A whisper: "God is with us."
When I imagine this story I hear the angel whispering. It's the middle of the night, and Joseph is rolling around in bed in a troubled sleep, when somewhere behind him in the dream, something great and terrible whispers: "God is with us."
Before he takes us to Bethlehem, Matthew takes us to a cemetery. It's the family plot and the tombstones go back to the beginning of the human race. There are all the ancestors. Adam, Abraham, the first dreamer Joseph who went to Egypt as a slave, King David and any number of other kings, and then finally down to, well, Joseph.
Except there's a curve ball, a kind of a mess. Today, we wouldn't give Jesus all these ancestors. Jesus couldn't claim to be a descendent from any of them. Because, from our point of view, Joseph wasn't really Jesus' father.
Yes, then as now, this situation was a mess. It was even more of a mess back then. In those days, getting betrothed really was just the first stage of marriage. It was a real contract, legally binding. If the bride got pregnant during the betrothal period, that was adultery. And according to Leviticus the punishment for adultery was death.
Mary was pregnant. And it wasn't because she'd had relations with Joseph. There was only one explanation as far as Joseph could tell. It was a mess. And it had to be cleaned up somehow.
You know, I truly rejoice with those I know who grew up in wholesome, happy families, where everyone kept their promises, where moms were self-sacrificing saints and dads were all-knowing heroes of strength and character. There really are families like that, you know. Families that are more or less sane, that gather for Christmas in peace and happiness, that get through the whole holiday without anyone getting drunk or making a scene or announcing that they were leaving and would never see any of the family again.
But my family wasn't like that, and there are many, many people I know who didn't have families like that, and don't have families like that today. Most of those people, sad to say, aren't in church. They assume church is for those people who have it all together, whose families are strong and sane and stable. And Christmas, strangely enough, is that time of year when it really comes home just what kind of family you really have, for better or for worse. For a lot of us, Christmas as it's celebrated reminds us how messed up our families were or are.
Why do we celebrate Christmas in this way? Matthew tells us that Jesus' life begins with a messy family problem. And even before he does that, Matthew makes sure to point out the gravestones of only three women in Jesus' family cemetery: Tamar, Ruth and the wife of Uriah, or Bathsheba, all three of whom represent messy situations. Tamar was Judah's daughter in law, but also bore him a son. Ruth was a non-Jewish foreigner who seduced Boaz. Bathsheba was of course the wife David stole from Uriah, his neighbor. Messy stuff.
Of course there's nothing wrong with having a sane and healthy and stable family. Nothing wrong with all the children being born in wedlock and mom and dad staying together for sixty years and everyone being responsible and slim and prosperous and popular. There's every reason to be grateful for such good people and to celebrate them.
But for the rest of us, who went through divorces and failures and poverty, who experienced bouncing Christmas checks and broken Christmas promises, it is a wonder and a grace and a joy to welcome the savior into our messy lives in the way that old Joseph welcomed him.
First of all, it's important to note that Joseph, even without the angel's intervention, decides to protect Mary from the harsh law of Israel. Separate from her quietly, let her go off somewhere where no one knows her to have the baby, and her family would then put the kid up in someone's house. In the male-dominated world of Joseph's day, this constituted amazing grace. Joseph, we learn right away, is a good, good man.
But Joseph is also like that old Joseph in the family cemetery, the one who had all the dreams from heaven, for in the darkness of the night the angel visits him and tells him a wonder. The child in Mary's womb is from the Holy Spirit, and he is to be called by two names.
Names were very important to Jews in ancient times. Every name was a sentence that said something about the person. Jesus means "God saves." And Emmanuel, as Matthew tells us, means "God is with us."
"Joseph," the angel whispers, "God is with us." And to all of us who notice at this time of year how imperfect are our lives, how messy are our families, how short we fall of wholesomeness, the angel whispers in this dark night, "God is with us."
Where did we get the idea that Christmas is up to us? Where did we get the idea that holiness, goodness, righteousness or justice is up to us? Where did we get the idea that what we do or fail to do has anything to do with how God feels about us? It's all part of our perverse and sinful pride, isn't it? The angel slips past our defenses, comes to us in the dark, in the dream, and reminds us, "God is with us."
My family and many others are full of messes, but strangely and marvelously and shockingly, they are also full of grace. There are many broken hearts in my history, many messes that have never really been cleaned up, but strangely and marvelously and shockingly, there is also forgiveness and mercy. And these things, these marvelous and lovely things, did not come from earthly sources, anymore than did that baby in Mary's womb.
(Whispered) God is with us.
Amen.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Least in the Kingdom (sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent Year A 2010)
What do you expect of Jesus?
There are some very successful preachers out there, much more polished and sharp than me, that promote a view of Jesus as a kind of magical helper. And so someone gets sick in the family and the family gets together and prays and they collect all those tracts and pamphlets out there that say if you visualize healing and your faith is strong then Jesus will heal your family member. But the person isn't healed. The family is offended. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
Others might think of Jesus as the power that could stop natural disasters or who could miraculously give food to the hungry or who could prevent terrible dictators from rising to power. But we see in the news all the time about disasters that happen and thousands die or lose their homes. We hear about the millions who go to bed hungry every day. We know there are vicious and sadistic despots in power all over the world. Those who expect an all-powerful ruler over history are offended. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
Others think of Jesus as the king of niceness, the Lord of good manners, a deity for the cultivated. And when they come across a church where people are shouting or dancing or where everyone isn't wearing nice clothes, they are deeply offended. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
There are still others who think that Jesus is the Lord of some other world, and not of this one, and who expect see him only after death. So when they hear about people who follow him in their business practices or in their political activities, they are shocked. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
There are a few who think of Jesus as a kind of guru of happiness. They think of Jesus as a way to deny the pain and suffering of life and just float along on a pink cloud of peace and joy. And then, inevitably, some trial comes along, something that just can't possibly be denied, and they are shocked and offended. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
In Jesus' time, people had just as many expectations of the Messiah. Some thought he should have taken a vow of poverty, lived in a hovel in the desert and talked about letting go of material things. Others thought he should have been a fiery rebel organizing a bloody revolution to cast the Romans out of Israel once and for all. Others thought he should have been a noble political genius who might even have taken over the Roman Empire. Others thought he should have been a kind of super-Moses, waving a staff that brought floods and famines and plagues on all those who had ever offended or oppressed Israel.
Jesus, in his own teaching, seems most indebted to the prophet Isaiah's vision, and we hear today some of Isaiah's expectations. Isaiah painted a picture of a road leading home, a clear and straight path through hazardous and desolate wilderness, a wilderness now miraculously blooming into a verdant garden and protected from all predators. Isaiah was almost certainly talking about the return of the exiles from Babylon to Israel. This miraculous return home was metaphorically compared to the blind gaining sight, the deaf gaining their hearing and the dead being raised back into life.
Five hundred years later, Jesus takes up Isaiah's words and applies them to himself, and to John. Now Israel was not in exile, but was again at home in the land. Now Israel was occupied by the Romans. Now Israel was led by powerful Jews who collaborated with the oppressor. In Jesus' take on Isaiah, John the Baptist was the one who prepared the way in the wilderness for the people of God to go home.
Home, however, was a different place now. Home now was the realm of God, and the realm of God was no longer a geographical location, a particular hill, a certain country. The realm of God was a way of seeing, a way of hearing, a way of walking, a way of living.
The realm of God was no longer dependent on the actual conditions or locations in which people were living, but rather on the living they did in the places and conditions in which they found themselves.
It was no longer about whether John the Baptist got out of prison. It was now about how John understood his prison, and what his imprisonment would accomplish. It was no longer about whether Jesus would be defeated by the powerful Jews and their Roman friends, but how Jesus would understand what that defeat might accomplish. It was no longer about what would actually happen. It was now about how--first Jesus, and then we--would see, hear, walk and live through it. This is the realm of God.
So what kind of Christ is this? This Christ would give sight to the blind, so that they could see the truth. This Christ would unstop the ears of the deaf, so that they could hear God's word. This Christ would give mobility to the paralyzed, so that they could go where God was leading them. This Christ would give eternal life to the dead, so that they could take part in what God had been doing before they were born and what God would continue to do long after they died.
Christ didn't come to transform conditions; Christ came to transform people.
