Watch What Rises

Isaiah 11:1-10, Matthew 3:1-12

An excerpt from This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley

We are approaching a great shaking, this is according to a prophecy from the Hopi people. The Hopi are mostly in Northeastern Arizona and trace their roots there to more than 2,000 years, but their history as a people goes back much further, to many more thousands of years. According to their own history, the Hopi migrated north to Arizona from the south, up from what is now South and Central America, and Mexico. The teachings of the tribe come in stories of course, telling of a huge flood and other significant events and since they are among the oldest living cultures documented in history, I have been drawn to learning from them, a deeply religious people, seeking to live by the ethic of peace and goodwill. The prophecy that came to me is called the Three Great Shakings of the Earth. Some of us have joked that Mother Earth might just shake us humans off so it felt perfect for this time. According to the story, the first two shakings are believed to have already occurred, in the form of the First and Second World Wars, both planet wide shifts that impacted all of humanity. But the Third Shaking, the Hopi foretold, would come at a time of great upheaval, marked by an increase in extreme weather events of all kinds, such as, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, storms, fires, and floods. All of these would be signs that Mother Earth was entering what they label “a sacred birthing process and a time of deep cleansing, purification and transformation in our world.”

For the Hopi, the Earth is a sacred being and our living, breathing Mother, offering harmony and balance with nature, honoring the lands, the waters, the planet and with great respect for all that She provides, teaching that She moves through natural cycles of release and renewal and that when humanity strays from living in alignment, the Earth responds with a great rebalancing. Or in this case, a great shaking. As the prophecy foretells, the time of The Third Shaking, includes global division, conflict and widespread disharmony which leads Mother Earth to start calling out to her children, urging us who live upon her, to return to peace, unity, and harmony with one another and with all of creation. Concurrently, the prophecy also speaks of a shift into a new era, which coincides with the Hopi Rainbow Warrior prophecy, that foretells a tribe of millions, from all races, nations and walks of life, who will hear the Earth’s call and begin to awaken. According to elder Lee Brown, for indigenous people, the metaphor of sleeping means they have lost touch with the teachings. To be asleep is to be unmoored from the way, out of alignment with God’s instructions. The prophecy tells us that the time to awaken is now! This might sound familiar to you. Many of the scriptures from Advent also speak of waking up. In the Letter to the Romans from the first week last Sunday, we hear “do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.” And just like for the Hopi, these writings tell us of an ancient truth: in bleak periods of history, in times that feel like a space between the worlds, between what was and what will be, when we humans aren’t sure what is next or what is ours to do, often the thing can do is: wake up, get up, so we can see clearly what is rising. You might remember that it is only when we are awake in the dark for a while that we can actually see. Otherwise it takes too much time for our eyes to adjust, we really don’t see anything.

In our tradition, Advent is not just a new season and a new beginning, but it is also a period of transition, a time between the worlds. It is a time to be on watch, waiting with an expectant heart, looking for light, seeking a way through or an answer where there doesn’t seem to be one. Wake up, get up, see clearly what is rising, which is probably why we have this story in the Gospel of Matthew about John the Baptist.

