“Hope grows up”
1st Sunday of Christmas C
Luke 2:41-52 / Colossians 3:12-17
30 December 2012
One of the “big money clips” videos on America’s Funniest Home Videos ... which means it gets played over and over again ... shows a kindergarten graduation ceremony, complete with podium, caps, gowns and diplomas ... and the teacher, inviting each child forward, asking them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The answers they give are routine ... “fireman” ... “teacher” ... until one little boy, thinking about his answer longer than the rest, finally says, “I don’t want to grow up.”
A truthful answer, but an unavoidable outcome. Because we all grow up ... mature ... age ... it is the way of things. Time passes, and things change ... sometimes, too fast, and yes, sometimes too slow ... but this is life, and to live means to change and grow.
Change and growth is what we get in our Gospel reading today. It’s the first Sunday of Christmas, we’re just twenty short verses away from our Nativity scene-story, but how things have changed from what we heard here last Monday night. It’s now the pre-teen, middle-school-aged Jesus we have before us ... with mom and dad, twelve years older too, on the journey they’d taken every year as part of their religious ... and parental duty as well ... going up to Jerusalem for the central festival of their faith.
We need to take care how we hear, how we read, how we interpret this story. Like so much of these early chapters of Luke’s Gospel ... with its stories that set the stage for all that’s to come afterwards ... we must not get distracted by the shiny little threads which we can find along the way. Just as some would prefer to make a lot out of Mary’s young age when she gets the news that she is to bear Jesus ... even though there’s nothing in the text itself which says how old or young she was ... others will choose to focus on what’s not in this text which we have before us today.
Some choose to speculate as to why there’s such a gap in the narrative, between Jesus’ birth, his first time at the Temple in Jerusalem ... his presentation as a baby, which is told of in the verses between the Christmas Eve story and today’s reading ... and the reading we have before us today, when Jesus is twelve ... so some spend much time and effort speculating about those ‘missing years’ ... what happened to Jesus between age one and age twelve, what he did, where he lived, the rest of his family.
Those are shiny threads, to be sure. But the problem with shiny threads is that they can distract us from the substance of the fabric itself. And there’s more than enough fabric, a rich full narrative of Luke’s Gospel of Jesus’ life and ministry, which we DO have before us, to keep our attention. And the fabric of Luke’s narrative about Jesus is that God has intervened at a time, in a place, right HERE in history, in order to change the course of history forever ... everything which has happened before and will happen hereafter needs to, must be viewed through this “Jesus lens,” if you will, because this is how God chooses to come to his people to make a new way for them, for us, for all of creation ... as the angel tells Mary, “of his kingdom there will be no end.”
In other words, hope must grow up ... the baby Jesus , the infant presented in the Temple ... he must become the adolescent staying behind in his Father’s house, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions ... worrying his parents when they realize that he’s not with them.
And Jesus’ earthly parents get another reminder of that in these Gospel words today ... as if Mary needed that reminder, given how she received the first news of Jesus’ coming, in the greeting and call from the angel ... and the visit of the shepherds to the manger after his birth ... but the link between these surprising events and the ones we read, hear of today ... the link is drawn for us; just as at the end of the Christmas story, so too today, we hear that Jesus’ mother “treasured all these things in her heart.”
For the heart is where hope grows up, hope matures and takes hold in our lives, the heart is where this all gets worked out for us ... so that we can be changed from the inside out ... and hope will continue to grow and change within us, so that we can, will be messengers of hope ... in our families, our workplaces, our schools and faith communities ... into the world God loves and sends his Son to save ... US ... to bring us into God’s eternal heart of love and life, forgiveness and peace, forever.
And hope growing up ... this also serves to remind us that the thing with growing up is that it may not turn out the way you and I, that we planned ... but it’s still hope.
There is a LOT of Jesus’ story in Luke’s Gospel ahead of us ... we have only scratched the surface in these four short weeks of Advent ... on Christmas Eve ... on this First Sunday of Christmas. Yes, it’s the same Gospel we heard three years ago, as we make our way through this circular cycle that is the lectionary and church year, this three year rotation of texts and themes, days and festivals ... but we are not the same people we were three years ago ... we are not the same faith community we were three years ago ... or three times three years ago.
When you and I started our journey together now, going on nine years ago, it was the Gospel of Luke which was our text and guide through those initial days of the late summer and fall of 2004.
For those of you who were here then, it was, we were certainly a different Nativity back then.
Hope grows up.
I was reminded of this on Christmas Eve. There were a lot of new faces ... reflective of the fact that our congregation has grown and changed much in those nine years ... there are more of us now who don’t at all remember what Nativity was like before 2004, than do.
But for those who were here in those days and who do remember, well, I watched your faces Monday night. And what I saw, was Wonder. Amazement. And Joy. This was what you had hoped for, what so many of you have prayed and worked so hard for, over the past decade. Numbers tell only part of the story ... but they do make a point: Almost two hundred fifty in worship on Christmas Eve ... Sunday worship attendance, over a hundred, for the first time since the early 1990s ... an active children’s and youth education and ministry program ... and service, God’s love actively lived out into our community and stretching all around the world.
Hope had, indeed, grown up.
And so I think it’s time ... time to officially mark the day ... as with our children when they reach milestone events in their lives ... Nativity, people of new birth, people of new life, let it be said, let it be heard, that the name which was placed on you as you began this millennium, you who were then a small but dedicated group of the faithful,... Nativity, you who were named a “redevelopment parish” of the Northwest Washington Synod ... I, who was called as your servant-leader following one who had begun this good work among you ... we who have been plowing this ground well here in Fairwood ... today, we have reached a milestone, together.
We’re no longer a ‘redevelopment.’ We are vital, and alive, and active, and growing, in faith, and love, and service.
Hope has, indeed, grown up.
So now what?
That’s the question, into which we’ll be living together NOW. Like Mary, keep those past events close, and treasure them in your hearts. As we continue to go and grow together, those memories will remind us of what hope was like then, and give us a clue of what hope will be like, now, and into God’s future.
As for how we begin ... we will start this new hope together as we have always started together ... steeped in God’s Word. This year, we will worship our way through Luke’s Gospel ... a particular Word about the incarnate Word, Jesus speaking and living out how “his kingdom will have no end,” particularly to those who always are on its out-side ... the poor, the powerless, the weak, the suffering, the depressed and oppressed. And we’ll be asking, What might, how might we be guided as Christ’s agents, his bodies and voices, hearts and hands of hope, into the world, to bring God’s kingdom of justice, mercy, peace and hope to these brothers and sisters who Jesus particularly loves?
We’ll learn as we grow, together ... those words of Colossians today, wonderful instruction and guidance as we begin ... that we would be compassionate, kind, humble, meek and patient ... bearing with one another, always being full of forgiveness, Christ’s peace, and thankfulness.
We’ll grow into those words, that life together ... in this community, hearing God’s word of forgiveness, grace, welcome, love and peace ...
... at this table, as we dine together at Jesus’ invitation ... and leave it, fed and nourished, blessed, empowered, sent to serve at his urging.
And we will not sit still ... for hope must continue to grow through us, both outwardly and inwardly, as we seek to deepen our exploration of what it means to be living, loving, saved by God’s grace, children of God; called, gathered, and sent into places which so need to hear, to feel, to receive HOPE ... HOPE, through us, God’s chosen agents of HOPE.
Some are as close as our own families ... others, in our schools and workplaces and community gathering spots ... to places, to people we are called to be, to live, to continue to grow into the people God is calling us to be, Nativity, people of new birth, people of God’s new, rich, full, abundant life.
Hope grows up. And keeps growing, and going, in and among us.
This is God’s word of promise, hope and joy for us as we enter another calendar year together, another year of God’s grace.
Of Jesus’ kingdom there will be no end.
A blessed ... faith- ... service- ... hope-filled New Year to you ... as God brings us, as Jesus leads us, together into the future he has already prepared for us.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
24 December 2012
Christmas Eve
“Hope is here!”
24 December 2012
Many of us like to go to movies during these Christmas-New Year’s weeks. Many of us prefer to stay home and watch the Old Movies on TV instead.
I fall into that latter category ... probably some of you do too ... and so, we’ve been treated to numerous airings of “White Christmas,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” and the multiple versions of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”
But one rarity made it onto AMC a week or so ago ... that wonderful 1968 classic ... set in a medieval Christmas of 1183 AD but with dialog rich with double meanings, written for that most difficult year in our more recent American history ... I’m talking about The Lion In Winter.
Near the end, Peter O’ Toole as King Henry II – who has many, many such wonderful lines in the film ... speaking to Katherine Hepburn, she playing Eleanor of Aquitaine ... near the end of the film Peter O’Toole utters my favorite line:
We’re both alive, and that’s what hope is.
We’re both alive, and that’s what hope is.
We are alive, and that is something to celebrate, isn’t it?
Certainly, fresh off yet another in a long, long line of failed predictions about “the end of the world,” we can and do jokingly rejoice and give thanks for still being here ... but don’t let the hysterics of a few cheapen the weightiness of this statement ... We are alive, and that’s what hope is.
It has been a year, that’s for sure ... a year since we gathered here last to mark this Night of Nights, for us, and for all the world.
We have been around one full cycle once more ... from shortest days and longest nights, the darkness of winter, through the rebirth of spring, a most glorious, warm, sunny summer and early fall, then sliding back into greyness and rain once again.
And that’s just been the weather-year.
For us, for all, the rest of this year of living has had its share of ups and downs, blessings and banes, sorrows and joys, losses and gains; in some ways, like every other year that comes along. In other ways, most unlike other years. We give thanks for the gains and suffer and mourn the losses, that is for sure ... but through all that, we must not forget tonight that
We are alive, and that’s what hope is.
That is, after all, why we have a celebration in the middle of winter, as we mark things in the Northern Hemisphere of the world. In the midst of the darkness of this time of year, there has seemingly always been time for celebration ... witness the winter solstice celebrations which go back thousands, tens of thousands of years, filling that basic of human needs ... to be hopeful. I found a few words on Wikipedia that allude to just that:
The winter solstice [was] immensely important because communities were not certain of living through the winter, and had to be prepared during the previous nine months. Starvation was common in winter between January and April. In temperate climates, the midwinter festival was the last feast celebration, before deep winter began. Most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed during the winter, so it was almost the only time of year when a supply of fresh meat was available. And the majority of wine and beer made during the year was finally fermented and ready for drinking at this time.
Celebration and hope ... for millennia ... in celebrations Druidic ... Greek, Iranian, East Indian ... it’s been this way.
So when the Church decided in 354 AD ... yes, that’s right, three and a half centuries after Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem ... when in 354 the Church set Jesus’ birthday as December 25th ... replacing all those non-Christian celebrations, and most especially the one which had been taking place in Rome on that exact date ... Saturnalia, the birth date of Mithras, the festival of the Unconquered Sun God ... well, it just made sense.
We don’t know when Jesus was born, the time of year, what the weather was like, or much of what else was going on. Trying to pin the events of Luke’s telling of the story down to history doesn’t work, because whatever historical records other than the Bible that existed have been long lost.
But celebrating his birth at the darkest time of the year “worked” for the Church back then, trying to Christianize history and remove the other preexisting religions and gods and goddesses from the calendar and replacing them with Jesus-festivals. So that is just what the Church did ... and kept doing ... going further and further ... asserting its own place, authority and rightness about all earthly matters just because it Was The Church, and That Settled It.
And that worked for, oh, about 2000 years.
But now, I wonder. I wonder because much of the world wonders. We wonder ... because some ends of the Church sound more and more like they are less and less connected with our real lives ... with what we experience every day.
We hear words about how “God has abandoned people” ... people who suffer abuse and scorn ... children in a school, shoppers in a mall ... and we wonder.
We hear criticisms and condemnations of people whose lives don’t always fit into the Church’s neat little constructions of life, and we wonder.
We witness stubborn adherence to traditions, rites and rituals which made sense at one time to people but are no longer understood, but they are still piously asserted by the Church just because “we’re the Church” with no explanation provided, no connection made to life outside church walls ... in some cases, asking people to check not just their brains, but their whole lives at the church door before they enter worship ... and we wonder.
We wonder ... is Church meant to be one big NO in our lives ... my way or the highway to hell?
We wonder ... wasn’t God active in the world before there was a Church?
Well, of course God was.
God’s plan for saving the world started long, long before there was a Church, with buildings and bishops, pews and pastors, to systematize and regularize it all, to tell us How We Are To Believe, and How We Are To Hope.
Isaiah’s words are old ... older than the Church, that’s for sure ... coming some seven centuries before Jesus’ birth ... and they proclaim that hope and joy of salvation to people “who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them light has shined.” These are words of deep, lasting hope ... for their age, and ours ... “the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.” An end to war, to hate, to fear and darkness ... humanity’s eternal enemies ... will come, come in the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
Of course there were many who came to Isaiah’s people, God’s people, in the centuries prior to Jesus who exhibited some of these tendencies ... these earthly rulers brought some light, some peace, some salvation ... not perfectly, but those Small Signs of Hope, Hope from Their God, those kept people going, going through the darkness, gathering each year in hope that one day, one day The One who would fulfill these words perfectly would come, and bring The Hope that would save them, save them from their suffering and sorrow and sinfulness and loss.
And of course that’s precisely why the Christmas story from Luke’s Gospel holds out so much hope for us. Jesus comes as God’s fulfillment of that Isaiah-Hope-Word ... Jesus comes, yes, but he comes in the way unexpected and mysterious ... certainly not in the way we humans, with all our rules of what’s right and proper, are all about.
Jesus comes not to the “church people” ... not to the religious leaders of his day, place and time ... nor does he come to the political leadership ... no, Jesus comes to those on the outside of things, those of the outside of the world, who are always looking in ...to the poor, the powerless, the politically weak and downtrodden, the economically distressed ... those whom the world would say, are of little worth. But it is to these that God comes ... comes, to shepherds in the fields ... and to a man with a young wife carrying a child who he knows is not his ... God comes to them, not in their home, but ‘on the road,’ in a strange place, a mean place, not at all the place the Nice Religious People of his or any age would choose for the birth of the Son of God.
But to those whom he comes ... he brings signs of hope ... unmistakable signs of hope ... and joy.
And that’s where I think that story ... that old, old story ... crosses with our stories, here, with us, tonight.
We are alive, and that’s what hope is.
When we gather in our mid-winter celebration, just as hundreds, thousands, millions of people have before us and ... I hope, millions more will gather after us, until the day when God decides it’s time to bring it all home for us ... bringing us all home, not to a place of fear and dread but into the place for which he sent his Son to be born, to live, to suffer and die, to rise again so that all creation might find their, our place deep in the loving, living heart of God forever ...
... when we gather in our mid-winter celebration, because of God’s continual, everlasting, permanent love for us ... which is made its most perfect in the cross-shaped life that is Jesus the Christ ... because of that, because of him, we can look back at our year just passed, and see small signs of hope, amid the scum and offscourings of our days, in our bad days and good days and just plain old boring days, we can look back and see and say, YES ... YES, in that day, in those times, I have seen hope, on the horizon, drawing near, ever growing within me, because I felt God with me in those times, through someone God sent to me, or in my being sent to someone, because I believe that God was working and moving through me.
To me, THAT’S faith. THAT’S HOPE.