Jesus points out to the crowds that in John the Baptist they might have expected the kind of prophet that moved in the high circles, who had influence with the big cheeses. Even old Isaiah had been a priest in the temple and would have had the ear of the king. The Jewish king of Jesus' day, Herod, put out a coin with a reed blown by the wind on one side and Herod's face on the other. But John the Baptist was not a temple priest and clearly didn't impress Herod, who had arrested and imprisoned him, and would eventually execute him. Nevertheless, Jesus says, John is greater than any human being born of woman up until that time.
But Jesus doesn't stop there. He goes on to say that "the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."
The Christmas miracle is the miracle of the Spirit of God taking residence in a living human being in such a way that a human being becomes the living embodiment of God in the real world. We celebrate Christmas not because 2,000 years ago something happened that would never happen again. In Jesus, God came to live among people. In us, God continues to do so.
We are invited through this Christ to become Christmas miracles. We are invited into the realm of God, which is not a place or a set of conditions. It is what we ourselves become when we open ourselves to God's Spirit, when we remove all the obstacles to God's coming into our bodies, when we gladly and joyfully invite God to use us, when we let go of all our desires and dreams so that the greater desire and dream of God might come true in us. When we are able to do this, everything becomes possible.
So when someone is sick, they are blessed if one of us is around, who can without fear or anger attend to them. And when a natural disaster strikes, the victims are blessed if we are around to respond with care and support. And when some awful despot rises, the oppressed are blessed if some of us are there to speak the truth to power, no matter what it costs us. And if someone, anyone, is caught in the dark valley of despair, they are blessed if we, the least in the kingdom of heaven, are there to give them hope.
And blessed are they who take no offense at us.
Amen.
There are some very successful preachers out there, much more polished and sharp than me, that promote a view of Jesus as a kind of magical helper. And so someone gets sick in the family and the family gets together and prays and they collect all those tracts and pamphlets out there that say if you visualize healing and your faith is strong then Jesus will heal your family member. But the person isn't healed. The family is offended. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
Others might think of Jesus as the power that could stop natural disasters or who could miraculously give food to the hungry or who could prevent terrible dictators from rising to power. But we see in the news all the time about disasters that happen and thousands die or lose their homes. We hear about the millions who go to bed hungry every day. We know there are vicious and sadistic despots in power all over the world. Those who expect an all-powerful ruler over history are offended. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
Others think of Jesus as the king of niceness, the Lord of good manners, a deity for the cultivated. And when they come across a church where people are shouting or dancing or where everyone isn't wearing nice clothes, they are deeply offended. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
There are still others who think that Jesus is the Lord of some other world, and not of this one, and who expect see him only after death. So when they hear about people who follow him in their business practices or in their political activities, they are shocked. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
There are a few who think of Jesus as a kind of guru of happiness. They think of Jesus as a way to deny the pain and suffering of life and just float along on a pink cloud of peace and joy. And then, inevitably, some trial comes along, something that just can't possibly be denied, and they are shocked and offended. What kind of Christ is this?
"Are you the one, or are we to expect another?"
In Jesus' time, people had just as many expectations of the Messiah. Some thought he should have taken a vow of poverty, lived in a hovel in the desert and talked about letting go of material things. Others thought he should have been a fiery rebel organizing a bloody revolution to cast the Romans out of Israel once and for all. Others thought he should have been a noble political genius who might even have taken over the Roman Empire. Others thought he should have been a kind of super-Moses, waving a staff that brought floods and famines and plagues on all those who had ever offended or oppressed Israel.
Jesus, in his own teaching, seems most indebted to the prophet Isaiah's vision, and we hear today some of Isaiah's expectations. Isaiah painted a picture of a road leading home, a clear and straight path through hazardous and desolate wilderness, a wilderness now miraculously blooming into a verdant garden and protected from all predators. Isaiah was almost certainly talking about the return of the exiles from Babylon to Israel. This miraculous return home was metaphorically compared to the blind gaining sight, the deaf gaining their hearing and the dead being raised back into life.
Five hundred years later, Jesus takes up Isaiah's words and applies them to himself, and to John. Now Israel was not in exile, but was again at home in the land. Now Israel was occupied by the Romans. Now Israel was led by powerful Jews who collaborated with the oppressor. In Jesus' take on Isaiah, John the Baptist was the one who prepared the way in the wilderness for the people of God to go home.
Home, however, was a different place now. Home now was the realm of God, and the realm of God was no longer a geographical location, a particular hill, a certain country. The realm of God was a way of seeing, a way of hearing, a way of walking, a way of living.
The realm of God was no longer dependent on the actual conditions or locations in which people were living, but rather on the living they did in the places and conditions in which they found themselves.
It was no longer about whether John the Baptist got out of prison. It was now about how John understood his prison, and what his imprisonment would accomplish. It was no longer about whether Jesus would be defeated by the powerful Jews and their Roman friends, but how Jesus would understand what that defeat might accomplish. It was no longer about what would actually happen. It was now about how--first Jesus, and then we--would see, hear, walk and live through it. This is the realm of God.
So what kind of Christ is this? This Christ would give sight to the blind, so that they could see the truth. This Christ would unstop the ears of the deaf, so that they could hear God's word. This Christ would give mobility to the paralyzed, so that they could go where God was leading them. This Christ would give eternal life to the dead, so that they could take part in what God had been doing before they were born and what God would continue to do long after they died.
Christ didn't come to transform conditions; Christ came to transform people.
Jesus points out to the crowds that in John the Baptist they might have expected the kind of prophet that moved in the high circles, who had influence with the big cheeses. Even old Isaiah had been a priest in the temple and would have had the ear of the king. The Jewish king of Jesus' day, Herod, put out a coin with a reed blown by the wind on one side and Herod's face on the other. But John the Baptist was not a temple priest and clearly didn't impress Herod, who had arrested and imprisoned him, and would eventually execute him. Nevertheless, Jesus says, John is greater than any human being born of woman up until that time.
But Jesus doesn't stop there. He goes on to say that "the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."
The Christmas miracle is the miracle of the Spirit of God taking residence in a living human being in such a way that a human being becomes the living embodiment of God in the real world. We celebrate Christmas not because 2,000 years ago something happened that would never happen again. In Jesus, God came to live among people. In us, God continues to do so.
We are invited through this Christ to become Christmas miracles. We are invited into the realm of God, which is not a place or a set of conditions. It is what we ourselves become when we open ourselves to God's Spirit, when we remove all the obstacles to God's coming into our bodies, when we gladly and joyfully invite God to use us, when we let go of all our desires and dreams so that the greater desire and dream of God might come true in us. When we are able to do this, everything becomes possible.
So when someone is sick, they are blessed if one of us is around, who can without fear or anger attend to them. And when a natural disaster strikes, the victims are blessed if we are around to respond with care and support. And when some awful despot rises, the oppressed are blessed if some of us are there to speak the truth to power, no matter what it costs us. And if someone, anyone, is caught in the dark valley of despair, they are blessed if we, the least in the kingdom of heaven, are there to give them hope.
And blessed are they who take no offense at us.
Amen.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Good Fruit (sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent Year A 2010)
I did a little reading about the miners that got trapped in Chile. I don't know all the details, but I'm sure someone is going to write the book, because it's really an amazing story.
It appears that they were without light or any sign that anyone knew they were there for some seventeen days. During that time, there was a very good chance that they would have despaired or turned against one another. It's what groups of people do oftentimes in crisis. Panicky people often struggle with one another for power, and while they're doing that, nothing productive is really getting done. It's the way of the world, I guess.
But not for the miners. They apparently made a decision that they would neither succumb to despair nor turn on one another. Instead they made--and lived out--a covenant.
Now, for those of you who haven't been with us for long, I'll say a few words about covenant. The Hebrew word we translate covenant most simply means contract. But the word eventually came to have a deeper connotation. A covenant is a free acceptance of a binding agreement between parties who love one another. A covenant most of us are aware of is a marriage. Certainly we would say that the binding promises people make to each other in marriage is more than a contract.
But the world covenant also bears the dimension of a contract that equalizes an unequal relationship, as with the covenant between God and Israel, and the covenantal social contract God required of Israel, in which the strong are obliged to care for the weak, the rich for the poor, the healthy for the sick, the righteous for the sinful, and so on. This is the peaceable kingdom that Isaiah paints a picture of in our first lesson: a society in which the predator peacefully coexists with its prey.
The miners established a covenant of hope, a promise they made to each other to believe that God had not abandoned them and that they would not give into despair. They got to know one another and probed one another for gifts and graces, just as they took stock of what meager supplies they had. They identified leadership, they appointed a chaplain to keep them in fellowship with God, they discovered who knew something about first aid and made that person the medic, someone who was a creative cook and put him in charge of the rations.