He is a preacher in between, on the edge, standing on the margins of a world he is critiquing, while clothed in camel’s hair and certainty. As one commentator wrote, “John has one foot in the old age that is coming to a close and the other foot in the new age that is being born. No less than Samuel, John is a bridge between eras in Israel’s history.” And in this wilderness in between, he is direct and demands repentance. He tells those gathered around him that not all that seems rooted right now will produce fruit and that will be revealed and so therefore some of what is here won’t last. It can’t. It won’t. John says to repent- humanity has strayed from living in alignment. You might remember that word repentance in Greek is metanoia. This word is important. In fact, it is so important that it became part of what sparked the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther was in much distress, he quite literally had a long list of concerns, as you know, 95 to be exact. But one of the scriptural foundations that drove him was learning that the word repentance had for a longtime been mistranslated. Luther discovered that for about 1,000 years the Roman Church had been mistranslating “repent” to read “do penance.” And he was irate. This error present in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, was made obvious with the publication of the first Greek New Testament manuscripts by Desiderius Erasmus in the year 1516. What μετάνοια (metanoia) really means is more like a change of heart and/or a change of mind. Meta is about ascending, changing or moving beyond and "noein"refers to the mind, thought, or perception. The intent of the word is about internal transformation. Internal shifting to be aligned with God, to stay in line with what God wants. But the Roman Church made the word into something else- a required outward act of penance- confession, satisfaction, and indulgences. In the second thesis of the 95, Luther directly argues against this writing, "This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy." And it turns out that long before him , the late Second Century Church Father Tertullian protested as well saying this translation of the word is inaccurate and unsuitable arguing that "in Greek, metanoia is not a confession of sins but a change of mind." [5] "Conversion"; (from the Latin conversiōn em turning round) with its "change in character" meaning is more nearly the equivalent of metanoia than repentance. [10] In Advent, we are called to repent and by this I mean, to change, what if right now, in this time in our country and on planet Earth, those of us who are willing are being asked to wake up, to realign so we can see clearly what is rising and what is coming? Whatever name we have for God, the Great Spirit is beckoning each of us individually and collectively to ascend- above our egos, our greed, our need to believe there isn’t enough for all of us-repent so our minds are opens, our hearts are softened. I wonder if John is saying to those of unwilling to adapt to what love requires, now is the time to change. He is simply speaking an ancient and abiding spiritual truth- those who are sleeping won’t get it, those unwilling to embrace internal conversions, will miss when God shows up. Wake up, get up, so we can see clearly what is rising. To repent is giving up what is needed so we can see things clearly, stretching our insides in such a way that we are compelled outward toward others. As Stephanie Duncan Smith writes, “we stretch by reaching toward each other—by reaching out from the solo act into the plural “we,”…”

Last fall, when it seemed like we were headed in this hard direction, I wasn’t in a good place. I prayed about how to get through, one day in November after the election, I was down so low, my whole system stopped and I couldn’t get out of bed. I told our staff team that I was “down for the count.” Like many of you it was a hard series of weeks and months, grieving the loss of the trajectory I thought we were on. I lost friendships, I lost illusions I was carrying, the truth was revealed in friends and family, showing racism, misogyny, xenophobia and more. I have had to let go of a lot of grief about that. But I held on to the scripture from John 8 telling us that the truth will set us free. I prayed for how I could keep on, but in a new and different way, asking how I could be more aligned with God/Spirit/Love. I prayed for new capacities. And for me this meant giving up shopping at Target, selling stock in Tesla, ditching alcohol and all purchases on Amazon. I guess I should have done all of this earlier, but grace invites me to look forward. It has been terrible and wonderful. I can tell you with certainty that I am more awake now!

It is a hard time, between the worlds, it feels like we are in a spot between what was and what shall be. And it’s not entirely clear what that looks like yet. John is asking us to be honest about what we have been neglecting, where we have failed to change where love beckoned us to. Where are we out of alignment with what we say we believe about ourselves, about one another and the world? What is blocking us, stopping us, from turning around, repenting, converting to love, being more aligned and waking up? Because when we fail to tend to these things, when we fail to wake up to the beauty within us and all around us, in the people and places in our lives, we become disconnected, lost, asleep. We can’t see when God is busting through. As we heard from the writer Cole Arther Riley, “When we grow accustomed to neglecting beauty, we eventually become creatures of hatred. We lose our imagination, a virtue to which wonder is helplessly tied… We become so accustomed to that bitter taste that we can taste nothing else…. Wash the earth in justice and watch what rises to the surface…”

Let us not become accustomed to bitterness. I don’t want our hearts to become stone. Much of the old world is dying, illusions about people and systems falling away. Some of what we thought was strong was clearly just held up by norms and duct tape. So a lot is changing. Things as we have known them are passing away and we are in that liminal space between, the wilderness is a good metaphor. May we shift what we expect. Notice what bears fruit. Watch what rises.

John the Baptist is saying if we want to recognize when hope is being born, if we want to understand when peace is making a way, if we want to know when love is breaking through, we must open all of the places inside ourselves that are closed off to beauty, to mystery, to forgiveness, to truth, to expecting what is wonderful and good. We must tend to all of the parts of ourselves that refuse change. One by one, the peoples would set aside their differences, and unite and return to a way of being that is rooted in love, healing, harmony and balance. What if this is the time of The Third Great Shaking, where the old ways of division, disconnection and imbalance are being revealed for what they are, which will allow them to dissolve so we can make way for something new. We are in a time between the worlds. It is a period to let ourselves see God right and realign our hearts and minds what we know is true. It being awake enough to see goodness in the bleak, being on watch. Let us be willing to stretch ourselves right now, closer to what love wants for all of us. So we can wake up, get up, so we can see clearly. Watch what is rising! May it be so. Amen.