It might not be Church, in the historic, official, pastor-collar-wearing and brick building sense. But then, nowhere does the Bible say that the Church has a lock on all the HOPE and FAITH. Actually, the Bible has a lot to say that’s the exact opposite ... which should serve to remind us that, when we hear that language of what Martin Luther called “the theology of glory,” the Church, church people, Christian brothers and sisters, speaking those lies of hate and separation, division and condemnation ... well, those aren’t Christ’s words ... or Christ’s acts. And so we who celebrate the “theology of the Cross,” God’s power made perfect through weakness, God’s strength made clear through his suffering, Christ’s choosing to be with us in the muck and mire of life so he could, can, always be God For Us ... well, we have a responsibility to speak the Truth. So that the life-destroying Garbage that some try to pass off as “Church” is put where it belongs ... in the dung heap, forever. So that the Truth is heard, clearly.
That’s why I love you, this place and people called Nativity. Not just because we spend the whole year reading and worshiping, studying and praying, baptizing and communing, so that we can be living that cross-shaped word of service-HOPE into the world.
But more ... because you give me hope on my dark winter days ... hope that brings me joy ... hope because I see signs ... some small, some huge ... some on the horizon, and some right here in my face... signs that show me and the world that you GET IT ...
... this table, open to all, every age, every background, whether you’ve been a lifelong follower of Jesus, or if you just walked into worship for the first time tonight ... if you feel called to come and eat and drink Jesus’ meal, then COME ... for Christ invites you ...
... this faith community, risen as from the dead, living that resurrection faith into the world, serving the hungry and homeless, the lonely and depressed, welcoming all, caring for all. Our parking lot this past year looked just like the rest of America. We had Obama and Romney stickers, McKenna and Inslee, pro and con R-74, legalizing and condemning weed, you name it, we are the rainbow of opinions here just like everyone else.
But we leave that stuff in the parking lot. Because here ... around this table ... in this faith community ... we do not condemn and demonize “the Other,” that lie that is perpetuated that somehow, some way, we are distinctly different from one another ... no, here, We Are One in The One who came to save the world. And that gives us HOPE ... HOPE that we can change the Church ... HOPE that we can change the World ... one person we encounter, one life we touch, at a time.
I think it’s no mistake that this place, we people are called Nativity.
For we are God’s sign of HOPE, right here, right now, into the places and to the people in the world, the life-places into which each of us are called, every day ...
this winter’s night, when all appears cold and dead around us, GOD IS STILL SPEAKING, speaking to us, speaking through us, living, active, as God has always been, as God will continue to be ...
... in the birth of Jesus, we have God’s blessing-stamp upon us, GOD LOVES US ... loved us then, loves us now, loves us still, has not, will not abandon us through ANYTHING. Through ANYTHING.
Christ, indeed, was born for this. Born for us.
And so we celebrate.
Lift your voices, embrace, shout it out, sing it out, Christ Is Born!
HOPE IS HERE!
Thanks Be To God.
Amen.
“Hope is here!”
24 December 2012
Many of us like to go to movies during these Christmas-New Year’s weeks. Many of us prefer to stay home and watch the Old Movies on TV instead.
I fall into that latter category ... probably some of you do too ... and so, we’ve been treated to numerous airings of “White Christmas,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” and the multiple versions of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”
But one rarity made it onto AMC a week or so ago ... that wonderful 1968 classic ... set in a medieval Christmas of 1183 AD but with dialog rich with double meanings, written for that most difficult year in our more recent American history ... I’m talking about The Lion In Winter.
Near the end, Peter O’ Toole as King Henry II – who has many, many such wonderful lines in the film ... speaking to Katherine Hepburn, she playing Eleanor of Aquitaine ... near the end of the film Peter O’Toole utters my favorite line:
We’re both alive, and that’s what hope is.
We’re both alive, and that’s what hope is.
We are alive, and that is something to celebrate, isn’t it?
Certainly, fresh off yet another in a long, long line of failed predictions about “the end of the world,” we can and do jokingly rejoice and give thanks for still being here ... but don’t let the hysterics of a few cheapen the weightiness of this statement ... We are alive, and that’s what hope is.
It has been a year, that’s for sure ... a year since we gathered here last to mark this Night of Nights, for us, and for all the world.
We have been around one full cycle once more ... from shortest days and longest nights, the darkness of winter, through the rebirth of spring, a most glorious, warm, sunny summer and early fall, then sliding back into greyness and rain once again.
And that’s just been the weather-year.
For us, for all, the rest of this year of living has had its share of ups and downs, blessings and banes, sorrows and joys, losses and gains; in some ways, like every other year that comes along. In other ways, most unlike other years. We give thanks for the gains and suffer and mourn the losses, that is for sure ... but through all that, we must not forget tonight that
We are alive, and that’s what hope is.
That is, after all, why we have a celebration in the middle of winter, as we mark things in the Northern Hemisphere of the world. In the midst of the darkness of this time of year, there has seemingly always been time for celebration ... witness the winter solstice celebrations which go back thousands, tens of thousands of years, filling that basic of human needs ... to be hopeful. I found a few words on Wikipedia that allude to just that:
The winter solstice [was] immensely important because communities were not certain of living through the winter, and had to be prepared during the previous nine months. Starvation was common in winter between January and April. In temperate climates, the midwinter festival was the last feast celebration, before deep winter began. Most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed during the winter, so it was almost the only time of year when a supply of fresh meat was available. And the majority of wine and beer made during the year was finally fermented and ready for drinking at this time.
Celebration and hope ... for millennia ... in celebrations Druidic ... Greek, Iranian, East Indian ... it’s been this way.
So when the Church decided in 354 AD ... yes, that’s right, three and a half centuries after Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem ... when in 354 the Church set Jesus’ birthday as December 25th ... replacing all those non-Christian celebrations, and most especially the one which had been taking place in Rome on that exact date ... Saturnalia, the birth date of Mithras, the festival of the Unconquered Sun God ... well, it just made sense.
We don’t know when Jesus was born, the time of year, what the weather was like, or much of what else was going on. Trying to pin the events of Luke’s telling of the story down to history doesn’t work, because whatever historical records other than the Bible that existed have been long lost.
But celebrating his birth at the darkest time of the year “worked” for the Church back then, trying to Christianize history and remove the other preexisting religions and gods and goddesses from the calendar and replacing them with Jesus-festivals. So that is just what the Church did ... and kept doing ... going further and further ... asserting its own place, authority and rightness about all earthly matters just because it Was The Church, and That Settled It.
And that worked for, oh, about 2000 years.
But now, I wonder. I wonder because much of the world wonders. We wonder ... because some ends of the Church sound more and more like they are less and less connected with our real lives ... with what we experience every day.
We hear words about how “God has abandoned people” ... people who suffer abuse and scorn ... children in a school, shoppers in a mall ... and we wonder.
We hear criticisms and condemnations of people whose lives don’t always fit into the Church’s neat little constructions of life, and we wonder.
We witness stubborn adherence to traditions, rites and rituals which made sense at one time to people but are no longer understood, but they are still piously asserted by the Church just because “we’re the Church” with no explanation provided, no connection made to life outside church walls ... in some cases, asking people to check not just their brains, but their whole lives at the church door before they enter worship ... and we wonder.
We wonder ... is Church meant to be one big NO in our lives ... my way or the highway to hell?
We wonder ... wasn’t God active in the world before there was a Church?
Well, of course God was.
God’s plan for saving the world started long, long before there was a Church, with buildings and bishops, pews and pastors, to systematize and regularize it all, to tell us How We Are To Believe, and How We Are To Hope.
Isaiah’s words are old ... older than the Church, that’s for sure ... coming some seven centuries before Jesus’ birth ... and they proclaim that hope and joy of salvation to people “who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them light has shined.” These are words of deep, lasting hope ... for their age, and ours ... “the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.” An end to war, to hate, to fear and darkness ... humanity’s eternal enemies ... will come, come in the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
Of course there were many who came to Isaiah’s people, God’s people, in the centuries prior to Jesus who exhibited some of these tendencies ... these earthly rulers brought some light, some peace, some salvation ... not perfectly, but those Small Signs of Hope, Hope from Their God, those kept people going, going through the darkness, gathering each year in hope that one day, one day The One who would fulfill these words perfectly would come, and bring The Hope that would save them, save them from their suffering and sorrow and sinfulness and loss.
And of course that’s precisely why the Christmas story from Luke’s Gospel holds out so much hope for us. Jesus comes as God’s fulfillment of that Isaiah-Hope-Word ... Jesus comes, yes, but he comes in the way unexpected and mysterious ... certainly not in the way we humans, with all our rules of what’s right and proper, are all about.
Jesus comes not to the “church people” ... not to the religious leaders of his day, place and time ... nor does he come to the political leadership ... no, Jesus comes to those on the outside of things, those of the outside of the world, who are always looking in ...to the poor, the powerless, the politically weak and downtrodden, the economically distressed ... those whom the world would say, are of little worth. But it is to these that God comes ... comes, to shepherds in the fields ... and to a man with a young wife carrying a child who he knows is not his ... God comes to them, not in their home, but ‘on the road,’ in a strange place, a mean place, not at all the place the Nice Religious People of his or any age would choose for the birth of the Son of God.
But to those whom he comes ... he brings signs of hope ... unmistakable signs of hope ... and joy.
And that’s where I think that story ... that old, old story ... crosses with our stories, here, with us, tonight.
We are alive, and that’s what hope is.
When we gather in our mid-winter celebration, just as hundreds, thousands, millions of people have before us and ... I hope, millions more will gather after us, until the day when God decides it’s time to bring it all home for us ... bringing us all home, not to a place of fear and dread but into the place for which he sent his Son to be born, to live, to suffer and die, to rise again so that all creation might find their, our place deep in the loving, living heart of God forever ...
... when we gather in our mid-winter celebration, because of God’s continual, everlasting, permanent love for us ... which is made its most perfect in the cross-shaped life that is Jesus the Christ ... because of that, because of him, we can look back at our year just passed, and see small signs of hope, amid the scum and offscourings of our days, in our bad days and good days and just plain old boring days, we can look back and see and say, YES ... YES, in that day, in those times, I have seen hope, on the horizon, drawing near, ever growing within me, because I felt God with me in those times, through someone God sent to me, or in my being sent to someone, because I believe that God was working and moving through me.
To me, THAT’S faith. THAT’S HOPE.
It might not be Church, in the historic, official, pastor-collar-wearing and brick building sense. But then, nowhere does the Bible say that the Church has a lock on all the HOPE and FAITH. Actually, the Bible has a lot to say that’s the exact opposite ... which should serve to remind us that, when we hear that language of what Martin Luther called “the theology of glory,” the Church, church people, Christian brothers and sisters, speaking those lies of hate and separation, division and condemnation ... well, those aren’t Christ’s words ... or Christ’s acts. And so we who celebrate the “theology of the Cross,” God’s power made perfect through weakness, God’s strength made clear through his suffering, Christ’s choosing to be with us in the muck and mire of life so he could, can, always be God For Us ... well, we have a responsibility to speak the Truth. So that the life-destroying Garbage that some try to pass off as “Church” is put where it belongs ... in the dung heap, forever. So that the Truth is heard, clearly.
That’s why I love you, this place and people called Nativity. Not just because we spend the whole year reading and worshiping, studying and praying, baptizing and communing, so that we can be living that cross-shaped word of service-HOPE into the world.
But more ... because you give me hope on my dark winter days ... hope that brings me joy ... hope because I see signs ... some small, some huge ... some on the horizon, and some right here in my face... signs that show me and the world that you GET IT ...
... this table, open to all, every age, every background, whether you’ve been a lifelong follower of Jesus, or if you just walked into worship for the first time tonight ... if you feel called to come and eat and drink Jesus’ meal, then COME ... for Christ invites you ...
... this faith community, risen as from the dead, living that resurrection faith into the world, serving the hungry and homeless, the lonely and depressed, welcoming all, caring for all. Our parking lot this past year looked just like the rest of America. We had Obama and Romney stickers, McKenna and Inslee, pro and con R-74, legalizing and condemning weed, you name it, we are the rainbow of opinions here just like everyone else.
But we leave that stuff in the parking lot. Because here ... around this table ... in this faith community ... we do not condemn and demonize “the Other,” that lie that is perpetuated that somehow, some way, we are distinctly different from one another ... no, here, We Are One in The One who came to save the world. And that gives us HOPE ... HOPE that we can change the Church ... HOPE that we can change the World ... one person we encounter, one life we touch, at a time.
I think it’s no mistake that this place, we people are called Nativity.
For we are God’s sign of HOPE, right here, right now, into the places and to the people in the world, the life-places into which each of us are called, every day ...
this winter’s night, when all appears cold and dead around us, GOD IS STILL SPEAKING, speaking to us, speaking through us, living, active, as God has always been, as God will continue to be ...
... in the birth of Jesus, we have God’s blessing-stamp upon us, GOD LOVES US ... loved us then, loves us now, loves us still, has not, will not abandon us through ANYTHING. Through ANYTHING.
Christ, indeed, was born for this. Born for us.
And so we celebrate.
Lift your voices, embrace, shout it out, sing it out, Christ Is Born!
HOPE IS HERE!
Thanks Be To God.
Amen.
Monday, December 24, 2012
23 December 2012
“Hope from this baby”
HOPE ... from the prophets ... through Jesus ... for US
Micah 5:2-5a / Luke 1:39-55
4 Advent C
23 December 2012
Last week I shared with you how Pastor Gretchen from Luther’s Table regularly puts up some kind of “sermon discussion topic” on her Facebook page ... and for many of us, that’s become a sort of virtual text study to help us in preparation for our messages each week.
Another on-line forum ... one with a larger following than even Pastor Gretchen ... is the ELCA Clergy Group on Facebook, to which about a third of the pastors in the ELCA ... some 4200 of us ... subscribe, and sometimes participate.
A couple of weeks ago, one of my colleagues found an article from the Pew Research Center, pointing out that the number of children being born in the US has been steadily declining for years, a trend which is now carrying over into ethnic groups other than whites. His comment, though, left many of us scratching our heads ... and reaching for our keyboards: “We are so worried about mainline Protestant churches shrinking ... and yet there is one very straightforward solution. Have more babies. That should be our main mission strategy. Have more babies.”
No. I’m not kidding. That’s what he said.
One of his examples? The Duggar family. Yes, they of the reality TV series, “19 Kids and Counting,” they who point out with great pride how God has richly blessed them with each child that has come along and so just trust Jesus and have your own zip code full of children and all will be well.
Well, many, most of us, freely admitted that such talk gives us the creeps. Not because we have anything against kids ... nor that, as the accusation from the ‘other side’ came, that we and many Americans – especially those of us who don’t have kids – that we view children as a liability ... certainly not ... but because this kind of talk echoes the words and actions of some not so savory episodes and characters from world history ... dictators from the past century ... some will recall the Margaret Atwood book “The Handmaid’s Tale” ... and even here in Seattle, the outspoken pastor of a Certain Large Urban Church has said that the way they’re going to "take Seattle back for Jesus is to have more kids than the godless liberals who currently run things around here."
To me, the worst thing about such talk as this, is that it simply washes away the reason that people should have children today ... which is, because they want to have children. Period.
In twenty-first century America, we aren’t in the 1st or 8th or 18th century ... times in human history where having children was a necessity ... where the Genesis 1 mandate of “be fruitful and multiply” had to happen for human survival. That’s the reason why those Bible stories exist, about Abram and Sarai, about Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah. “The Sign of the Child” in those ancient Bible times meant hope, a hope for the future; if, simply, hope that there would be someone around to take care of you in your old age.