They made a covenant with each other to focus not on what they didn't have, but on what they did. They made a covenant to focus not on what danger they were in, but on what hope they had. They made a covenant to set aside their individual opinions and preferences to become one body, each one giving everything to the common good of all.
They became a church.
When they were finally rescued, the medical personnel on site were amazed at how little they had to do. A month later one of the miners ran a marathon.
What is the the good fruit that is worthy of repentance? The biblical word we translate repentance simply means a change of mind. But in the context of Jewish and Christian spiritual life, repentance has to do with covenant. It is a decision to enter covenant, to freely bind oneself to God and to God's people for the sake of the world God loves.
The Ten Commandments together comprise a covenant. They are not simply a law code. They are the way of life for a people in covenant with God. God says, I shall be your God and you shall be my people. By "you," God means Israel and the church. You shall not have any other gods, you shall remember and keep sabbath, you shall not misuse God's name, you shall honor your parents, you shall not murder, steal, commit adultery, or bear false witness, and you shall not covet your neighbor's possessions or relationships. If you are a Christian, you have accepted these commandments as your way of life.
But as subjects of Christ and children of God, you have also accepted the New Covenant, which Jesus mentioned on the night in which he was betrayed. Jesus described the blood he was to spill the next day as the new blood of the covenant. He was referring to the practice of sacrifice as a way of sealing a covenant between God and God's people. Jesus' blood sealed a new covenant, a way of life now defined by Jesus. This is the reign of God Jesus spent his entire ministry teaching about, and that John was announcing before him. When we repent, we are repenting of our way of life, we are letting go of our learned ways of thinking and seeing and doing, in order to bear the good fruit of covenant faithfulness, of working for the purposes Christ has defined
The Pharisees come to John the Baptist to be baptized. John has some choice words for them.
John proclaims to them that repentance is a real change of heart and mind. He suggests to them that their ethnicity is not an entitlement but a responsibility. To be Jewish no longer means to be privileged. In the coming kingdom, it means to be responsible. It means to be bound to God and to God's people. It means to be committed to the peaceable kingdom of which Isaiah dreamed, where predators give up their predatory ways and become friends to the prey, and where the prey risk relationship with the predator, trusting that on God's holy mountain, none will hurt or destroy.
There are so many things we say we can't do. So many situations and challenges we evaluate as hopeless, both in our personal and in our world wide ministry. And yet it never ceases to amaze me how easily we find solutions and how quickly we can organize and how powerfully we can act, both as individuals and a congregation, when we have simply agreed to do so. And the reign of God, the covenantal life Jesus wants to bring to all of us, is pretty simple. It's the faith that God is still with us and that God can do what we can't. God who makes the sun burn, God who swings the planets in their orbits, God who whispered over the seas and life came into being, God can do what we cannot, God can make of us what we are not, God can accomplish what the most powerful and wise and rich cannot, God can do in us and through us things we could never do without God.
I was a part of a church-based organization in Boston over the years I was serving churches there. One year, six of our churches located in the poorest neighborhood in the city got their youth together, who then covenanted to work for the common good. The youth decided that they wanted to have a safe and wholesome place to go to have fun. They found out about an old skating rink that had been closed for some years. They got to work in the community raising money to get the rink going again. When they had over half of the money they needed, they arranged a public meeting with the city council members responsible for their neighborhood to ask the city to fund the rest of the project. They planned the meeting and set the agenda and ran the meeting entirely on their own. Not one adult did a thing except advise them in the process.
The meeting went smoothly, and the council was prepared to say yes. It was after all a political coup for them. After this part of the meeting, one of the council members got up and approached a microphone and started to say something.
The chairwoman, a seventeen year old girl, had been trained to stick to the agenda agreed upon. She told the council member that he'd already had his chance to speak and to please sit down. And he sat down.
Many of us in the aftermath of the event talked about that moment, when someone who had formerly been powerless and unknown told a powerful and influential politician what to do, and he did it. That young lady would never have risen to such heights without the covenant of the organization behind her. Good fruit indeed.
As we await the coming of Jesus, we are invited to open ourselves to God's Spirit. Essential to that opening is a decision to bind ourselves to God and to God's people, which for us is the church. This decision means nothing if we don't really intend to carry it out. If what we really mean when we repent is that we're a little bit sorry about being bad actors sometimes and would like a free pass so we can keep on doing what we've always done, then old John the Baptist is telling us not to bother repenting at all. He's suggesting we step away from the water if we don't really want to get clean.
But if we are willing to commit ourselves to God and to one another, if we are willing to set aside our private agendas, to let go of our old ideas, and commit ourselves together to the hope of the Messiah, Jesus, we might just find out way out of the darkness and the depths, and up to that magnificent and holy mountain.
Amen.
It appears that they were without light or any sign that anyone knew they were there for some seventeen days. During that time, there was a very good chance that they would have despaired or turned against one another. It's what groups of people do oftentimes in crisis. Panicky people often struggle with one another for power, and while they're doing that, nothing productive is really getting done. It's the way of the world, I guess.
But not for the miners. They apparently made a decision that they would neither succumb to despair nor turn on one another. Instead they made--and lived out--a covenant.
Now, for those of you who haven't been with us for long, I'll say a few words about covenant. The Hebrew word we translate covenant most simply means contract. But the word eventually came to have a deeper connotation. A covenant is a free acceptance of a binding agreement between parties who love one another. A covenant most of us are aware of is a marriage. Certainly we would say that the binding promises people make to each other in marriage is more than a contract.
But the world covenant also bears the dimension of a contract that equalizes an unequal relationship, as with the covenant between God and Israel, and the covenantal social contract God required of Israel, in which the strong are obliged to care for the weak, the rich for the poor, the healthy for the sick, the righteous for the sinful, and so on. This is the peaceable kingdom that Isaiah paints a picture of in our first lesson: a society in which the predator peacefully coexists with its prey.
The miners established a covenant of hope, a promise they made to each other to believe that God had not abandoned them and that they would not give into despair. They got to know one another and probed one another for gifts and graces, just as they took stock of what meager supplies they had. They identified leadership, they appointed a chaplain to keep them in fellowship with God, they discovered who knew something about first aid and made that person the medic, someone who was a creative cook and put him in charge of the rations.
They made a covenant with each other to focus not on what they didn't have, but on what they did. They made a covenant to focus not on what danger they were in, but on what hope they had. They made a covenant to set aside their individual opinions and preferences to become one body, each one giving everything to the common good of all.
They became a church.
When they were finally rescued, the medical personnel on site were amazed at how little they had to do. A month later one of the miners ran a marathon.
What is the the good fruit that is worthy of repentance? The biblical word we translate repentance simply means a change of mind. But in the context of Jewish and Christian spiritual life, repentance has to do with covenant. It is a decision to enter covenant, to freely bind oneself to God and to God's people for the sake of the world God loves.
The Ten Commandments together comprise a covenant. They are not simply a law code. They are the way of life for a people in covenant with God. God says, I shall be your God and you shall be my people. By "you," God means Israel and the church. You shall not have any other gods, you shall remember and keep sabbath, you shall not misuse God's name, you shall honor your parents, you shall not murder, steal, commit adultery, or bear false witness, and you shall not covet your neighbor's possessions or relationships. If you are a Christian, you have accepted these commandments as your way of life.
But as subjects of Christ and children of God, you have also accepted the New Covenant, which Jesus mentioned on the night in which he was betrayed. Jesus described the blood he was to spill the next day as the new blood of the covenant. He was referring to the practice of sacrifice as a way of sealing a covenant between God and God's people. Jesus' blood sealed a new covenant, a way of life now defined by Jesus. This is the reign of God Jesus spent his entire ministry teaching about, and that John was announcing before him. When we repent, we are repenting of our way of life, we are letting go of our learned ways of thinking and seeing and doing, in order to bear the good fruit of covenant faithfulness, of working for the purposes Christ has defined
The Pharisees come to John the Baptist to be baptized. John has some choice words for them.
John proclaims to them that repentance is a real change of heart and mind. He suggests to them that their ethnicity is not an entitlement but a responsibility. To be Jewish no longer means to be privileged. In the coming kingdom, it means to be responsible. It means to be bound to God and to God's people. It means to be committed to the peaceable kingdom of which Isaiah dreamed, where predators give up their predatory ways and become friends to the prey, and where the prey risk relationship with the predator, trusting that on God's holy mountain, none will hurt or destroy.
