation in raising this issue on this particular weekend. Well, I would have no hesitation on any weekend, but it seems especially appropriate this Thanksgiving weekend. Thanksgiving has always been a holiday that for me has carried a kind of dark, silent reminder of this painful history that I’ve been referring to. While maybe on the surface I am enjoying being with friends or family and sharing a good meal, or maybe in some more quiet way reflecting on things to be thankful for, there is always also in my mind a memory of the story I was taught about the first American Thanksgiving where the Pilgrims and the Indians were supposed to have met and eaten together in friendship. Of course that story, and many other stories I learned in my childhood, were fundamentally false. They were lies, so far as giving me a true picture of the history the Europeans imposed on the Native Americans. My childhood was a long time ago, and I’m sure we have improved somewhat on what we teach our children. I’m also pretty sure we haven’t improved enough. And this issue comes up again as preparations are made for the Jamestown 400 year commemoration in 2007. Will the history and humanity of Native Americans be recognized in the way stories are told relative to the Jamestown commemoration? That gives the question of the federal recognition of the tribes an added meaning from their point of view. How can their story be told if their existence is not recognized?
As I say, all of this seems to me appropriate to speak of on a Thanksgiving weekend. But as I thought about it, it also seems appropriate to speak of as we enter into the season of Advent. To me, Christmas is not about the birthday of Jesus, and Advent is not about getting ourselves spiritually ready so that we may properly celebrate the birth of the Son of God or the Savior of the World. It is not about waiting for, expecting, and then receiving this miraculous intervention from God that will save the world, or who will save at least those who have repented of their sins and seen the light and believed that Jesus is the promised messiah.
For me, Jesus is savior and messiah, but not because he is in and of himself someone to be believed in. Jesus is not the person of God. Jesus is the vision of God, God’s vision for human life, embodied, incarnate in words and ways of living. Jesus is that vision coming to life among us. And Advent is a time for the renewing of that vision. And if we are to make room in our hearts or spirits for Jesus, it is that vision we need to make room for. It is hope being sent from the heart of God and bubbling up from the heart of the earth and the hearts of human beings.
It is a vision of shalom. Shalom, as you may know is a word that is often translated as meaning peace, but it could be translated many other ways as well: peace, but peace that includes health and healing and wholeness and contentment and happiness and prosperity. It is a vision of total well-being for human beings and for the human family. It is a vision spoken of by prophets in words such as those Matt read earlier from Isaiah, where the wolf and the lamb and the lion and the leopard and the kid shall lie down in peace and where no one, anywhere shall any longer hurt or destroy. We read passages from Isaiah and other prophets during Advent, not because sometimes they seem to amazingly predict the birth of someone some 5 or 6 or seven hundred years ahead of time, but because they speak of this vision of shalom that is planted in us because God is planted in us. We wait for Christ because we wait for that vision of shalom to be fulfilled among us, and for some of us we find in Christ a full expression of shalom. And it is such a vision of shalom that can save us, if anything can.
Now to return to what I was saying about Native Americans, surely part of Advent, surely part of renewing and reclaiming any vision of shalom is to recognize where in our selves, where in our lives, where in our world there is a need for healing, for mercy, for forgiveness, for reconciliation, for some kind of making whole. There was a worship service the night of our meeting at Samaria Baptist Church that involved members of that congregation, a drum circle, a preacher of Native American descent, and members of the Virginia Council of Churches, who were mostly European type people. It was billed as a service of reconciliation and healing, which seemed to me like a good idea. There certainly needs to be reconciliation and healing as between the dominant culture and the Native American people.
I’m not sure what I expected to happen that would make it a service of healing, but sometime into the service I realized that there was not much in the service that spoke of reconciliation or healing. I don’t say that in a critical way because what I realized at the same time was that I was relieved and in a way heartened by the fact that there were no easy words spoken about reconciliation, that there was no effort to pretend that four hundred years of injustice could be made ok by a few conciliatory words. The service I realized did have a lot to do with healing and reconciliation, but only because it was in fact a service of recognition, recognition of a painful history that a few words, no matter how well chosen, cannot undo. The brokenness of that history remains. What has been done cannot be undone. And for me there is no easy way to make the pain of that history go away. And it struck me suddenly that the people we most need to make peace with may be ourselves. Sometimes Advent may not be only about recognizing the places that are in need of healing but also recognizing that there are no quick fixes, no words with power to do the mending, no answers that will relieve us of the need to pay any more than passing attention.
The scripture from Mark for this morning tells us to watch and to “stay awake”. Those are traditional themes for Advent when presumably we are supposed to watch and wait for the coming of the messiah, because we never know in what way or at what time he will come to us. There are, I’m sure, many ways to read and hear those words. There is much that we would do well to watch for and much that merits our staying awake. I choose this year to hear those words in connection with the story I have been telling you relating to the meeting on Indian ground last week. It has become for me a sort of parable informing my approach to Advent this year.
I hear the instruction to watch and stay awake as an injunction to pay attention and to recognize, recognize yes the specific history of our interaction with Native Americans, for it is certainly one of the places in need of healing, but recognize that as an invitation to recognize as much as I can of the places in my life and in the world in need of healing. Not with an eye to making the healing happen but just for now, for the moment, with the intention of recognition. Mere recognition may not seem like a lot from one perspective, but Native Americans will tell you that it doesn’t necessarily come easily.
It is important that our attention also be fixed on the visions of shalom and that we understand ourselves to be on a journey to comfort, to heal, to make whole God’s people. But we begin not by expecting to get all the way there by taking two giant steps but by recognizing where there is a need for healing, not focusing on the likelihood or the difficulty or on who needs to do what, but just on the need, so that we may begin the Advent journey, which is in fact a life-long journey toward shalom, that we begin just with the act of recognition. It may help to insure that we will walk humbly through the Advent season. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 27, 2005