Up until about a hundred years ago, people had to have a lot of kids because so many children didn’t make it to adulthood ... and you needed the labor on the farm ... the income in the tenement from child labor ... you needed lots of kids just in order to survive.
And survival was the key word. Because losing a child or children before adulthood was a regular occurrence then. Anyone who does genealogy knows that; look back at your family tree and see how many children died from the flu or measles or pneumonia before the age of 10. Tiny Tim from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” wasn’t the exception, but the rule, a relatively short time ago. So having a large family was a visible hope for assurance of future blessing, in a way that is not the case now, since the advent of penicillin and better farming and food production and nutrition habits that have moved the infant mortality rate low, lower, still lower ... most people survive infancy and childhood now ... and families are as a result smaller.
Smaller ... but no less full of hope ... for the sign of a child, a baby born, still brings with it, him or her, hopes, dreams, for a new life started, family together, growing together, raising hope, a future with hope, milestones marked through the years, baptisms, confirmations, graduations, weddings, grandchildren, “the crown of old age.”
And yet ... and yet ... we all know that things don’t always turn out the way we hope. Sometimes just the very coming of children is enough to fill prospective parents with nervousness ... fear ... feelings of unpreparedness ... “how can I, how will I ever do this?” Sometimes people who want to have children never can, never do ... for a myriad of reasons. And sometimes children don’t turn out the way we hope. Parents don’t parent the way we hope. There still is illness ... physical, mental, spiritual ... which changes things ... sometimes, permanently. And we know ... some of us too well; all of us, too recently, that even today, our children sometimes do not outlive us ... sometimes they don’t even make it out of childhood.
Even though children are the oldest sign of hope among us humans ... we know all too well that hope is not the only emotion they bring us. Sometimes, it’s sadness ... loss ... and fear.
Sadness ... loss ... and fear. Likely the three emotions which Mary carried with her as she ran cross country to her cousin Elizabeth’s house.
This is the part of the Mary story we often ignore. After Mary got the unexpected and mysterious news that she was to bear the Son of God ... she ran. She ran, ran away from home, away from her parents and her family and her friends ... those around her who she thought wouldn’t understand ... she was young, she was not married, and now what was going to happen to her????
So she ran. She ran to one who she believed would understand her. Elizabeth. Her old cousin. Well, yes, if you want to do dates and times, human measurements of things, Elizabeth was likely an old woman of 40 or 45 while Mary was probably still in her early teens ... but that isn’t as important a part of the story as some would make it out to be.
What is important is how Mary felt about what was going to happen to her. Because she “went with haste.” Gotta love the Bible and its euphemisms. She ran away from everything she knew so well because she was scared ... she was afraid she would lose everything ... her family (they’d kick her out) ... her life (she could be stoned for adultery ... girls were usually promised in marriage to a man ... though we don’t hear about Joseph here, yet, we’ve read the story and know he’s out there, looming, in the future ... and he’d dump her fast, because she’d been messing around with another man, that was for sure.)
Mary was scared ... fearful of the looming losses in her life ... probably sad to leave it all behind too ... as she ran, ran like the wind, ran to her old cousin’s house. The only one who would understand her. The one who could most tangibly, help her make some sense out of all this confusion which had descended upon her. The one who could bring her a word of hope.
Because Mary and Elizabeth shared a secret, a secret unexpected and mysterious ... God had intervened in both their lives and the result was children.
In Elizabeth’s case, a woman probably well into menopause, with an equally old husband living before the times of current ahem medicinal helps ... to them was going to come a child, the one who was to make ready a people prepared for the Lord ... John, who we call The Baptist.
Mary had heard from the angel who announced her pregnancy, that her relative Elizabeth was going to bear this miracle-child, “for nothing will be impossible with God.” And so off to Elizabeth Mary ran. In search of understanding ... calming of her fears ... HOPE ... and a HOME.
And HOPE ... and HOME ... is precisely what Elizabeth ... her words, her welcome, inspired by, given by God’s Spirit ... HOPE and HOME are what Elizabeth gives to Mary.
Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?
For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.
And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.
Blessed is she who believed. A word ... a word of HOME and HOPE, of wholeness and healing if ever there was. For Elizabeth knows ... knows, deep in her heart, that she has been brought into, she is part of the everlasting heart of love and life, forgiveness and peace that is the will and the work of her God and our God, forever. She has experienced this deep in her very being. And so she is uniquely gifted as the one who brings this Good News to Mary ... Good News to this one who has until now, been dwelling in sadness and loss and fear ... now, Elizabeth says, NOW, it is time to put all that off forever. For Mary, you are blessed, and more, this child you are to bear, he is the ONE for whom we have waited so, so long. The ONE who will deliver us, who will save us, who will bring all the world into the everlasting heart of God forever.
It is no mistake that Mary has come here, to Elizabeth, this day. Like seeks out like, for comfort, for love, for hope, for home. And Elizabeth has The Word, deep within herself, which turns Mary around, turns Mary around so that she can sing, sing those beloved words of hope which we know as the Magnificat:
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
Why does Mary rejoice? Because she is a sign, a sign that God is about to do something Very New. She – Mary – is the last of the Old Testament prophets – for, like the prophets ... like Jeremiah and Malachi, Zephaniah and Isaiah and Micah, she has been called to bring forth, to bear forth, to make God present to his people ... but she is the only one who has been given the special duty to bring God forth bodily, in flesh and blood, as a baby ... to rescue, to redeem, to turn the world around for all the babies of God’s good creation ... to give us all the first, best, most wondrous child-sign of HOPE, the way God will call us all HOME ... through Jesus.
Yes, earthly powers and principalities will be turned topsy-turvy. Watch out, pride! Move over, power! Be gone, wealth! Come into God’s fullness, meekness and weakness, poverty and despair! But that’s the point, isn’t it? Into a world where God’s good and gracious will is thwarted again and again, where it’s all been turned upside down by human sinfulness,where it always looks like the good loses and the bad triumphs ... into this, God himself needs to come to set it all right ... and so God is going to come, and so God comes, and so God has come, and comes, and will come ... to do just that.
What we have done with God’s good gifts of love, and life, this good earth itself ... the mess that has become of them through the web of sin and suffering we have spun through the ages ... Mary sings ... God, you are coming to set it all right once again.
Sadness, loss, and fear, yes, you are real, quite real, and we suffer because of you ... but mark my words, Mary sings, your days are numbered.
HOPE is coming ... from, through, THIS baby. Come to save all the babies of the world ... three months, three years, three decades or three score years and more ... to us, to all, in sorrow and fear, this baby will come ... has come ... is come ... Jesus, the Christ ... born as us, living as us, through all the joys and sorrows of this life ... suffering, dying FOR US when we couldn’t handle such pure love among us ... rising again, because “nothing is impossible with God” ... and God’s love can, will overcome even death itself ... to bring us all HOME, to that ultimate place of HOPE ... the everlasting heart of God, the place of love and life, forever.
That news made Mary sing the greatest song of joy and hope ever composed.
And the Good News for us today is that God is still speaking ... still calling forth the same song in, from us, calling us, like Mary, to bring forth, to bear forth, to make God present to all people. Sung in whichever way we are called to bring it forth, the music of our love, the cantata of our gifts and talents shared with a world lost in sadness, loss and fear ... the symphony of our voices, lifted together, bringing light and life, HOPE and HOME into this world, this world with so much wrong and awful, yes, but it is still the world God loves. That God loves so much that he would come as one of us, and live and die for it, so that we would have that HOPE and HOME restored for us, and for all, forever.
HOPE ... from this child ... for all of US ...
Starting through those small signs ... ever growing on the horizon ... bringing joy, and love, and peace to all.
Christ is born for this.
Amen.
HOPE ... from the prophets ... through Jesus ... for US
Micah 5:2-5a / Luke 1:39-55
4 Advent C
23 December 2012
Last week I shared with you how Pastor Gretchen from Luther’s Table regularly puts up some kind of “sermon discussion topic” on her Facebook page ... and for many of us, that’s become a sort of virtual text study to help us in preparation for our messages each week.
Another on-line forum ... one with a larger following than even Pastor Gretchen ... is the ELCA Clergy Group on Facebook, to which about a third of the pastors in the ELCA ... some 4200 of us ... subscribe, and sometimes participate.
A couple of weeks ago, one of my colleagues found an article from the Pew Research Center, pointing out that the number of children being born in the US has been steadily declining for years, a trend which is now carrying over into ethnic groups other than whites. His comment, though, left many of us scratching our heads ... and reaching for our keyboards: “We are so worried about mainline Protestant churches shrinking ... and yet there is one very straightforward solution. Have more babies. That should be our main mission strategy. Have more babies.”
No. I’m not kidding. That’s what he said.
One of his examples? The Duggar family. Yes, they of the reality TV series, “19 Kids and Counting,” they who point out with great pride how God has richly blessed them with each child that has come along and so just trust Jesus and have your own zip code full of children and all will be well.
Well, many, most of us, freely admitted that such talk gives us the creeps. Not because we have anything against kids ... nor that, as the accusation from the ‘other side’ came, that we and many Americans – especially those of us who don’t have kids – that we view children as a liability ... certainly not ... but because this kind of talk echoes the words and actions of some not so savory episodes and characters from world history ... dictators from the past century ... some will recall the Margaret Atwood book “The Handmaid’s Tale” ... and even here in Seattle, the outspoken pastor of a Certain Large Urban Church has said that the way they’re going to "take Seattle back for Jesus is to have more kids than the godless liberals who currently run things around here."
To me, the worst thing about such talk as this, is that it simply washes away the reason that people should have children today ... which is, because they want to have children. Period.
In twenty-first century America, we aren’t in the 1st or 8th or 18th century ... times in human history where having children was a necessity ... where the Genesis 1 mandate of “be fruitful and multiply” had to happen for human survival. That’s the reason why those Bible stories exist, about Abram and Sarai, about Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah. “The Sign of the Child” in those ancient Bible times meant hope, a hope for the future; if, simply, hope that there would be someone around to take care of you in your old age.
Up until about a hundred years ago, people had to have a lot of kids because so many children didn’t make it to adulthood ... and you needed the labor on the farm ... the income in the tenement from child labor ... you needed lots of kids just in order to survive.
And survival was the key word. Because losing a child or children before adulthood was a regular occurrence then. Anyone who does genealogy knows that; look back at your family tree and see how many children died from the flu or measles or pneumonia before the age of 10. Tiny Tim from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” wasn’t the exception, but the rule, a relatively short time ago. So having a large family was a visible hope for assurance of future blessing, in a way that is not the case now, since the advent of penicillin and better farming and food production and nutrition habits that have moved the infant mortality rate low, lower, still lower ... most people survive infancy and childhood now ... and families are as a result smaller.
Smaller ... but no less full of hope ... for the sign of a child, a baby born, still brings with it, him or her, hopes, dreams, for a new life started, family together, growing together, raising hope, a future with hope, milestones marked through the years, baptisms, confirmations, graduations, weddings, grandchildren, “the crown of old age.”
And yet ... and yet ... we all know that things don’t always turn out the way we hope. Sometimes just the very coming of children is enough to fill prospective parents with nervousness ... fear ... feelings of unpreparedness ... “how can I, how will I ever do this?” Sometimes people who want to have children never can, never do ... for a myriad of reasons. And sometimes children don’t turn out the way we hope. Parents don’t parent the way we hope. There still is illness ... physical, mental, spiritual ... which changes things ... sometimes, permanently. And we know ... some of us too well; all of us, too recently, that even today, our children sometimes do not outlive us ... sometimes they don’t even make it out of childhood.
Even though children are the oldest sign of hope among us humans ... we know all too well that hope is not the only emotion they bring us. Sometimes, it’s sadness ... loss ... and fear.
Sadness ... loss ... and fear. Likely the three emotions which Mary carried with her as she ran cross country to her cousin Elizabeth’s house.
This is the part of the Mary story we often ignore. After Mary got the unexpected and mysterious news that she was to bear the Son of God ... she ran. She ran, ran away from home, away from her parents and her family and her friends ... those around her who she thought wouldn’t understand ... she was young, she was not married, and now what was going to happen to her????
So she ran. She ran to one who she believed would understand her. Elizabeth. Her old cousin. Well, yes, if you want to do dates and times, human measurements of things, Elizabeth was likely an old woman of 40 or 45 while Mary was probably still in her early teens ... but that isn’t as important a part of the story as some would make it out to be.
What is important is how Mary felt about what was going to happen to her. Because she “went with haste.” Gotta love the Bible and its euphemisms. She ran away from everything she knew so well because she was scared ... she was afraid she would lose everything ... her family (they’d kick her out) ... her life (she could be stoned for adultery ... girls were usually promised in marriage to a man ... though we don’t hear about Joseph here, yet, we’ve read the story and know he’s out there, looming, in the future ... and he’d dump her fast, because she’d been messing around with another man, that was for sure.)
Mary was scared ... fearful of the looming losses in her life ... probably sad to leave it all behind too ... as she ran, ran like the wind, ran to her old cousin’s house. The only one who would understand her. The one who could most tangibly, help her make some sense out of all this confusion which had descended upon her. The one who could bring her a word of hope.
Because Mary and Elizabeth shared a secret, a secret unexpected and mysterious ... God had intervened in both their lives and the result was children.
In Elizabeth’s case, a woman probably well into menopause, with an equally old husband living before the times of current ahem medicinal helps ... to them was going to come a child, the one who was to make ready a people prepared for the Lord ... John, who we call The Baptist.
Mary had heard from the angel who announced her pregnancy, that her relative Elizabeth was going to bear this miracle-child, “for nothing will be impossible with God.” And so off to Elizabeth Mary ran. In search of understanding ... calming of her fears ... HOPE ... and a HOME.
And HOPE ... and HOME ... is precisely what Elizabeth ... her words, her welcome, inspired by, given by God’s Spirit ... HOPE and HOME are what Elizabeth gives to Mary.
Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?
For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.
And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.
Blessed is she who believed. A word ... a word of HOME and HOPE, of wholeness and healing if ever there was. For Elizabeth knows ... knows, deep in her heart, that she has been brought into, she is part of the everlasting heart of love and life, forgiveness and peace that is the will and the work of her God and our God, forever. She has experienced this deep in her very being. And so she is uniquely gifted as the one who brings this Good News to Mary ... Good News to this one who has until now, been dwelling in sadness and loss and fear ... now, Elizabeth says, NOW, it is time to put all that off forever. For Mary, you are blessed, and more, this child you are to bear, he is the ONE for whom we have waited so, so long. The ONE who will deliver us, who will save us, who will bring all the world into the everlasting heart of God forever.
It is no mistake that Mary has come here, to Elizabeth, this day. Like seeks out like, for comfort, for love, for hope, for home. And Elizabeth has The Word, deep within herself, which turns Mary around, turns Mary around so that she can sing, sing those beloved words of hope which we know as the Magnificat:
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
Why does Mary rejoice? Because she is a sign, a sign that God is about to do something Very New. She – Mary – is the last of the Old Testament prophets – for, like the prophets ... like Jeremiah and Malachi, Zephaniah and Isaiah and Micah, she has been called to bring forth, to bear forth, to make God present to his people ... but she is the only one who has been given the special duty to bring God forth bodily, in flesh and blood, as a baby ... to rescue, to redeem, to turn the world around for all the babies of God’s good creation ... to give us all the first, best, most wondrous child-sign of HOPE, the way God will call us all HOME ... through Jesus.
