Christmas Eve 2011
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
December 24, 1968. The world sat spellbound that Christmas Eve, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 sent back pictures to earth that had never been seen before – the bright blue planet from which the three men had come, hovering silently over the grey lifeless landscape of the moon beneath them. They were the first humans to orbit the moon, and that day being Christmas Eve, one astronaut was so moved by the sight of the earth from so far away that he read from the beginning of the book of Genesis.
The Apollo 8 astronauts chose those words from the first chapter of Genesis because they so clearly fit the scene they saw that Christmas Eve. Beneath them lay an utterly desolate, grey, lifeless moon. Yet over it rose the earth, a bright blue dot in a black sky, a place of life in the emptiness of space. The factual arguments of the story, creation versus evolution, faded away before them, as they grasped the truth of the story for them … the same truth of that old, old story for us, no matter whether you believe it factually or as a human way of explaining those things which can only be fully understood by the divine.
To those of us here on earth, those old words took on new meaning, they gave people hope, hope and optimism about our country at the end of a year when so much had gone wrong … in the midst of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Vietnam … we could still grasp the wonderful significance of what the astronauts were seeing and doing, so far away. Even those of us who were the little kids of 1968 could still realize that we were growing up in a time and place in which we were beginning to learn about the very beginnings of life … big, big stuff … stuff that previously had been so far beyond us, we hadn’t even dared to think about it.
It was as if a window into God’s eternity was thrown wide open, then and there, that Christmas Eve of 1968. I’ve been told – by those who were gathered there with them that night – that even the most unspiritual, just the facts and figures moon rocket scientists of that time were brought to a state of awe, and wonder, and prayer.
Now, I know that many of us here tonight don’t remember Christmas Eve 1968 … as one who was there said to me just days ago, “well, you’ll lose half your audience with that old story.”
Perhaps.
But we’ll all come back together and re-connect, with all of this.
Year after year, we still come here and see and experience Christmas Eve … we come to church tonight and see the candles burning and the decorations shining and sing the carols and hear the Scriptures read and … even us, practical, realistic, common-sense, double-tall-latted and I-padded Seattleites, we get all warm and fuzzy and even cry, if we have it in us.
And why is that?
Because we know, we trust, we feel with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, that the window into God’s eternity is wide open tonight. Our past and our present and our future are all laid out before us. These words and this music and these sights and smells remind us of Christmases past, times when we’ve been together with family and friends, times when we’ve felt safe and secure and loved. There’s a opening into the souls of even the most serious of us, where we can all be touched by the significance of what we come together to celebrate.
That’s the personal side of this night.
But we also have a collective story in which we share, one which touches us in an even better way.
It’s a story which starts far in the past … God speaking through the words of the Old Testament prophets, in the readings we’ve heard, speaking words of comfort and hope to a people who were suffering and thought that they were abandoned by God.
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” the prophet Isaiah said of his people … a people who were oppressed and suffering under social, economic and political injustice.
“A child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders;” these words spoke the hope of a people looking forward to a new, more powerful, earthly king in David’s line … and, beyond that … to a king who would rescue his people from sin and evil and death forever.
And the story continues … with God keeping his promises through that old but ever new sign of a child. First a baby born to the old Elizabeth and Zechariah – John the Baptist. Then an angel coming to Mary and promising her that she would bear God’s son - Jesus.
And then that special night when the window to eternity opened wide … a birth in a backwards town in a forgotten corner of the world, a baby born to an unlikely couple. An infant lying in straw … angels singing, shepherds hearing and seeing, God’s glory made visible to us in the birth of Christ our Lord.
And it is a story with a future … the child grown to be the man Jesus, who suffered and died on a cross but was raised again so that the window to God’s eternity might be open forever. “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory …” Jesus’ gift to us is that we have a future and our future is together … in him. Together, with all those who have gone before us … some we never knew … and some whom we knew and loved very much and miss every day of our lives. Christ’s promise is that we will be together … one day … with him and in him … no more suffering, no more crying, no more pain … no more death … forever.
Tonight, that window to God’s eternity is wide open. The theologians may well call it the communion of saints, as we are surrounded by the angels and the past, present and future of the Church, on earth as it is in heaven. But we … we with our limited, finite understanding of the infinite … we might just call it “that Christmas spirit,” or feel it in a burst of gladness and tears that washes over us as we see a child’s face tonight … or sing our favorite Christmas carol … or look at the beautiful decorations … or remember a particular Christmas past, spent in happiness and warmth and safety. It’s our finite human way of experiencing God’s wide open window into eternity tonight.
For that is what Christmas Eve is all about.
And because of that gift of gifts, this night of nights, we can truly sing with those in heaven and those on earth, the saints and the angels, “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” Not just at that nativity 2000 years ago. But in this Nativity of 2011.
May you feel the window to God’s eternity wide open to you tonight. May you be blessed with that feeling … the essence of Christmas Eve. May your faith be strengthened through this worship … through the word and song … through being fed and strengthened by Jesus’ words of promise and hope in this meal we will soon share.
And, most important, as your heart and spirit are warmed by God’s Spirit … may that feeling of warmth and hope, joy and peace stay with you as you go from this place … to share with others this great news of the Birth of our Savior … until that day when he comes again and the window to God’s eternity is thrown wide open forever.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
18 December 2011
What is baptism? It’s an Advent Conspiracy.
“Love all”
4 Advent B
The Magnificat – Luke 1:46-55
18 December 2011
We’ve finally made it.
Yes, today we come to the end of our Advent journey … and granted, it’s been a bumpy one.
We began three weeks ago with the usual First Sunday in Advent words of apocalypse … Jesus’ warnings and encouraging about The End, his coming again.
Then we had our two weeks with John the Baptist … this year’s visit, some might say, mercifully short, no cursing the people, “You brood of vipers,” but still, there he was, hair shirted, ranting in the wilderness.
But remember … this year, we’ve laid two other themes on top of the Scriptures. Both are faithful to the texts … both are faithful to the sense of the season.
The first – our year-long focus – is on Baptism.
And the second – perhaps controversial to some – is the reform movement known as Advent Conspiracy. We’ve heard so far three of the four points of that reform of this season … Worship Fully, Spend Less, and Give More.
Maybe … with those texts, with those prominent themes; combined with life as it plays out for us, personally, corporately … maybe it hasn’t felt like, maybe it hasn’t been a happy Advent for you.
Not that the season of Advent – as Lutherans and other liturgical, church year cycle following Christians mark it – is ever really a “happy” time … as in gleeful and giddy. Apocalyptic Scripture isn’t usually part of the “feel good” hit parade of Bible readings. Neither does the hair shirted bug eater John the Baptist get everyone in a warm Yule mood.
But then, Advent was never supposed to be, as the song goes, the “most wonderful time of the year.” What Advent is all about … is joy … deep, abiding joy … trust and hope in the coming again of the Messiah to earth, the One who came once, who lived our life and suffered our suffering and died our death but rose again … to give us the promise, the hope, the deep joy of eternal life THEN … one day … which gives us the courage to fully engage in this life, to live, to risk, to share with others NOW.
Ah … but that was the past three weeks.
Today we are at the final stop in our Advent journey … the fourth Sunday in Advent … and, most certainly, happiness and cheerful holiday spirit are definitely among us.
Why, our Advent Conspiracy message for today is certainly one of warm holiday fuzziness for us … LOVE ALL. Certainly that’s a beloved, blessed outcome of our baptism, walking wet in God’s forgiveness, that we would LOVE ALL. It sounds like one of those Christmas carols we hear … “Why can’t it be Christmas the whole year long?” meaning that, ah, people just seem to be nicer and warmer and more loving and love-ly this time of year, and wouldn’t it be nice if that feeling lasted, at least into February.
And our text for today … it’s the lovely story of Mary; first her conversation with the angel Gabriel, the words of promise and hope coming to her, that she is the chosen one of God, chosen to bear God’s Messiah, God’s deliverer to the world … God for us, Emmanuel … and then, the song we’ve sung so many times, throughout Christian history and our own history here, Nativity, people of new birth, people who love these words … the Magnificat … “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
How could we not be happy with this theme, these words before us?
How indeed.
So why don’t we take a deeper look at this text … there’s no harm in that, is there?
Yes … it’s true … we do know these words of Scripture quite well … but normally, they are inseparable from the music to which they are sung. There are many, many musical settings of Mary’s Magnificat … quite a number of hymns we have sung which include these words … but of course, it’s our dear favorite from Marty Haugen’s Holden Evening Prayer that likely rings in our ears loudest.
Today, though, different from past years, we’re deliberately not singing this Scripture-song … because I didn’t want the music to get in the way of our hearing what is, and isn’t, here for us.
So what is here?
There appear to be many deep contrasts in Mary’s words.
He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant
Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty
For Mary, these contrasts are directly related to the deep contrasts she saw in the world around her, and that she was experiencing personally.
First, in her own story … the visit from the angel, that great and terrible announcement to this poor little teenage girl … “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son … he will be called the Son of the Most High.”
Second, what she saw in the world of her time … the kings of the world, the wealthy and powerful rulers of Israel and the equally wealthy and powerful Roman occupiers, lording it over the poor and powerless of this backward corner of the world … especially this little rural backwater known as Nazareth.
We know Mary’s situation. It’s been painted and poured out in art and word and song for hundreds of years … God comes to poor lowly country girl, to announce that she will bear the Messiah.
The world is about to turn.
Those words … they are words of promise and hope, especially to those who are on the short end of things in the world … people like Mary, people who are poor, oppressed, suffering. Some would like this world-turning to happen on a speedier timeline … and on their own political terms. Mary’s words have of late been co-opted … watch out world; God’s deep reversal is going to be at work, cosmic Robin Hood-Jesus is coming to take from the rich and give to the poor and throw everything topsy-turvy … from the sound of some, you’d think Mary was the first century spokesperson for Occupy Nazareth.
Ah, but wait just a minute.
Is that what Mary’s really saying here?
We might think we live in a particularly unjust time in world history … but there have been plenty of other times when the inequality between rich and poor has been particularly striking.
Martin Luther’s, for example.
In 1522, right as he was being called before the Diet of Worms and the emperor Charles to defend his work in setting the church free from the tyranny of its powerful oppressors, Luther wrote a commentary on the Magnificat. From its early sentences, readers knew it would be a blockbuster.
[In these words] God breaks what is whole and makes whole what is broken.
With a start like that, people thought that here, Luther would write a work that would fan the fires of peasant revolt, turning servant and slave upon their master in revolution and world-turning.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he wrote of humility.
Those of low degree [of which Mary sings] are here not the humble, but all those who are contemptible and altogether nothing in the eyes of the world. It is the same expression that Mary applied to herself: “He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” Nevertheless, those who are willing to be nothing and lowly of heart, and do not strive to be great, are truly humble. Now when God exalts them, it does not mean that God will put them in the seats of those God has cast out any more than that when God shows mercy to those who fear him, God puts them in the place of the learned, that is, the proud. Rather God lets them be exalted spiritually and in God, and be judges over seats and power and all might, here and hereafter; for they have more knowledge than all the learned and the mighty.
Humility, then, is the guiding light of these words of Mary. Not ‘revolution.’ Not a call for a violent moment when “the world is about to turn,” at least, in a political or economic sense. But instead, here is a Word to encourage those who are willing to be nothing for the sake of God, for the sake of their neighbor, for the sake of the world. Those who put place, power, prestige aside, and live, as Mary did, “Let it be.”
A quote from Mother Teresa here comes to mind:
A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.
Humility … and here we see a tie in, a link, with both our seasonal series as well. For what, indeed, is “Love All” but a call and a cry for humility … setting aside our own agendas for the sake of being a vessel for love, a servant in the journey of Jesus.
To put it in the vernacular … who is the person who you can’t stand the most? Your boss? That jerk who cut you off in traffic? Your teacher? A student? Newt Gingrich? Barack Obama?
Humility calls for an emptying of that hatred, a humbling of ourselves, a setting aside of even our most self-righteous anger … and loving … not just the ones we find loveable, not just the ones we view as “mild inconveniences” on our path … but the most annoying, obnoxious, downright opposite-to-our-nature-and-way-of-living people in our lives.
Ah, but you might say … look further. There’s more of the Magnificat.
Yes, there is.
So don’t these verses call forth some kind of “world about to turn-ned-ness?”
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.
Again, I’ll let the words of Luther speak:
Those who are lowly … are those who are willing to be in such a state … especially if they have been forced into it for the sake of God’s Word. On the other hand … what hindrance was their riches to the holy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Or their high station or great riches to those who had them or who have them today, provided they do not set their hearts on them or seek their own advantage in them? “The Lord weighs the spirit,” that is, God judges not according to the outward appearance, whether one is rich or poor, high or low, but according to the spirit and how it behaves itself within.
Our wretched unbelief always hinders God from working [good works] in us, and ourselves from experiencing and knowing them. We desire to be filled and have plenty of everything before hunger and want arrive. We lay up provision against future hunger and need, so that we no longer have need of God and God’s works. What sort of faith is that which trusts in God, when all the while you feel and know that you have goods laid up to help yourself? This is to esteem temporal goods more than God and to put them in God’s place as an idol.
You see, Luther says, the beauty of the words of the Magnificat, are that they are all about God’s work, not ours. Here, in the words of Mary, God is not laying out some kind of world-turning revolution, taking from the rich and filling the poor … “everything for everyone” … no, to God, wealth and power have no standing whatsoever. In the coming Kingdom of God … the Kingdom which has its here and now start with the announcement of the birth of Jesus … wealth and power have no place at all.
So all the stuff we count as being of worth and value … all the things we end up spending our whole lives scratching and clawing after … place, power, prestige … status, honor, rank … the number of years one has served in a place as pastor, or been members of a church congregation … it doesn’t count for diddly squat, folks.
That’s the message of the Magnificat.
See, this is God’s justice at work … God’s justice, not ours … it’s not about the lowly clawing up and pulling down, or the wealthy and powerful hanging on to what they have rightfully earned … God cares for us, but God doesn’t care at all for our stuff-lust.
And you get that from Mary’s words here … if we have eyes to see and ears to hear … they most certainly are forward looking words.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.
Certainly, for anyone paying attention to the daily news of Mary’s time, this wasn’t the case. Certainly for anyone paying attention to the news of our own time, it’s not the case either.
That’s because these words are about life, life as seen through the lens of the Cross … yes, the Cross … here, even here at the height of the Advent season, we are called to view everything through the death of Jesus … the death of Jesus, into which our baptism has inextricably joined us …
in the words of the apostle Paul, “YOU, you who follow Jesus, you who are baptized into his baptism, YOU ARE DEAD, buried with him in baptism” … dead to all this, this worldly clawing and clutching, grasping and grabbing for place and honor … and stuff …
and “YOU ARE MADE ALIVE” … alive with Christ, for in your baptism, you have also risen with him, risen to a new life full of truth, forgiveness, giving and peace … in which you must LOVE ALL because nothing else matters anymore.
The beauty of the Magnificat is that Mary’s words make clear that God isn’t in the business of worldly revolution … but rather, the cosmic revolution of changing hearts forever. God’s politics are no more “Occupy Wall Street” than they are “Let them eat cake.”
Though … God hopes, God prays, God wills … in Christ … who calls us through our baptism into him to LOVE ALL … God calls us all to something new, a new way of living, here and now.
Again, Luther puts it so well:
How could one bring a more damning accusation against riches, or more grievously terrify the rich, than by saying that God sends them empty away? On the other hand, how could one be more strongly and comfortably moved to willing endurance of hunger and poverty than by these fine words of the Mother of God – that God will fill all the hungry with good things?
We have here such a promise of God and such strong comfort … for God’s own beloved people [us], for whose sake God also became man, to redeem [us] from the power of the devil, of sin, death, and hell, and to lead us to righteousness, eternal life, and salvation. That is the help of which Mary sings.
God’s promise … God’s help … God’s call, in Jesus, to a new way of living. For God is in the business of changing hearts … not changing politics … though, as hearts change, politics will surely, necessarily change too.
In other words … true love, God’s love, is a matter of faith. We don’t see it now fully, we don’t experience it now fully; and this life surely as we live it, will be more sad than happy, always, in all ways. This is the truth and reality of life in this world …
…Mary’s world, where the angel’s announcement to her, that she, an unmarried girl barely in her teens, would become pregnant with God’s son … this Word would bring her anything but happiness …
… and our world, where the words and actions of justice and peace, comfort and hope, are always, always in the minority.
But we have a deep abiding joy … a joy which will not be taken from us …
… for Mary, as Mary sings, as Mary says, we have a merciful God … or rather, that merciful God has us …
… and for us all, that same merciful God wants and works and wills that no one would be condemned to the hell of being sent away empty … neither the poor of this world nor the poor of the next … but instead, that God’s good and gracious will is that all … both the empty, and the full … the poor, and the rich … the powerful, and the meek … that all would be saved, to live, then in the future, and now as well, to live in the full-ness of God.
And so Mary’s song must be our song … Mary’s words, our words … heart changing words of Gospel truth … as we are called and gathered here to WORSHIP FULLY, fed on forgiveness and grace, sent forth to risk and to serve, to SPEND LESS but GIVE MORE, to tend relationships and not stuff, not just Conspiring together to overturn the Advent chaos and mess which we’ve made of this season … but to carry into the world a good Word, the best Word, of deep, lasting Hope and Peace, Joy and Love …
Blessed indeed are they who believe that there will be a fulfillment of what is spoken to us by the Lord.
