Final Advent
Saturday I asked Roz, “Do you want to go to church? It’s the last Sunday in Advent,” I said.
“What about Albert?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Arsenal’s got a new manager, I can’t remember his name — he was at Manchester City.”
“Mikel Arteta,” Roz said. “Hair!” She made an exploding noise. “Is it real, do you think?”
I took it instead as a rhetorical question. “He said, Uncle Albert, that if he went to church, he might be tempted to pray for the Arsenal Football Club. Not something he wanted to find himself doing.”
“I’ll think about it,” Roz said.
Then she read in the paper that her friend, the Narrow Man, was preaching again at the little Presbyterian Church near Red Spring, the church our State Senator goes to.*
“Do you remember where we’re going?” I asked Roz. She was driving.
“I think so,” she said. “I’m pretty sure. It looks right.”
The Psalm was 80, or parts of it: how we’re weeping because, though we’ve never turned away from him, God is allowing our neighbors to mock us. But surely he will send “the man of [his] right hand,” and he will give us life. The Old Testament lesson was the passage in Isaiah where God speaks to Ahaz whether Ahaz wants to listen or not. A sign is coming: a young woman will bear a son, called Immanuel, “God with.” And God will be with — with Ahaz and Israel —; and their enemies shall fail. In the Epistle lesson, Paul explains to the Romans that the Son of God has already come and died and been raised that they may have faith.
We sang three hymns: “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus”; “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (and ransom captive Ĭ-ĭ-ĭs-ra-el); and “Joy to the World,” because he has come as both the Prophet and the Apostle said. The singing was much better than the last time we were there. There were about 40 in the congregation, almost enough voice to overcome the jangly piano.
The gospel lesson came from Matthew, but it was not the lesson for the day, which is about how Joseph finds out that Mary is pregnant, and he isn’t sure what to do: it’s not his child. Then, an angel comes to him in a dream: he should marry her, call the boy Jesus; he is the Immanuel the Prophet talked about.
That was the gospel for the day, what was printed in the bulletin:
Gospel Lesson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew 1:18-25
But it wasn’t what the Narrow Man read. He read instead: 6:19-24 from the Sermon on the Mount:
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.”
“That’s God with a capital-G and Mammon with a capital- M,” the Narrow Man concluded.
“This is my last Sunday with you,” he went on, “my last sermon.” “Of the year,” I thought at first. But he said it again, “My last sermon.”
“Over a hundred years ago, someone said that Civilization, with a capital-C, had become money, and this money would become the enemy against which Christianity would fight its last great battle.
“If the last, then it must lose, right? And so it did. He was right. Today, before anything else, whatever we profess, we are Capitalists.
“I’m not going to cite sixteen examples,” the Narrow Man said. “Just look around you, ‘everywhere you go.’” — he sang the phrase from the Perry Como hit.**
 |
| Speaking of hair: Meredith Willson in 1961 |
A pair of hop-a-long boots and a pistol that shoots
Is the wish of Barney and Ben.
Dolls that'll talk and will go for a walk
Is the hope of Janice and Jen.
“That was seventy years ago,” he said.
Now it’s phones that will talk and go for a walk.
Ferragamo boots, electric scooters that scoot.
It’s gift cards full of money to spend.
“Everywhere you go.
“Two more shopping days!” he said. “Two. Amen. And amen.”
He stopped. He took a drink of water. “That’s it,” he said. He took another drink.
“What I have taken part in the last three and more decades is one of those skirmishes that take place after the armistice has been signed but the news that the war is over hasn’t reached every corner of the field. I’m burnt by the sun. My cap is long gone. My coat is in shreds. My skin is in tatters. It’s dark by five o’clock. And it’s cold before it’s dark.
“I leave the field, limping on a sprained ankle I don’t know how I came by. I would like to think I have fought well, though that has meant for me that I have aimed away from the enemy, hoping I would injure no one. So maybe I fought not so well after all because the enemy — the vile enemy — has won. And any who thinks Christianity has been bloody and narrow-minded: beware of the Capitalism still to come. We (Christians) may well end up remembered as the children of light, however dark you now our reign.
“I’m putting down my weapon. I’m out of powder.
“I’m not sure where I’m going as I wander off the field. Somewhere I’ll be welcome, I hope: a home for backward-thinking, battle-scarred eccentrics — may there be such a thing — and somewhere Mammon is somehow kept somewhat at bay.
“Thank you for letting me preach here on the fourth Sunday of the last four months. Thank you for listening to the garblings of an old man. So, as the philosopher Joseph — another Joseph, not the favored son of Jacob or the one that married Mary — as the philosopher Joseph was fond of saying, “There it is.”
He announced the last hymn. We sang. He “recessed” on the last verse.
He rules the earth with truth and grace,
and makes the nations prove
the glories of his righteousness
and wonders of his love
and makes the nations prove
the glories of his righteousness
and wonders of his love
He greeted the people at the door. None tried to avoid him. They wished him every one a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. “You, too,” he said to each. “The best Christmas ever,” he said to Roz and me, “and the most joyous New Year.”
Wrapped in our anoraks, we stood by our car in the parking lot until the last car but ours and two others had gone. The preacher came out with his robe over one arm and another man that locked the door behind them. They shook hands at the bottom of the steps. The man got in his truck, a Dodge Ram 3500 shining black, and the preacher got in his car, a colorless old Toyota Corolla. And they drove off, the roaring truck and then the stuttering car. The preacher stuck his hand out the window and waved at us, still standing there.
Roz cranked the engine, and we started home.
“Do you know who said that?” Roz asked, because it’s the kind of thing I would know was her implication, “about money and faith.”
“Balzac,” I said as if I did know. And I thought I did though I wasn’t sure how. I’m never quite sure how I know what I know, so I’m never quite sure either that I’m right, that I do know what I think I do.
We stopped for hotdogs on the way, but Roz didn’t eat all hers because she wasn’t hungry. She said, “ You know I was worried about him before. I’m really worried about him now.”
“Especially since he’s probably right,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “He is.”
12.24.19
_______________
** written by Meredith Willson, of The Music Man fame. Click here.
Picture credit: By stage company promo dept. - Stage program for The Unsinkable Molly Brown, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41907162
No comments:
Post a Comment