Yes, earthly powers and principalities will be turned topsy-turvy. Watch out, pride! Move over, power! Be gone, wealth! Come into God’s fullness, meekness and weakness, poverty and despair! But that’s the point, isn’t it? Into a world where God’s good and gracious will is thwarted again and again, where it’s all been turned upside down by human sinfulness,where it always looks like the good loses and the bad triumphs ... into this, God himself needs to come to set it all right ... and so God is going to come, and so God comes, and so God has come, and comes, and will come ... to do just that.
What we have done with God’s good gifts of love, and life, this good earth itself ... the mess that has become of them through the web of sin and suffering we have spun through the ages ... Mary sings ... God, you are coming to set it all right once again.
Sadness, loss, and fear, yes, you are real, quite real, and we suffer because of you ... but mark my words, Mary sings, your days are numbered.
HOPE is coming ... from, through, THIS baby. Come to save all the babies of the world ... three months, three years, three decades or three score years and more ... to us, to all, in sorrow and fear, this baby will come ... has come ... is come ... Jesus, the Christ ... born as us, living as us, through all the joys and sorrows of this life ... suffering, dying FOR US when we couldn’t handle such pure love among us ... rising again, because “nothing is impossible with God” ... and God’s love can, will overcome even death itself ... to bring us all HOME, to that ultimate place of HOPE ... the everlasting heart of God, the place of love and life, forever.
That news made Mary sing the greatest song of joy and hope ever composed.
And the Good News for us today is that God is still speaking ... still calling forth the same song in, from us, calling us, like Mary, to bring forth, to bear forth, to make God present to all people. Sung in whichever way we are called to bring it forth, the music of our love, the cantata of our gifts and talents shared with a world lost in sadness, loss and fear ... the symphony of our voices, lifted together, bringing light and life, HOPE and HOME into this world, this world with so much wrong and awful, yes, but it is still the world God loves. That God loves so much that he would come as one of us, and live and die for it, so that we would have that HOPE and HOME restored for us, and for all, forever.
HOPE ... from this child ... for all of US ...
Starting through those small signs ... ever growing on the horizon ... bringing joy, and love, and peace to all.
Christ is born for this.
Amen.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
16 December 2012
“Hope brings joy”
HOPE … from the prophets … through Jesus … for US
Third Sunday in Advent C
Zephaniah 3:14-20 / Isaiah 12:2-6 /
Philippians 4:4-7 / Luke 3:7-18
23 December 2012
And so we’ve come to the third Sunday in Advent … pink candle Sunday … JOY Sunday … whatever you want to call it.
It’s “Pink Candle Sunday” because the pink Advent candle is the one we light as the third one on the wreath, this third Sunday in Advent. Pink … because … back in the earlier centuries of the church … some hundreds of years ago … there was a clearer connection between the seasons of Advent (preceding Christmas) and Lent (preceding Easter). Advent was seen, like Lent, as a somber time, a season of repentance and preparation, a time of “getting ready” for the Messiah-gift-festival once again.
Over the centuries, we’ve lost some of that sense of Advent as a late fall / early winter Lent, a season of prayerful, careful preparation … though our texts for the first three Sundays in Advent certainly call us there ... with their words of Jesus’ coming again, and John the Baptist’s readying the way ... and the events of the past week, as dark and foreboding as any we’ve experienced recently, most certainly call us back to the prayer and supplications central to our faith ... Kyrie, Eleison ... Lord, Have Mercy upon us.
But ... even in the midst of these dark days of winter ... these dark days of our lives together ... we still have this Pink Candle Sunday before us ... a word, a wisdom, clearer, brighter than the ages ... a word, a light, for us, today.
So how can one have joy in the midst of so much sadness?
We need to make a clear distinction, between joy and happiness.
For they are two different things.
Pastor Gretchen, from Luther’s Table in downtown Renton, asked the question on her Facebook page last Thursday, For you, what is the difference between joy and happiness?
There were many different answers, many deep, well-thought out responses.
Here is mine. I don’t know how well – for you - it meets either of those criteria, but it’s the way I truthfully approached the subject.
Joy is deep, abiding, comforting and hopeful, but not always happy. Happiness is overrated. It can be shallow, cheap, for sale, breakable, addictive, transitory ... terribly American-optimistic and therefore not very realistic (note how our films always have to have a “happy ending” no matter how unbelievable). I’d rather have joy, any day. I’m often not happy (who can be these days ... I take after Luther in that regard) but I am, more often than not, joyful.
There is a difference between joy and happiness, and that’s what I offer you this morning in these words.
All of our texts today are joyful. Yes, all of them.
In some, that joy is not hard to find. It’s right out there, for us.
Isaiah 12, our welcoming litany this morning, is an interjection of joy within chapters of warning, gloom and doom threat, and hopelessness ... as Israel and Judah, the land of God’s promise for his people, careened toward suffering, war, and exile. Certainly life was not happy for Isaiah as he saw what was coming upon his people, for their stubbornness, their faithlessness, their worshipping false gods. And yet, and yet, he could still speak these words of joy ... joy borne from his hope, his unending hope, that his God, and our God, would, will save ...and not make a complete end:
Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid,
For the Lord God is my strength and my might, and has become my salvation.
... Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion,
For great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.
The prophet Zephaniah, too, sings a song of joy for his people.
Most of Zephaniah’s words are, like Isaiah’s, words of judgment for his people ... judgment for their sin, their turning their backs on the ways of God ... particularly, for their worshipping of other, false gods ... but here in the last chapter of this very minor prophet’s words ... there are unmistakable words of joy ... joy which brings hope ... joy with words of HOME.
Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!
At that time I will bring you home,
At the time when I gather you ...
JOY. In the midst of unhappiness ... national suffering ... looming tragedy ... still, Zephaniah speaks these words of deep, abiding JOY. It’s not foolish ... ridiculous ... devil-may-care ... though it may have appeared that way then ... and, certainly, even today.
But the prophet can and does speak these great words of JOY because he knows ... knows, in his heart, knows, through the Word of God dwelling, richly, deeply, in his heart ... he knows the JOY of God ... JOY which, in the midst of hopelessness, brings HOPE ... JOY, in the HOPE that this God, his God, their God ... Our God ... cares for and loves us so much that he will bring us HOME ... HOME to the safe, secure, vast, deep, everlasting heart of God, forever.
It is this deep, abiding JOY we have from God which gives HOPE for us to show forth the love of God in our midst ... to show it forth, in the way that God has most clearly, most palpably, shown it to us ... in sharing the Word, of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Paul shares a word of that “showing forth” in our Philippians reading.
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
The way of JOY, the way of sharing forth the JOY which comes to us from God ... is in our showing of gentleness, prayer, supplication with thanksgiving ... in other words ... the cross-shaped, servant way of living that is what being a disciple of Jesus Christ is all about.
Discipleship is a much bantered around word, but what it’s really all about is living as Christ calls us to live ... which is, the way he lived. We can go to all the Bible studies we want ... learn Scripture from rote memory ... say we’re “moral” people ... attend church every Sunday ... but we will not be changed ... and the world will not be changed ... until our hearts and minds are changed ... changed by the Word of God that is Jesus the Christ ... which calls us to fall to our knees in regular, from the heart repentance ... “Lord, have mercy,” ... and rise in the assurance that our sins are forgiven ... and live that cross shaped life into the world ... only then, only then, will real change happen in our hearts, in the hearts of those we encounter, meet, interact with, love.
And this is also where we find good news in our Gospel text.
Certainly the Baptist’s words ... “You brood of vipers!” ... we probably don’t think of them as joyous ... because they are not happy words. But remember, joy and happiness are two distinctly different states of being for us ... one can be joyful without being happy.
John was not happy. He saw a sinful world around him ... a world where the strong oppressed the weak ... where the rich abused the poor ... where armed might was wielded inappropriately to keep people in line for the sake of political gain ... where innocents were regularly slaughtered by whim and fiat. Who could, who can be happy in the face of this?
I can’t. We shouldn’t.
IT IS ALL RIGHT FOR US NOT TO BE HAPPY. TODAY, DURING ADVENT, AT CHRISTMAS, ANY TIME WE SEE THE GARBAGE OF THE WORLD GOING ON AROUND US. IT IS ALL RIGHT FOR US TO LAMENT THE LOSS ... TO SIT IN DUST AND ASHES AND WEEP ... TO BE SILENT BECAUSE FOR THE PAIN OF THIS PRESENT DARKNESS THERE SIMPLY ARE NO WORDS.
But I believe John was JOYFUL. JOYFUL because even in the midst of his lament, he was full of HOPE. HOPE, in the promise of God in the coming of his Son, Jesus the Christ.
Bear fruits worthy of repentance. There is a sentence brimming with hope. Hope through repentance ... turning around, turning to God, giving it up to God in prayer and supplication ... Lord, have mercy ... even in the midst of a time as hopeless as any ... John still had HOPE, HOPE that God would “bring it all home” in the life of Jesus the Christ, come to baptize, come to gather the good fruit, gather the wheat of love and peace and joy and hope into his granary; come to burn up the chaff, the hate and violence and evil and injustice of the world forever ... come to bring us all into our promised HOME, the deep, abiding heart of the love and JOY and HOPE of our God, forever.
Even in his time ... as bad as it was ... as unhappy as it was ... John could, John did, have JOY. JOY THAT WAS BRIMMING WITH HOPE.
Even in our time ... people of God called Nativity, my brothers and sisters ... even in the midst of our unhappiness, suffering and sorrow, loss and lament, we can, we do, still have JOY. Joy ... on this Pink Candle Sunday, this Third Sunday in Advent 2012 ... JOY THAT BRINGS HOPE ... HOPE for us, HOPE for our faith community, HOPE for our families and homes and communities and schools and workplaces, HOPE for our county and state and nation, HOPE for our world.
Because God says so. Because we see so ... through what being part of this faith community ... our bathing in Christ’s promising waters ... our dining at Christ’s welcoming table ... our going forth and serving as Jesus’ hands and feet ... we see the light of Christ piercing the darkness of this world.
JOY that brings us HOPE ... so that we may bring others hope.
May you be that light in someone’s life this week ... this week, the shortest, the darkest of the year ... may the light of Christ in and through YOU bring someone JOY ... JOY that brings HOPE ... and may the world, through that JOY and HOPE, begin to turn ... if even a little ... if even a little ...
Amen.
HOPE … from the prophets … through Jesus … for US
Third Sunday in Advent C
Zephaniah 3:14-20 / Isaiah 12:2-6 /
Philippians 4:4-7 / Luke 3:7-18
23 December 2012
And so we’ve come to the third Sunday in Advent … pink candle Sunday … JOY Sunday … whatever you want to call it.
It’s “Pink Candle Sunday” because the pink Advent candle is the one we light as the third one on the wreath, this third Sunday in Advent. Pink … because … back in the earlier centuries of the church … some hundreds of years ago … there was a clearer connection between the seasons of Advent (preceding Christmas) and Lent (preceding Easter). Advent was seen, like Lent, as a somber time, a season of repentance and preparation, a time of “getting ready” for the Messiah-gift-festival once again.
Over the centuries, we’ve lost some of that sense of Advent as a late fall / early winter Lent, a season of prayerful, careful preparation … though our texts for the first three Sundays in Advent certainly call us there ... with their words of Jesus’ coming again, and John the Baptist’s readying the way ... and the events of the past week, as dark and foreboding as any we’ve experienced recently, most certainly call us back to the prayer and supplications central to our faith ... Kyrie, Eleison ... Lord, Have Mercy upon us.
But ... even in the midst of these dark days of winter ... these dark days of our lives together ... we still have this Pink Candle Sunday before us ... a word, a wisdom, clearer, brighter than the ages ... a word, a light, for us, today.
So how can one have joy in the midst of so much sadness?
We need to make a clear distinction, between joy and happiness.
For they are two different things.
Pastor Gretchen, from Luther’s Table in downtown Renton, asked the question on her Facebook page last Thursday, For you, what is the difference between joy and happiness?
There were many different answers, many deep, well-thought out responses.
Here is mine. I don’t know how well – for you - it meets either of those criteria, but it’s the way I truthfully approached the subject.
Joy is deep, abiding, comforting and hopeful, but not always happy. Happiness is overrated. It can be shallow, cheap, for sale, breakable, addictive, transitory ... terribly American-optimistic and therefore not very realistic (note how our films always have to have a “happy ending” no matter how unbelievable). I’d rather have joy, any day. I’m often not happy (who can be these days ... I take after Luther in that regard) but I am, more often than not, joyful.
There is a difference between joy and happiness, and that’s what I offer you this morning in these words.
All of our texts today are joyful. Yes, all of them.
In some, that joy is not hard to find. It’s right out there, for us.
Isaiah 12, our welcoming litany this morning, is an interjection of joy within chapters of warning, gloom and doom threat, and hopelessness ... as Israel and Judah, the land of God’s promise for his people, careened toward suffering, war, and exile. Certainly life was not happy for Isaiah as he saw what was coming upon his people, for their stubbornness, their faithlessness, their worshipping false gods. And yet, and yet, he could still speak these words of joy ... joy borne from his hope, his unending hope, that his God, and our God, would, will save ...and not make a complete end:
Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid,
For the Lord God is my strength and my might, and has become my salvation.
... Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion,
For great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.
The prophet Zephaniah, too, sings a song of joy for his people.
Most of Zephaniah’s words are, like Isaiah’s, words of judgment for his people ... judgment for their sin, their turning their backs on the ways of God ... particularly, for their worshipping of other, false gods ... but here in the last chapter of this very minor prophet’s words ... there are unmistakable words of joy ... joy which brings hope ... joy with words of HOME.
Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!
At that time I will bring you home,
At the time when I gather you ...
JOY. In the midst of unhappiness ... national suffering ... looming tragedy ... still, Zephaniah speaks these words of deep, abiding JOY. It’s not foolish ... ridiculous ... devil-may-care ... though it may have appeared that way then ... and, certainly, even today.
But the prophet can and does speak these great words of JOY because he knows ... knows, in his heart, knows, through the Word of God dwelling, richly, deeply, in his heart ... he knows the JOY of God ... JOY which, in the midst of hopelessness, brings HOPE ... JOY, in the HOPE that this God, his God, their God ... Our God ... cares for and loves us so much that he will bring us HOME ... HOME to the safe, secure, vast, deep, everlasting heart of God, forever.
It is this deep, abiding JOY we have from God which gives HOPE for us to show forth the love of God in our midst ... to show it forth, in the way that God has most clearly, most palpably, shown it to us ... in sharing the Word, of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Paul shares a word of that “showing forth” in our Philippians reading.
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
The way of JOY, the way of sharing forth the JOY which comes to us from God ... is in our showing of gentleness, prayer, supplication with thanksgiving ... in other words ... the cross-shaped, servant way of living that is what being a disciple of Jesus Christ is all about.
Discipleship is a much bantered around word, but what it’s really all about is living as Christ calls us to live ... which is, the way he lived. We can go to all the Bible studies we want ... learn Scripture from rote memory ... say we’re “moral” people ... attend church every Sunday ... but we will not be changed ... and the world will not be changed ... until our hearts and minds are changed ... changed by the Word of God that is Jesus the Christ ... which calls us to fall to our knees in regular, from the heart repentance ... “Lord, have mercy,” ... and rise in the assurance that our sins are forgiven ... and live that cross shaped life into the world ... only then, only then, will real change happen in our hearts, in the hearts of those we encounter, meet, interact with, love.
And this is also where we find good news in our Gospel text.