Happiness is overrated but LOVING ALL is not … it is our call, our cry, our mission, not just in Advent, but all year through.
And so there’s nothing left to say this Advent … nothing more than … Merry Christmas …
… blessed Good Friday …
… Happy Easter …
… and may Jesus come again soon, to make IT, and US, ALL right. Amen.
“Love all”
4 Advent B
The Magnificat – Luke 1:46-55
18 December 2011
We’ve finally made it.
Yes, today we come to the end of our Advent journey … and granted, it’s been a bumpy one.
We began three weeks ago with the usual First Sunday in Advent words of apocalypse … Jesus’ warnings and encouraging about The End, his coming again.
Then we had our two weeks with John the Baptist … this year’s visit, some might say, mercifully short, no cursing the people, “You brood of vipers,” but still, there he was, hair shirted, ranting in the wilderness.
But remember … this year, we’ve laid two other themes on top of the Scriptures. Both are faithful to the texts … both are faithful to the sense of the season.
The first – our year-long focus – is on Baptism.
And the second – perhaps controversial to some – is the reform movement known as Advent Conspiracy. We’ve heard so far three of the four points of that reform of this season … Worship Fully, Spend Less, and Give More.
Maybe … with those texts, with those prominent themes; combined with life as it plays out for us, personally, corporately … maybe it hasn’t felt like, maybe it hasn’t been a happy Advent for you.
Not that the season of Advent – as Lutherans and other liturgical, church year cycle following Christians mark it – is ever really a “happy” time … as in gleeful and giddy. Apocalyptic Scripture isn’t usually part of the “feel good” hit parade of Bible readings. Neither does the hair shirted bug eater John the Baptist get everyone in a warm Yule mood.
But then, Advent was never supposed to be, as the song goes, the “most wonderful time of the year.” What Advent is all about … is joy … deep, abiding joy … trust and hope in the coming again of the Messiah to earth, the One who came once, who lived our life and suffered our suffering and died our death but rose again … to give us the promise, the hope, the deep joy of eternal life THEN … one day … which gives us the courage to fully engage in this life, to live, to risk, to share with others NOW.
Ah … but that was the past three weeks.
Today we are at the final stop in our Advent journey … the fourth Sunday in Advent … and, most certainly, happiness and cheerful holiday spirit are definitely among us.
Why, our Advent Conspiracy message for today is certainly one of warm holiday fuzziness for us … LOVE ALL. Certainly that’s a beloved, blessed outcome of our baptism, walking wet in God’s forgiveness, that we would LOVE ALL. It sounds like one of those Christmas carols we hear … “Why can’t it be Christmas the whole year long?” meaning that, ah, people just seem to be nicer and warmer and more loving and love-ly this time of year, and wouldn’t it be nice if that feeling lasted, at least into February.
And our text for today … it’s the lovely story of Mary; first her conversation with the angel Gabriel, the words of promise and hope coming to her, that she is the chosen one of God, chosen to bear God’s Messiah, God’s deliverer to the world … God for us, Emmanuel … and then, the song we’ve sung so many times, throughout Christian history and our own history here, Nativity, people of new birth, people who love these words … the Magnificat … “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
How could we not be happy with this theme, these words before us?
How indeed.
So why don’t we take a deeper look at this text … there’s no harm in that, is there?
Yes … it’s true … we do know these words of Scripture quite well … but normally, they are inseparable from the music to which they are sung. There are many, many musical settings of Mary’s Magnificat … quite a number of hymns we have sung which include these words … but of course, it’s our dear favorite from Marty Haugen’s Holden Evening Prayer that likely rings in our ears loudest.
Today, though, different from past years, we’re deliberately not singing this Scripture-song … because I didn’t want the music to get in the way of our hearing what is, and isn’t, here for us.
So what is here?
There appear to be many deep contrasts in Mary’s words.
He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant
Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty
For Mary, these contrasts are directly related to the deep contrasts she saw in the world around her, and that she was experiencing personally.
First, in her own story … the visit from the angel, that great and terrible announcement to this poor little teenage girl … “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son … he will be called the Son of the Most High.”
Second, what she saw in the world of her time … the kings of the world, the wealthy and powerful rulers of Israel and the equally wealthy and powerful Roman occupiers, lording it over the poor and powerless of this backward corner of the world … especially this little rural backwater known as Nazareth.
We know Mary’s situation. It’s been painted and poured out in art and word and song for hundreds of years … God comes to poor lowly country girl, to announce that she will bear the Messiah.
The world is about to turn.
Those words … they are words of promise and hope, especially to those who are on the short end of things in the world … people like Mary, people who are poor, oppressed, suffering. Some would like this world-turning to happen on a speedier timeline … and on their own political terms. Mary’s words have of late been co-opted … watch out world; God’s deep reversal is going to be at work, cosmic Robin Hood-Jesus is coming to take from the rich and give to the poor and throw everything topsy-turvy … from the sound of some, you’d think Mary was the first century spokesperson for Occupy Nazareth.
Ah, but wait just a minute.
Is that what Mary’s really saying here?
We might think we live in a particularly unjust time in world history … but there have been plenty of other times when the inequality between rich and poor has been particularly striking.
Martin Luther’s, for example.
In 1522, right as he was being called before the Diet of Worms and the emperor Charles to defend his work in setting the church free from the tyranny of its powerful oppressors, Luther wrote a commentary on the Magnificat. From its early sentences, readers knew it would be a blockbuster.
[In these words] God breaks what is whole and makes whole what is broken.
With a start like that, people thought that here, Luther would write a work that would fan the fires of peasant revolt, turning servant and slave upon their master in revolution and world-turning.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he wrote of humility.
Those of low degree [of which Mary sings] are here not the humble, but all those who are contemptible and altogether nothing in the eyes of the world. It is the same expression that Mary applied to herself: “He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” Nevertheless, those who are willing to be nothing and lowly of heart, and do not strive to be great, are truly humble. Now when God exalts them, it does not mean that God will put them in the seats of those God has cast out any more than that when God shows mercy to those who fear him, God puts them in the place of the learned, that is, the proud. Rather God lets them be exalted spiritually and in God, and be judges over seats and power and all might, here and hereafter; for they have more knowledge than all the learned and the mighty.
Humility, then, is the guiding light of these words of Mary. Not ‘revolution.’ Not a call for a violent moment when “the world is about to turn,” at least, in a political or economic sense. But instead, here is a Word to encourage those who are willing to be nothing for the sake of God, for the sake of their neighbor, for the sake of the world. Those who put place, power, prestige aside, and live, as Mary did, “Let it be.”
A quote from Mother Teresa here comes to mind:
A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.
Humility … and here we see a tie in, a link, with both our seasonal series as well. For what, indeed, is “Love All” but a call and a cry for humility … setting aside our own agendas for the sake of being a vessel for love, a servant in the journey of Jesus.
To put it in the vernacular … who is the person who you can’t stand the most? Your boss? That jerk who cut you off in traffic? Your teacher? A student? Newt Gingrich? Barack Obama?
Humility calls for an emptying of that hatred, a humbling of ourselves, a setting aside of even our most self-righteous anger … and loving … not just the ones we find loveable, not just the ones we view as “mild inconveniences” on our path … but the most annoying, obnoxious, downright opposite-to-our-nature-and-way-of-living people in our lives.
Ah, but you might say … look further. There’s more of the Magnificat.
Yes, there is.
So don’t these verses call forth some kind of “world about to turn-ned-ness?”
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.
Again, I’ll let the words of Luther speak:
Those who are lowly … are those who are willing to be in such a state … especially if they have been forced into it for the sake of God’s Word. On the other hand … what hindrance was their riches to the holy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Or their high station or great riches to those who had them or who have them today, provided they do not set their hearts on them or seek their own advantage in them? “The Lord weighs the spirit,” that is, God judges not according to the outward appearance, whether one is rich or poor, high or low, but according to the spirit and how it behaves itself within.
Our wretched unbelief always hinders God from working [good works] in us, and ourselves from experiencing and knowing them. We desire to be filled and have plenty of everything before hunger and want arrive. We lay up provision against future hunger and need, so that we no longer have need of God and God’s works. What sort of faith is that which trusts in God, when all the while you feel and know that you have goods laid up to help yourself? This is to esteem temporal goods more than God and to put them in God’s place as an idol.
You see, Luther says, the beauty of the words of the Magnificat, are that they are all about God’s work, not ours. Here, in the words of Mary, God is not laying out some kind of world-turning revolution, taking from the rich and filling the poor … “everything for everyone” … no, to God, wealth and power have no standing whatsoever. In the coming Kingdom of God … the Kingdom which has its here and now start with the announcement of the birth of Jesus … wealth and power have no place at all.
So all the stuff we count as being of worth and value … all the things we end up spending our whole lives scratching and clawing after … place, power, prestige … status, honor, rank … the number of years one has served in a place as pastor, or been members of a church congregation … it doesn’t count for diddly squat, folks.
That’s the message of the Magnificat.
See, this is God’s justice at work … God’s justice, not ours … it’s not about the lowly clawing up and pulling down, or the wealthy and powerful hanging on to what they have rightfully earned … God cares for us, but God doesn’t care at all for our stuff-lust.
And you get that from Mary’s words here … if we have eyes to see and ears to hear … they most certainly are forward looking words.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.
Certainly, for anyone paying attention to the daily news of Mary’s time, this wasn’t the case. Certainly for anyone paying attention to the news of our own time, it’s not the case either.
That’s because these words are about life, life as seen through the lens of the Cross … yes, the Cross … here, even here at the height of the Advent season, we are called to view everything through the death of Jesus … the death of Jesus, into which our baptism has inextricably joined us …
in the words of the apostle Paul, “YOU, you who follow Jesus, you who are baptized into his baptism, YOU ARE DEAD, buried with him in baptism” … dead to all this, this worldly clawing and clutching, grasping and grabbing for place and honor … and stuff …
and “YOU ARE MADE ALIVE” … alive with Christ, for in your baptism, you have also risen with him, risen to a new life full of truth, forgiveness, giving and peace … in which you must LOVE ALL because nothing else matters anymore.
The beauty of the Magnificat is that Mary’s words make clear that God isn’t in the business of worldly revolution … but rather, the cosmic revolution of changing hearts forever. God’s politics are no more “Occupy Wall Street” than they are “Let them eat cake.”
Though … God hopes, God prays, God wills … in Christ … who calls us through our baptism into him to LOVE ALL … God calls us all to something new, a new way of living, here and now.
Again, Luther puts it so well:
How could one bring a more damning accusation against riches, or more grievously terrify the rich, than by saying that God sends them empty away? On the other hand, how could one be more strongly and comfortably moved to willing endurance of hunger and poverty than by these fine words of the Mother of God – that God will fill all the hungry with good things?
We have here such a promise of God and such strong comfort … for God’s own beloved people [us], for whose sake God also became man, to redeem [us] from the power of the devil, of sin, death, and hell, and to lead us to righteousness, eternal life, and salvation. That is the help of which Mary sings.
God’s promise … God’s help … God’s call, in Jesus, to a new way of living. For God is in the business of changing hearts … not changing politics … though, as hearts change, politics will surely, necessarily change too.
In other words … true love, God’s love, is a matter of faith. We don’t see it now fully, we don’t experience it now fully; and this life surely as we live it, will be more sad than happy, always, in all ways. This is the truth and reality of life in this world …
…Mary’s world, where the angel’s announcement to her, that she, an unmarried girl barely in her teens, would become pregnant with God’s son … this Word would bring her anything but happiness …
… and our world, where the words and actions of justice and peace, comfort and hope, are always, always in the minority.
But we have a deep abiding joy … a joy which will not be taken from us …
… for Mary, as Mary sings, as Mary says, we have a merciful God … or rather, that merciful God has us …
… and for us all, that same merciful God wants and works and wills that no one would be condemned to the hell of being sent away empty … neither the poor of this world nor the poor of the next … but instead, that God’s good and gracious will is that all … both the empty, and the full … the poor, and the rich … the powerful, and the meek … that all would be saved, to live, then in the future, and now as well, to live in the full-ness of God.
And so Mary’s song must be our song … Mary’s words, our words … heart changing words of Gospel truth … as we are called and gathered here to WORSHIP FULLY, fed on forgiveness and grace, sent forth to risk and to serve, to SPEND LESS but GIVE MORE, to tend relationships and not stuff, not just Conspiring together to overturn the Advent chaos and mess which we’ve made of this season … but to carry into the world a good Word, the best Word, of deep, lasting Hope and Peace, Joy and Love …
Blessed indeed are they who believe that there will be a fulfillment of what is spoken to us by the Lord.
Happiness is overrated but LOVING ALL is not … it is our call, our cry, our mission, not just in Advent, but all year through.
And so there’s nothing left to say this Advent … nothing more than … Merry Christmas …
… blessed Good Friday …
… Happy Easter …
… and may Jesus come again soon, to make IT, and US, ALL right. Amen.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
4 December 2011
What is baptism? It’s an Advent Conspiracy.
“Spend less”
2 Advent B
4 December 2011
Last week we began the season of Advent, and our “Advent Conspiracy” series, with a remembrance of a television series – in that case, Seinfeld, and how it launched a whole new holiday, Festivus, created especially for people who have grown disgusted with what Christmas has become in our culture. Overblown, drawn out forever, and dollar-driven … many, many people have said “there’s got to be another way.”
That way for the creators of the Advent Conspiracy was our initial focus … Worship Fully … meaning that, the holiday begins, and ends, in Jesus … and by worshipping fully, by following our baptismal calling to live fully into the preparation and anticipation of the season of Advent … preparing for, anticipating Jesus’ return to earth once again, rejoicing in the Good News that the kingdom of God is coming “on earth as it is in heaven,” … and we ourselves, dying and rising with Jesus, joined with him in our own baptism … we are given freedom to reject the death-bound ways of worldly living (like overbloated Christmas) and instead, embrace real, authentic, faith-filled life, so we can truly receive and celebrate Christmas as God intends it … GOD, FOR US.
But that was last week.
This week, this Second Sunday in Advent, we move ahead … move ahead, with the word of … another television show.
It’s one of those “train wreck” kind of reality programs … presenting situations so horrible and awful, you feel like you have to turn away … but we don’t … we’ve got to watch because we just can’t believe it’s true. Perhaps it’s one of your “guilty pleasures.”
I’m talking about “Hoarders,” the series on A&E which focuses on people who are literally surrounded by their stuff.
Many of us save things … some of us more than others. We collect t-shirts and baseball hats, ticket stubs and commemorative plates. My dad was a “saver” … not a hoarder, but he kept an inordinate amount of stuff in his basement shop … some of it, things he’d fished out of the trash that my mom, my brother and I had thrown out. So the three of us – all “throwers” … we learned the neat trick of setting things in the outside trash can right before the garbage got picked up.
“Throwers” don’t save much … we give it away or recycle it or sell it or just plain get rid of it because we like things neat and tidy with lots of room to move around.
But I digress … we were talking, not about savers and throwers, but “Hoarders.” These are the extreme people who have massive problems with massive amounts of STUFF.
One recent episode of “Hoarders” showed a man who had somewhere between 50 and 60 cars in his yard, all in various states of disrepair and decomposition. Another woman’s house had every room filled with bins and bins of videotapes she’d recorded on her 10 or 15 VCRs. And many of the hoarders simply have houses crammed full of … STUFF … you name it, they have it, piled so high they can’t get through the doorways of their houses, and when they do manage to crawl in they can’t get in bed, can’t use the dining table, can’t even hardly move because of the sheer amount of STUFF. So each episode follows the trials and tribulations of these hoarders … most of them, in some kind of life crisis (usually a demand from a family member or the local authorities) to clean up their place, to reduce their piles of stuff, to throw things out, recycle, just plain GET RID OF IT. And the “train wreck” comes in the watching, the seeing, how they (usually) just can’t do it … can’t bring themselves to part with any of it.
The show points out, that there are more and more hoarders, more and more people in crisis over having too much stuff, all the time.
Really, it’s the nightmare scenario of the American way, isn’t it? This end result of the consumerist merry-go-round we all are on … hoarding, throwing, saving, losing, it really doesn’t matter, because it’s still all about our STUFF, isn’t it?
To have STUFF to give or throw away, we have to have bought the STUFF in the first place.
We buy a lot of STUFF at all times of the year; the economists and politicians are all very happy when we decide, to heck with our budgets, LET’S GO SHOPPING.
But at Christmas, even in the worst of times, we pull off the brakes and go all out.
The good folks at Advent Conspiracy know this … and here’s what they have to say about it:
We like gifts. Our kids really like gifts. But consider this: America spends an average of $450 billion a year every Christmas. How often have you spent money on Christmas presents for no other reason than obligation? How many times have you received a gift out of that same obligation? Thanks, but no thanks, right?
And so in this second week of our participation in the Conspiracy, they present us with this challenge:
We’re asking people to SPEND LESS … to consider buying ONE LESS GIFT this Christmas. Just one. Sounds insignificant, yet many who have taken this small sacrifice have experienced something nothing less than a miracle: They have been more available to celebrate Christ during the Advent season.