There are so many things we say we can't do. So many situations and challenges we evaluate as hopeless, both in our personal and in our world wide ministry. And yet it never ceases to amaze me how easily we find solutions and how quickly we can organize and how powerfully we can act, both as individuals and a congregation, when we have simply agreed to do so. And the reign of God, the covenantal life Jesus wants to bring to all of us, is pretty simple. It's the faith that God is still with us and that God can do what we can't. God who makes the sun burn, God who swings the planets in their orbits, God who whispered over the seas and life came into being, God can do what we cannot, God can make of us what we are not, God can accomplish what the most powerful and wise and rich cannot, God can do in us and through us things we could never do without God.
I was a part of a church-based organization in Boston over the years I was serving churches there. One year, six of our churches located in the poorest neighborhood in the city got their youth together, who then covenanted to work for the common good. The youth decided that they wanted to have a safe and wholesome place to go to have fun. They found out about an old skating rink that had been closed for some years. They got to work in the community raising money to get the rink going again. When they had over half of the money they needed, they arranged a public meeting with the city council members responsible for their neighborhood to ask the city to fund the rest of the project. They planned the meeting and set the agenda and ran the meeting entirely on their own. Not one adult did a thing except advise them in the process.
The meeting went smoothly, and the council was prepared to say yes. It was after all a political coup for them. After this part of the meeting, one of the council members got up and approached a microphone and started to say something.
The chairwoman, a seventeen year old girl, had been trained to stick to the agenda agreed upon. She told the council member that he'd already had his chance to speak and to please sit down. And he sat down.
Many of us in the aftermath of the event talked about that moment, when someone who had formerly been powerless and unknown told a powerful and influential politician what to do, and he did it. That young lady would never have risen to such heights without the covenant of the organization behind her. Good fruit indeed.
As we await the coming of Jesus, we are invited to open ourselves to God's Spirit. Essential to that opening is a decision to bind ourselves to God and to God's people, which for us is the church. This decision means nothing if we don't really intend to carry it out. If what we really mean when we repent is that we're a little bit sorry about being bad actors sometimes and would like a free pass so we can keep on doing what we've always done, then old John the Baptist is telling us not to bother repenting at all. He's suggesting we step away from the water if we don't really want to get clean.
But if we are willing to commit ourselves to God and to one another, if we are willing to set aside our private agendas, to let go of our old ideas, and commit ourselves together to the hope of the Messiah, Jesus, we might just find out way out of the darkness and the depths, and up to that magnificent and holy mountain.
Amen.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
An Unexpected Hour (sermon for the 1st Sunday in Advent 2010)
She whispered to me, "Do you know where I belong?"
I was in my early months at Philippi. I had gone to Mizpah Nursing Home to visit Cornelia Kennard. That was what was on my to-do list. I had a bunch of other names on that list, people I aimed to visit, and I had finished with Cornelia and was walking down the hall toward the door and my car.
For some reason there seemed to be a good bit of shadow in the hallway that day. And standing before me in the darkness was a tall woman, a very beautiful woman. Have you noticed how the very old often become strikingly beautiful? As I hurried by her, the new young pastor on the very important mission, she whispered, "Do you know where I belong?"
I was rather undone. I looked around for staff, but saw none. I felt a little panicky, truth be told. I told the woman to stay where she was and I ran back to the nurse's station and told them about her. I'm not sure why I felt there was such an emergency. People call out to you at nursing homes all the time. Often they themselves don't realize what they are doing. But with her I felt sure that she really needed help.
Her words began to haunt me as a drove to my next visit. And that haunting sense grew and grew. It finally dawned on me that I had missed a reign of God moment.
What's a reign of God moment? I'm glad you asked.
Years before the Mizpah incident, I was dating Liz, I was a divorced dad and there came a time one Advent season when Liz finally met my daughter Hilary, who was then nine years old. I believe it was at a Christmas party at Faith Lutheran Church, where I was pastor. In that setting Liz could meet Hilary without necessarily announcing that she was my girlfriend. In the course of chatting, Hilary, who was beginning to go through a pretty hard time, mentioned to Liz that she had begun to doubt that Santa Claus was real.
I suppose it was the next weekend, pretty close to Christmas, and I had Hilary with me. We'd gone to the movies. I don't remember what we had gone to see, but we'd planned it earlier that week. When we returned to the car we discovered that it was filled with Christmas presents. We could hardly get into the car. The first thing we checked were the little cards attached to each one. They were all meant for Hilary, and they were all, every one, signed "Santa."
Even I at that point had no idea where the presents had come from and I have to say I was awed. It was only later I learned about Liz' conversation with Hilary. But at that moment I was as stunned as Hilary and of course she was watching me carefully for signs of sneakiness, but couldn't find a drop.
In the course of prior conversations, Liz had gotten the scoop about where Hilary and I were going that day, without letting on her purpose. And then, while we were in the movie, she'd driven around the parking lot until she found my car. She had a spare key and put the presents in there. At least that's what I finally figured out. She never did admit it.
A reign of God moment had come for Liz, and she had been ready.
I've made up this term, "a reign of God moment." First off, I need to tell you that the word is "reign" as in "rule" rather than "rain" as in "water falling from the sky." The reign of God sounds less masculine and exclusive than "kingdom of God" but that's pretty much what it means.
There are three elements to a reign of God moment, and all three have to be present in order for the moment to be a true reign of God moment.
The first element is surprise. A true reign of God moment always defies expectation. You know, I've known people in the course of my life who think that such moments are their entitlement, and they become resentful of people around them for not providing them. This rather amazes me. If you expect it, it can't be a reign of God moment. It's not something people can do without divine inspiration. You can't expect people to have divine revelation whenever you want them to. A reign of God moment is always a surprise.
The second element of a reign of God moment is that it always summons to mind, immediately and undeniably, God. There are plenty of nice things people do for each other, all kinds of loving and sweet things, and some of them are surprising. But a reign of God moment is never about how wonderful a person is. It's always about how wonderful God is.
The third crucial element of a reign of God moment is that, despite the moment pointing to God, it is a moment brought about through a human being. I suppose there are some miracles that are simply the invisible hand of God reaching into a situation and doing something, and those are certainly wonderful. But a reign of God moment is when God takes over a human being and does something through that human being, something surprising and something that glorifies God. A reign of God moment is always carried out by a human being.
So a reign of God moment is when God uses an ordinary human being to bring about a surprising and wonderful moment that glorifies God. The key issue then is not how we do such things, but how we become ready to let God come into our bodies and take over whenever he wants to.
In the case of the poor woman in the nursing home hallway, it seemed to me there was an opportunity to really comfort that woman in a way she might never have expected, in a way that might have made God present to her right then. I was being offered the opportunity to be God's presence to her and I missed it. I wasn't ready. I was asleep.
Jesus teaches us quite a bit about readiness, about staying awake. And many people understand this to mean being ready for death, and many people understand this as being ready for the rapture, but I believe those things are bigger things than Jesus wants us to be concerned about, the wars and rumors of wars and the nations rising up against nations. Certainly we should work for justice and speak out about what we believe is right. But the reign of God moments are much more spontaneous and unpredictable than that.
An example can be taken from the civil rights movement in the sixties. I believe it was a white preacher who was marching with the blacks in Selma or someplace. One of the outraged bystanders walked up to him and spit in his face.
Now the issue of the day was the great issue, the issue of equal rights under the law, and that is certainly a good issue and it was a great thing that all those folks were there marching about it. But the reign of God moment was right there, right there when a violently angry person spit into a minister's face, the opportunity was right there for God to take over that minister's body. And the divine grace was there, and the minister was ready.
He said, "Do you have a handkerchief?"
And his enemy, without thinking, reached into his back pocket and pulled one out and gave it to the minister before he could even think about what he was doing. A perfect reign of God moment.
Christmas was the first reign of God moment, and the perfect epitome of all the others after it. It is the unexpected and glorious entrance of God into the troubled world in the form of an ordinary human being. God came in Jesus, and God wants to come in each one of us. I wasn't ready that day in Mizpah. But years before, when a troubled little girl confessed her dying faith, Liz had been ready, ready to receive the spirit of God, ready to become God's physical presence in the troubled world.
That's what discipleship is, friends. It's all about getting ready and staying ready, about watching and waiting for the unexpected hour. It's about longing to be filled with God's Spirit, to be the instrument of the surprising and glorious moment of God's coming. It's about becoming the Son of Man for that very special and healing moment.
It's about Christmas.
Amen.