Certainly the Baptist’s words ... “You brood of vipers!” ... we probably don’t think of them as joyous ... because they are not happy words. But remember, joy and happiness are two distinctly different states of being for us ... one can be joyful without being happy.
John was not happy. He saw a sinful world around him ... a world where the strong oppressed the weak ... where the rich abused the poor ... where armed might was wielded inappropriately to keep people in line for the sake of political gain ... where innocents were regularly slaughtered by whim and fiat. Who could, who can be happy in the face of this?
I can’t. We shouldn’t.
IT IS ALL RIGHT FOR US NOT TO BE HAPPY. TODAY, DURING ADVENT, AT CHRISTMAS, ANY TIME WE SEE THE GARBAGE OF THE WORLD GOING ON AROUND US. IT IS ALL RIGHT FOR US TO LAMENT THE LOSS ... TO SIT IN DUST AND ASHES AND WEEP ... TO BE SILENT BECAUSE FOR THE PAIN OF THIS PRESENT DARKNESS THERE SIMPLY ARE NO WORDS.
But I believe John was JOYFUL. JOYFUL because even in the midst of his lament, he was full of HOPE. HOPE, in the promise of God in the coming of his Son, Jesus the Christ.
Bear fruits worthy of repentance. There is a sentence brimming with hope. Hope through repentance ... turning around, turning to God, giving it up to God in prayer and supplication ... Lord, have mercy ... even in the midst of a time as hopeless as any ... John still had HOPE, HOPE that God would “bring it all home” in the life of Jesus the Christ, come to baptize, come to gather the good fruit, gather the wheat of love and peace and joy and hope into his granary; come to burn up the chaff, the hate and violence and evil and injustice of the world forever ... come to bring us all into our promised HOME, the deep, abiding heart of the love and JOY and HOPE of our God, forever.
Even in his time ... as bad as it was ... as unhappy as it was ... John could, John did, have JOY. JOY THAT WAS BRIMMING WITH HOPE.
Even in our time ... people of God called Nativity, my brothers and sisters ... even in the midst of our unhappiness, suffering and sorrow, loss and lament, we can, we do, still have JOY. Joy ... on this Pink Candle Sunday, this Third Sunday in Advent 2012 ... JOY THAT BRINGS HOPE ... HOPE for us, HOPE for our faith community, HOPE for our families and homes and communities and schools and workplaces, HOPE for our county and state and nation, HOPE for our world.
Because God says so. Because we see so ... through what being part of this faith community ... our bathing in Christ’s promising waters ... our dining at Christ’s welcoming table ... our going forth and serving as Jesus’ hands and feet ... we see the light of Christ piercing the darkness of this world.
JOY that brings us HOPE ... so that we may bring others hope.
May you be that light in someone’s life this week ... this week, the shortest, the darkest of the year ... may the light of Christ in and through YOU bring someone JOY ... JOY that brings HOPE ... and may the world, through that JOY and HOPE, begin to turn ... if even a little ... if even a little ...
Amen.
Sunday, December 09, 2012
9 December 2012
2 Advent C
HOPE: from the prophets ... through Jesus ... for US
“Hope on the horizon”
Baruch 5:1-9 / Luke 3:1-6
9 December 2012
The scene on the front of the bulletin this morning … yes, I know, it’s a little difficult to make out … but it’s a scene familiar to anyone who has traveled the “high line” … Highway 2 through Montana, taking “the old road” back to the Midwest and beyond.
This was our favorite way of traveling back and forth to the Northwest during our years in Minnesota … the old highway is slower, quieter, easier in many ways than the Interstate.
And my favorite part of the trip was always this … what we have before us today. It’s somewhere west of Cut Bank, Montana … the point in the trip west when you wonder if you’re ever going to get across eastern Montana … when, in the distance, on the horizon … faintly at first, then, increasing, slowly but surely, the closer you get … rise up the Rocky Mountains of Glacier National Park.
When we saw the mountains … our spirits always rose, and we were filled with hope, hope because once we saw the mountains, we knew we were getting closer to home.
Now, of course, there were, there are, miles and miles of driving ahead to “the wet side” … at least three sets of mountains and passes to climb over … deserts and valleys and lakesides and, depending on when you cut over to I-90, one large city (Spokane) to maneuver through.
But at this point … home is getting closer… you can see it, you can almost taste it … hope is on the horizon.
HOPE on the horizon. That also sums up our reading from Baruch. These words come around every three years as an alternate Sunday text – alternate because they are from the Apocrypha, books recognized by many but not all Christians as canonical and authoritative … these are the books “between” the Old and New Testaments in many editions of the Bible.
I like Baruch because historically, he is Jeremiah’s secretary … recording Jeremiah, whose words, small signs of hope, words of encouragement to his people Israel, in exile, taken away from their homeland and held as prisoners and slaves … those words, we heard last week, God’s promise that God would raise up a righteous branch, a leader for his people from David’s line, who would “execute justice and righteousness in the land.”
Now, this week, Baruch’s words not only echo, they increase the volume of Jeremiah’s words of hope.
Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God.
Arise, Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remember them.
Baruch’s words … the prophet’s words of true HOPE … they’re the inspiration for our closing song this morning, “People, look east” … they represent the words, the hopes and dreams, the people of God of that exiled time and place … that God would keep promises, and bring the people of HOPE back to the land of HOPE and fulfilled promise for them.
Granted, that HOPE was still a long ways off. To those carried off into exile to Babylon, they were thousands of miles and hopes and dreams away from home … for those left in Jerusalem, waiting for friends and family there amid the ruins of their homeland, their religion, their way of life … it also looked hopeless.
But God’s words, through Jeremiah the prophet, and recorded by Baruch, they came as words of HOPE … HOPE on the horizon, afar off, but look, but see, God’s promise, God’s promise of redemption and release, from exile and slavery and all that beset them, God’s promise is there, on the horizon, drawing ever closer … ever closer, to HOME … a place, and more, a feeling, a state of body and mind and living, that says, HERE, here I am, and here I belong, with those who love me and who I love, and more, HERE I am at home in the deep, merciful, everlasting heart of God.
Fine, wonderful words from a somewhat obscure source … for God’s people then … and for us, NOW … people, look East, look toward the rising of the Son … the Son of God … God’s promises fulfilled in flesh and blood , promises of deliverance from all that exiles us from what God wants for us … deliverance from a bad economy or poor health ... aging or illness ... addictions, bad relationships, greed, selfishness, or just, plain poor choices ... for everyone needs deliverance from something ... and everyone needs deliverance to something ... the something of God ... life, full, abundant to overflowing.
It’s a beautiful, HOPE-filled word for us today.
There’s just one thing, though.
For some, many of us ... it’s still HOPE ON THE HORIZON.
It’s a great word ... the best, the most beautiful of words ... but it’s a long way off.
Home is a long way away.
First we still have a lot to go through ... mountains and valleys, winding roads, twists and turns.
So ... ladies and gentlemen ... allow me to introduce our guide for this part of our journey ... John the Baptist.
Groan.
Yes, yes, it’s true, you’re probably not too excited to hear the word about John the Baptist, once again, the Second and Third Sundays in Advent ... as the rest of the world around us is in a fever pitch to rush to the manger and the babe, the shopping and retail extravaganza that is “Christmas” ... but, once again, we will not be rushed there. This is what we are about as liturgical, church year, cross-centered Christians ... we take our time and mark our Advent season well.
And John the Baptist is part of that marking ... this week, and next. We prepare best to receive the Word of Hope in flesh and blood, by hearing the whole story of his coming among us.
That story, this year, comes to us from Luke’s gospel. And Luke is unique among the Gospel writers, in that he initially frames Jesus’ story with John’s. Chapter one of Luke tells the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth ... John’s parents, first ... and then, Luke introduces Mary, he has her sing her Magnificat (the Gospel text we’ll have in two weeks), then tells the story of the birth of Jesus ... and finally, ends that part of his Gospel with the word we have beginning before us today ... the introduction of John’s adult ministry, which brings Jesus’ story back into the picture through his baptism.
Luke is also unique among the Gospel writers in that he is so particular about setting John the Baptist into the timeline of history. That litany of names of rulers with which our text begins ... even today, we can understand them, some of the names, readily recognizable to anyone with a smattering of history under their belt ... and to those who read the Bible, the names are quite familiar. Emperor Tiberias ... Pontius Pilate ... Herod and Philip, Annas and Caiphas ... all of those names put together in one place allow the timelines to converge in a dating of what’s happening here, somewhere between 26 and 29 ... AD ... or Common Era.
Why is this so important? To Luke, it was the way for him to get the point across to his readers and hearers, that “the things about which they had been instructed” were not just “done in a corner” (both of those phrases, quotes from Luke’s Gospel and its second volume, the Book of Acts) ... Jesus came and lived and suffered and died and was raised again, in real time, in history, for the sake of all the world, humans, animals, the entire creation ... who live in history as well.
That was good news for them ... and it’s good news for us too. God coming and being part of history, our history, is exactly what we need, to be delivered from the things in history that beset us. God coming in history ... here, the forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist, preparing Jesus’ way ... this is God’s signal ... then, and now, that HOPE is on the horizon.
HOPE is on the horizon. Yes. We can see it from here.
But there are still mountains to go over. Valleys to cross, winding, dangerous roads ahead. Falling rocks, potholes, bridges may be out ... and for sure, there will be HEAVY TRAFFIC.
Luke knows this too. That’s why he includes the prophetic words of Isaiah here ... words that, which, most certainly, remind us of Baruch’s poem. Why?
Both these words of Isaiah ... for Bible scholars, these would be called words of “Second Isaiah,” the later Isaiah, from the time of the Israelites’ exile ... words from the 40th chapter of that long book ... both these words of Isaiah and the words of Baruch, recording the words of Jeremiah ... both these works are from the same time ... the time of the Israelites being a long way away from HOME ... looking, hoping, praying for a return to HOME ... these words certainly speak of HOPE on the horizon for them.
They acknowledge that the road ahead may well be bumpy, mountainous, winding, through valleys, potholed, dangerous ... but they also bring that word of comforting HOPE that God will be, is there, through it all ... for them, and for us ...
Every valley shall be filled,
And every mountain and hill shall be made low,
And the crooked shall be made straight,
And the rough ways made smooth;
And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
For those who first heard, who first read, these words of Isaiah, of Baruch, about John the Baptist ... they all were signs of HOPE on the horizon. GOD IS COMING ... we can see it, see it afar off now, but it’s getting closer, closer, bringing HOPE, bringing HOPE in the hopeful word of HOME ... HOME, in the loving, welcoming arms of God, forever.
And for us too ... hundreds, thousands of years later, these words also point the way, point the way toward HOPE for us.
In the fourth year of the presidency of Barack Obama, when Christine Gregoire was governor of Washington State, when Dow Constantine was King County executive, and Pat McCarthy was Pierce County executive, and Aaron Reardon was Snohomish County executive ... during the bishopric of Mark Hanson in the ELCA and Chris Boerger of its Northwest Washington Synod ... the Word of God comes to ...
YOU.
You, O Nativity, the good news of God for you this day is that GOD IS HERE, not just on the horizon, BUT RIGHT HERE, to bring hope and health and healing, for you, for this congregation, for this community, into the world God loves.
Here as we gather around God’s Word ... in water of Baptism ... in Word read and proclaimed ... in bread and wine of Holy Communion ... in the community of each other’s presence, greeting, welcoming, praying for one another ...
In the sharing of gifts ... in the giving of our time, our talents and our treasure ... through food for the hungry, through blankets and socks for the hurting and helpless, through support to campus ministries and veterans’ housing ...
In all these ways, we show each other HOPE, and through each other, we bring HOPE into the world, HOPE, not just on the horizon, BUT RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW ... HOPE that God is with us. That Jesus the Christ has come and is coming daily, hourly, minute by minute, to comfort and rescue and deliver us from all that assails us ...
Comfort and rescue and deliver us ... FOR LIFE. For each other ... for THEM ... for the sake of this world God loves.
HOPE IS on the horizon ... but more, HOPE is ALREADY HERE. Here, to bring us a foretaste of the HOME to which, for which God sent his Son to give us ...
May your days be filled with that HOPE which is here, at this table, in this meal, in this community, in each other, FOR YOU. And more ... now, may you take that hope out into the world, your worlds, so that, when others see and hear you, they will see and feel and receive that same HOPE, HOPE FOR LIFE, rich, full, abundant, as God wants and wills and gives to us ...
HOPE ... that all flesh will indeed, see the salvation of our God.
Amen.
HOPE: from the prophets ... through Jesus ... for US
“Hope on the horizon”
Baruch 5:1-9 / Luke 3:1-6
9 December 2012
The scene on the front of the bulletin this morning … yes, I know, it’s a little difficult to make out … but it’s a scene familiar to anyone who has traveled the “high line” … Highway 2 through Montana, taking “the old road” back to the Midwest and beyond.
This was our favorite way of traveling back and forth to the Northwest during our years in Minnesota … the old highway is slower, quieter, easier in many ways than the Interstate.
And my favorite part of the trip was always this … what we have before us today. It’s somewhere west of Cut Bank, Montana … the point in the trip west when you wonder if you’re ever going to get across eastern Montana … when, in the distance, on the horizon … faintly at first, then, increasing, slowly but surely, the closer you get … rise up the Rocky Mountains of Glacier National Park.
When we saw the mountains … our spirits always rose, and we were filled with hope, hope because once we saw the mountains, we knew we were getting closer to home.
Now, of course, there were, there are, miles and miles of driving ahead to “the wet side” … at least three sets of mountains and passes to climb over … deserts and valleys and lakesides and, depending on when you cut over to I-90, one large city (Spokane) to maneuver through.
But at this point … home is getting closer… you can see it, you can almost taste it … hope is on the horizon.
HOPE on the horizon. That also sums up our reading from Baruch. These words come around every three years as an alternate Sunday text – alternate because they are from the Apocrypha, books recognized by many but not all Christians as canonical and authoritative … these are the books “between” the Old and New Testaments in many editions of the Bible.
I like Baruch because historically, he is Jeremiah’s secretary … recording Jeremiah, whose words, small signs of hope, words of encouragement to his people Israel, in exile, taken away from their homeland and held as prisoners and slaves … those words, we heard last week, God’s promise that God would raise up a righteous branch, a leader for his people from David’s line, who would “execute justice and righteousness in the land.”
Now, this week, Baruch’s words not only echo, they increase the volume of Jeremiah’s words of hope.
Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God.
Arise, Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remember them.
Baruch’s words … the prophet’s words of true HOPE … they’re the inspiration for our closing song this morning, “People, look east” … they represent the words, the hopes and dreams, the people of God of that exiled time and place … that God would keep promises, and bring the people of HOPE back to the land of HOPE and fulfilled promise for them.
Granted, that HOPE was still a long ways off. To those carried off into exile to Babylon, they were thousands of miles and hopes and dreams away from home … for those left in Jerusalem, waiting for friends and family there amid the ruins of their homeland, their religion, their way of life … it also looked hopeless.
But God’s words, through Jeremiah the prophet, and recorded by Baruch, they came as words of HOPE … HOPE on the horizon, afar off, but look, but see, God’s promise, God’s promise of redemption and release, from exile and slavery and all that beset them, God’s promise is there, on the horizon, drawing ever closer … ever closer, to HOME … a place, and more, a feeling, a state of body and mind and living, that says, HERE, here I am, and here I belong, with those who love me and who I love, and more, HERE I am at home in the deep, merciful, everlasting heart of God.