Spend Less this Christmas? Why, it sounds positively un-American!
I mean, haven’t we been told by our leaders, exhorted by our authorities, that the way we’ll get out of our economic mess is TO GO SHOPPING????!
I can just hear the economists and politicians now: “Why, in our economy which is almost totally built on consumption, if everyone Spent Less, we’d be plunged into recession. Maybe even, depression. Hundreds of thousands, millions, would suffer because of that ONE GIFT NOT PURCHASED.
Well, probably not.
But, maybe?
AND SO WHAT IF IT DID put a little dent into our economy?
Might that actually point out that what’s really messed up isn’t the suggestion that we buy one less gift this Christmas, but OUR mindset and OUR behavior instead … credit-carded, buy it now, pay for it later, endless consumption of more and more AND MORE STUFF.
So why do we do it, anyway?
It almost seems like, like, we’re looking for meaning in our STUFF.
Certainly that’s true for those television show-“Hoarders.” Each program always features a psychologist brought in to help provide the hoarder much-needed therapy. And the first thing we hear from the psychologist each week, is that the Hoarder is initially unable to give up even one little thing because to them, it means giving up part of who they are.
But I’m probably being too hard on the Hoarders. For we all try to find identity, meaning, in our stuff. Part of why we buy STUFF is because of what we believe the STUFF says about us. The kind of car we drive, the house we live in, the labels on the clothes we wear, the ZIP code in which we choose to live, that’s the way we believe we show our identity to the world.
What a contrast to the texts we have before us today. Yes, they are also about identity, who people are, who WE are, but they’re sure not focused on STUFF.
Isaiah’s word comes as to us as pure grace. It’s not the harsh prophetic word of judgment for God’s people that we hear in the first chapters of this book. No, here the people Israel have already lost the war and been hauled off into exile in Babylon. They’ve had the land of God’s promise taken from them because of their greed and idolatry.
Everything bad that they feared has come to pass. What their living has gotten them into is a wilderness, for sure, a place where all that they’d been certain and sure of in their lives, their very identity, has been snatched away from them.
So Isaiah’s word comes to them, helpless, hurting people, to remind them of WHOSE they are, so they can once again know WHO they are:
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand fast forever.
Despite your search for identity away from me, Israel … God says to them … despite your wandering away into a wilderness where you have felt abandoned and become hopeless … despite all this, God says to them, my promises to you remain true and FOR YOU. I will once again rescue you from the ‘fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into’ because I am your God and you are my people, and I will be your shepherd, your caregiver, your help and your hope, and I will never leave you.
Then there’s our Gospel text. It starts out The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and at first, it certainly sounds like good news, quoting word for word what Isaiah said to his people centuries earlier.
Ah, but the one we encounter in these words isn’t a comforting Isaiah, but a hair-shirted John the Baptist, calling people to repent, to turn from their sins, to turn around and follow God’s call to holy living.
But once again, we hear a word about identity … knowing whose we are, so we can know WHO we are.
John is calling people to baptism, to be sure … but his is a baptism of repentance, for forgiveness. It was an ancient Jewish practice still done today, called Mikveh , a ritual bath of immersion for purification. This kind of baptism which John offers would have to be repeated time and time again, as many times as people sin and become impure, they would need to be immersed.
Yet John points beyond himself … to the one whose way he is preparing … the one whose Good News is being proclaimed in these opening verses of Mark’s gospel:
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
The good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is that his baptism will inseparably link his people with him, forever … his people, US, WE will be baptized with the same Holy Spirit with which he, Jesus, is baptized. And so we recall the words we heard last week about that baptism:
• On the one hand, Baptism = death. Being joined to Jesus in his baptism means dying to the old ways of sin and death. Dying to the death-bound ways of the world. Dying to how far short we fall from where God calls us to live and be, to and for others.
• On the other hand, Baptism = life. Being raised with Christ, we are raised FOR something. And that something is life … full, rich, and abundant … free from the fears that we’re going to lose out on something … whether it’s place or stuff or whatever other gods, other idols we’ve placed in our path along the way. In Baptism, we have DIED to the death-bound ways of the world, and been RAISED to life together, in Christ, forever.
The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which we received from last week’s text is that we no longer fear “the End” because our End is in Jesus Christ, the Lord of life and forgiveness and salvation, … and he is in God and with God, forever.
The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which is for us this week is that our identity, our True Identity, is … baptized child of God, brother or sister of the one who brings Good News in his very self, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
In other words … our STUFF is not us, whether that’s a fancy car, piles of video cassettes or clothes or papers hoarded away … or pride in a clean, tidy house, an organized desk, or a showroom-condition car. We are not saved from our sins by our hoarding or our throwing, our saving or our recycling.
OUR STUFF IS NOT US.
No, we are given our indelible identity in our baptism … though the water evaporates, it leaves its mark on us permanently, because, as Luther tells us in his Catechism,
Baptism is not just water.
The Good News for us here this week is that Baptism is Identity for us … we are part of God’s Kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven, what will be perfect then, is not yet perfect now, but still in the works nonetheless. We are walking wet works in progress … dead in Baptism, alive in Baptism, sinner-saints, sent forth to bring wet footprints of God’s love into the world.
And Advent is the perfect time for us to focus on “walking wet,” all our Baptism means for us.
In the old, old church days … Advent was seen as a ‘little Lent,’ a time of repentance, preparation before the festival of the Incarnation of Jesus … Christmas. Though we use blue as our liturgical color for Advent now, we still have a vestige of that Lenten link in the purple and pink candles of Advent … purple being the liturgical color for Lent.
And that’s not a bad thing. We hear the Baptist’s call for repentance today, and we heed it … heed it by repenting from our overspending, overconsuming ways that have marked Christmas for us in the past. We can turn from that poor way of marking the Advent, the coming of our God in Jesus Christ … turn from it, if even a little, hearing and following the Advent Conspiracy call to a simpler celebration this year.
And in the Baptist’s words we’re also given freedom … freedom from our fears and courage to take risks … little risks (like not giving in to the needless ‘well, she bought me something, so I need to buy her something’ cycle), but meaningful ones nonetheless … giving us more freedom, more time to spend in our true calling as disciples of Jesus, to continue to go and grow in faith …
So here’s a suggestion … with the time you’ll gain from doing less shopping … why not take up a devotional life?
Here’s a Word for you which doesn’t have to cost you a cent. The Daily Texts are a great way to engage with the Scriptures every day, brief readings and prayers which millions of people have used worldwide since the 1700s to begin their day with a Word of faith and life.
Yes, they are produced by the Moravian Church, one of our ecumenical church partners … but millions of Lutherans use them, too. They were Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s constant companion throughout his life, including his time in Nazi prisons. And they can be yours, too, just by visiting the Moravian Church’s website (I’ve run off copies of the web page and they’re on the round table – with the url listed) and signing up for email delivery of the Daily Texts, each day.
If you’re more a book person, you can also order your own personal copy of the Daily Texts for a little more than $10, by using the order form which is attached.
I ask you, Nativity, God calls you, Nativity, to go deeper in faith … not just “going to church,” but BEING CHURCH.
For Jesus has given us an indelible identity, our true identity, in our baptism.
And we are called to set aside that masks that identity … hiding behind our STUFF, our
busy-ness, in fear of going deeper prayerfully, spiritually, in faith … we are called to set that all aside, to unmask, to cease hiding … and walk wet … fearlessly, in faith, in love, in service … walk wet into God’s future … where all that matters is that we are IN HIM, brothers and sisters of our Lord, given his same Spirit, beloved, baptized children of God.
Amen.
“Spend less”
2 Advent B
4 December 2011
Last week we began the season of Advent, and our “Advent Conspiracy” series, with a remembrance of a television series – in that case, Seinfeld, and how it launched a whole new holiday, Festivus, created especially for people who have grown disgusted with what Christmas has become in our culture. Overblown, drawn out forever, and dollar-driven … many, many people have said “there’s got to be another way.”
That way for the creators of the Advent Conspiracy was our initial focus … Worship Fully … meaning that, the holiday begins, and ends, in Jesus … and by worshipping fully, by following our baptismal calling to live fully into the preparation and anticipation of the season of Advent … preparing for, anticipating Jesus’ return to earth once again, rejoicing in the Good News that the kingdom of God is coming “on earth as it is in heaven,” … and we ourselves, dying and rising with Jesus, joined with him in our own baptism … we are given freedom to reject the death-bound ways of worldly living (like overbloated Christmas) and instead, embrace real, authentic, faith-filled life, so we can truly receive and celebrate Christmas as God intends it … GOD, FOR US.
But that was last week.
This week, this Second Sunday in Advent, we move ahead … move ahead, with the word of … another television show.
It’s one of those “train wreck” kind of reality programs … presenting situations so horrible and awful, you feel like you have to turn away … but we don’t … we’ve got to watch because we just can’t believe it’s true. Perhaps it’s one of your “guilty pleasures.”
I’m talking about “Hoarders,” the series on A&E which focuses on people who are literally surrounded by their stuff.
Many of us save things … some of us more than others. We collect t-shirts and baseball hats, ticket stubs and commemorative plates. My dad was a “saver” … not a hoarder, but he kept an inordinate amount of stuff in his basement shop … some of it, things he’d fished out of the trash that my mom, my brother and I had thrown out. So the three of us – all “throwers” … we learned the neat trick of setting things in the outside trash can right before the garbage got picked up.
“Throwers” don’t save much … we give it away or recycle it or sell it or just plain get rid of it because we like things neat and tidy with lots of room to move around.
But I digress … we were talking, not about savers and throwers, but “Hoarders.” These are the extreme people who have massive problems with massive amounts of STUFF.
One recent episode of “Hoarders” showed a man who had somewhere between 50 and 60 cars in his yard, all in various states of disrepair and decomposition. Another woman’s house had every room filled with bins and bins of videotapes she’d recorded on her 10 or 15 VCRs. And many of the hoarders simply have houses crammed full of … STUFF … you name it, they have it, piled so high they can’t get through the doorways of their houses, and when they do manage to crawl in they can’t get in bed, can’t use the dining table, can’t even hardly move because of the sheer amount of STUFF. So each episode follows the trials and tribulations of these hoarders … most of them, in some kind of life crisis (usually a demand from a family member or the local authorities) to clean up their place, to reduce their piles of stuff, to throw things out, recycle, just plain GET RID OF IT. And the “train wreck” comes in the watching, the seeing, how they (usually) just can’t do it … can’t bring themselves to part with any of it.
The show points out, that there are more and more hoarders, more and more people in crisis over having too much stuff, all the time.
Really, it’s the nightmare scenario of the American way, isn’t it? This end result of the consumerist merry-go-round we all are on … hoarding, throwing, saving, losing, it really doesn’t matter, because it’s still all about our STUFF, isn’t it?
To have STUFF to give or throw away, we have to have bought the STUFF in the first place.
We buy a lot of STUFF at all times of the year; the economists and politicians are all very happy when we decide, to heck with our budgets, LET’S GO SHOPPING.
But at Christmas, even in the worst of times, we pull off the brakes and go all out.
The good folks at Advent Conspiracy know this … and here’s what they have to say about it:
We like gifts. Our kids really like gifts. But consider this: America spends an average of $450 billion a year every Christmas. How often have you spent money on Christmas presents for no other reason than obligation? How many times have you received a gift out of that same obligation? Thanks, but no thanks, right?
And so in this second week of our participation in the Conspiracy, they present us with this challenge:
We’re asking people to SPEND LESS … to consider buying ONE LESS GIFT this Christmas. Just one. Sounds insignificant, yet many who have taken this small sacrifice have experienced something nothing less than a miracle: They have been more available to celebrate Christ during the Advent season.
Spend Less this Christmas? Why, it sounds positively un-American!
I mean, haven’t we been told by our leaders, exhorted by our authorities, that the way we’ll get out of our economic mess is TO GO SHOPPING????!
I can just hear the economists and politicians now: “Why, in our economy which is almost totally built on consumption, if everyone Spent Less, we’d be plunged into recession. Maybe even, depression. Hundreds of thousands, millions, would suffer because of that ONE GIFT NOT PURCHASED.
Well, probably not.
But, maybe?
AND SO WHAT IF IT DID put a little dent into our economy?
Might that actually point out that what’s really messed up isn’t the suggestion that we buy one less gift this Christmas, but OUR mindset and OUR behavior instead … credit-carded, buy it now, pay for it later, endless consumption of more and more AND MORE STUFF.
So why do we do it, anyway?
It almost seems like, like, we’re looking for meaning in our STUFF.
Certainly that’s true for those television show-“Hoarders.” Each program always features a psychologist brought in to help provide the hoarder much-needed therapy. And the first thing we hear from the psychologist each week, is that the Hoarder is initially unable to give up even one little thing because to them, it means giving up part of who they are.
But I’m probably being too hard on the Hoarders. For we all try to find identity, meaning, in our stuff. Part of why we buy STUFF is because of what we believe the STUFF says about us. The kind of car we drive, the house we live in, the labels on the clothes we wear, the ZIP code in which we choose to live, that’s the way we believe we show our identity to the world.
What a contrast to the texts we have before us today. Yes, they are also about identity, who people are, who WE are, but they’re sure not focused on STUFF.
Isaiah’s word comes as to us as pure grace. It’s not the harsh prophetic word of judgment for God’s people that we hear in the first chapters of this book. No, here the people Israel have already lost the war and been hauled off into exile in Babylon. They’ve had the land of God’s promise taken from them because of their greed and idolatry.
Everything bad that they feared has come to pass. What their living has gotten them into is a wilderness, for sure, a place where all that they’d been certain and sure of in their lives, their very identity, has been snatched away from them.
So Isaiah’s word comes to them, helpless, hurting people, to remind them of WHOSE they are, so they can once again know WHO they are:
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand fast forever.
Despite your search for identity away from me, Israel … God says to them … despite your wandering away into a wilderness where you have felt abandoned and become hopeless … despite all this, God says to them, my promises to you remain true and FOR YOU. I will once again rescue you from the ‘fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into’ because I am your God and you are my people, and I will be your shepherd, your caregiver, your help and your hope, and I will never leave you.
Then there’s our Gospel text. It starts out The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and at first, it certainly sounds like good news, quoting word for word what Isaiah said to his people centuries earlier.
Ah, but the one we encounter in these words isn’t a comforting Isaiah, but a hair-shirted John the Baptist, calling people to repent, to turn from their sins, to turn around and follow God’s call to holy living.
But once again, we hear a word about identity … knowing whose we are, so we can know WHO we are.
John is calling people to baptism, to be sure … but his is a baptism of repentance, for forgiveness. It was an ancient Jewish practice still done today, called Mikveh , a ritual bath of immersion for purification. This kind of baptism which John offers would have to be repeated time and time again, as many times as people sin and become impure, they would need to be immersed.
Yet John points beyond himself … to the one whose way he is preparing … the one whose Good News is being proclaimed in these opening verses of Mark’s gospel:
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
The good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is that his baptism will inseparably link his people with him, forever … his people, US, WE will be baptized with the same Holy Spirit with which he, Jesus, is baptized. And so we recall the words we heard last week about that baptism:
• On the one hand, Baptism = death. Being joined to Jesus in his baptism means dying to the old ways of sin and death. Dying to the death-bound ways of the world. Dying to how far short we fall from where God calls us to live and be, to and for others.
• On the other hand, Baptism = life. Being raised with Christ, we are raised FOR something. And that something is life … full, rich, and abundant … free from the fears that we’re going to lose out on something … whether it’s place or stuff or whatever other gods, other idols we’ve placed in our path along the way. In Baptism, we have DIED to the death-bound ways of the world, and been RAISED to life together, in Christ, forever.
The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which we received from last week’s text is that we no longer fear “the End” because our End is in Jesus Christ, the Lord of life and forgiveness and salvation, … and he is in God and with God, forever.
The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which is for us this week is that our identity, our True Identity, is … baptized child of God, brother or sister of the one who brings Good News in his very self, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
In other words … our STUFF is not us, whether that’s a fancy car, piles of video cassettes or clothes or papers hoarded away … or pride in a clean, tidy house, an organized desk, or a showroom-condition car. We are not saved from our sins by our hoarding or our throwing, our saving or our recycling.
OUR STUFF IS NOT US.
No, we are given our indelible identity in our baptism … though the water evaporates, it leaves its mark on us permanently, because, as Luther tells us in his Catechism,
Baptism is not just water.
The Good News for us here this week is that Baptism is Identity for us … we are part of God’s Kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven, what will be perfect then, is not yet perfect now, but still in the works nonetheless. We are walking wet works in progress … dead in Baptism, alive in Baptism, sinner-saints, sent forth to bring wet footprints of God’s love into the world.
And Advent is the perfect time for us to focus on “walking wet,” all our Baptism means for us.
In the old, old church days … Advent was seen as a ‘little Lent,’ a time of repentance, preparation before the festival of the Incarnation of Jesus … Christmas. Though we use blue as our liturgical color for Advent now, we still have a vestige of that Lenten link in the purple and pink candles of Advent … purple being the liturgical color for Lent.
And that’s not a bad thing. We hear the Baptist’s call for repentance today, and we heed it … heed it by repenting from our overspending, overconsuming ways that have marked Christmas for us in the past. We can turn from that poor way of marking the Advent, the coming of our God in Jesus Christ … turn from it, if even a little, hearing and following the Advent Conspiracy call to a simpler celebration this year.