I was in my early months at Philippi. I had gone to Mizpah Nursing Home to visit Cornelia Kennard. That was what was on my to-do list. I had a bunch of other names on that list, people I aimed to visit, and I had finished with Cornelia and was walking down the hall toward the door and my car.
For some reason there seemed to be a good bit of shadow in the hallway that day. And standing before me in the darkness was a tall woman, a very beautiful woman. Have you noticed how the very old often become strikingly beautiful? As I hurried by her, the new young pastor on the very important mission, she whispered, "Do you know where I belong?"
I was rather undone. I looked around for staff, but saw none. I felt a little panicky, truth be told. I told the woman to stay where she was and I ran back to the nurse's station and told them about her. I'm not sure why I felt there was such an emergency. People call out to you at nursing homes all the time. Often they themselves don't realize what they are doing. But with her I felt sure that she really needed help.
Her words began to haunt me as a drove to my next visit. And that haunting sense grew and grew. It finally dawned on me that I had missed a reign of God moment.
What's a reign of God moment? I'm glad you asked.
Years before the Mizpah incident, I was dating Liz, I was a divorced dad and there came a time one Advent season when Liz finally met my daughter Hilary, who was then nine years old. I believe it was at a Christmas party at Faith Lutheran Church, where I was pastor. In that setting Liz could meet Hilary without necessarily announcing that she was my girlfriend. In the course of chatting, Hilary, who was beginning to go through a pretty hard time, mentioned to Liz that she had begun to doubt that Santa Claus was real.
I suppose it was the next weekend, pretty close to Christmas, and I had Hilary with me. We'd gone to the movies. I don't remember what we had gone to see, but we'd planned it earlier that week. When we returned to the car we discovered that it was filled with Christmas presents. We could hardly get into the car. The first thing we checked were the little cards attached to each one. They were all meant for Hilary, and they were all, every one, signed "Santa."
Even I at that point had no idea where the presents had come from and I have to say I was awed. It was only later I learned about Liz' conversation with Hilary. But at that moment I was as stunned as Hilary and of course she was watching me carefully for signs of sneakiness, but couldn't find a drop.
In the course of prior conversations, Liz had gotten the scoop about where Hilary and I were going that day, without letting on her purpose. And then, while we were in the movie, she'd driven around the parking lot until she found my car. She had a spare key and put the presents in there. At least that's what I finally figured out. She never did admit it.
A reign of God moment had come for Liz, and she had been ready.
I've made up this term, "a reign of God moment." First off, I need to tell you that the word is "reign" as in "rule" rather than "rain" as in "water falling from the sky." The reign of God sounds less masculine and exclusive than "kingdom of God" but that's pretty much what it means.
There are three elements to a reign of God moment, and all three have to be present in order for the moment to be a true reign of God moment.
The first element is surprise. A true reign of God moment always defies expectation. You know, I've known people in the course of my life who think that such moments are their entitlement, and they become resentful of people around them for not providing them. This rather amazes me. If you expect it, it can't be a reign of God moment. It's not something people can do without divine inspiration. You can't expect people to have divine revelation whenever you want them to. A reign of God moment is always a surprise.
The second element of a reign of God moment is that it always summons to mind, immediately and undeniably, God. There are plenty of nice things people do for each other, all kinds of loving and sweet things, and some of them are surprising. But a reign of God moment is never about how wonderful a person is. It's always about how wonderful God is.
The third crucial element of a reign of God moment is that, despite the moment pointing to God, it is a moment brought about through a human being. I suppose there are some miracles that are simply the invisible hand of God reaching into a situation and doing something, and those are certainly wonderful. But a reign of God moment is when God takes over a human being and does something through that human being, something surprising and something that glorifies God. A reign of God moment is always carried out by a human being.
So a reign of God moment is when God uses an ordinary human being to bring about a surprising and wonderful moment that glorifies God. The key issue then is not how we do such things, but how we become ready to let God come into our bodies and take over whenever he wants to.
In the case of the poor woman in the nursing home hallway, it seemed to me there was an opportunity to really comfort that woman in a way she might never have expected, in a way that might have made God present to her right then. I was being offered the opportunity to be God's presence to her and I missed it. I wasn't ready. I was asleep.
Jesus teaches us quite a bit about readiness, about staying awake. And many people understand this to mean being ready for death, and many people understand this as being ready for the rapture, but I believe those things are bigger things than Jesus wants us to be concerned about, the wars and rumors of wars and the nations rising up against nations. Certainly we should work for justice and speak out about what we believe is right. But the reign of God moments are much more spontaneous and unpredictable than that.
An example can be taken from the civil rights movement in the sixties. I believe it was a white preacher who was marching with the blacks in Selma or someplace. One of the outraged bystanders walked up to him and spit in his face.
Now the issue of the day was the great issue, the issue of equal rights under the law, and that is certainly a good issue and it was a great thing that all those folks were there marching about it. But the reign of God moment was right there, right there when a violently angry person spit into a minister's face, the opportunity was right there for God to take over that minister's body. And the divine grace was there, and the minister was ready.
He said, "Do you have a handkerchief?"
And his enemy, without thinking, reached into his back pocket and pulled one out and gave it to the minister before he could even think about what he was doing. A perfect reign of God moment.
Christmas was the first reign of God moment, and the perfect epitome of all the others after it. It is the unexpected and glorious entrance of God into the troubled world in the form of an ordinary human being. God came in Jesus, and God wants to come in each one of us. I wasn't ready that day in Mizpah. But years before, when a troubled little girl confessed her dying faith, Liz had been ready, ready to receive the spirit of God, ready to become God's physical presence in the troubled world.
That's what discipleship is, friends. It's all about getting ready and staying ready, about watching and waiting for the unexpected hour. It's about longing to be filled with God's Spirit, to be the instrument of the surprising and glorious moment of God's coming. It's about becoming the Son of Man for that very special and healing moment.
It's about Christmas.
Amen.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The Food That Endures (sermon for Thanksgiving Sunday)
I went rock fishing with my wife yesterday during the short 36 hour visit she had down here before returning this morning to care for her mother in Boston. Our 10 hour trip yielded exactly three fish.
The ways of fish are impenetrable. Our captain, whose apt nickname is "Pudd'n," assured us that there were many fish, but that they simply weren't acting right. To bring home his point we were usually surrounded by large numbers of other vessels, their hind ends bristling with trolling lines, implying that like Pudd'n, the captains thereof were convinced of the immanence of fish.
For a time we were in the Piankatank, right where the river bends sharply northward toward the bridge. We circled there so many times, and passed the same homes so often, one of our group commented that we might send those folks Christmas cards this year. But while we were there, we did have the privilege of riding through one of those fascinating moments in the great cycle of nature, of which, of course, we were a part.
Waiting patiently on various docks around this particular stretch of water was a large flock of seagulls. At one point they rose as a body into the air and fell like kamakaze fighter planes on a little area just off our bow. This was one of those feeding frenzies brought on by the bait fish rising close to the surface, where the seagulls could get at them.
We rode right through it, our eyes fixed on our lines. Why? Because the rise of the baitfish to the surface most likely had been caused by the rock fish hunting them. Did we catch one? No, we did not.
Like I said, the ways of fish are impenetrable. My point here is that we were there and the baitfish were there, and the seagulls were there, all involved in the amazing dance that has gone on for lo, these many millennia. I have no doubt that native american indians had for hundreds if not thousands of years also been out there in their canoes doing just the same thing, albeit probably with greater success.
And at the same time, you know, we in the boat sidled back and forth, from port to starboard, following the sun on that crisp fall day. Whenever the boat would turn, the roof over the deck would cast its shadow and we would be too cold. A move to the other side put us in the sun, which quickly warmed us. I am sure there were any number of other living creatures, all around us out there, plants and animals of all kinds, that were similarly turning themselves to receive the warmth of the fall sun.
We caught three fish, but I also caught a powerful, almost overwhelming sense of the huge and loving and impartial generosity of God. The world was filled with light and air and warmth and food. Who did it all belong to? Certainly not me. And yet it was all there before me, like the table of a feast.
Much of the industrial food production system that we have created in this modern world is turning out to be not so good for us, if not positively bad for us. One of our party remarked that few rural people starved during the depression because the country was accustomed to growing and trading local foods, a practice that required no cash. Before the advent of the single-planting seed, seeds could be harvested and saved and planted again. When only local populations were eating the produce of the bay, fish and oyster and crab populations could easily stay large and vital. God provided pretty much all that was needed for life. Now, when very few people grow their own food, and even farmers have to purchase seed every year anew, and when seafood is shipped in great quantities all around the world, an economic crisis might very well leave people hungry.