Fine, wonderful words from a somewhat obscure source … for God’s people then … and for us, NOW … people, look East, look toward the rising of the Son … the Son of God … God’s promises fulfilled in flesh and blood , promises of deliverance from all that exiles us from what God wants for us … deliverance from a bad economy or poor health ... aging or illness ... addictions, bad relationships, greed, selfishness, or just, plain poor choices ... for everyone needs deliverance from something ... and everyone needs deliverance to something ... the something of God ... life, full, abundant to overflowing.
It’s a beautiful, HOPE-filled word for us today.
There’s just one thing, though.
For some, many of us ... it’s still HOPE ON THE HORIZON.
It’s a great word ... the best, the most beautiful of words ... but it’s a long way off.
Home is a long way away.
First we still have a lot to go through ... mountains and valleys, winding roads, twists and turns.
So ... ladies and gentlemen ... allow me to introduce our guide for this part of our journey ... John the Baptist.
Groan.
Yes, yes, it’s true, you’re probably not too excited to hear the word about John the Baptist, once again, the Second and Third Sundays in Advent ... as the rest of the world around us is in a fever pitch to rush to the manger and the babe, the shopping and retail extravaganza that is “Christmas” ... but, once again, we will not be rushed there. This is what we are about as liturgical, church year, cross-centered Christians ... we take our time and mark our Advent season well.
And John the Baptist is part of that marking ... this week, and next. We prepare best to receive the Word of Hope in flesh and blood, by hearing the whole story of his coming among us.
That story, this year, comes to us from Luke’s gospel. And Luke is unique among the Gospel writers, in that he initially frames Jesus’ story with John’s. Chapter one of Luke tells the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth ... John’s parents, first ... and then, Luke introduces Mary, he has her sing her Magnificat (the Gospel text we’ll have in two weeks), then tells the story of the birth of Jesus ... and finally, ends that part of his Gospel with the word we have beginning before us today ... the introduction of John’s adult ministry, which brings Jesus’ story back into the picture through his baptism.
Luke is also unique among the Gospel writers in that he is so particular about setting John the Baptist into the timeline of history. That litany of names of rulers with which our text begins ... even today, we can understand them, some of the names, readily recognizable to anyone with a smattering of history under their belt ... and to those who read the Bible, the names are quite familiar. Emperor Tiberias ... Pontius Pilate ... Herod and Philip, Annas and Caiphas ... all of those names put together in one place allow the timelines to converge in a dating of what’s happening here, somewhere between 26 and 29 ... AD ... or Common Era.
Why is this so important? To Luke, it was the way for him to get the point across to his readers and hearers, that “the things about which they had been instructed” were not just “done in a corner” (both of those phrases, quotes from Luke’s Gospel and its second volume, the Book of Acts) ... Jesus came and lived and suffered and died and was raised again, in real time, in history, for the sake of all the world, humans, animals, the entire creation ... who live in history as well.
That was good news for them ... and it’s good news for us too. God coming and being part of history, our history, is exactly what we need, to be delivered from the things in history that beset us. God coming in history ... here, the forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist, preparing Jesus’ way ... this is God’s signal ... then, and now, that HOPE is on the horizon.
HOPE is on the horizon. Yes. We can see it from here.
But there are still mountains to go over. Valleys to cross, winding, dangerous roads ahead. Falling rocks, potholes, bridges may be out ... and for sure, there will be HEAVY TRAFFIC.
Luke knows this too. That’s why he includes the prophetic words of Isaiah here ... words that, which, most certainly, remind us of Baruch’s poem. Why?
Both these words of Isaiah ... for Bible scholars, these would be called words of “Second Isaiah,” the later Isaiah, from the time of the Israelites’ exile ... words from the 40th chapter of that long book ... both these words of Isaiah and the words of Baruch, recording the words of Jeremiah ... both these works are from the same time ... the time of the Israelites being a long way away from HOME ... looking, hoping, praying for a return to HOME ... these words certainly speak of HOPE on the horizon for them.
They acknowledge that the road ahead may well be bumpy, mountainous, winding, through valleys, potholed, dangerous ... but they also bring that word of comforting HOPE that God will be, is there, through it all ... for them, and for us ...
Every valley shall be filled,
And every mountain and hill shall be made low,
And the crooked shall be made straight,
And the rough ways made smooth;
And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
For those who first heard, who first read, these words of Isaiah, of Baruch, about John the Baptist ... they all were signs of HOPE on the horizon. GOD IS COMING ... we can see it, see it afar off now, but it’s getting closer, closer, bringing HOPE, bringing HOPE in the hopeful word of HOME ... HOME, in the loving, welcoming arms of God, forever.
And for us too ... hundreds, thousands of years later, these words also point the way, point the way toward HOPE for us.
In the fourth year of the presidency of Barack Obama, when Christine Gregoire was governor of Washington State, when Dow Constantine was King County executive, and Pat McCarthy was Pierce County executive, and Aaron Reardon was Snohomish County executive ... during the bishopric of Mark Hanson in the ELCA and Chris Boerger of its Northwest Washington Synod ... the Word of God comes to ...
YOU.
You, O Nativity, the good news of God for you this day is that GOD IS HERE, not just on the horizon, BUT RIGHT HERE, to bring hope and health and healing, for you, for this congregation, for this community, into the world God loves.
Here as we gather around God’s Word ... in water of Baptism ... in Word read and proclaimed ... in bread and wine of Holy Communion ... in the community of each other’s presence, greeting, welcoming, praying for one another ...
In the sharing of gifts ... in the giving of our time, our talents and our treasure ... through food for the hungry, through blankets and socks for the hurting and helpless, through support to campus ministries and veterans’ housing ...
In all these ways, we show each other HOPE, and through each other, we bring HOPE into the world, HOPE, not just on the horizon, BUT RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW ... HOPE that God is with us. That Jesus the Christ has come and is coming daily, hourly, minute by minute, to comfort and rescue and deliver us from all that assails us ...
Comfort and rescue and deliver us ... FOR LIFE. For each other ... for THEM ... for the sake of this world God loves.
HOPE IS on the horizon ... but more, HOPE is ALREADY HERE. Here, to bring us a foretaste of the HOME to which, for which God sent his Son to give us ...
May your days be filled with that HOPE which is here, at this table, in this meal, in this community, in each other, FOR YOU. And more ... now, may you take that hope out into the world, your worlds, so that, when others see and hear you, they will see and feel and receive that same HOPE, HOPE FOR LIFE, rich, full, abundant, as God wants and wills and gives to us ...
HOPE ... that all flesh will indeed, see the salvation of our God.
Amen.
Sunday, December 02, 2012
2 December 2012
1 Advent C
HOPE: from the prophets ... through Jesus ... for US
“Small signs of hope”
Luke 21:25-36
2 December 2012
Happy New Year! Blessed Advent!
Well, why not? Why shouldn’t we be greeting each other that way, this morning?
For Advent has begun once more … Advent, the season of hope ... here we are, surrounded by the symbols of hope this morning ... the Advent wreath, candles lit in anticipation once more ... the blue color, blue signifying hope, blue is all around us ... even on some of us.
Now, I realize, that word, HOPE, has become cheapened lately ... in political campaigns and agendas both blue and red ... and certainly, certainly, hope is over-commercialized. Especially at this time of the year. Yet, Advent hope is not the same thing as “Christmas” ... and here, I put that in quotes, meaning, not The Nativity Of Our Lord, but the publicly observed winter festival, full of Black Fridays and shopping deals, its joyful songs sung by Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond and Madonna (psst ... they’re all Jewish) ... this time and season which is forever and always full of more shallow pleasures than ... Advent hope.
Advent hope ... in contrast ... is a hope that lasts longer than two months of 24 hour a day Christmas carols on the radio ... which is deeper than staying up all night on Thanksgiving to rush into Walmart and get the biggest bargain ... that is more profound than deciding to use debit cards rather than credit cards to buy our gifts this year.
Our theme this year helps right us, and pull us back into what Advent Hope is all about:
HOPE: from the prophets ... through Jesus ... for US
This is hope which has its source in the divine, hope for deliverance, hope for restoration to what God desires for us, hope for salvation.
This is the hope we have before us in the words of the prophet Jeremiah. Now, the Old Testament prophets often get a bad reputation ... and, yes, much, many of their words can be heard as ‘gloom and doom,’ words calling Israel back to faithfulness, faithfulness to God, faithfulness to God’s Word and God’s ways, faithfulness they have abandoned in the pursuit of other gods, other ways, ways which are unjust to the poor, and unloving to God’s good creation. Their words are filled with a Word of judgment ... God is not going to stand idly by while people and land are hurting, groaning in despair, under the weight of oppression and injustice ... God is going to intervene, intervene actively for the sake of the people God loves.
So, judgment ... but it’s judgment steeped through and through ... with hope.
This is the Word of God through the prophet Jeremiah which we receive this morning.
The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness."
Justice and righteousness ... two commodities at a premium, indeed, virtually nonexistent to Jeremiah and his people, carried off into exile, taken from their home and homeland, held in a distant country against their will while their homeland was being attacked and destroyed. They thought, they saw, they believed that God’s promises for them had ended ... that they would no longer be people who would see the “goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” ... that they would never go back to the homeland of their godly heritage.
They were a people without hope, for them, in a land, a place, a time without hope.
That’s what makes these words of God through Jeremiah so profound, so abundant with HOPE.
I will fulfill the promise I made, God says. God has not forgotten them, nor God’s word to them through the ages.
I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
Someone is coming, someone of my sending, God says, even though it looks bleak and hopeless right now ... I am with you now ... and I will continue to be with you, into and through the future, when you shall be safe and well and blessed ... and home.
Home. That’s where we can best connect with this text.
We may not, no, we likely don’t, can’t understand how those Israelites felt there, in exile ... that kind of hopelessness ... but we can understand that deep longing for ‘home.’
Not necessarily a place ... but a feeling ... more than a warm fuzzy, more than the momentary satisfaction which comes from Christmas shopping or giving and receiving ... this is deep, abiding hope for us ... a knowing, part of every fibre and strand of our DNA, knowing that we are loved and safe and secure, that we have a place within God’s heart, THE heart of love and life, forever.
THAT is HOPE. THAT is the hope which each of us ... each and every one of us, in our own places and spaces of life ... each and every one of us, can connect with that sense of hope. And long for it.
And THAT is what God is promising here, in these ancient words of the prophet Jeremiah. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill ...” this promise, I make to you.
A Word of Hope. Not just for these ancient people. But for US too.
Us ... too ... we who also have that Gospel text before us this morning.
Thought I’d forgotten about it, hadn’t you?
In comparison to Jeremiah’s hopeful words, this section of Luke’s apocalypse ... words about The End ... these words seem barren of hope.
Indeed, to kick off this season of HOPE, these words seem HOPE-LESS.
There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
It’s words like these, to which people point and say, how utterly countercultural the Church ... the churches of the Church who abide by the Sundays and Seasons of the Church Year ... how utterly ... read, boneheadedly stubborn ... we are. The rest of the world is all happyhappy joy joy and Christmasy wonderful ... carols and cinnamon smells and Santa Claus. And yet, here we are, on the first Sunday of Advent, the same today as every year, with no Christmas tree, just our one puny Advent candle, singing “Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending” and “The King Shall Come.”
Way to spoil Christmas, Liturgical, Cross-centered Christians.
But wait a minute. This is the way it is for us every year, the first Sunday in Advent. This first Sunday in the Christian Church year. In the churches which, who use the Lectionary series of Scripture readings, who follow the Church Year Cycle ... the season of Advent always begins with a look to the future coming of the Son of Man. Always. Because this look to the future ... contrary to what the world fears ... this look to the future ... it is all about true HOPE. HOPE ... which we need to be reminded regularly ... this future HOPE is what being a follower of Jesus the Christ ... our faith, our life as community of Christ ... this is what this is all about.
We can’t anticipate Christmas because Christ’s mass ... his birth, indeed, his life, his death, his resurrection ... those are all in the PAST. They have already happened.
THAT event ... was what the people of Jeremiah’s time looked forward to, hoped in ... a redeemer, a messiah, a rescuer to save them and bring God’s reign of justice, mercy, peace and love, to reality, for them, forever.
But all that has already been accomplished ... for us.
So what we have to look forward to, is Jesus’ coming again.
THAT is why we mark Advent.
And THAT is why Advent is the season of HOPE.
The hope in Jesus’ coming again gives us real HOPE ... for today, and for all the days to come.
Because we all need real HOPE. We all need deliverance. Deliverance from that which oppresses us ... holds us back from being the people God created us to be ... people of deep, abiding joy, and strong, faithful HOPE.
Whether it’s deliverance from a bad economy or poor health ... aging or illness ... addictions, bad relationships, greed, selfishness, or just, plain poor choices ... everyone needs deliverance from something. Don’t listen to the lie of the modern world ... “every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better” ... nor the lie of the post-modern world ... “the only deliverance you can have, is what you make for yourself.” They are just two sides of the same coin ... a coin which will ultimately disappoint you. You can’t buy happiness ... at “Christmas” or anytime else ... because that happiness is cheap and fleeting and waaay overrated ... but more, neither can you buy your own deliverance ... and ultimately, you can not make your own abiding HOPE.
That’s why Jesus is so insistent in these apocalyptic texts about keeping alert and awake, paying attention, keeping watch. Keeping watch for the small signs of hope ... for they will be small ... perhaps insignificant by media standards ... but they will most certainly be there.
And they will come through other people.
Small signs of HOPE ... HOPE formed in simple gathering of community, community called by God from many different places, through many different faces, community wet with Baptismal promise, community fed on forgiveness and strengthened for service in proclaimed Word, in bread-and-wine Word, in peace-shared and-welcoming Word of love.
HOPE ... brought forth in Kids’ Church, MAGI lunches, dramas and dinners, generosity poured forth into communities in need of hope, close by Veterans’ Housing and far away orphanages in Haiti.
HOPE ... manifest in shared prayers for our ill, our hurting and helpless and, yes, hopeless ... but more; prayer followed up with hearts and hands willing to share, hearts to listen and comfort and simply be present with and for each other.
These all are small signs of HOPE ... to be sure. But for us, people formed in HOPE, people who have heard Christ’s call to look for HOPE, to encourage and nurture HOPE, to welcome HOPE ... these will be enough ...
... enough to feed us and fill us when our hope runs low ...
... enough to send us forth as beacons of Jesus’ true HOPE ... his redemption, his deliverance, his salvation ... for, into a world chasing after false hope ... into that world, we go with true HOPE ... into that world which God loves so very much that he came as one of us, lived, suffered, died, and was raised ... raised in HOPE ... raised for HOPE ... raised for US.
So indeed ... today, as we begin again, together, it is indeed a Happy New Year! And A Blessed Advent! Happy, and truly HOPE-filled, for you and me, and for all the world.
Amen.
HOPE: from the prophets ... through Jesus ... for US
“Small signs of hope”
Luke 21:25-36
2 December 2012
Happy New Year! Blessed Advent!
Well, why not? Why shouldn’t we be greeting each other that way, this morning?
For Advent has begun once more … Advent, the season of hope ... here we are, surrounded by the symbols of hope this morning ... the Advent wreath, candles lit in anticipation once more ... the blue color, blue signifying hope, blue is all around us ... even on some of us.