And in the Baptist’s words we’re also given freedom … freedom from our fears and courage to take risks … little risks (like not giving in to the needless ‘well, she bought me something, so I need to buy her something’ cycle), but meaningful ones nonetheless … giving us more freedom, more time to spend in our true calling as disciples of Jesus, to continue to go and grow in faith …
So here’s a suggestion … with the time you’ll gain from doing less shopping … why not take up a devotional life?
Here’s a Word for you which doesn’t have to cost you a cent. The Daily Texts are a great way to engage with the Scriptures every day, brief readings and prayers which millions of people have used worldwide since the 1700s to begin their day with a Word of faith and life.
Yes, they are produced by the Moravian Church, one of our ecumenical church partners … but millions of Lutherans use them, too. They were Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s constant companion throughout his life, including his time in Nazi prisons. And they can be yours, too, just by visiting the Moravian Church’s website (I’ve run off copies of the web page and they’re on the round table – with the url listed) and signing up for email delivery of the Daily Texts, each day.
If you’re more a book person, you can also order your own personal copy of the Daily Texts for a little more than $10, by using the order form which is attached.
I ask you, Nativity, God calls you, Nativity, to go deeper in faith … not just “going to church,” but BEING CHURCH.
For Jesus has given us an indelible identity, our true identity, in our baptism.
And we are called to set aside that masks that identity … hiding behind our STUFF, our
busy-ness, in fear of going deeper prayerfully, spiritually, in faith … we are called to set that all aside, to unmask, to cease hiding … and walk wet … fearlessly, in faith, in love, in service … walk wet into God’s future … where all that matters is that we are IN HIM, brothers and sisters of our Lord, given his same Spirit, beloved, baptized children of God.
Amen.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
27 November 2011
What is baptism? It’s an Advent Conspiracy.
“Worship fully”
1 Advent B
27 November 2011
One of my favorite episodes of the old TV series “Seinfeld” – maybe yours, too – is the one in which George Costanza’s dad Frank relates the creation of the holiday known as Festivus.
That character, played by Jerry Stiller, relates in the show how and why he decided to create another, alternative wintertime celebration, one without the commercialism and pressure of Christmas:
"Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way. [The doll] was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born: a Festivus for the rest of us!"
And so another moment in popular culture was born; all over the country, unadorned metal Festivus poles have sprouted ever since; and people mark the date (December 23) with “Seinfeld”-inspired events such as “Feats of Strength” and the “Airing of Grievances.”
It’s not hard to figure out why people would reject tradition and choose a made-up, sitcom-spun wintertime celebration instead. Christmas has in many ways become a commercially bloated, disfigured, even mean-spirited shadow of itself. And every year, it gets worse … holiday decorations going up in mid-October … Christmas music plays on the radio right after Halloween … “Black Friday” slops over into Thanksgiving … shoppers pepper spray, trample and even shoot each other to get that One Great Bargain.
As for we liturgical Christians who mark the church year … today doesn’t begin Christmas, but Advent … a time of preparation, looking forward to Christ’s return to earth even as we anticipate the coming celebration of his birth … we don’t jump right into singing Christmas carols, we don’t have the sanctuary decorated with tree and lights the moment Thanksgiving worship is over, because we mark Advent first …
…well, we may mark it in here, but the light from our one, two, three, four Advent candles … it’s easily snuffed out the moment we get out the door, and are swamped in the tide of wall to wall Christmas.
Advent preparation and anticipation, it seems, has no place in the world anymore.
It was this realization which brought pastors from three different churches together to take a stand in their congregations, and create what’s now known as Advent Conspiracy. Rather than caving to the culture … which wipes out Advent altogether in a sea of wall-to-wall Christmas from October through December … rather than creating a new holiday like Festivus to show disgust with what Christmas has become … these pastors decided to, ahem, Occupy Advent, if you will … they decided to take a stand for the origins of the season and the traditions of the Church, and create a movement which would help people in their congregations fully engage in what these seasons are really all about.
The opening paragraph from the Advent Conspiracy brochure makes these intentions clear:
The story of Christ’s birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love. So, what happened? What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a Savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists. And when it's all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling of missed purpose. Is this what we really want out of Christmas? What if Christmas became a world-changing event again? Welcome to Advent Conspiracy, a movement calling us to proclaim Christ in how we celebrate Christmas.
The Conspiracy “takes back” the holiday by encouraging us to engage it differently than does the rest of the world. Sorry, there are no “Feats of Strength” or “Airing of Grievances,” but there are these four revolutionary actions :
• Worship Fully
• Spend Less
• Give More
• Love All
Now, admittedly, the churches in which Advent Conspiracy originated aren’t traditional Western catholic liturgical churches … Imago Dei in Portland, for example, is an emergent Evangelical worshipping community. But that there are four rallying points for the Conspiracy … corresponds nicely for us who do follow the liturgical year … four points; four Sundays in Advent.
And especially for us of Nativity, as we being to mark this year of special focus on the Sacrament of Holy Baptism … these four marks of Advent Conspiracy will guide us, as we move through these four Sundays of Advent, these Sundays of preparation and anticipation; guiding our thoughts and words and prayers and, I hope, our actions as well, here as we gather, and there as we are sent into the world.
So today, we begin, right where we are supposed to begin, for us, our first, last and always call as we walk the discipleship walk, following Jesus: Worship Fully.
Worship. The main activity of the Christian church is gathering on each Lord’s day for worship. It’s been this way ever since the beginning … we stand firmly in the tradition of our Jewish brothers and sisters, and come together in community to hear God’s word, sing God’s word, be fed and strengthened on God’s word … from the Scriptures, from the tradition, from the preacher who is prayerfully guided by God to stand at the intersection of all of them and proclaim a message of engagement and relevance to us, here, today …
… and we also stand firmly in the Word of Jesus, who calls us from the ages, and from this table, to gather each week around Jesus’ very self, in bread and wine, given to and for us to feed and strengthen us, food for the journey of our lives as his people.
Fully. The call, God’s call to worship is not an ornament or bauble, a nicety which fills out our resume or is something we “do” once we get done with everything else which fills our schedules and calendars … no, God’s call to worship is one of full, undivided presence …
… God’s full presence, here, with us, as we are called and gathered, fed on Word and Meal, and then sent forth for service to our neighbors.
And our full presence, too. Worship isn’t the last thing we do at the end of a long week … it is the FIRST thing we do at the beginning of a new week, it sets the tone and stride for us, all week. That’s why St. Paul , when he describes the Sacrament of Holy Communion, that’s why St. Paul writes “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” THAT means we are to do it OFTEN, and FULLY, engaged with all our heart and soul, mind and strength.
Worship Fully … it means, like the other Sacrament around which we gather, the one which will guide our worship in this liturgical year, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism … Worship Fully, like baptism, implies that this is not just a “one and done” thing. As Baptism is a mark, a sign, a beginning of the life of faith within us, a work of God which fills and empowers us for our doing God’s work in the world … so Worship Fully is a word emphasizing just that … worship is a posture, a lifestyle, a way of living into which we are called … walking wet, baptized people of God, spreading our water-signed footprints everywhere we go.
It’s been said that the Church is the only organization which exists solely for the sake of those who are not part of it yet.
Well, that’s a little extreme, but you get the point. We … God’s people, the Church … we are called and gathered by God’s Word to worship God, fully, engaged fully in that worship, as part and parcel of who we are … and then we continue that worship in serving and proclaiming to others.
Our focus … in worship, for worship, is not ourselves … our motivation … in worship, for worship, is not ourselves … but God, and God’s call to GO and SERVE and PROCLAIM in word and action, the coming of God’s kingdom.
When we start focusing on ourselves, we stand in judgment … God’s judgment … the place of needing to be corrected, in our worship, in our work as God’s gathered and sent people.
That is what our Scripture readings on this first Sunday in Advent are all about; words we commonly refer to as readings about “the end.”
The words of Isaiah do come at the end of that book, but aren’t necessarily just about God coming down at the end of all things. They are more about repentance … the repentance of God’s people, God’s people who have returned from their forced exile out of the land of God’s promise, God’s people who have returned to that land once again, but life has not turned out for them as well as they had hoped. Looking inward, looking at what they have done, how they have sinned … the gulf, still wide between them and God … their call, their cry to God, “Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever,” these are words of worship, corporate repentance, a plea for forgiveness, a prayer that God would hear them.
The verses from Mark we commonly refer to as “Mark’s Apocalypse.” “Apocalypse” simply means “of the end;” each year on the first Sunday in Advent, we hear words of Apocalypse from one of the chronological Gospels (Matthew, Luke; this liturgical year as we are immersed in Mark’s Gospel, those are the words we read). Despite all the fear and foreboding surrounding words of Apocalypse, these verses simply illustrate that one, potent verse of our Creed which we confess together as God’s people: that we believe that Jesus Christ will come back, bodily, to earth, to establish God’s reign fully, on earth as it is in heaven.
Granted, these words from Mark’s apocalypse aren’t popular ones. They stand fully opposed to where the culture lives, right here, right now, one month out from Christmas Day but fully tinsled and decorated nonetheless.
And yet, we need these readings, coming as they do each year, heralding to us the beginning of the Advent season … because they point out so well the two ditches into which followers of Jesus can easily fall at this time of the year:
• Focusing on ourselves … Christians hear the words of Apocalypse and judgment, and either worry about our own salvation to the neglect of everyone else; or we smugly assume, “Oh, that’s not me Jesus is talking about, I’m one of the saved, not one of the sinful ones who aren’t.”
• Or, another focus on ourselves … we ignore these words calling us into Advent meditation, preparation and hope of final restoration of it all, as we go pedal-to-the-metal toward Christmas.
But both of these are just wrong.
You see, what these words of Scripture really introduce to us, is that Advent is a four week miniature course in what it is to be a baptized child of God, claimed by Jesus, and marked with the cross of Christ forever.
• On the one hand, Baptism = death. Being joined to Jesus in his baptism means dying to the old ways of sin and death. Dying to the death-bound ways of the world. Dying to all that those words of Isaiah point out, how far short we fall from where God calls us to live and be, to and for others.
• On the other hand, Baptism = life. Being raised with Christ, we are raised FOR something. And that something is life … full, rich, and abundant … free from the fears that we’re going to lose out on something … whether it’s place or stuff or whatever other gods, other idols we’ve placed in our path along the way. In Baptism, we have DIED to the death-bound ways of the world, and been RAISED to life together, in Christ, forever. We no longer fear “the End” because our End is in Jesus Christ, the Lord of life and forgiveness and salvation, with God, forever.
And so what do we do in this life now? We Worship Fully. The point of Church isn’t that we’re just another social club of the like-minded or an all fun, all the time feel-good organization … nor are we a little holier than thou gathering of the piously religious, who lord our “betterness” over the rest of the world …
No … though there are churches and Christians who do behave that way … that isn’t what we’re called to be about …
and this is not what we will be about.
Our call as baptized children of God, brothers and sisters of our Lord Jesus Christ … in whatever season of the year … was, is, and always will be … to come together as dead-and-alive redeemed sinners who worship fully, exalting God for God’s sake, and serving God’s people for God’s sake … and theirs.
That is what “being church” is all about … first, last and always … Worshipping Fully.
And yes, even though it’s true that we exist as Church for the sake of those who are not yet part of us … we still get something “out of it” too. Of course we do.
What we “get” is real and right and true … the anticipation, the preparation, for the real Advent of our Lord … his making fully, on earth as it is in heaven, the realization of all that our Lord has in store for our neighbor and for us, giving us the faith and freedom to risk and try NOW, to go deeper in faith, deeper in discipleship and faith friendships, deeper in prayer and study and service, to live our worship outside these walls as richly as we receive it inside them …
God’s people, people of Water and Word, take your wet footprints forth from this worship this week, and leave your mark out there, Worshipping Fully even as you have been fully filled, fully blessed, fully saved FOR the sake of our Lord and the life of your neighbor.
Amen.
“Worship fully”
1 Advent B
27 November 2011
One of my favorite episodes of the old TV series “Seinfeld” – maybe yours, too – is the one in which George Costanza’s dad Frank relates the creation of the holiday known as Festivus.
That character, played by Jerry Stiller, relates in the show how and why he decided to create another, alternative wintertime celebration, one without the commercialism and pressure of Christmas:
"Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way. [The doll] was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born: a Festivus for the rest of us!"
And so another moment in popular culture was born; all over the country, unadorned metal Festivus poles have sprouted ever since; and people mark the date (December 23) with “Seinfeld”-inspired events such as “Feats of Strength” and the “Airing of Grievances.”
It’s not hard to figure out why people would reject tradition and choose a made-up, sitcom-spun wintertime celebration instead. Christmas has in many ways become a commercially bloated, disfigured, even mean-spirited shadow of itself. And every year, it gets worse … holiday decorations going up in mid-October … Christmas music plays on the radio right after Halloween … “Black Friday” slops over into Thanksgiving … shoppers pepper spray, trample and even shoot each other to get that One Great Bargain.
As for we liturgical Christians who mark the church year … today doesn’t begin Christmas, but Advent … a time of preparation, looking forward to Christ’s return to earth even as we anticipate the coming celebration of his birth … we don’t jump right into singing Christmas carols, we don’t have the sanctuary decorated with tree and lights the moment Thanksgiving worship is over, because we mark Advent first …
…well, we may mark it in here, but the light from our one, two, three, four Advent candles … it’s easily snuffed out the moment we get out the door, and are swamped in the tide of wall to wall Christmas.
Advent preparation and anticipation, it seems, has no place in the world anymore.
It was this realization which brought pastors from three different churches together to take a stand in their congregations, and create what’s now known as Advent Conspiracy. Rather than caving to the culture … which wipes out Advent altogether in a sea of wall-to-wall Christmas from October through December … rather than creating a new holiday like Festivus to show disgust with what Christmas has become … these pastors decided to, ahem, Occupy Advent, if you will … they decided to take a stand for the origins of the season and the traditions of the Church, and create a movement which would help people in their congregations fully engage in what these seasons are really all about.
The opening paragraph from the Advent Conspiracy brochure makes these intentions clear:
The story of Christ’s birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love. So, what happened? What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a Savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists. And when it's all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling of missed purpose. Is this what we really want out of Christmas? What if Christmas became a world-changing event again? Welcome to Advent Conspiracy, a movement calling us to proclaim Christ in how we celebrate Christmas.
The Conspiracy “takes back” the holiday by encouraging us to engage it differently than does the rest of the world. Sorry, there are no “Feats of Strength” or “Airing of Grievances,” but there are these four revolutionary actions :
• Worship Fully
• Spend Less
• Give More
• Love All
Now, admittedly, the churches in which Advent Conspiracy originated aren’t traditional Western catholic liturgical churches … Imago Dei in Portland, for example, is an emergent Evangelical worshipping community. But that there are four rallying points for the Conspiracy … corresponds nicely for us who do follow the liturgical year … four points; four Sundays in Advent.
And especially for us of Nativity, as we being to mark this year of special focus on the Sacrament of Holy Baptism … these four marks of Advent Conspiracy will guide us, as we move through these four Sundays of Advent, these Sundays of preparation and anticipation; guiding our thoughts and words and prayers and, I hope, our actions as well, here as we gather, and there as we are sent into the world.
So today, we begin, right where we are supposed to begin, for us, our first, last and always call as we walk the discipleship walk, following Jesus: Worship Fully.
Worship. The main activity of the Christian church is gathering on each Lord’s day for worship. It’s been this way ever since the beginning … we stand firmly in the tradition of our Jewish brothers and sisters, and come together in community to hear God’s word, sing God’s word, be fed and strengthened on God’s word … from the Scriptures, from the tradition, from the preacher who is prayerfully guided by God to stand at the intersection of all of them and proclaim a message of engagement and relevance to us, here, today …
… and we also stand firmly in the Word of Jesus, who calls us from the ages, and from this table, to gather each week around Jesus’ very self, in bread and wine, given to and for us to feed and strengthen us, food for the journey of our lives as his people.
Fully. The call, God’s call to worship is not an ornament or bauble, a nicety which fills out our resume or is something we “do” once we get done with everything else which fills our schedules and calendars … no, God’s call to worship is one of full, undivided presence …
… God’s full presence, here, with us, as we are called and gathered, fed on Word and Meal, and then sent forth for service to our neighbors.
And our full presence, too. Worship isn’t the last thing we do at the end of a long week … it is the FIRST thing we do at the beginning of a new week, it sets the tone and stride for us, all week. That’s why St. Paul , when he describes the Sacrament of Holy Communion, that’s why St. Paul writes “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” THAT means we are to do it OFTEN, and FULLY, engaged with all our heart and soul, mind and strength.
Worship Fully … it means, like the other Sacrament around which we gather, the one which will guide our worship in this liturgical year, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism … Worship Fully, like baptism, implies that this is not just a “one and done” thing. As Baptism is a mark, a sign, a beginning of the life of faith within us, a work of God which fills and empowers us for our doing God’s work in the world … so Worship Fully is a word emphasizing just that … worship is a posture, a lifestyle, a way of living into which we are called … walking wet, baptized people of God, spreading our water-signed footprints everywhere we go.