In North America we produce enough food to feed the world, but how it is distributed and marketed somehow ends up leaving huge populations hungry. The weight loss industry in our country alone is worth about 45 billion dollars a year, and the impact on the health care system of obesity-related disease is in the billions as well. It seems every time we turn around there is another outbreak of some infection spread all over the country by industrial food production.
I believe it is a tenet of the Jewish and Christian tradition that scarcity is caused by human beings. And by scarcity I don't mean some spiritualized idea of poverty, but the kind of scarcity that actually causes people to starve or to die of diseases for which there is a simple cure. Scarcity is caused by fear.
Jesus invites his followers to stop orienting their lives and the morals and their choices around their fears of not having enough, and begin to live into the generosity of God. He'd just finished multiplying the loaves and fishes. The people were chasing him because it seemed to them that he could continue to feed them. Of course, Jesus feeding the five thousand was a concrete example of the power of God and of God's abundant provision for everyone. That was the lesson it was to teach, but the people were still being motivated by their fear.
Jesus is hoping that we might hear about the deeper significance of the feeding miracle. Jesus is hoping that we might see that the world as God has created it is a place of abundance and plenty for all of God's creatures, including humankind. Jesus is hoping that we might take in that the problem of scarcity is not caused by God not providing enough, but by the inequities of human systems of sharing.
Thanksgiving is one of the basic practices of Jewish and Christian people. Indeed one of the traditional Greek names for the ritual of the Lord's Supper means "thanksgiving." It's interesting to me that one of the levels of our Thanksgiving tradition is the remembrance of the ways native people helped the Pilgrims to make use of local foods, thus saving them from starvation. For the native people of the Americas, a person could no more own the land than own the sea or sky. Everything was there by the generosity of their idea of God. If the Pilgrims had been open to the native's beliefs, they might soon have discovered some real similarities to their own.
Thanksgiving is the way that God's generosity becomes ours. This story we heard this morning comes to us from the gospel of John, in which is written many a Christian's favorite verse. Say it with me now: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son." God loved, and God gave.
In our gratitude for God's provision is the seed of our own generosity. As we gather with our families, and give thanks for food and love and life and sun and children and old people, let's open our hearts to the marvelous truth of Christ: God provides enough for all.
Amen.
The ways of fish are impenetrable. Our captain, whose apt nickname is "Pudd'n," assured us that there were many fish, but that they simply weren't acting right. To bring home his point we were usually surrounded by large numbers of other vessels, their hind ends bristling with trolling lines, implying that like Pudd'n, the captains thereof were convinced of the immanence of fish.
For a time we were in the Piankatank, right where the river bends sharply northward toward the bridge. We circled there so many times, and passed the same homes so often, one of our group commented that we might send those folks Christmas cards this year. But while we were there, we did have the privilege of riding through one of those fascinating moments in the great cycle of nature, of which, of course, we were a part.
Waiting patiently on various docks around this particular stretch of water was a large flock of seagulls. At one point they rose as a body into the air and fell like kamakaze fighter planes on a little area just off our bow. This was one of those feeding frenzies brought on by the bait fish rising close to the surface, where the seagulls could get at them.
We rode right through it, our eyes fixed on our lines. Why? Because the rise of the baitfish to the surface most likely had been caused by the rock fish hunting them. Did we catch one? No, we did not.
Like I said, the ways of fish are impenetrable. My point here is that we were there and the baitfish were there, and the seagulls were there, all involved in the amazing dance that has gone on for lo, these many millennia. I have no doubt that native american indians had for hundreds if not thousands of years also been out there in their canoes doing just the same thing, albeit probably with greater success.
And at the same time, you know, we in the boat sidled back and forth, from port to starboard, following the sun on that crisp fall day. Whenever the boat would turn, the roof over the deck would cast its shadow and we would be too cold. A move to the other side put us in the sun, which quickly warmed us. I am sure there were any number of other living creatures, all around us out there, plants and animals of all kinds, that were similarly turning themselves to receive the warmth of the fall sun.
We caught three fish, but I also caught a powerful, almost overwhelming sense of the huge and loving and impartial generosity of God. The world was filled with light and air and warmth and food. Who did it all belong to? Certainly not me. And yet it was all there before me, like the table of a feast.
Much of the industrial food production system that we have created in this modern world is turning out to be not so good for us, if not positively bad for us. One of our party remarked that few rural people starved during the depression because the country was accustomed to growing and trading local foods, a practice that required no cash. Before the advent of the single-planting seed, seeds could be harvested and saved and planted again. When only local populations were eating the produce of the bay, fish and oyster and crab populations could easily stay large and vital. God provided pretty much all that was needed for life. Now, when very few people grow their own food, and even farmers have to purchase seed every year anew, and when seafood is shipped in great quantities all around the world, an economic crisis might very well leave people hungry.
In North America we produce enough food to feed the world, but how it is distributed and marketed somehow ends up leaving huge populations hungry. The weight loss industry in our country alone is worth about 45 billion dollars a year, and the impact on the health care system of obesity-related disease is in the billions as well. It seems every time we turn around there is another outbreak of some infection spread all over the country by industrial food production.
I believe it is a tenet of the Jewish and Christian tradition that scarcity is caused by human beings. And by scarcity I don't mean some spiritualized idea of poverty, but the kind of scarcity that actually causes people to starve or to die of diseases for which there is a simple cure. Scarcity is caused by fear.
Jesus invites his followers to stop orienting their lives and the morals and their choices around their fears of not having enough, and begin to live into the generosity of God. He'd just finished multiplying the loaves and fishes. The people were chasing him because it seemed to them that he could continue to feed them. Of course, Jesus feeding the five thousand was a concrete example of the power of God and of God's abundant provision for everyone. That was the lesson it was to teach, but the people were still being motivated by their fear.
Jesus is hoping that we might hear about the deeper significance of the feeding miracle. Jesus is hoping that we might see that the world as God has created it is a place of abundance and plenty for all of God's creatures, including humankind. Jesus is hoping that we might take in that the problem of scarcity is not caused by God not providing enough, but by the inequities of human systems of sharing.
Thanksgiving is one of the basic practices of Jewish and Christian people. Indeed one of the traditional Greek names for the ritual of the Lord's Supper means "thanksgiving." It's interesting to me that one of the levels of our Thanksgiving tradition is the remembrance of the ways native people helped the Pilgrims to make use of local foods, thus saving them from starvation. For the native people of the Americas, a person could no more own the land than own the sea or sky. Everything was there by the generosity of their idea of God. If the Pilgrims had been open to the native's beliefs, they might soon have discovered some real similarities to their own.
Thanksgiving is the way that God's generosity becomes ours. This story we heard this morning comes to us from the gospel of John, in which is written many a Christian's favorite verse. Say it with me now: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son." God loved, and God gave.
In our gratitude for God's provision is the seed of our own generosity. As we gather with our families, and give thanks for food and love and life and sun and children and old people, let's open our hearts to the marvelous truth of Christ: God provides enough for all.
Amen.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
A New Earth (a sermon for the 25th Sunday After Pentecost Year C, 2010)
Did you ever wonder exactly why early Christians got in trouble so much?
Most Jews were made very angry by Christians. They barred them from synagogue worship, they sometimes whipped them and even murdered them as blasphemers, and they also did what they could to get Christians in trouble with the Romans. What do you suppose made the Jews so angry?
And what was it about the Christians that made the Romans so nervous? They were more or less constantly hounding them, arresting them, torturing them and even killing them.
In the early years of Christianity, the religion was officially pacifist. Soldiers, if they wanted to be Christian, had to resign from soldiering. You couldn't even hold office in the Roman government because the government engaged in warfare and a violent system of punishment for crime. The point here is that Christians were utterly unarmed and were strictly constrained from doing violence for any reason. What therefore was threatening about them?
We know that many Christians came together to live in community. We know all of them that were wealthy voluntarily liquidated much of their property and contributed it to the community to be redistributed. We know that the church sought out and supported widows and orphans, people too old or too young to work and who were not being cared for by their families.
We know these communities had rich worship and prayer lives and that from the very beginning they celebrated baptism and the Lord's Supper. We know they didn't have buildings, but met in people's homes. We know they were egalitarian, mixing many ethnic groups and classes together, and empowering leadership regardless of ethnicity or gender or class, at least until late in Paul's life, perhaps even later, when women's equality was again brought into question.