Now, I realize, that word, HOPE, has become cheapened lately ... in political campaigns and agendas both blue and red ... and certainly, certainly, hope is over-commercialized. Especially at this time of the year. Yet, Advent hope is not the same thing as “Christmas” ... and here, I put that in quotes, meaning, not The Nativity Of Our Lord, but the publicly observed winter festival, full of Black Fridays and shopping deals, its joyful songs sung by Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond and Madonna (psst ... they’re all Jewish) ... this time and season which is forever and always full of more shallow pleasures than ... Advent hope.
Advent hope ... in contrast ... is a hope that lasts longer than two months of 24 hour a day Christmas carols on the radio ... which is deeper than staying up all night on Thanksgiving to rush into Walmart and get the biggest bargain ... that is more profound than deciding to use debit cards rather than credit cards to buy our gifts this year.
Our theme this year helps right us, and pull us back into what Advent Hope is all about:
HOPE: from the prophets ... through Jesus ... for US
This is hope which has its source in the divine, hope for deliverance, hope for restoration to what God desires for us, hope for salvation.
This is the hope we have before us in the words of the prophet Jeremiah. Now, the Old Testament prophets often get a bad reputation ... and, yes, much, many of their words can be heard as ‘gloom and doom,’ words calling Israel back to faithfulness, faithfulness to God, faithfulness to God’s Word and God’s ways, faithfulness they have abandoned in the pursuit of other gods, other ways, ways which are unjust to the poor, and unloving to God’s good creation. Their words are filled with a Word of judgment ... God is not going to stand idly by while people and land are hurting, groaning in despair, under the weight of oppression and injustice ... God is going to intervene, intervene actively for the sake of the people God loves.
So, judgment ... but it’s judgment steeped through and through ... with hope.
This is the Word of God through the prophet Jeremiah which we receive this morning.
The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness."
Justice and righteousness ... two commodities at a premium, indeed, virtually nonexistent to Jeremiah and his people, carried off into exile, taken from their home and homeland, held in a distant country against their will while their homeland was being attacked and destroyed. They thought, they saw, they believed that God’s promises for them had ended ... that they would no longer be people who would see the “goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” ... that they would never go back to the homeland of their godly heritage.
They were a people without hope, for them, in a land, a place, a time without hope.
That’s what makes these words of God through Jeremiah so profound, so abundant with HOPE.
I will fulfill the promise I made, God says. God has not forgotten them, nor God’s word to them through the ages.
I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
Someone is coming, someone of my sending, God says, even though it looks bleak and hopeless right now ... I am with you now ... and I will continue to be with you, into and through the future, when you shall be safe and well and blessed ... and home.
Home. That’s where we can best connect with this text.
We may not, no, we likely don’t, can’t understand how those Israelites felt there, in exile ... that kind of hopelessness ... but we can understand that deep longing for ‘home.’
Not necessarily a place ... but a feeling ... more than a warm fuzzy, more than the momentary satisfaction which comes from Christmas shopping or giving and receiving ... this is deep, abiding hope for us ... a knowing, part of every fibre and strand of our DNA, knowing that we are loved and safe and secure, that we have a place within God’s heart, THE heart of love and life, forever.
THAT is HOPE. THAT is the hope which each of us ... each and every one of us, in our own places and spaces of life ... each and every one of us, can connect with that sense of hope. And long for it.
And THAT is what God is promising here, in these ancient words of the prophet Jeremiah. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill ...” this promise, I make to you.
A Word of Hope. Not just for these ancient people. But for US too.
Us ... too ... we who also have that Gospel text before us this morning.
Thought I’d forgotten about it, hadn’t you?
In comparison to Jeremiah’s hopeful words, this section of Luke’s apocalypse ... words about The End ... these words seem barren of hope.
Indeed, to kick off this season of HOPE, these words seem HOPE-LESS.
There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
It’s words like these, to which people point and say, how utterly countercultural the Church ... the churches of the Church who abide by the Sundays and Seasons of the Church Year ... how utterly ... read, boneheadedly stubborn ... we are. The rest of the world is all happyhappy joy joy and Christmasy wonderful ... carols and cinnamon smells and Santa Claus. And yet, here we are, on the first Sunday of Advent, the same today as every year, with no Christmas tree, just our one puny Advent candle, singing “Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending” and “The King Shall Come.”
Way to spoil Christmas, Liturgical, Cross-centered Christians.
But wait a minute. This is the way it is for us every year, the first Sunday in Advent. This first Sunday in the Christian Church year. In the churches which, who use the Lectionary series of Scripture readings, who follow the Church Year Cycle ... the season of Advent always begins with a look to the future coming of the Son of Man. Always. Because this look to the future ... contrary to what the world fears ... this look to the future ... it is all about true HOPE. HOPE ... which we need to be reminded regularly ... this future HOPE is what being a follower of Jesus the Christ ... our faith, our life as community of Christ ... this is what this is all about.
We can’t anticipate Christmas because Christ’s mass ... his birth, indeed, his life, his death, his resurrection ... those are all in the PAST. They have already happened.
THAT event ... was what the people of Jeremiah’s time looked forward to, hoped in ... a redeemer, a messiah, a rescuer to save them and bring God’s reign of justice, mercy, peace and love, to reality, for them, forever.
But all that has already been accomplished ... for us.
So what we have to look forward to, is Jesus’ coming again.
THAT is why we mark Advent.
And THAT is why Advent is the season of HOPE.
The hope in Jesus’ coming again gives us real HOPE ... for today, and for all the days to come.
Because we all need real HOPE. We all need deliverance. Deliverance from that which oppresses us ... holds us back from being the people God created us to be ... people of deep, abiding joy, and strong, faithful HOPE.
Whether it’s deliverance from a bad economy or poor health ... aging or illness ... addictions, bad relationships, greed, selfishness, or just, plain poor choices ... everyone needs deliverance from something. Don’t listen to the lie of the modern world ... “every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better” ... nor the lie of the post-modern world ... “the only deliverance you can have, is what you make for yourself.” They are just two sides of the same coin ... a coin which will ultimately disappoint you. You can’t buy happiness ... at “Christmas” or anytime else ... because that happiness is cheap and fleeting and waaay overrated ... but more, neither can you buy your own deliverance ... and ultimately, you can not make your own abiding HOPE.
That’s why Jesus is so insistent in these apocalyptic texts about keeping alert and awake, paying attention, keeping watch. Keeping watch for the small signs of hope ... for they will be small ... perhaps insignificant by media standards ... but they will most certainly be there.
And they will come through other people.
Small signs of HOPE ... HOPE formed in simple gathering of community, community called by God from many different places, through many different faces, community wet with Baptismal promise, community fed on forgiveness and strengthened for service in proclaimed Word, in bread-and-wine Word, in peace-shared and-welcoming Word of love.
HOPE ... brought forth in Kids’ Church, MAGI lunches, dramas and dinners, generosity poured forth into communities in need of hope, close by Veterans’ Housing and far away orphanages in Haiti.
HOPE ... manifest in shared prayers for our ill, our hurting and helpless and, yes, hopeless ... but more; prayer followed up with hearts and hands willing to share, hearts to listen and comfort and simply be present with and for each other.
These all are small signs of HOPE ... to be sure. But for us, people formed in HOPE, people who have heard Christ’s call to look for HOPE, to encourage and nurture HOPE, to welcome HOPE ... these will be enough ...
... enough to feed us and fill us when our hope runs low ...
... enough to send us forth as beacons of Jesus’ true HOPE ... his redemption, his deliverance, his salvation ... for, into a world chasing after false hope ... into that world, we go with true HOPE ... into that world which God loves so very much that he came as one of us, lived, suffered, died, and was raised ... raised in HOPE ... raised for HOPE ... raised for US.
So indeed ... today, as we begin again, together, it is indeed a Happy New Year! And A Blessed Advent! Happy, and truly HOPE-filled, for you and me, and for all the world.
Amen.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
25 November 2012
“What is truth?”
OT 34B / Christ the King
John 18:33-38b
25 November 2012
Those social observer experts who say they know such things … they who have been telling us that we’ve been living with one leg in “modernity” and one leg in “post-modernity” for about 40 years … well, now, they’re saying that the world has irreversibly shifted to “post-modernity.”
To me, that’s funny, because I think there are many, many of us who don’t even know what those terms ... modern, post-modern ... many of us don’t even know what they mean.
So ... a little primer.
The modern world is the mechanized world. The world of parts which make up a greater whole; the assembly line society. The educational system en mass turns out highly educated students for the workforce-world. Medicine and pills and chemicals, properly prescribed and ingested, make people healthier. We work to control nature through science. The modern world is full of things which can be graphed, charted, recorded, noted, and predicted, because they follow a precise, concise path.
And “every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better.”
Post-modernity throws all this on its ear. In the post-modern world, everything is personal experience and personal experience is everything. Mass mechanized models give way to individually tooled ones. Now we have charter schools ... holistic medicine, which is centered on the patient’s wishes rather than on the doctor’s convenience. And we find that nature is something … or someone, an entity, person-like … with which we must make peace; we must change ourselves and our ways to live with and within it. As for outcomes ... they are random, as random as people are random; they can’t be predicted or graphed or recorded, noted or polled, because they do not follow any precise, concise path. And optimism? Well, at best, it’s not corporate, it’s personal ... and at worst, it sounds like Generation X and Generation Y – millennial … read, those of us who are about 50 and under … OUR angst about the future ... post-industrial, it’s “the downward spiral.”
You and I have seen – have been part – of this seismic shift in our society ...most likely, standing with one leg in modernity and the other in post modernity. But the move into post modernity … or even post-post-modernity (which is post modernity’s movement to try to recover some of the aspects of pre-modernity, all the while with a post-modern twist … boy, can that ever make your head hurt!) … this move into post modernity is actual, and final … in other words, we’re not going back. One only needs to take a look around, and you can see that we are most certainly in the post modern world … in business, manufacturing, education, medicine, and yes, politics. Some are saying that the recent election was the first truly post-modern one … with highly visible ... and yes, sometimes contradictory ... outcomes.
Post modernity is here to stay. Whether you like it or not … it IS.
And so today … when we denizens of post modernity encounter Pilate’s question of Jesus …
What is truth?
… well, it can set our heads a-spinning.
Truth? In a post-modern world? What is that, anyway?
In the pre-modern and the modern world, we the church knew what truth was.
It was objective. Solid. An either / or proposition; either you are with it, either you are in; or you are out.
I BELIEVE …
I believe in God the Father almighty … In Jesus the Christ … In the Holy Ghost.
Creedal statements. Doctrinal truth. “God said it … I believe it … that settles it.”
Ah, but now …
Now, Christians are just one of many … a world, a nation, a county, full of Buddhists and Sikhs and Muslims and that most-rapidly-growing-of-religious-preferences … the one which claims adherents from 30+% of our neighbors and even 25% of us nationally … NONE OF THE ABOVE.
So what is truth?
It’s what I believe. But it’s just what I believe, in my own personal world. You can believe whatever you want. And you will. Because that’s your truth.
But what if my truth and your truth conflict … disagree? Between religions … or even in the same church congregation?
Well, then, that’s your opinion.
And haven’t we all heard that. I … you … we’re free to have our truth, but hey, keep your own truth to yourself.
But back to Pilate’s question of Jesus.
It certainly didn’t have the taint of the pre-modern/ modern / post modern mix about it.
Pilate was simply asking a question, for which he didn’t have an answer.
Let’s back up a little here to get some perspective.
Our Gospel passage is a small part of the Passion narrative in John’s gospel … that last day in Jesus’ life, his arrest and trial, his suffering and crucifixion and death.
Here, Jesus is before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, Jesus’ own people having turned him over to the political authority (who, they hoped, would execute him for sedition … so they wouldn’t have to do the deed before their Passover festival) … and Pilate is simply trying to find out what is going on.
We need to understand some things that this passage is not about.
First, it’s not anti-Jewish. It would be better to translate the words here as “some of the Jews” instead of the blanket “The Jews.” Since Jesus’ followers here … and Jesus himself … never stopped being Jewish. It’s an unfortunate slander, perpetuated in error; it’s time for that error to stop.
Second, it’s not really a trial. What’s happening here is nothing like how we experience trials in court today. It’s more of a hearing, really; the representative political governing authority for an occupied nation, trying to figure out why the leadership of the occupied people has such a problem with Jesus.
And so what is this passage about?
The reader – we- need to understand that Jesus’ kingship isn’t like a usual king of his time. We in our era and place have a difficult time understanding what a “king” or “royalty” is … especially since we haven’t had any for over 200 years … but Pilate represents what that would mean to the original hearers and readers of this text. The king was the author and guarantor of the prosperity of his people … kings ensured prosperity on land and sea … in other words, the one who was expected to provide “the good life” to and for his subjects.
Pilate was the local representative of Caesar, and Caesar was the king. The political / religious / social leader of his time.
Pilate calls Jesus “King of the Jews” because he’s heard the Jewish people themselves call Jesus this … perhaps expecting him to lead a rebellion, to try and throw off the Roman invader / occupiers … and bring them “the good life” once more. It is this charge that the religious leaders of Israel have leveled against Jesus … that he was trying to draw the people away from Caesar and into open rebellion. Pilate is trying to check Jesus out, and see if he’s really seditious … a terrorist … a threat to the Empire.
He wants to know what kind of “kingly” actions Jesus has taken.
None. That’s the point.
My kingdom is not from this world.
Jesus’ kingdom is not one with borders and capitals and armies and palaces.
Pilate can’t get this.
Even though Jesus explains this, to Pilate, and to us.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.
Actually, that’s a poor translation of what John’s gospel actually puts forth in his original language.
Literally … it goes like this:
All of the ones who are out of the truth – who have come out of the truth-tradition – they listen to my voice.
And now we can start to get it.
Pilate hasn’t come out of this truth-tradition of which Jesus speaks. He hasn’t been listening to Jesus, he hasn’t seen him do the miracles, turn water into wine, heal the man born blind … raise Lazarus from the dead … he’s never encountered Jesus until now … so he has no currency, no background, no ability to understand what Jesus is saying. And so his answer … simply displays his lack of understanding … and perhaps, even his contempt, at having this “case” brought to him.
Indeed, in the next sentence, when Pilate goes out to the religious leaders, he tells them that he finds no case against Jesus … even though, being a good politician, he ends up releasing Jesus to them, to do to him as they wish.
What is truth?
That’s our question, too, people of Nativity, people of new birth, new life, as we live in this world, this post-modern world.
We’ve spent the last year steeped in the waters of our baptism … for twelve months, walking wet through the church year, the life cycle of Jesus … birth … baptism … ministry … serving … suffering … dying ... rising … and proclaiming … through the past twelve months, we’ve recited and remembered, given thanks for, celebrated our baptisms.
But to what end?
If we’ve simply done this as a nice little exercise, an ornament to our usual Sunday morning worship, well, perhaps then we learned something, but it was all rather pointless, wasn’t it?
And so we turn once again to Jesus’ words to Pilate, the words which confound Pilate, but the words which bring it all ... word, water, baptism, walking wet for the past year together ... our living in a post modern world ... bring it all into focus for us.
All of the ones who are out of the truth listen to my voice.
Friends in Christ, we are the ones who are out of the truth. We are borne out of the truth through water and Word of welcome and forgiveness, new birth and everlasting life ... we are fed in the truth through Word of instruction and faith, Word that forms us into people of the truth ... fed in the truth at Christ’s table of grace, welcoming, giving, receiving, taking his very body into our bodies ...
... and so, now, as ones “out of that truth,” born, fed, raised ... we are now sent in that truth to the world.