It’s been said that the Church is the only organization which exists solely for the sake of those who are not part of it yet.
Well, that’s a little extreme, but you get the point. We … God’s people, the Church … we are called and gathered by God’s Word to worship God, fully, engaged fully in that worship, as part and parcel of who we are … and then we continue that worship in serving and proclaiming to others.
Our focus … in worship, for worship, is not ourselves … our motivation … in worship, for worship, is not ourselves … but God, and God’s call to GO and SERVE and PROCLAIM in word and action, the coming of God’s kingdom.
When we start focusing on ourselves, we stand in judgment … God’s judgment … the place of needing to be corrected, in our worship, in our work as God’s gathered and sent people.
That is what our Scripture readings on this first Sunday in Advent are all about; words we commonly refer to as readings about “the end.”
The words of Isaiah do come at the end of that book, but aren’t necessarily just about God coming down at the end of all things. They are more about repentance … the repentance of God’s people, God’s people who have returned from their forced exile out of the land of God’s promise, God’s people who have returned to that land once again, but life has not turned out for them as well as they had hoped. Looking inward, looking at what they have done, how they have sinned … the gulf, still wide between them and God … their call, their cry to God, “Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever,” these are words of worship, corporate repentance, a plea for forgiveness, a prayer that God would hear them.
The verses from Mark we commonly refer to as “Mark’s Apocalypse.” “Apocalypse” simply means “of the end;” each year on the first Sunday in Advent, we hear words of Apocalypse from one of the chronological Gospels (Matthew, Luke; this liturgical year as we are immersed in Mark’s Gospel, those are the words we read). Despite all the fear and foreboding surrounding words of Apocalypse, these verses simply illustrate that one, potent verse of our Creed which we confess together as God’s people: that we believe that Jesus Christ will come back, bodily, to earth, to establish God’s reign fully, on earth as it is in heaven.
Granted, these words from Mark’s apocalypse aren’t popular ones. They stand fully opposed to where the culture lives, right here, right now, one month out from Christmas Day but fully tinsled and decorated nonetheless.
And yet, we need these readings, coming as they do each year, heralding to us the beginning of the Advent season … because they point out so well the two ditches into which followers of Jesus can easily fall at this time of the year:
• Focusing on ourselves … Christians hear the words of Apocalypse and judgment, and either worry about our own salvation to the neglect of everyone else; or we smugly assume, “Oh, that’s not me Jesus is talking about, I’m one of the saved, not one of the sinful ones who aren’t.”
• Or, another focus on ourselves … we ignore these words calling us into Advent meditation, preparation and hope of final restoration of it all, as we go pedal-to-the-metal toward Christmas.
But both of these are just wrong.
You see, what these words of Scripture really introduce to us, is that Advent is a four week miniature course in what it is to be a baptized child of God, claimed by Jesus, and marked with the cross of Christ forever.
• On the one hand, Baptism = death. Being joined to Jesus in his baptism means dying to the old ways of sin and death. Dying to the death-bound ways of the world. Dying to all that those words of Isaiah point out, how far short we fall from where God calls us to live and be, to and for others.
• On the other hand, Baptism = life. Being raised with Christ, we are raised FOR something. And that something is life … full, rich, and abundant … free from the fears that we’re going to lose out on something … whether it’s place or stuff or whatever other gods, other idols we’ve placed in our path along the way. In Baptism, we have DIED to the death-bound ways of the world, and been RAISED to life together, in Christ, forever. We no longer fear “the End” because our End is in Jesus Christ, the Lord of life and forgiveness and salvation, with God, forever.
And so what do we do in this life now? We Worship Fully. The point of Church isn’t that we’re just another social club of the like-minded or an all fun, all the time feel-good organization … nor are we a little holier than thou gathering of the piously religious, who lord our “betterness” over the rest of the world …
No … though there are churches and Christians who do behave that way … that isn’t what we’re called to be about …
and this is not what we will be about.
Our call as baptized children of God, brothers and sisters of our Lord Jesus Christ … in whatever season of the year … was, is, and always will be … to come together as dead-and-alive redeemed sinners who worship fully, exalting God for God’s sake, and serving God’s people for God’s sake … and theirs.
That is what “being church” is all about … first, last and always … Worshipping Fully.
And yes, even though it’s true that we exist as Church for the sake of those who are not yet part of us … we still get something “out of it” too. Of course we do.
What we “get” is real and right and true … the anticipation, the preparation, for the real Advent of our Lord … his making fully, on earth as it is in heaven, the realization of all that our Lord has in store for our neighbor and for us, giving us the faith and freedom to risk and try NOW, to go deeper in faith, deeper in discipleship and faith friendships, deeper in prayer and study and service, to live our worship outside these walls as richly as we receive it inside them …
God’s people, people of Water and Word, take your wet footprints forth from this worship this week, and leave your mark out there, Worshipping Fully even as you have been fully filled, fully blessed, fully saved FOR the sake of our Lord and the life of your neighbor.
Amen.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
24 November 2011
“No mood to be thankful”
Thanksgiving Eve 2011
Deuteronomy 8:7-18 / Philippians 4:4-9 / Matthew 6:25-33
I like Thanksgiving. The holiday, that is. The food and family, the togetherness, yes, the football, too. It’s a great day. Probably, you’d say so too.
I also like Thanksgiving (the theological concept.) Giving thanks to God is a regular part of my prayer life. Probably, yours too.
But preaching on Thanksgiving … well, that’s a different story. I’ve managed to avoid it since 1998 … until tonight. Thanks to my friends.
Now, it’s not that I don’t enjoy having the opportunity to share the Word with you. That’s always a privilege and honor.
It’s just that, well, what word about Thankgiving should I share with you?
After all, Thanksgiving Day isn’t a church holiday. It’s not on our liturgical calendar. In our shared Western catholic liturgical tradition, it falls between Christ the King (the end of one liturgical or church year) and the First Sunday in Advent (the beginning of a new liturgical or church year).
But the National Day of Thanksgiving (the official name for tomorrow) is a civic holiday, declared so by the President of the United States each year. Even though we might want to credit the Pilgrims, it’s at the proclamation of the chief executive that we celebrate this day, ever since 1789, when George Washington penned these words at the end of the Revolutionary War, and declared the first official United States day of National Thanksgiving:
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor-- and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.
Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.
Note that he got both houses of Congress to agree to this. That in and of itself would be a reason for thanksgiving.
Washington’s Thanksgiving was for just that one year, 1789, only. It would be left to Abraham Lincoln who, in the midst of the Civil War, set the last Thursday in November as a National Day of Thanksgiving. In 1863, he did so with these words:
The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God ... No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.
Ever since then, the President has kept the tradition of Lincoln alive by declaring a National Day of Thanksgiving. And tonight and tomorrow, thousands of churches will hold services on this only civic holiday which is also recognized as a day of worship by the Church.
Perhaps I would just be better off to recognize that this is a civic holiday, and leave it to the words of the statesmen and women, of the ages and of today. There have been years when I’ve done just that. But I think you expect more than that tonight.
So maybe I should look to the Church for some symbol, some mark of this day to honor and speak of. But the Church has no particular symbols for this day ... unlike Christmas, with the juxtaposition of Santa and baby Jesus ... that doesn’t happen at Thanksgiving. That probably has to do with the fact that people of many faiths observe this day. So we all think of the little pilgrim girl, the little pilgrim boy, the turkey. They are cute, warm and fuzzy reminders of the day.
Still, that's a little odd, when you think about it, because those first Thanksgiving Days were far from warm and fuzzy. The legendary Pilgrims – they to whom we say, we owe this day – the Pilgrims had suffered famine and disease and poor harvests, and many of their number had died. The memories and wounds of the Revolutionary War which Washington had won were still fresh. And Lincoln was in the middle of a horrible Civil War. It’s hard to see how anyone could have seen “the ever watchful providence of Almighty God” at work in that.
But they did ... this nation at those hard times in its history nevertheless took the time, dedicated a day to giving thanks to the Creator for all the blessings it had received.
Perhaps they ... our thankful forebears ... perhaps the reason for their desire for national thankfulness ... was that they were familiar with the text from Deuteronomy which was our reading tonight ... and that they drew parallels between the experience of the Israelites and their own experiences in establishing the American nation.
Certainly Washington’s and Lincoln’s words in their Thanksgiving proclamations, they strongly echo what we just heard read from the Old Testament.
So perhaps here is our symbol … in the Word, where the civic holiday crosses over into the theological concept.
Moses and the Israelites had been through a lot ... the Exodus from Egypt ... hopefulness turned to whining and disobedience in the wilderness ... years of wandering. Now Moses was preparing them to finally come into the Land which God had promised to his people so long ago. Once more they heard the story of how God had been faithful to his people as they traveled through the desert ... the “ever-watchful providence of Almighty God” was at work, as their clothes did not wear out nor did their feet swell during those forty years. They were fed, and protected from the dangers of the trip. And once more they heard the promises of God about how wonderful the land would be ... “a land with flowing streams ... a land of wheat and barley ... a land where you will lack nothing.”
It all sounded so wonderful ... a place of great wealth, riches, and success for them. They would be at last able to “build fine houses and live in them” ... to see their herds and flocks, and their silver and gold, and all that they had, be multiplied. But Moses knew how fickle God’s people could be -- himself included. So he reminded them once again, when they had realized all these blessings, to give credit to whom credit was due for all of them ... to their God, who had brought them to this place and who was the source of all that they had.
“Remember,” Moses said. “Remember the Lord your God” when you are tempted to think that all your blessings have come from your own hands. “Remember,” Moses said, for all that you have is just God holding up God’s end of the deal, the covenant of blessing God made with Abraham ... and in your wealth, your end of the covenant is to be “blessed to be a blessing” -- to bless God and praise God for all you have been given, and also, to use what you have been given by God to help the orphan, the widow, the resident alien in your midst.
Well, certainly Israel waxed and waned in its “remembering” of God, honoring God and giving God the credit, the praise for all their blessings. And there did come a day when God’s people grew fickle, causing God to seemingly withdraw “His protection and favor” from them, as they went into exile.
But God remained faithful to his people even when they were not; they were brought out of exile; they were even sent a Savior, his own Son, who continued to echo this call to “return thanks” to God for all that he gives daily, even life itself. And praise and thanksgiving became a chief focus of Christian worship ... even our own in this day and time, as our shared Western catholic liturgy still includes a “Glory to God,” and many of our hymns reflect this theme of praise and thanksgiving to our creator.
We know this. We know as Christians that we’re supposed to give thanks … as the words of our Philippians reading exhort us, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” Our most simple prayers, the ones we first learn, are ones of thanksgiving: “God is great, God is good … let us thank God for our food.”
We Lutherans hear this call to thankfulness loud and clear in Martin Luther’s explanation to the First Article of the Creed:
I believe that God has created me together with all that exists. God has given me and still preserves my body and soul: eyes, ears, and all limbs and senses; reason and all mental faculties.
In addition, God daily and abundantly provides shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and farm, spouse and children, fields, livestock, and all property – along with all the necessities and nourishment for this body and life. God protects me against all danger and shields and preserves me from all evil. And all this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all! For all of this I owe it to God to thank and praise, serve and obey him. This is most certainly true.
Giving thanks has been so drummed into us as Christians that we maybe, probably do it by rote and without thought.
And that’s just the point, isn’t it? By rote and without thought would get us through those other words of our Scripture readings tonight: “Do not worry about anything” … “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or wear.” We could just blissfully pass over them on the way to another wonderful Thanksgiving feast, waiting for us at home, the Turkey Day of our hopes and dreams.
Ah, but then it would be more than just the Israelites crossing DeNial, wouldn’t it?
Maybe that’s the reason I find it so hard to preach on Thanksgiving, especially these days, especially with these texts. For what kind of a cheap shot, callous word is this, in these miserable days of unemployment and budget cuts, economic uncertainty, desperation for so many? Today we just received the word from the 2010 Census that one in three Americans is either in or near poverty. “Don’t worry?” “Give thanks to the Lord with all your hearts?”
Sorry, God, I’m in no mood to be thankful. Not today. Not this year. And in fact, I’m pretty hacked off at those words, right there. They seem downright mean for so many, “don’t worry, be happy!”
But what if God’s rejoicing, God’s worry-less living, is not meant as some kind of knee-jerk response, not simply magic words we speak to “cover our bases” before we inhale our turkey and dressing … but rather, what if God’s thanksgiving is a state of being, a way of living, that we truly experience only through … that which signifies the loss of everything?
What if … real thankfulness … comes only … through the Cross?
Listen, O people of the body of Christ here tonight … Lutherans, Methodists, United Church of Christ and Disciples … we have been gifted by God to be in a unique place. We worship in churches which mark the liturgical year … the cycle of readings which follow Jesus’ life cycle. Tonight … and every Thanksgiving … we stand at the crossroads, between Christ the King Sunday and the first Sunday in Advent … between that which has been and that which will be.
On the one hand, we recall Christ the King’s Scriptures about Jesus, his final words and instructions as he makes his way to the Cross, which is his total emptying of self, the end of his earthly life, his total abandonment, the place where he cries “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
On the other, we anticipate those texts yet to come, the First Sunday in Advent, Jesus’ words about that which will be, after his death and resurrection, after his ascension to his Father and our Father in heaven, after these days of working and worshipping and waiting on our part … that great and glorious day when Jesus will come again to earth in his resurrected body, come to earth to make all things “on earth as it is in heaven,” to make all things new, finally and forever.
For us who worship under the sign of the Cross, we receive this National Day of Thanksgiving … a civic, a civil, holiday of our Government and Nation … we receive this day through the Cross … the Cross of Jesus Christ which puts to death … puts to death greed and want, hoarding and poverty, the sinfulness of how we humans treat each other, treat and steward God’s good creation, and treat God … the Cross of Jesus Christ puts it all to death, everything, once and for all, forever.
And this Cross of Jesus Christ also raises up … raises us up to see that, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, because he will come again to make all things new, because of this … we who have died along with Christ to the old ways of sin and death are also raised up to a new way of life … life in which we can say, “I have enough … enough to live … and enough to share” …
… we are raised up to generosity and giving to those who God especially entrusts to us, in our care … the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger and resident alien in our midst …
… we are given strength and courage to stand alongside them against the sinfulness and selfishness of the world … to give them hope … to give them material gain … so that they, too, may live, and know, and feel, the love of God through us.
We who have been claimed and named by Jesus Christ as his own … put to death through our Baptism into his death … raised again to life because of his Resurrection … we have been saved FOR something, and given this new life FOR something …
And that something, right here, right now, on this eve of the National Day of Thanksgiving, is a call to action … a redemption of Thanksgiving … not just one day of excess which kicks off a whole season of excess … but, instead, we hear Christ’s call to a simple and whole way of living, living which shows our death-and-resurrection-life to the world …
… living through Christ the King who claims us as his own, …
…living into the Advent of the One who has given us the real freedom to live, in the words of Luther, as “little Christs” here on earth.
Here is true, and real, Thanksgiving … a posture, a lifestyle, a life … in which we point compass-true to the One who gives us the real reason to be thankful … and gifts us with life and freedom to give so that others may be blessed through us … so that the words of that old, old prayer might have new life breathed into and through them, through us, not just tomorrow but through every day of our lives …
O Lord … Lord of the Cross, Lord of the empty Tomb, Lord of the Resurrection … for what we have received, for what is ours now, for what we are about to receive … MAKE US TRULY THANKFUL.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Thanksgiving Eve 2011
Deuteronomy 8:7-18 / Philippians 4:4-9 / Matthew 6:25-33
I like Thanksgiving. The holiday, that is. The food and family, the togetherness, yes, the football, too. It’s a great day. Probably, you’d say so too.
I also like Thanksgiving (the theological concept.) Giving thanks to God is a regular part of my prayer life. Probably, yours too.
But preaching on Thanksgiving … well, that’s a different story. I’ve managed to avoid it since 1998 … until tonight. Thanks to my friends.
Now, it’s not that I don’t enjoy having the opportunity to share the Word with you. That’s always a privilege and honor.
It’s just that, well, what word about Thankgiving should I share with you?
After all, Thanksgiving Day isn’t a church holiday. It’s not on our liturgical calendar. In our shared Western catholic liturgical tradition, it falls between Christ the King (the end of one liturgical or church year) and the First Sunday in Advent (the beginning of a new liturgical or church year).
But the National Day of Thanksgiving (the official name for tomorrow) is a civic holiday, declared so by the President of the United States each year. Even though we might want to credit the Pilgrims, it’s at the proclamation of the chief executive that we celebrate this day, ever since 1789, when George Washington penned these words at the end of the Revolutionary War, and declared the first official United States day of National Thanksgiving:
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor-- and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.
Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.
Note that he got both houses of Congress to agree to this. That in and of itself would be a reason for thanksgiving.
Washington’s Thanksgiving was for just that one year, 1789, only. It would be left to Abraham Lincoln who, in the midst of the Civil War, set the last Thursday in November as a National Day of Thanksgiving. In 1863, he did so with these words:
The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God ... No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.
Ever since then, the President has kept the tradition of Lincoln alive by declaring a National Day of Thanksgiving. And tonight and tomorrow, thousands of churches will hold services on this only civic holiday which is also recognized as a day of worship by the Church.