We know that evangelists, deacons and apostles travelled far and wide and that they performed miracles not unlike the ones Jesus had done before the resurrection. They healed the sick, raised the dead, fed multitudes, travelled supernaturally, stilled storms, and cast out spirits and demons that possessed people.
What is it in any of this that might have caused the Romans or the Jews so much anxiety?
It appears in Acts that the Jewish authorities were really angry that the Christians kept saying that Jesus wasn't dead, even though everyone had seen him get crucified on Good Friday. The Jewish authorities kept telling the Christians to stop saying that, but the Christians wouldn't listen. The reason the Christians gave for bucking the Jewish authorities? They had to obey God rather than people. God apparently had commanded them to announce that Jesus was alive, and to keep announcing it.
Why was this so upsetting?
In Acts, it appears that there were economic consequences to this message. Paul healed the slave girl with the demon and deprived her owners of the rich income she brought. Paul got everyone to denounce idols and the city's lucrative idol factories died for want of customers.
But this wasn't all. In this same letter of Paul to the Thessalonians we heard this morning, Paul goes to some length speaking about the "man of lawlessness," which modern Christians maybe think of as the devil. But many of us believe it much more likely that Paul was talking about the emperor of Rome.
A very small percentage of the people living under the Roman Empire lived well. That being said, there were a lot of people living under the Roman Empire. So that small percentage of wealthy people made up a pretty big number. Merchants, politicians, officers in the military, tax collectors, local royalty, priests of various religious sects, these were the people who had the resources to live what must have been pretty delightful lives. But the vast majority of peoples living under the Romans lived miserable, short and desperate lives, because the fruits of their labor and toil mostly went to the delightful lives of the relatively few.
The promise of Isaiah, that laborers would not have to give up the fruits of their labors to oppressors, came to pass, but in a strange and miraculous way.
The Christian communities, at least at the beginning, really seemed to bring about justice. The few who were well-to-do used their resources to re-endow those who had been robbed of theirs. We have evidence also in Paul's letters that resources also flowed from well-to-do congregations to those suffering want.
Now it's important here to recognize that there is no evidence that the Christians had any agenda to get the Romans to adopt the Christian way of life. They certainly were not a political party. But it was obvious to many of the poor just whose side the Christians were on. And I suspect it was obvious to the Romans as well.
It's also obvious that then as now, some folks sought to take advantage of the Christians. They probably were pretending to be teachers like Paul and demanding that they be taken care of. We think this because Paul calls them "busybodies," presumably because they were sticking their noses in everyone's business instead of actually preaching and teaching the gospel. Jesus warns about them in his sermon today, saying that many will come claiming to be him, but not to believe them. Paul doesn't deny that apostles and teachers should be cared for by the congregation, but he has the number of those idlers who were using the churches as a means to an easy life.
The Romans and their local minions were constantly pouring out propaganda to the poor about how Roman exploitation of the poor was actually good for everyone, and every once in a while the Romans would stage big impressive entertainments and pass out free bread to convince the poor they actually were taking care of them. It was very important for the Romans and the Jews who were getting rich and powerful under Roman rule that the poor never wake up to their majority, and never recognize what was really being done to them.
The Christians were gaining supporters for themselves from among the poor, who were very very many, and these poor people, because of the concrete generosity of the church, began to believe in Jesus and not in Herod or Caesar or the rest of the ruling class, who were rather few, comparatively speaking.
And so it was that Christians were turning the world upside down. Making a new earth is a tumultuous and rowdy business. When God raised Jesus from the dead, God threw down a glove. God announced in Jesus that God's kingdom was henceforth impossible to keep out, impossible to knock down, impossible to reject, no matter how powerful the human kingdom that tries to knock it down, keep it out, or reject it.
Philippi is a warm and lovable bunch of people. Almost all of them are involved in the community, doing all kinds of loving service. Indeed, many of our members are greatly admired and loved by their neighbors.
What, I wonder, might we do to get in trouble?
Amen.
Most Jews were made very angry by Christians. They barred them from synagogue worship, they sometimes whipped them and even murdered them as blasphemers, and they also did what they could to get Christians in trouble with the Romans. What do you suppose made the Jews so angry?
And what was it about the Christians that made the Romans so nervous? They were more or less constantly hounding them, arresting them, torturing them and even killing them.
In the early years of Christianity, the religion was officially pacifist. Soldiers, if they wanted to be Christian, had to resign from soldiering. You couldn't even hold office in the Roman government because the government engaged in warfare and a violent system of punishment for crime. The point here is that Christians were utterly unarmed and were strictly constrained from doing violence for any reason. What therefore was threatening about them?
We know that many Christians came together to live in community. We know all of them that were wealthy voluntarily liquidated much of their property and contributed it to the community to be redistributed. We know that the church sought out and supported widows and orphans, people too old or too young to work and who were not being cared for by their families.
We know these communities had rich worship and prayer lives and that from the very beginning they celebrated baptism and the Lord's Supper. We know they didn't have buildings, but met in people's homes. We know they were egalitarian, mixing many ethnic groups and classes together, and empowering leadership regardless of ethnicity or gender or class, at least until late in Paul's life, perhaps even later, when women's equality was again brought into question.
We know that evangelists, deacons and apostles travelled far and wide and that they performed miracles not unlike the ones Jesus had done before the resurrection. They healed the sick, raised the dead, fed multitudes, travelled supernaturally, stilled storms, and cast out spirits and demons that possessed people.
What is it in any of this that might have caused the Romans or the Jews so much anxiety?
It appears in Acts that the Jewish authorities were really angry that the Christians kept saying that Jesus wasn't dead, even though everyone had seen him get crucified on Good Friday. The Jewish authorities kept telling the Christians to stop saying that, but the Christians wouldn't listen. The reason the Christians gave for bucking the Jewish authorities? They had to obey God rather than people. God apparently had commanded them to announce that Jesus was alive, and to keep announcing it.
Why was this so upsetting?
In Acts, it appears that there were economic consequences to this message. Paul healed the slave girl with the demon and deprived her owners of the rich income she brought. Paul got everyone to denounce idols and the city's lucrative idol factories died for want of customers.
But this wasn't all. In this same letter of Paul to the Thessalonians we heard this morning, Paul goes to some length speaking about the "man of lawlessness," which modern Christians maybe think of as the devil. But many of us believe it much more likely that Paul was talking about the emperor of Rome.
A very small percentage of the people living under the Roman Empire lived well. That being said, there were a lot of people living under the Roman Empire. So that small percentage of wealthy people made up a pretty big number. Merchants, politicians, officers in the military, tax collectors, local royalty, priests of various religious sects, these were the people who had the resources to live what must have been pretty delightful lives. But the vast majority of peoples living under the Romans lived miserable, short and desperate lives, because the fruits of their labor and toil mostly went to the delightful lives of the relatively few.
The promise of Isaiah, that laborers would not have to give up the fruits of their labors to oppressors, came to pass, but in a strange and miraculous way.
The Christian communities, at least at the beginning, really seemed to bring about justice. The few who were well-to-do used their resources to re-endow those who had been robbed of theirs. We have evidence also in Paul's letters that resources also flowed from well-to-do congregations to those suffering want.
Now it's important here to recognize that there is no evidence that the Christians had any agenda to get the Romans to adopt the Christian way of life. They certainly were not a political party. But it was obvious to many of the poor just whose side the Christians were on. And I suspect it was obvious to the Romans as well.
It's also obvious that then as now, some folks sought to take advantage of the Christians. They probably were pretending to be teachers like Paul and demanding that they be taken care of. We think this because Paul calls them "busybodies," presumably because they were sticking their noses in everyone's business instead of actually preaching and teaching the gospel. Jesus warns about them in his sermon today, saying that many will come claiming to be him, but not to believe them. Paul doesn't deny that apostles and teachers should be cared for by the congregation, but he has the number of those idlers who were using the churches as a means to an easy life.
The Romans and their local minions were constantly pouring out propaganda to the poor about how Roman exploitation of the poor was actually good for everyone, and every once in a while the Romans would stage big impressive entertainments and pass out free bread to convince the poor they actually were taking care of them. It was very important for the Romans and the Jews who were getting rich and powerful under Roman rule that the poor never wake up to their majority, and never recognize what was really being done to them.
The Christians were gaining supporters for themselves from among the poor, who were very very many, and these poor people, because of the concrete generosity of the church, began to believe in Jesus and not in Herod or Caesar or the rest of the ruling class, who were rather few, comparatively speaking.