Perhaps I would just be better off to recognize that this is a civic holiday, and leave it to the words of the statesmen and women, of the ages and of today. There have been years when I’ve done just that. But I think you expect more than that tonight.
So maybe I should look to the Church for some symbol, some mark of this day to honor and speak of. But the Church has no particular symbols for this day ... unlike Christmas, with the juxtaposition of Santa and baby Jesus ... that doesn’t happen at Thanksgiving. That probably has to do with the fact that people of many faiths observe this day. So we all think of the little pilgrim girl, the little pilgrim boy, the turkey. They are cute, warm and fuzzy reminders of the day.
Still, that's a little odd, when you think about it, because those first Thanksgiving Days were far from warm and fuzzy. The legendary Pilgrims – they to whom we say, we owe this day – the Pilgrims had suffered famine and disease and poor harvests, and many of their number had died. The memories and wounds of the Revolutionary War which Washington had won were still fresh. And Lincoln was in the middle of a horrible Civil War. It’s hard to see how anyone could have seen “the ever watchful providence of Almighty God” at work in that.
But they did ... this nation at those hard times in its history nevertheless took the time, dedicated a day to giving thanks to the Creator for all the blessings it had received.
Perhaps they ... our thankful forebears ... perhaps the reason for their desire for national thankfulness ... was that they were familiar with the text from Deuteronomy which was our reading tonight ... and that they drew parallels between the experience of the Israelites and their own experiences in establishing the American nation.
Certainly Washington’s and Lincoln’s words in their Thanksgiving proclamations, they strongly echo what we just heard read from the Old Testament.
So perhaps here is our symbol … in the Word, where the civic holiday crosses over into the theological concept.
Moses and the Israelites had been through a lot ... the Exodus from Egypt ... hopefulness turned to whining and disobedience in the wilderness ... years of wandering. Now Moses was preparing them to finally come into the Land which God had promised to his people so long ago. Once more they heard the story of how God had been faithful to his people as they traveled through the desert ... the “ever-watchful providence of Almighty God” was at work, as their clothes did not wear out nor did their feet swell during those forty years. They were fed, and protected from the dangers of the trip. And once more they heard the promises of God about how wonderful the land would be ... “a land with flowing streams ... a land of wheat and barley ... a land where you will lack nothing.”
It all sounded so wonderful ... a place of great wealth, riches, and success for them. They would be at last able to “build fine houses and live in them” ... to see their herds and flocks, and their silver and gold, and all that they had, be multiplied. But Moses knew how fickle God’s people could be -- himself included. So he reminded them once again, when they had realized all these blessings, to give credit to whom credit was due for all of them ... to their God, who had brought them to this place and who was the source of all that they had.
“Remember,” Moses said. “Remember the Lord your God” when you are tempted to think that all your blessings have come from your own hands. “Remember,” Moses said, for all that you have is just God holding up God’s end of the deal, the covenant of blessing God made with Abraham ... and in your wealth, your end of the covenant is to be “blessed to be a blessing” -- to bless God and praise God for all you have been given, and also, to use what you have been given by God to help the orphan, the widow, the resident alien in your midst.
Well, certainly Israel waxed and waned in its “remembering” of God, honoring God and giving God the credit, the praise for all their blessings. And there did come a day when God’s people grew fickle, causing God to seemingly withdraw “His protection and favor” from them, as they went into exile.
But God remained faithful to his people even when they were not; they were brought out of exile; they were even sent a Savior, his own Son, who continued to echo this call to “return thanks” to God for all that he gives daily, even life itself. And praise and thanksgiving became a chief focus of Christian worship ... even our own in this day and time, as our shared Western catholic liturgy still includes a “Glory to God,” and many of our hymns reflect this theme of praise and thanksgiving to our creator.
We know this. We know as Christians that we’re supposed to give thanks … as the words of our Philippians reading exhort us, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” Our most simple prayers, the ones we first learn, are ones of thanksgiving: “God is great, God is good … let us thank God for our food.”
We Lutherans hear this call to thankfulness loud and clear in Martin Luther’s explanation to the First Article of the Creed:
I believe that God has created me together with all that exists. God has given me and still preserves my body and soul: eyes, ears, and all limbs and senses; reason and all mental faculties.
In addition, God daily and abundantly provides shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and farm, spouse and children, fields, livestock, and all property – along with all the necessities and nourishment for this body and life. God protects me against all danger and shields and preserves me from all evil. And all this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all! For all of this I owe it to God to thank and praise, serve and obey him. This is most certainly true.
Giving thanks has been so drummed into us as Christians that we maybe, probably do it by rote and without thought.
And that’s just the point, isn’t it? By rote and without thought would get us through those other words of our Scripture readings tonight: “Do not worry about anything” … “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or wear.” We could just blissfully pass over them on the way to another wonderful Thanksgiving feast, waiting for us at home, the Turkey Day of our hopes and dreams.
Ah, but then it would be more than just the Israelites crossing DeNial, wouldn’t it?
Maybe that’s the reason I find it so hard to preach on Thanksgiving, especially these days, especially with these texts. For what kind of a cheap shot, callous word is this, in these miserable days of unemployment and budget cuts, economic uncertainty, desperation for so many? Today we just received the word from the 2010 Census that one in three Americans is either in or near poverty. “Don’t worry?” “Give thanks to the Lord with all your hearts?”
Sorry, God, I’m in no mood to be thankful. Not today. Not this year. And in fact, I’m pretty hacked off at those words, right there. They seem downright mean for so many, “don’t worry, be happy!”
But what if God’s rejoicing, God’s worry-less living, is not meant as some kind of knee-jerk response, not simply magic words we speak to “cover our bases” before we inhale our turkey and dressing … but rather, what if God’s thanksgiving is a state of being, a way of living, that we truly experience only through … that which signifies the loss of everything?
What if … real thankfulness … comes only … through the Cross?
Listen, O people of the body of Christ here tonight … Lutherans, Methodists, United Church of Christ and Disciples … we have been gifted by God to be in a unique place. We worship in churches which mark the liturgical year … the cycle of readings which follow Jesus’ life cycle. Tonight … and every Thanksgiving … we stand at the crossroads, between Christ the King Sunday and the first Sunday in Advent … between that which has been and that which will be.
On the one hand, we recall Christ the King’s Scriptures about Jesus, his final words and instructions as he makes his way to the Cross, which is his total emptying of self, the end of his earthly life, his total abandonment, the place where he cries “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
On the other, we anticipate those texts yet to come, the First Sunday in Advent, Jesus’ words about that which will be, after his death and resurrection, after his ascension to his Father and our Father in heaven, after these days of working and worshipping and waiting on our part … that great and glorious day when Jesus will come again to earth in his resurrected body, come to earth to make all things “on earth as it is in heaven,” to make all things new, finally and forever.
For us who worship under the sign of the Cross, we receive this National Day of Thanksgiving … a civic, a civil, holiday of our Government and Nation … we receive this day through the Cross … the Cross of Jesus Christ which puts to death … puts to death greed and want, hoarding and poverty, the sinfulness of how we humans treat each other, treat and steward God’s good creation, and treat God … the Cross of Jesus Christ puts it all to death, everything, once and for all, forever.
And this Cross of Jesus Christ also raises up … raises us up to see that, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, because he will come again to make all things new, because of this … we who have died along with Christ to the old ways of sin and death are also raised up to a new way of life … life in which we can say, “I have enough … enough to live … and enough to share” …
… we are raised up to generosity and giving to those who God especially entrusts to us, in our care … the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger and resident alien in our midst …
… we are given strength and courage to stand alongside them against the sinfulness and selfishness of the world … to give them hope … to give them material gain … so that they, too, may live, and know, and feel, the love of God through us.
We who have been claimed and named by Jesus Christ as his own … put to death through our Baptism into his death … raised again to life because of his Resurrection … we have been saved FOR something, and given this new life FOR something …
And that something, right here, right now, on this eve of the National Day of Thanksgiving, is a call to action … a redemption of Thanksgiving … not just one day of excess which kicks off a whole season of excess … but, instead, we hear Christ’s call to a simple and whole way of living, living which shows our death-and-resurrection-life to the world …
… living through Christ the King who claims us as his own, …
…living into the Advent of the One who has given us the real freedom to live, in the words of Luther, as “little Christs” here on earth.
Here is true, and real, Thanksgiving … a posture, a lifestyle, a life … in which we point compass-true to the One who gives us the real reason to be thankful … and gifts us with life and freedom to give so that others may be blessed through us … so that the words of that old, old prayer might have new life breathed into and through them, through us, not just tomorrow but through every day of our lives …
O Lord … Lord of the Cross, Lord of the empty Tomb, Lord of the Resurrection … for what we have received, for what is ours now, for what we are about to receive … MAKE US TRULY THANKFUL.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Monday, November 21, 2011
20 November 2011
“Famous last words”
Matthew 25:31-46
Christ the King Sunday
20 November 2011
If you knew that the next words out of your mouth would be the last opportunity you would have to … make a public proclamation … try to influence others’ hearts and minds … make a lasting impression on others … what would you say?
Would it be something like Lou Gehrig’s famous retirement speech, words of gratitude offered to the crowd at Yankee Stadium: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Maybe you’d try and be humorous, like The Beatles in their final public concert, after recording “Get Back” on top of the building in Saville Row: “On behalf of the crew and ourselves, I hope we pass the audition.” Or perhaps you’d be more poignant, like Johnny Carson at the end his last broadcast: “I wish you a heartfelt goodnight.”
Today’s Gospel reading gives us that moment for Jesus. His days of public ministry have come to an end; the next verses begin the story of his passion and crucifixion.
So what do you think Jesus should say?
Should he leave us with a stern lecture about “pure doctrine,” exhorting us to lay out every bit of our faith in systematically intricate, well-constructed confessional theological statements with which no one can argue?
Should he implore us to liturgical correctness, emphasizing “right worship,” the proper way to pray, praise and give thanks to God?
Certainly he should focus on naming moral rights and wrongs, laying out what’s sinful and what’s not, so that we can congratulate good behavior on the one hand, and judge and condemn on the other.
But surprise! Jesus pulls a fast one. In these his last words of instruction before his Passion and crucifixion, he says … hey, what the kingdom of heaven is all about, what it’s going to be like when I come again to you … is … justice, love, service. Concern for the poor, the sick, those in prison, those on the margins of our society. That’s what it’s all about, Jesus says.
Now … it’s not that Jesus doesn’t care about that other business. He gave us pure doctrine already in the Great Commandments, earlier in Matthew’s gospel – “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart … and soul… and mind … and your neighbor as yourself. On these … hang all the law and the prophets.”
Right worship? He set that straight in a passage shortly before today’s … Matthew 23.23: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.”
And as for morality … Jesus’ words of the Sermon on the Mount up the ante. He calls suffering and sacrifice for others a God-blessed state; saying that those who practice meekness, making peace, and being persecuted for his sake are truly blessed; and also exhorting us not to resist an evildoer … if anyone strikes us on the right cheek, turn the other also … and to love our enemies, praying for those who persecute us.
But it’s here in the 25th chapter of Matthew that Jesus makes his real point. What truly concerned him then … what truly concerns him now … and what will truly concern him on that day when “The Son of Man comes in his glory,” is how we treat “the least” of our brothers and sisters in this life.
Right doctrine, right worship, right morality … they all take a back seat to this: how we treat the hungry, the poor, and the prisoner … the disenfranchised … the ones who don’t fit in, most of the time, with “nice people”… in fact, these are the ones whom the “nice people” would probably rather avoid, and ignore, sweep them under the carpet.
We might want to forget them. But Jesus doesn’t. Like all the prophets who came before him, from Isaiah and Amos right on through to John the Baptist, the ones who are usually the last on everyone else’ mind are the first people on Jesus’ mind.
Those who care for the poor, the powerless, those without a voice in this life, he says that they are the righteous ones… for in caring for them, they are really caring for Jesus. This is true religion … this is what right worship of God is all about … this is proper moral behavior.
And what of those who reject the poor and the powerless and those without a voice in this life … ignoring them, forgetting them, shoving them into the background, providing for themselves first at the expense of those who can least afford it, leaving them isolated and abandoned? Well, they are the ones who stand condemned. “Truly I tell you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
A Lutheran colleague of mine says that last sentence is precisely why he has a hate-love relationship with this text. He hates it because it seems to make what we do into the requirement for being blessed by God. And indeed, it sure seems that way. Where’s the grace?
But he also loves these words … because the ones who Jesus calls “righteous” are surprised. Here’s the grace. The ones who have been “doing to Jesus” don’t even realize it.
And that’s because their whole life attitude, their posture for living … doctrine, worship, morality … it comes as second nature to them … it’s just part of who they are. Their “doing to Jesus” doesn’t earn them heaven because they never understood faith to be this way.
And the goats … the ones who didn’t “do to Jesus” in this life … they are equally surprised, but for the opposite reason … they were so intent, so conscious of their posture of “rightness before God” … in doctrine, in worship, in morality … that they spent all their earthly time paying attention only to themselves, and missed the real opportunities to serve the Lord by serving “the least of these” … their neighbors who were truly in need.
It is like posture, after all … when “standing up straight” becomes second nature to us, we do it without thinking. When we’re always looking in the mirror and checking and rechecking “how we look,” we miss real life … it goes by us.
In he same way … our salvation, our being made right with God in Jesus … isn’t given to us so that we would stand around and preen and point out “how good and right we are.” No … our salvation is to be our very motivation for our neighbor’s emancipation … we are saved so that we would go and do for the “least of these” in the same way that Jesus comes and does for us, sinners that we all are. We have been given freedom and forgiveness from God in Jesus Christ, so we are to go and give – to the hungry, the poor, the sick, those in prison … in our pledges, our offerings, our prayers and our service.
You and I are saved for something … we are called to live justice … the gift of salvation is a call to go and do to and for “the least of these.”
And not some day in the future. You and I are called to do it now. We are called by our Lord and Savior to do it now. Right now. And every day from now on. Our posture … our doctrine, our worship, our morality … is to make sure that “the least of these” are not forgotten. We are called … called, not to sit, not to get comfortable, but to stand up straight and get to work.
This is Jesus’ way. This is Jesus’ work. This is Jesus’ faith. This is his final word to us … and the way he wants to find us when he comes again … our posture for living … not checking our selves in the mirror, but suddenly seeing in the mirror of the faces of our neighbors … that in serving them, we have truly been serving our Lord. Amen.
Matthew 25:31-46
Christ the King Sunday
20 November 2011
If you knew that the next words out of your mouth would be the last opportunity you would have to … make a public proclamation … try to influence others’ hearts and minds … make a lasting impression on others … what would you say?
Would it be something like Lou Gehrig’s famous retirement speech, words of gratitude offered to the crowd at Yankee Stadium: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Maybe you’d try and be humorous, like The Beatles in their final public concert, after recording “Get Back” on top of the building in Saville Row: “On behalf of the crew and ourselves, I hope we pass the audition.” Or perhaps you’d be more poignant, like Johnny Carson at the end his last broadcast: “I wish you a heartfelt goodnight.”
Today’s Gospel reading gives us that moment for Jesus. His days of public ministry have come to an end; the next verses begin the story of his passion and crucifixion.
So what do you think Jesus should say?
Should he leave us with a stern lecture about “pure doctrine,” exhorting us to lay out every bit of our faith in systematically intricate, well-constructed confessional theological statements with which no one can argue?
Should he implore us to liturgical correctness, emphasizing “right worship,” the proper way to pray, praise and give thanks to God?
Certainly he should focus on naming moral rights and wrongs, laying out what’s sinful and what’s not, so that we can congratulate good behavior on the one hand, and judge and condemn on the other.
But surprise! Jesus pulls a fast one. In these his last words of instruction before his Passion and crucifixion, he says … hey, what the kingdom of heaven is all about, what it’s going to be like when I come again to you … is … justice, love, service. Concern for the poor, the sick, those in prison, those on the margins of our society. That’s what it’s all about, Jesus says.
Now … it’s not that Jesus doesn’t care about that other business. He gave us pure doctrine already in the Great Commandments, earlier in Matthew’s gospel – “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart … and soul… and mind … and your neighbor as yourself. On these … hang all the law and the prophets.”
Right worship? He set that straight in a passage shortly before today’s … Matthew 23.23: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.”
And as for morality … Jesus’ words of the Sermon on the Mount up the ante. He calls suffering and sacrifice for others a God-blessed state; saying that those who practice meekness, making peace, and being persecuted for his sake are truly blessed; and also exhorting us not to resist an evildoer … if anyone strikes us on the right cheek, turn the other also … and to love our enemies, praying for those who persecute us.
But it’s here in the 25th chapter of Matthew that Jesus makes his real point. What truly concerned him then … what truly concerns him now … and what will truly concern him on that day when “The Son of Man comes in his glory,” is how we treat “the least” of our brothers and sisters in this life.
Right doctrine, right worship, right morality … they all take a back seat to this: how we treat the hungry, the poor, and the prisoner … the disenfranchised … the ones who don’t fit in, most of the time, with “nice people”… in fact, these are the ones whom the “nice people” would probably rather avoid, and ignore, sweep them under the carpet.
We might want to forget them. But Jesus doesn’t. Like all the prophets who came before him, from Isaiah and Amos right on through to John the Baptist, the ones who are usually the last on everyone else’ mind are the first people on Jesus’ mind.