And so it was that Christians were turning the world upside down. Making a new earth is a tumultuous and rowdy business. When God raised Jesus from the dead, God threw down a glove. God announced in Jesus that God's kingdom was henceforth impossible to keep out, impossible to knock down, impossible to reject, no matter how powerful the human kingdom that tries to knock it down, keep it out, or reject it.
Philippi is a warm and lovable bunch of people. Almost all of them are involved in the community, doing all kinds of loving service. Indeed, many of our members are greatly admired and loved by their neighbors.
What, I wonder, might we do to get in trouble?
Amen.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
The Hope To Which He Has Called You (sermon for All Saints 2010
The Hope To Which He Has Called You
The story is told of a Sunday school class of children. The teacher asked, "What do you have to do to be a saint?"
Of course, none of the children said anything. So the teacher said, "If I sold everything I had and gave it to the poor would that make me a saint?"
And the children said, "No."
So the teacher said, "What if I went around always being nice to everyone all the time, would that make me a saint?"
And the children said, "No."
"What if I were able to change the world and make it a peaceful and happy place, would that make me a saint?"
And the children said, "No."
So finally, the teacher asked, "OK, then, tell me, what would I have to do to be a saint?"
And one of the children said, "You have to die!"
Of course, All Saints Day has traditionally been about honoring those who have died. But in the protestant tradition, we have rediscovered the word in both the old and new testaments, and we see that a saint is not just those who have died, but also those whom God has made saints.
So let's ask, what do you have to do to be a saint?
St. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, said that there are three gifts of the Holy Spirit that are eternal, that never pass away, faith, hope and love. And he said, the greatest of these is love. And certainly, we would say, one has to love to be a saint. And not just any love, as Jesus himself pointed out in this lesson from Luke. We'll talk about that later.
Today, I think the focus is on the second of St. Paul's three eternal spiritual gifts, that of hope.
A saint is a person who hopes.
The hope is not just any hope, but the hope to which God has called you.
Hope, according to Webster's, is a desire with an expectation of fulfillment. We're not talking about pipe dreams or wishful thinking or even optimism. We're talking about honestly taking stock of the real world and expecting confidently that God can and will transform that world from the inside out, starting with us.
Do we have this confidence? I don't know. When I listen to people in my daily rounds, I don't hear the beatitudes of Jesus. I hear a different set. It goes something like this:
"Blessed are the rich, for they have earned it.
"Woe to the poor, for they are lazy and irresponsible.
"Blessed are you when people speak well of you, because reputation is everything,
"Woe to you if they revile you, because you are an annoying troublemaker and deserve everything you get.
"Hate you enemies, and do not bless them. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, shoot them in the head.
"Love those you love you, and ignore the rest."
The world's beatitudes have not really changed since Jesus' day. They are still just as central to the way lots of people think. The beatitudes of Jesus are not difficult to understand, but they fly so much in face of the wisdom of the world as to simply be unacceptable. The good news is that Jesus is not pronouncing a final judgment. He's pronouncing hope. Hope for all of us.
The hope to which God has called us is the hope that the poor will inherit the kingdom, the sorrowful will be comforted, and those persecuted for declaring that hope will be vindicated. It is the hope that the humble people of God, the ones who practice love for their enemies, will triumph over the much more impressive powers that practice domination and vengeance.
All Saints began as a day to remember those who were martyred in the early years after Jesus' resurrection. The people of God from the very beginning strove to keep in remembrance those who refused both to obey the law that said they had to worship anyone other than Christ, and more importantly, refused to hate or to even resist those who badmouthed, persecuted, tortured and even murdered them. Many of these people they knew, but there were many more who simply disappeared, anonymous Christians who were chewed up in the maul of the Roman machine. Early Christians established All Saints Day in special remembrance of those nameless witnesses, who forgave the crowds that cheered for their blood and died praying for them.
They did these things because they practiced the hope to which God had called them. They sold off possession to give them to the poor in order to practice this hope. They gave up their homes to be used as places of gathering and worship as a way of practicing the hope to which God had called them. They prayed for people that hated them, hoping as God had called them to hope. They gave to everyone who begged from them, no questions asked, because they hoped as God asked them to. If someone stole from them, they offered the thief more of their possessions in the hope that their generosity would inspire him, as God had called them to hope. They responded to evil with good, in the hope to which God had called them.
The love, the eternal and unstoppable love which Paul said was the greatest of all God's spiritual gifts, is very specific and amazing: it is love for one's enemies. It is this love, above all others, that saves the world.
So let's take some time right now, friends, to remember any and all who have gone on before us into the heavenly places that practiced this hope for God's kingdom, and love for their enemies.
(Candle lighting ceremony.)
The story is told of a Sunday school class of children. The teacher asked, "What do you have to do to be a saint?"
Of course, none of the children said anything. So the teacher said, "If I sold everything I had and gave it to the poor would that make me a saint?"
And the children said, "No."
So the teacher said, "What if I went around always being nice to everyone all the time, would that make me a saint?"
And the children said, "No."
"What if I were able to change the world and make it a peaceful and happy place, would that make me a saint?"
And the children said, "No."
So finally, the teacher asked, "OK, then, tell me, what would I have to do to be a saint?"
And one of the children said, "You have to die!"
Of course, All Saints Day has traditionally been about honoring those who have died. But in the protestant tradition, we have rediscovered the word in both the old and new testaments, and we see that a saint is not just those who have died, but also those whom God has made saints.
So let's ask, what do you have to do to be a saint?
St. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, said that there are three gifts of the Holy Spirit that are eternal, that never pass away, faith, hope and love. And he said, the greatest of these is love. And certainly, we would say, one has to love to be a saint. And not just any love, as Jesus himself pointed out in this lesson from Luke. We'll talk about that later.
Today, I think the focus is on the second of St. Paul's three eternal spiritual gifts, that of hope.
A saint is a person who hopes.
The hope is not just any hope, but the hope to which God has called you.
Hope, according to Webster's, is a desire with an expectation of fulfillment. We're not talking about pipe dreams or wishful thinking or even optimism. We're talking about honestly taking stock of the real world and expecting confidently that God can and will transform that world from the inside out, starting with us.
Do we have this confidence? I don't know. When I listen to people in my daily rounds, I don't hear the beatitudes of Jesus. I hear a different set. It goes something like this:
"Blessed are the rich, for they have earned it.
"Woe to the poor, for they are lazy and irresponsible.
"Blessed are you when people speak well of you, because reputation is everything,
"Woe to you if they revile you, because you are an annoying troublemaker and deserve everything you get.
"Hate you enemies, and do not bless them. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, shoot them in the head.
"Love those you love you, and ignore the rest."
The world's beatitudes have not really changed since Jesus' day. They are still just as central to the way lots of people think. The beatitudes of Jesus are not difficult to understand, but they fly so much in face of the wisdom of the world as to simply be unacceptable. The good news is that Jesus is not pronouncing a final judgment. He's pronouncing hope. Hope for all of us.
The hope to which God has called us is the hope that the poor will inherit the kingdom, the sorrowful will be comforted, and those persecuted for declaring that hope will be vindicated. It is the hope that the humble people of God, the ones who practice love for their enemies, will triumph over the much more impressive powers that practice domination and vengeance.
All Saints began as a day to remember those who were martyred in the early years after Jesus' resurrection. The people of God from the very beginning strove to keep in remembrance those who refused both to obey the law that said they had to worship anyone other than Christ, and more importantly, refused to hate or to even resist those who badmouthed, persecuted, tortured and even murdered them. Many of these people they knew, but there were many more who simply disappeared, anonymous Christians who were chewed up in the maul of the Roman machine. Early Christians established All Saints Day in special remembrance of those nameless witnesses, who forgave the crowds that cheered for their blood and died praying for them.
They did these things because they practiced the hope to which God had called them. They sold off possession to give them to the poor in order to practice this hope. They gave up their homes to be used as places of gathering and worship as a way of practicing the hope to which God had called them. They prayed for people that hated them, hoping as God had called them to hope. They gave to everyone who begged from them, no questions asked, because they hoped as God asked them to. If someone stole from them, they offered the thief more of their possessions in the hope that their generosity would inspire him, as God had called them to hope. They responded to evil with good, in the hope to which God had called them.
The love, the eternal and unstoppable love which Paul said was the greatest of all God's spiritual gifts, is very specific and amazing: it is love for one's enemies. It is this love, above all others, that saves the world.
So let's take some time right now, friends, to remember any and all who have gone on before us into the heavenly places that practiced this hope for God's kingdom, and love for their enemies.
(Candle lighting ceremony.)
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