Those who care for the poor, the powerless, those without a voice in this life, he says that they are the righteous ones… for in caring for them, they are really caring for Jesus. This is true religion … this is what right worship of God is all about … this is proper moral behavior.
And what of those who reject the poor and the powerless and those without a voice in this life … ignoring them, forgetting them, shoving them into the background, providing for themselves first at the expense of those who can least afford it, leaving them isolated and abandoned? Well, they are the ones who stand condemned. “Truly I tell you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
A Lutheran colleague of mine says that last sentence is precisely why he has a hate-love relationship with this text. He hates it because it seems to make what we do into the requirement for being blessed by God. And indeed, it sure seems that way. Where’s the grace?
But he also loves these words … because the ones who Jesus calls “righteous” are surprised. Here’s the grace. The ones who have been “doing to Jesus” don’t even realize it.
And that’s because their whole life attitude, their posture for living … doctrine, worship, morality … it comes as second nature to them … it’s just part of who they are. Their “doing to Jesus” doesn’t earn them heaven because they never understood faith to be this way.
And the goats … the ones who didn’t “do to Jesus” in this life … they are equally surprised, but for the opposite reason … they were so intent, so conscious of their posture of “rightness before God” … in doctrine, in worship, in morality … that they spent all their earthly time paying attention only to themselves, and missed the real opportunities to serve the Lord by serving “the least of these” … their neighbors who were truly in need.
It is like posture, after all … when “standing up straight” becomes second nature to us, we do it without thinking. When we’re always looking in the mirror and checking and rechecking “how we look,” we miss real life … it goes by us.
In he same way … our salvation, our being made right with God in Jesus … isn’t given to us so that we would stand around and preen and point out “how good and right we are.” No … our salvation is to be our very motivation for our neighbor’s emancipation … we are saved so that we would go and do for the “least of these” in the same way that Jesus comes and does for us, sinners that we all are. We have been given freedom and forgiveness from God in Jesus Christ, so we are to go and give – to the hungry, the poor, the sick, those in prison … in our pledges, our offerings, our prayers and our service.
You and I are saved for something … we are called to live justice … the gift of salvation is a call to go and do to and for “the least of these.”
And not some day in the future. You and I are called to do it now. We are called by our Lord and Savior to do it now. Right now. And every day from now on. Our posture … our doctrine, our worship, our morality … is to make sure that “the least of these” are not forgotten. We are called … called, not to sit, not to get comfortable, but to stand up straight and get to work.
This is Jesus’ way. This is Jesus’ work. This is Jesus’ faith. This is his final word to us … and the way he wants to find us when he comes again … our posture for living … not checking our selves in the mirror, but suddenly seeing in the mirror of the faces of our neighbors … that in serving them, we have truly been serving our Lord. Amen.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
23 October 2011
The Lord raised up deliverers – a series on Judges
“Natural law”
Conclusion: Judges 17 to end
Matthew 22:34-40
OT 30A / Time after Pentecost
23 October 2011
If I was to pick a one-word description for today’s theme, it would be interim… both our texts today are about being in an interim time … meaning, that they describe people and events who, which are between what has been, and what will be.
You and I … many, most of us, know this term well. In the church we most often associate it with interim ministry … the time between one settled pastor’s leaving, and another settled pastor’s arriving … Nativity, in our history, has had several interim pastors, most recently, for a three year period, from ten to seven years ago … a time which allowed this congregation to sort through and discern the bad and the good of who and where you had been, who and where you were at that “now,” and into what kind of future God was calling you to be.
Our Judges text for today is an interim text. It’s set in the time between the final judge … Samson, who we met last week … and the time of the kings which begins in 1 Samuel. A time between the “was,” “is,” and “will be” for Israel.
What I’ve selected for today is long enough … it’s actually just a piece of the concluding five chapters of Judges … the complete story there being far too long for us to cover in a Sunday worship service … but even with this briefer selection, we get the feel for what it going on in this interim time for the Israelites.
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.
Samson was dead. He had not been a successful judge – indeed, he was the worst of the judges, a selfish swaggering goon, in it primarily for himself … unsuccessful in throwing off the Philistine yoke of oppression.
That’s the backdrop for our text today. The Israelites might be whining and crying to God for relief from their oppression, but God is almost totally silent.
Who can blame God? God has lived through many repetitions of this cycle which set off every judge-saga:
• People forget about God;
• People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
• People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
• People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
• God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
• Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways.
A quote from Martin Luther does well to sum up where God is through these remaining chapters of Judges:
The god you imagine is the God you get.
Meaning that … since the Israelites imagined a god who just stood idly by while they went after idols, the “gods” of their neighbors … the Canaanites, the Philistines … God would cheerfully oblige their desires, by going on vacation. You don’t want me around … fine … see ya later!
Of course, in the judge-sagas just prior to where we’ve been in the book, God hears the whining and crying of his people, and sends a judge – a human deliverer – to deliver them. Ehud and Deborah, Barak and Jehu, Gideon and Jephthah, and yes, Samson … these all arrive on the scene and bring some level of deliverance and peace to God’s people … well, all except Samson.
But here … how many times is God’s presence mentioned? Once. And then, just in passing.
The god you imagine is the God you get. The Israelites imagined a God who didn’t want to be intimately involved -- in close relationship – with the people of his choosing, the people whom he went so far to save … so, indeed, that’s what they got.
What happens as a result? Another awful story. This time, because they aren’t willing … or just plain can’t … do anything about the larger problems of the world before them … the Israelites turn on themselves … each other.
I left out the most salacious parts of the tale – though you can certainly go to Judges chapter 19 and read it for yourselves … a incident which is bad enough is made worse by the lies of the unnamed Levite … he who is willing to put the entirety of God’s people on the line to cover up his own poor choices.
The object of the ire and rage of the majority of the tribes of the Israelites is their brother-tribe, Benjamin … (you will remember that Ehud was a member of this tribe) … there is an incident – an awful incident – and a horrid response … a decision is made for civil war, and civil war is indeed what the Israelites get.
And then God shows up… the one mention of God acting in this history is that the Lord defeated Benjamin before Israel… but I don’t believe we should read anything more into this text than that it is the outcome of a battle which we would expect, when an army of four hundred thousand takes on an army of twenty-six thousand. It is a natural law, a sure and certain outcome, based on sheer numbers and logic.
One thousand men of the tribe of Benjamin are left.
The outcome of the battle – successful as it was – turns out not to be what the rest of the tribes really wanted – that they’d now be down a tribe, from 12 to 11.
So a cockeyed scheme is hatched by the rest of Israel for the repopulation of their brother-tribe, which allows them to get around their own rule that they shouldn’t give their daughters in marriage to the remaining men of the renegade tribe of the Benjamanites.
And it works … at least, as far as this book is concerned.
And the whole book ends on that hopeless note which began this section …
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.
It’s a sad end for a book which gets off to a bad start … and maybe that’s why we don’t read from the book of Judges much in worship, in this or any other Christian church. In our lectionary-cycled way of things the liturgical churches ignore all the stories but the first part of the Deborah saga … but a quick survey of the Internet shows that our evangelical brothers and sisters, neither those of the more serious Mars Hill-like mindset, nor those of whom one of my colleagues calls the “happy-clappy” churches, they don’t read from or preach on this book any more than we.
Why is that?
After all, Judges is part of our heritage … our shared story of life with God, as God’s people, along the way.
Perhaps it’s because of the truths that this book makes so evident about ourselves.
Namely, that people … we … stink … as creators of our own destiny.
As Luther said, the god you imagine is the God you get. The people of Judges imagine a God they don’t really need, until things get so bad they see no way out. The downward spiral hits rock bottom (or so they think … because as the book points out, there is always a lower bottom to hit.)
It’s a depressing world view … and one in which salvation is seen as God’s answer to the people’s cry, “get me out of this, please!”
No wonder God is so absent through this book. God goes to all the trouble of bringing his people from slavery and bondage to freedom, gives them a good land and great potential ahead of them … and all they do is make a mess out of things … and end up whining for a ticket out. Save us, Lord. Get us out of this mess, Lord.
Two thousand years later … Jesus faces the same cries … desires … longings of his people, in our Gospel text today. Salvation … the Messiah … was the one who was going to come and “get them out of the mess they were in.”
The Pharisees, for their part, are still looking for someone to deliver them physically, like the judges of old, a king in the shape of a David, someone who would be Superman and “get them out of this mess” they had found themselves in … under Roman oppression, military occupation.
But Jesus isn’t going to buy into that old human pattern of salvation as escape from this present darkness. No … he points out that salvation is for the here and now of life.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
In other words, don’t love God as payment for a trip to a heavenly hereafter … don’t work for “God” or whatever image of God you cook up in your head, that you imagine, is going to be the one who “gets you out of here” … Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here … Jane, stop this crazy thing.
That may be the God you imagine … it may even be the God you try to put over on the world … creating lies like that Levite, fabricating the truth to make yourself look good …
… ah, but in the end, the end of the ‘natural law’ which Jesus truly lays out here … in the end … that is NOT the god you or I or anyone else will get.
Indeed, it is the end of “God as we imagine God” and the beginning of “God for us.”
Because the salvation of our God is ALL about living in the here and now, the kingdom of God coming on earth as it is in heaven … justice and mercy, fairness and blessing for all … you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
In other words, don’t look for salvation in anyone or any thing other than God … the God who sends his very self to us in Jesus … the God who comes to us as one of us, to live our life in all its suffering and joy, to die our death, but to rise again … to give us back life … full, rich, and abundant … life in this world, here and now, lived loving God and loving others … indeed, loving God through loving others … this life is not to be escaped from or rescued out of, but redeemed for us to live into completely, fully, naturally … naturally, the way God created it for us.
What a word for us as we are called to follow Jesus today.
For we are most certainly in a time, among a people, brothers and sisters who claim the name of Jesus, but who have so twisted the word of faith that the word about Jesus the world hears through them … their voices, being the loudest, shout “we don’t care about our world, God’s creation, or our neighbors … their poverty, their suffering, the abuse of this planet … Jesus, just get us out of here!”
But that is not God’s Word for us.
It is a lie … about God, about Christ, and about ourselves.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, our call is to lovingly, but firmly, steadfastly, and without backing down … to drown out their lie with the truth of God’s word … “No, I’m staying right here, in the thick of it … no matter how bad it gets … because Christ is here in the midst of it with me, and he calls me to be here, too, not just for his sake, but for yours.”
Sixty years ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, sitting in the Nazi Tegel prison, penned these words in a letter to a friend … Bonhoeffer, a man in a time most certainly worse than our own …
It is only by living completely in the world that one learns to have faith. By this I mean living unreservedly in life duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely in the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?
Indeed. The call of God is to be natural … naturally living into the law he gives us, to love God in and through loving others, in the here and now, even as we are saved for the here and now, even as we gather in the here and now to worship, to hear, to eat and drink God’s word of salvation, forgiveness, and new life.
We do not ignore the present for some future paradise … for Jesus says, all you need, all I give you, is right here, right now … my very self, given and shed for you, to go and live fully, so others may fully live.
In his name, and with his Word … Amen.
“Natural law”
Conclusion: Judges 17 to end
Matthew 22:34-40
OT 30A / Time after Pentecost
23 October 2011
If I was to pick a one-word description for today’s theme, it would be interim… both our texts today are about being in an interim time … meaning, that they describe people and events who, which are between what has been, and what will be.
You and I … many, most of us, know this term well. In the church we most often associate it with interim ministry … the time between one settled pastor’s leaving, and another settled pastor’s arriving … Nativity, in our history, has had several interim pastors, most recently, for a three year period, from ten to seven years ago … a time which allowed this congregation to sort through and discern the bad and the good of who and where you had been, who and where you were at that “now,” and into what kind of future God was calling you to be.
Our Judges text for today is an interim text. It’s set in the time between the final judge … Samson, who we met last week … and the time of the kings which begins in 1 Samuel. A time between the “was,” “is,” and “will be” for Israel.
What I’ve selected for today is long enough … it’s actually just a piece of the concluding five chapters of Judges … the complete story there being far too long for us to cover in a Sunday worship service … but even with this briefer selection, we get the feel for what it going on in this interim time for the Israelites.
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.
Samson was dead. He had not been a successful judge – indeed, he was the worst of the judges, a selfish swaggering goon, in it primarily for himself … unsuccessful in throwing off the Philistine yoke of oppression.
That’s the backdrop for our text today. The Israelites might be whining and crying to God for relief from their oppression, but God is almost totally silent.
Who can blame God? God has lived through many repetitions of this cycle which set off every judge-saga:
• People forget about God;
• People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
• People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
• People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
• God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
• Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways.
A quote from Martin Luther does well to sum up where God is through these remaining chapters of Judges:
The god you imagine is the God you get.
Meaning that … since the Israelites imagined a god who just stood idly by while they went after idols, the “gods” of their neighbors … the Canaanites, the Philistines … God would cheerfully oblige their desires, by going on vacation. You don’t want me around … fine … see ya later!
Of course, in the judge-sagas just prior to where we’ve been in the book, God hears the whining and crying of his people, and sends a judge – a human deliverer – to deliver them. Ehud and Deborah, Barak and Jehu, Gideon and Jephthah, and yes, Samson … these all arrive on the scene and bring some level of deliverance and peace to God’s people … well, all except Samson.
But here … how many times is God’s presence mentioned? Once. And then, just in passing.
The god you imagine is the God you get. The Israelites imagined a God who didn’t want to be intimately involved -- in close relationship – with the people of his choosing, the people whom he went so far to save … so, indeed, that’s what they got.
What happens as a result? Another awful story. This time, because they aren’t willing … or just plain can’t … do anything about the larger problems of the world before them … the Israelites turn on themselves … each other.
I left out the most salacious parts of the tale – though you can certainly go to Judges chapter 19 and read it for yourselves … a incident which is bad enough is made worse by the lies of the unnamed Levite … he who is willing to put the entirety of God’s people on the line to cover up his own poor choices.
The object of the ire and rage of the majority of the tribes of the Israelites is their brother-tribe, Benjamin … (you will remember that Ehud was a member of this tribe) … there is an incident – an awful incident – and a horrid response … a decision is made for civil war, and civil war is indeed what the Israelites get.
And then God shows up… the one mention of God acting in this history is that the Lord defeated Benjamin before Israel… but I don’t believe we should read anything more into this text than that it is the outcome of a battle which we would expect, when an army of four hundred thousand takes on an army of twenty-six thousand. It is a natural law, a sure and certain outcome, based on sheer numbers and logic.
One thousand men of the tribe of Benjamin are left.
The outcome of the battle – successful as it was – turns out not to be what the rest of the tribes really wanted – that they’d now be down a tribe, from 12 to 11.
So a cockeyed scheme is hatched by the rest of Israel for the repopulation of their brother-tribe, which allows them to get around their own rule that they shouldn’t give their daughters in marriage to the remaining men of the renegade tribe of the Benjamanites.
And it works … at least, as far as this book is concerned.
And the whole book ends on that hopeless note which began this section …
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.
It’s a sad end for a book which gets off to a bad start … and maybe that’s why we don’t read from the book of Judges much in worship, in this or any other Christian church. In our lectionary-cycled way of things the liturgical churches ignore all the stories but the first part of the Deborah saga … but a quick survey of the Internet shows that our evangelical brothers and sisters, neither those of the more serious Mars Hill-like mindset, nor those of whom one of my colleagues calls the “happy-clappy” churches, they don’t read from or preach on this book any more than we.
Why is that?
After all, Judges is part of our heritage … our shared story of life with God, as God’s people, along the way.
Perhaps it’s because of the truths that this book makes so evident about ourselves.
Namely, that people … we … stink … as creators of our own destiny.
As Luther said, the god you imagine is the God you get. The people of Judges imagine a God they don’t really need, until things get so bad they see no way out. The downward spiral hits rock bottom (or so they think … because as the book points out, there is always a lower bottom to hit.)
It’s a depressing world view … and one in which salvation is seen as God’s answer to the people’s cry, “get me out of this, please!”
No wonder God is so absent through this book. God goes to all the trouble of bringing his people from slavery and bondage to freedom, gives them a good land and great potential ahead of them … and all they do is make a mess out of things … and end up whining for a ticket out. Save us, Lord. Get us out of this mess, Lord.
Two thousand years later … Jesus faces the same cries … desires … longings of his people, in our Gospel text today. Salvation … the Messiah … was the one who was going to come and “get them out of the mess they were in.”
The Pharisees, for their part, are still looking for someone to deliver them physically, like the judges of old, a king in the shape of a David, someone who would be Superman and “get them out of this mess” they had found themselves in … under Roman oppression, military occupation.
But Jesus isn’t going to buy into that old human pattern of salvation as escape from this present darkness. No … he points out that salvation is for the here and now of life.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
In other words, don’t love God as payment for a trip to a heavenly hereafter … don’t work for “God” or whatever image of God you cook up in your head, that you imagine, is going to be the one who “gets you out of here” … Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here … Jane, stop this crazy thing.
That may be the God you imagine … it may even be the God you try to put over on the world … creating lies like that Levite, fabricating the truth to make yourself look good …
… ah, but in the end, the end of the ‘natural law’ which Jesus truly lays out here … in the end … that is NOT the god you or I or anyone else will get.
Indeed, it is the end of “God as we imagine God” and the beginning of “God for us.”
Because the salvation of our God is ALL about living in the here and now, the kingdom of God coming on earth as it is in heaven … justice and mercy, fairness and blessing for all … you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
In other words, don’t look for salvation in anyone or any thing other than God … the God who sends his very self to us in Jesus … the God who comes to us as one of us, to live our life in all its suffering and joy, to die our death, but to rise again … to give us back life … full, rich, and abundant … life in this world, here and now, lived loving God and loving others … indeed, loving God through loving others … this life is not to be escaped from or rescued out of, but redeemed for us to live into completely, fully, naturally … naturally, the way God created it for us.
What a word for us as we are called to follow Jesus today.
For we are most certainly in a time, among a people, brothers and sisters who claim the name of Jesus, but who have so twisted the word of faith that the word about Jesus the world hears through them … their voices, being the loudest, shout “we don’t care about our world, God’s creation, or our neighbors … their poverty, their suffering, the abuse of this planet … Jesus, just get us out of here!”
But that is not God’s Word for us.
It is a lie … about God, about Christ, and about ourselves.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, our call is to lovingly, but firmly, steadfastly, and without backing down … to drown out their lie with the truth of God’s word … “No, I’m staying right here, in the thick of it … no matter how bad it gets … because Christ is here in the midst of it with me, and he calls me to be here, too, not just for his sake, but for yours.”
Sixty years ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, sitting in the Nazi Tegel prison, penned these words in a letter to a friend … Bonhoeffer, a man in a time most certainly worse than our own …
It is only by living completely in the world that one learns to have faith. By this I mean living unreservedly in life duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely in the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?
Indeed. The call of God is to be natural … naturally living into the law he gives us, to love God in and through loving others, in the here and now, even as we are saved for the here and now, even as we gather in the here and now to worship, to hear, to eat and drink God’s word of salvation, forgiveness, and new life.
We do not ignore the present for some future paradise … for Jesus says, all you need, all I give you, is right here, right now … my very self, given and shed for you, to go and live fully, so others may fully live.
In his name, and with his Word … Amen.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
16 October 2011
The Lord raised up deliverers – a series on Judges
Samson – Judges 13 through 15
Also including 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
OT 29A / Time after Pentecost
16 October 2011
And so we have come to the last of the judges from the book of that same name … and oh, what a leader we have before us today! Such might and strength, such bravado and swagger, such a womanizer … no, it’s not a certain Austrian bodybuilder turned actor turned governor of California … but Samson. Samson is the final judge in this series of human deliverers God sends to his people Israel.
Samson’s story is also the longest of the judge-sagas … spanning four entire chapters of the book. That makes it far too long for reading in its entirety during Sunday worship … so I chose some selections which would fit within our time frame today.
We begin in chapter 13 with the same old refrain which has started each new judge saga … “The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord …” and this time, the enemies at whose hands they begin to suffer are the Philistines … a name which should be quite familiar to us today, as we pronounce it Palestinians … here is a rivalry for the land which goes back thousands and thousands of years.
And so the usual cycle of things, apparent in each judge-story, is also present here:
• People forget about God;
• People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
• People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
• People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
• God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
• Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways.
What we have before us today, though, as our printed portion, doesn’t include all these steps. Since these “missing” are the more well-known parts of the Samson saga, I chose to leave them out. So what did we miss by not including them?
• Samson, like so many of the patriarchs before him and at least one prophet after him (Samuel), is born to a childless woman … and when she does become pregnant, Samson’s mother vows that he will be a Nazirite, citing the sixth chapter of the book of Numbers, which outlines the procedures for being one “consecrated to the Lord” (for that is what Nazirite means). The two main requirements are that the Nazirite will not drink wine or strong spirits, nor will a razor ever touch their hair.
• … and, for those who know the Samson story, that hair piece (ha ha) becomes vitally important for Samson later on in his story … the story at the end of his story, the most well-known part, Samson’s falling for Delilah … which leads to the breaking of his Nazirite vow, the loss of his superhuman strength, his blinding by the Philistines, and his violent death … in which he took out more Philistines than he did in his whole life.
But those parts of Samson’s story, well-known as they are … to which you may return on your own (they are in chapters 13 and 16 of Judges) … that’s NOT what’s before us today.
What we DO have here … are stories which point out why Biblical scholars call the Samson saga “the moral low point of the book.” Indeed, the Bible I use most often, the Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version, puts this summary-note on this story:
The final “deliverer” is the moral low point of the major judges. Samson broke his Nazirite vows, had intercourse with non-Israelite women (something forbidden by God), never associated with other Israelites in his conflicts with the Philistines, and did not deliver the Israelites from the Philistine oppression.
As we take a closer look at these selections from the 14th and 15th chapters of Judges, we see this unfold.
These three stories, joined together as they are today, do have a common thread. Samson is a Lone Ranger kind of judge, to be sure … whereas the other judges may have lit the fires of rebellion in a similar manner, they always went back and enlisted the aid of their fellow Israelites in continuing the battle to throw off their oppressors. Not Samson. His is an “hasta la vista, baby” go-it-alone swagger-style.
At first, God is mentioned as a reason why Samson does as he does … violating God’s law by taking a non-Israelite for his wife. His parents know God’s rules, and protest. But Samson prevails, “Get her for me, because she pleases me.” It is said that this was from the Lord, for he was seeking a pretext to act against the Philistines.
But that’s the last mention of God in any of these sections of Samson’s story. In the whole of the Samson saga, God is mentioned only three more times … passages not before us today … and in most of those, times when Samson called on God to rescue HIM, because his swagger-style had gotten him into trouble.
So what shall we make of Samson, then? Obviously his is a tale far worse than the Sunday-school-image we’ve passed along over the years … far more PG-13 or even R-rated than G … this womanizing, petulant, faith-fraud, short-fused flier off the handle … unwanting, unwilling of the help of any of his countrymen … a go it alone “my way or the highway” kind of guy …
… and yet, and yet, THIS is the one God chose for the task at hand. Yes, he failed at it … he didn’t shake off the Philistines … and his judgeship was one of endless war with them … but still, God chose him for the task.
Why?
Well, again, we need to go back to that six-step process which tells the tale of each judge-saga in this book of Judges … the Israelites always sin, and that sin ALWAYS has to do with their dissing God … their real deliverer, the one who not long before had rescued them from their Egyptian oppressors … they Israelites diss God, and so God says … OK, you don’t want me around, I’ll oblige … you’ll see what life will be like without me.
Now, God always hears the Israelites’ cries, and God always sends them a human deliverer … a judge … to rescue them from themselves and their ways which led them once again into servitude and subjugation at the hands of other nations … but we must note this about those judge-deliverers … each one of them had shortcomings … failings … some kind of behavior which would make us question their fitness to be worthy of that name … deliverer.
Ehud was plain gross. Deborah, Barak and Jehu upset the social norms of their … and our … time. Gideon questioned God’s choosing him. Jephthah made that horrible vow which cost his daughter her life. And Samson was a great big jerk.
And that’s precisely the point God’s making here. Do not totally trust in human deliverers … human rulers … for they will fail you totally. We see this here in these judge-sagas … we continue to see it in the stories of the kings of Israel and Judah which follow, in the books of Chronicles and Kings … we’ve seen it throughout history … the history of kings and queens, princes of the church and reformers of the church, politicians and presidents … yes, even and especially today.
DO NOT PUT YOUR FAITH IN LEADERS OF FLESH AND BLOOD, FOR THEY WILL FAIL YOU.
God knows this about us. God saw it even then … during and through the times of the Judges, the kings … the exile and the return … the takeover of Israel by Rome.
So God decided to make a change. God decided to send One of himself … his own Son … for a personal delivery of humanity from all that we bring upon ourselves.
That’s the message Paul brings as he begins his first letter to the Thessalonians … a message coming in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction… we need no human deliverers because in Jesus, God has sent himself to deliver all of humanity, all of creation. Jesus – fully God so that where human deliverers have failed, he will not … but also fully human so that he gets what is going on with us … living our life, suffering as we suffer, rejoicing as we rejoice … dying our death … yet, raised to new life, to give us the same promise and hope.
We need no human deliverers, no human rescuers … because in Jesus, God has sent his very self to rescue us. Wrath … bad stuff … has happened and is happening and will continue to happen … to be sure … and it will always be tempting to turn to human rescuers … smooth talkers offering easy solutions to the difficult, complex problems of living in the 21st century. Swagger and bravado can be quite appealing to us.
And yet … as Paul writes … our God says, don’t choose rescuers with hearts of stone and feet of clay … for these can become false gods, idols … instead, turn to God, and THE rescuer he sends us, the fully God-fully man named Jesus Christ … who will guide us in our living in these difficult days … guide us to work while we wait … to live out our calling to go and tell, to do his work … his work, which we discern as we read his Word, worship in his Word, eat and drink his Word … a Word which exhorts and implores us to be his feet and his hands in going to those who the world rejects … the poor and the powerless, the downtrodden and despised, the meek and suffering, the ones the world considers of little account … to these we are called to go and serve, to live with and love in the name of the Son of God, who comes to us and claims us as his own … without swagger, without bravado … just quietly, patiently, working his will in the world.
Will we stumble? Will we fail? Of course. But that’s no excuse to not get up and get going. Remember that God called Ehud and Barak, Jephthah and Gideon and yes, even Samson, to his task … since God called those to his Word, and was with them … God will most certainly be with us, too, as we share in this most blessed of callings … to serve a living and true God, THE living and true God, while we wait for his Son from heaven, who he raised from the dead … Jesus … our rescuer, in whose name we worship and work and live.
Amen.
Samson – Judges 13 through 15
Also including 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
OT 29A / Time after Pentecost
16 October 2011
And so we have come to the last of the judges from the book of that same name … and oh, what a leader we have before us today! Such might and strength, such bravado and swagger, such a womanizer … no, it’s not a certain Austrian bodybuilder turned actor turned governor of California … but Samson. Samson is the final judge in this series of human deliverers God sends to his people Israel.
Samson’s story is also the longest of the judge-sagas … spanning four entire chapters of the book. That makes it far too long for reading in its entirety during Sunday worship … so I chose some selections which would fit within our time frame today.
We begin in chapter 13 with the same old refrain which has started each new judge saga … “The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord …” and this time, the enemies at whose hands they begin to suffer are the Philistines … a name which should be quite familiar to us today, as we pronounce it Palestinians … here is a rivalry for the land which goes back thousands and thousands of years.
And so the usual cycle of things, apparent in each judge-story, is also present here:
• People forget about God;
• People start worshipping other gods, primarily the gods of their neighbors;
• People start to suffer at the hands of their enemies (plunderers who plundered them);
• People lift up their voices and weep at their misfortune;
• God sends a judge to deliver them from their enemies;
• Judge dies and people go back to their stubborn, disobedient ways.
What we have before us today, though, as our printed portion, doesn’t include all these steps. Since these “missing” are the more well-known parts of the Samson saga, I chose to leave them out. So what did we miss by not including them?
• Samson, like so many of the patriarchs before him and at least one prophet after him (Samuel), is born to a childless woman … and when she does become pregnant, Samson’s mother vows that he will be a Nazirite, citing the sixth chapter of the book of Numbers, which outlines the procedures for being one “consecrated to the Lord” (for that is what Nazirite means). The two main requirements are that the Nazirite will not drink wine or strong spirits, nor will a razor ever touch their hair.
• … and, for those who know the Samson story, that hair piece (ha ha) becomes vitally important for Samson later on in his story … the story at the end of his story, the most well-known part, Samson’s falling for Delilah … which leads to the breaking of his Nazirite vow, the loss of his superhuman strength, his blinding by the Philistines, and his violent death … in which he took out more Philistines than he did in his whole life.
But those parts of Samson’s story, well-known as they are … to which you may return on your own (they are in chapters 13 and 16 of Judges) … that’s NOT what’s before us today.
What we DO have here … are stories which point out why Biblical scholars call the Samson saga “the moral low point of the book.” Indeed, the Bible I use most often, the Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version, puts this summary-note on this story:
The final “deliverer” is the moral low point of the major judges. Samson broke his Nazirite vows, had intercourse with non-Israelite women (something forbidden by God), never associated with other Israelites in his conflicts with the Philistines, and did not deliver the Israelites from the Philistine oppression.
As we take a closer look at these selections from the 14th and 15th chapters of Judges, we see this unfold.
These three stories, joined together as they are today, do have a common thread. Samson is a Lone Ranger kind of judge, to be sure … whereas the other judges may have lit the fires of rebellion in a similar manner, they always went back and enlisted the aid of their fellow Israelites in continuing the battle to throw off their oppressors. Not Samson. His is an “hasta la vista, baby” go-it-alone swagger-style.
At first, God is mentioned as a reason why Samson does as he does … violating God’s law by taking a non-Israelite for his wife. His parents know God’s rules, and protest. But Samson prevails, “Get her for me, because she pleases me.” It is said that this was from the Lord, for he was seeking a pretext to act against the Philistines.
But that’s the last mention of God in any of these sections of Samson’s story. In the whole of the Samson saga, God is mentioned only three more times … passages not before us today … and in most of those, times when Samson called on God to rescue HIM, because his swagger-style had gotten him into trouble.
So what shall we make of Samson, then? Obviously his is a tale far worse than the Sunday-school-image we’ve passed along over the years … far more PG-13 or even R-rated than G … this womanizing, petulant, faith-fraud, short-fused flier off the handle … unwanting, unwilling of the help of any of his countrymen … a go it alone “my way or the highway” kind of guy …
… and yet, and yet, THIS is the one God chose for the task at hand. Yes, he failed at it … he didn’t shake off the Philistines … and his judgeship was one of endless war with them … but still, God chose him for the task.
Why?
Well, again, we need to go back to that six-step process which tells the tale of each judge-saga in this book of Judges … the Israelites always sin, and that sin ALWAYS has to do with their dissing God … their real deliverer, the one who not long before had rescued them from their Egyptian oppressors … they Israelites diss God, and so God says … OK, you don’t want me around, I’ll oblige … you’ll see what life will be like without me.
Now, God always hears the Israelites’ cries, and God always sends them a human deliverer … a judge … to rescue them from themselves and their ways which led them once again into servitude and subjugation at the hands of other nations … but we must note this about those judge-deliverers … each one of them had shortcomings … failings … some kind of behavior which would make us question their fitness to be worthy of that name … deliverer.
Ehud was plain gross. Deborah, Barak and Jehu upset the social norms of their … and our … time. Gideon questioned God’s choosing him. Jephthah made that horrible vow which cost his daughter her life. And Samson was a great big jerk.
And that’s precisely the point God’s making here. Do not totally trust in human deliverers … human rulers … for they will fail you totally. We see this here in these judge-sagas … we continue to see it in the stories of the kings of Israel and Judah which follow, in the books of Chronicles and Kings … we’ve seen it throughout history … the history of kings and queens, princes of the church and reformers of the church, politicians and presidents … yes, even and especially today.
DO NOT PUT YOUR FAITH IN LEADERS OF FLESH AND BLOOD, FOR THEY WILL FAIL YOU.
God knows this about us. God saw it even then … during and through the times of the Judges, the kings … the exile and the return … the takeover of Israel by Rome.
So God decided to make a change. God decided to send One of himself … his own Son … for a personal delivery of humanity from all that we bring upon ourselves.
That’s the message Paul brings as he begins his first letter to the Thessalonians … a message coming in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction… we need no human deliverers because in Jesus, God has sent himself to deliver all of humanity, all of creation. Jesus – fully God so that where human deliverers have failed, he will not … but also fully human so that he gets what is going on with us … living our life, suffering as we suffer, rejoicing as we rejoice … dying our death … yet, raised to new life, to give us the same promise and hope.
We need no human deliverers, no human rescuers … because in Jesus, God has sent his very self to rescue us. Wrath … bad stuff … has happened and is happening and will continue to happen … to be sure … and it will always be tempting to turn to human rescuers … smooth talkers offering easy solutions to the difficult, complex problems of living in the 21st century. Swagger and bravado can be quite appealing to us.
And yet … as Paul writes … our God says, don’t choose rescuers with hearts of stone and feet of clay … for these can become false gods, idols … instead, turn to God, and THE rescuer he sends us, the fully God-fully man named Jesus Christ … who will guide us in our living in these difficult days … guide us to work while we wait … to live out our calling to go and tell, to do his work … his work, which we discern as we read his Word, worship in his Word, eat and drink his Word … a Word which exhorts and implores us to be his feet and his hands in going to those who the world rejects … the poor and the powerless, the downtrodden and despised, the meek and suffering, the ones the world considers of little account … to these we are called to go and serve, to live with and love in the name of the Son of God, who comes to us and claims us as his own … without swagger, without bravado … just quietly, patiently, working his will in the world.
Will we stumble? Will we fail? Of course. But that’s no excuse to not get up and get going. Remember that God called Ehud and Barak, Jephthah and Gideon and yes, even Samson, to his task … since God called those to his Word, and was with them … God will most certainly be with us, too, as we share in this most blessed of callings … to serve a living and true God, THE living and true God, while we wait for his Son from heaven, who he raised from the dead … Jesus … our rescuer, in whose name we worship and work and live.
Amen.
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