Which is precisely the way this post-modern world so needs to see, to hear, to receive us. Our experience, together, as Christ’s body, in this place, creates us, makes us authentic, Christ’s real body of real flesh and blood people, sent out to live and to love as Christ’s personal ambassadors into the world.
Into a world where the old modern ways of proclaiming “church” ... that we proclaim the institution first before, instead of the Christ who gives it, gives us life ...
... instead of starting with, and arguing over, doctrine and creeds, music styles and liturgies, days and seasons, clergy and leadership ... that old modern way, when we start with an argument that “our club rules are better than theirs” ... in a post-modern world, this argument falls on deaf ears, it is unwelcome ...
... so instead we start with the personal, personal experience, personal authenticity, faith lived as Christ’s body going out in service, in love, into the world ... this speaks far louder, far closer, far deeper ... and this Word will be heard, in our post modern, post post modern, and whatever other human colorings and creations will come along in and for this world ...
... so that the old song will continue to be true ...
They will know we are Christians by our love.
May the love, the peace, the joy, the hope that is Christ our King, come to us, given and shed for us, bathed over us, fed into us ... may he continue to form us into his body of love, given, strengthened and sent, into the world God loves ... for all our sakes. Ours ... and most especially ... theirs ... they who have not seen, have not heard, who stand and watch and wait as they ask that question still ...
What is truth?
They watch, and they wait, for us to bring them the answer.
So may you ... the ones out of his truth ... may you continue to be fed, and blessed, fed and blessed to share, to share in your own places, in and into your own worlds, into, until, through the day when we are all gathered into the blessed and glorious reign of Christ our King, the One in whom and for whom all that was and is and will be is made One.
For his sake, and in his name, amen, and AMEN.
OT 34B / Christ the King
John 18:33-38b
25 November 2012
Those social observer experts who say they know such things … they who have been telling us that we’ve been living with one leg in “modernity” and one leg in “post-modernity” for about 40 years … well, now, they’re saying that the world has irreversibly shifted to “post-modernity.”
To me, that’s funny, because I think there are many, many of us who don’t even know what those terms ... modern, post-modern ... many of us don’t even know what they mean.
So ... a little primer.
The modern world is the mechanized world. The world of parts which make up a greater whole; the assembly line society. The educational system en mass turns out highly educated students for the workforce-world. Medicine and pills and chemicals, properly prescribed and ingested, make people healthier. We work to control nature through science. The modern world is full of things which can be graphed, charted, recorded, noted, and predicted, because they follow a precise, concise path.
And “every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better.”
Post-modernity throws all this on its ear. In the post-modern world, everything is personal experience and personal experience is everything. Mass mechanized models give way to individually tooled ones. Now we have charter schools ... holistic medicine, which is centered on the patient’s wishes rather than on the doctor’s convenience. And we find that nature is something … or someone, an entity, person-like … with which we must make peace; we must change ourselves and our ways to live with and within it. As for outcomes ... they are random, as random as people are random; they can’t be predicted or graphed or recorded, noted or polled, because they do not follow any precise, concise path. And optimism? Well, at best, it’s not corporate, it’s personal ... and at worst, it sounds like Generation X and Generation Y – millennial … read, those of us who are about 50 and under … OUR angst about the future ... post-industrial, it’s “the downward spiral.”
You and I have seen – have been part – of this seismic shift in our society ...most likely, standing with one leg in modernity and the other in post modernity. But the move into post modernity … or even post-post-modernity (which is post modernity’s movement to try to recover some of the aspects of pre-modernity, all the while with a post-modern twist … boy, can that ever make your head hurt!) … this move into post modernity is actual, and final … in other words, we’re not going back. One only needs to take a look around, and you can see that we are most certainly in the post modern world … in business, manufacturing, education, medicine, and yes, politics. Some are saying that the recent election was the first truly post-modern one … with highly visible ... and yes, sometimes contradictory ... outcomes.
Post modernity is here to stay. Whether you like it or not … it IS.
And so today … when we denizens of post modernity encounter Pilate’s question of Jesus …
What is truth?
… well, it can set our heads a-spinning.
Truth? In a post-modern world? What is that, anyway?
In the pre-modern and the modern world, we the church knew what truth was.
It was objective. Solid. An either / or proposition; either you are with it, either you are in; or you are out.
I BELIEVE …
I believe in God the Father almighty … In Jesus the Christ … In the Holy Ghost.
Creedal statements. Doctrinal truth. “God said it … I believe it … that settles it.”
Ah, but now …
Now, Christians are just one of many … a world, a nation, a county, full of Buddhists and Sikhs and Muslims and that most-rapidly-growing-of-religious-preferences … the one which claims adherents from 30+% of our neighbors and even 25% of us nationally … NONE OF THE ABOVE.
So what is truth?
It’s what I believe. But it’s just what I believe, in my own personal world. You can believe whatever you want. And you will. Because that’s your truth.
But what if my truth and your truth conflict … disagree? Between religions … or even in the same church congregation?
Well, then, that’s your opinion.
And haven’t we all heard that. I … you … we’re free to have our truth, but hey, keep your own truth to yourself.
But back to Pilate’s question of Jesus.
It certainly didn’t have the taint of the pre-modern/ modern / post modern mix about it.
Pilate was simply asking a question, for which he didn’t have an answer.
Let’s back up a little here to get some perspective.
Our Gospel passage is a small part of the Passion narrative in John’s gospel … that last day in Jesus’ life, his arrest and trial, his suffering and crucifixion and death.
Here, Jesus is before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, Jesus’ own people having turned him over to the political authority (who, they hoped, would execute him for sedition … so they wouldn’t have to do the deed before their Passover festival) … and Pilate is simply trying to find out what is going on.
We need to understand some things that this passage is not about.
First, it’s not anti-Jewish. It would be better to translate the words here as “some of the Jews” instead of the blanket “The Jews.” Since Jesus’ followers here … and Jesus himself … never stopped being Jewish. It’s an unfortunate slander, perpetuated in error; it’s time for that error to stop.
Second, it’s not really a trial. What’s happening here is nothing like how we experience trials in court today. It’s more of a hearing, really; the representative political governing authority for an occupied nation, trying to figure out why the leadership of the occupied people has such a problem with Jesus.
And so what is this passage about?
The reader – we- need to understand that Jesus’ kingship isn’t like a usual king of his time. We in our era and place have a difficult time understanding what a “king” or “royalty” is … especially since we haven’t had any for over 200 years … but Pilate represents what that would mean to the original hearers and readers of this text. The king was the author and guarantor of the prosperity of his people … kings ensured prosperity on land and sea … in other words, the one who was expected to provide “the good life” to and for his subjects.
Pilate was the local representative of Caesar, and Caesar was the king. The political / religious / social leader of his time.
Pilate calls Jesus “King of the Jews” because he’s heard the Jewish people themselves call Jesus this … perhaps expecting him to lead a rebellion, to try and throw off the Roman invader / occupiers … and bring them “the good life” once more. It is this charge that the religious leaders of Israel have leveled against Jesus … that he was trying to draw the people away from Caesar and into open rebellion. Pilate is trying to check Jesus out, and see if he’s really seditious … a terrorist … a threat to the Empire.
He wants to know what kind of “kingly” actions Jesus has taken.
None. That’s the point.
My kingdom is not from this world.
Jesus’ kingdom is not one with borders and capitals and armies and palaces.
Pilate can’t get this.
Even though Jesus explains this, to Pilate, and to us.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.
Actually, that’s a poor translation of what John’s gospel actually puts forth in his original language.
Literally … it goes like this:
All of the ones who are out of the truth – who have come out of the truth-tradition – they listen to my voice.
And now we can start to get it.
Pilate hasn’t come out of this truth-tradition of which Jesus speaks. He hasn’t been listening to Jesus, he hasn’t seen him do the miracles, turn water into wine, heal the man born blind … raise Lazarus from the dead … he’s never encountered Jesus until now … so he has no currency, no background, no ability to understand what Jesus is saying. And so his answer … simply displays his lack of understanding … and perhaps, even his contempt, at having this “case” brought to him.
Indeed, in the next sentence, when Pilate goes out to the religious leaders, he tells them that he finds no case against Jesus … even though, being a good politician, he ends up releasing Jesus to them, to do to him as they wish.
What is truth?
That’s our question, too, people of Nativity, people of new birth, new life, as we live in this world, this post-modern world.
We’ve spent the last year steeped in the waters of our baptism … for twelve months, walking wet through the church year, the life cycle of Jesus … birth … baptism … ministry … serving … suffering … dying ... rising … and proclaiming … through the past twelve months, we’ve recited and remembered, given thanks for, celebrated our baptisms.
But to what end?
If we’ve simply done this as a nice little exercise, an ornament to our usual Sunday morning worship, well, perhaps then we learned something, but it was all rather pointless, wasn’t it?
And so we turn once again to Jesus’ words to Pilate, the words which confound Pilate, but the words which bring it all ... word, water, baptism, walking wet for the past year together ... our living in a post modern world ... bring it all into focus for us.
All of the ones who are out of the truth listen to my voice.
Friends in Christ, we are the ones who are out of the truth. We are borne out of the truth through water and Word of welcome and forgiveness, new birth and everlasting life ... we are fed in the truth through Word of instruction and faith, Word that forms us into people of the truth ... fed in the truth at Christ’s table of grace, welcoming, giving, receiving, taking his very body into our bodies ...
... and so, now, as ones “out of that truth,” born, fed, raised ... we are now sent in that truth to the world.
Which is precisely the way this post-modern world so needs to see, to hear, to receive us. Our experience, together, as Christ’s body, in this place, creates us, makes us authentic, Christ’s real body of real flesh and blood people, sent out to live and to love as Christ’s personal ambassadors into the world.
Into a world where the old modern ways of proclaiming “church” ... that we proclaim the institution first before, instead of the Christ who gives it, gives us life ...
... instead of starting with, and arguing over, doctrine and creeds, music styles and liturgies, days and seasons, clergy and leadership ... that old modern way, when we start with an argument that “our club rules are better than theirs” ... in a post-modern world, this argument falls on deaf ears, it is unwelcome ...
... so instead we start with the personal, personal experience, personal authenticity, faith lived as Christ’s body going out in service, in love, into the world ... this speaks far louder, far closer, far deeper ... and this Word will be heard, in our post modern, post post modern, and whatever other human colorings and creations will come along in and for this world ...
... so that the old song will continue to be true ...
They will know we are Christians by our love.
May the love, the peace, the joy, the hope that is Christ our King, come to us, given and shed for us, bathed over us, fed into us ... may he continue to form us into his body of love, given, strengthened and sent, into the world God loves ... for all our sakes. Ours ... and most especially ... theirs ... they who have not seen, have not heard, who stand and watch and wait as they ask that question still ...
What is truth?
They watch, and they wait, for us to bring them the answer.
So may you ... the ones out of his truth ... may you continue to be fed, and blessed, fed and blessed to share, to share in your own places, in and into your own worlds, into, until, through the day when we are all gathered into the blessed and glorious reign of Christ our King, the One in whom and for whom all that was and is and will be is made One.
For his sake, and in his name, amen, and AMEN.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
11 November 2012
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 17:8-16 / Mark 12:38-44
11 November 2012
Today ... in our continued walk through our end of the church year “basics of faith” review ... we have a tale of two widows.
One widow is the victim of a drought; a drought sent by God upon his people Israel, to convince their king and the other rulers that indeed, God is God, and that the false gods and goddesses of their neighbors, which the King has adopted as his own gods … God is out to prove that those false gods are no gods at all. And this widow is caught up in the results of the king’s poor choices.
The other widow … she is a victim of the religious establishment, those who openly prey on women such as her, to make themselves rich at her expense.
However, both widows end up being for us examples of … and witnesses to … God’s abundance; full, rich, plentiful living, cup filled to overflowing blessings which God so wants and wills to shower on all of us … and for which we are called to offer thanks and praise to God.
Abundance. It’s all around us. It’s all of what God so richly wants to give us.
And yet … abundance is so often the furthest thing from us.
Because we live in a world, a culture, often, with a theology … a way of thinking, and talking about God which is all about … scarcity.
The theology of scarcity … really, it’s embodied fear that there won’t be enough to go around, there won’t be enough for me, and therefore I have to amass more and more and more.
Scarcity is the byword in both of our texts for today.
In the Word from Kings, the woman known as the “Widow of Zarephath” is living scarcity. There is a drought in Israel, sent by God because King Ahab has put his faith and trust in his neighbors’ false god Ba’al, instead of the God who brought his people from slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. The prophet Elijah, sent by God into the wilderness, comes across the Widow of Zarephath -- a foreigner, it must be pointed out – and Elijah makes that request of her,
Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.
The Widow of Zarephath’s objection is understandable. There’s nothing left, only enough for a last meal for her and her son. To be a widow in these Bible times meant suffering … a husband’s premature death was seen as divine punishment for some kind of horrible sin husband or wife had committed … and when her husband died, the widow had no means of support or livelihood other than begging or relying on the grace, the charity of others. Now even that had run out … or so she thought.
Yet God had other plans, through Elijah, for her.
Do not be afraid!
That’s the way Elijah prefaces his word to this Widow of Zarephath. In the face of so much scarcity, he goes right to the heart of it all, for her and for us … fear drives scarcity, and just serves to make things worse. So do not be afraid … trust in this word I bring to you in my body … do as I ask of you, and you will have enough … this is what Elijah says to her.
And so the Widow of Zarephath she went and did what Elijah said … and she, and her son, and Elijah had enough.
This is a fine story of God’s abundance casting out scarcity and fear … on so many levels … religious fear, national fear (the Widow of Zarephath isn’t an Israelite in faith or nationality) … and, especially, fear that there won’t be enough.
To all that fear ... God says ... turn around, my people. Turn and look, turn and receive, turn and hear and follow and do and be, in the richness of my abundance ... which is, for you.
Fear is also at work in the lives of those scribes in our Gospel reading today … the ones of which Jesus warns,
Beware! Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.
Here … Jesus wraps up his case against them … their theology … their way of thinking and talking and acting and living about God … the God they claim to worship … they may say one thing with their lips, but their actions shout loud and clear, “I don’t trust this God to give me what I need … I need more. More stuff … more respect … more honor.”
So much more, so great was their need and their greed, that they needed to devour widow’s houses – taking from even the poorest of the poor.
Oh yeah, these scribes, these religious leaders and authorities of Israel ... they had the best seats in the synagogues – they prayed long prayers – but their lifestyles spoke even louder and longer than their voices.
We don’t believe that God will provide … that God is in charge … that God is God … so it’s every scribe for himself … survival of the fittest, the fattest, the most financially flush.
Ah … but I said this would be “a tale of two widows,” not Slap a Scribe.
So let’s see, let’s hear Jesus’ word about this widow.
Once again, and ... just like Elijah in our Old Testament reading ... Jesus is caught up with an outsider … one who, by her very living, is not part of “the crowd” that Jesus sees passing by the Temple treasury, throwing in money as they pass by. Just like blind Bartimaeus from our reading a couple of weeks ago, this woman was invisible to everyone else … her clothes, ratty and threadbare; her wealth, a pittance. Two copper pennies don’t make much noise when they fall into the collection box.
But large sums do. And when the rich people came by, and threw in their bags of coins, everyone knew it, and surely turned, smiling approvingly in their direction. CLANK!
But Jesus hears with different ears and sees with different eyes than the spellbound crowd. He noticed this unnamed, unassuming, beggarly widow. Calling his disciples over to him, he points her out and says, “See her? When she threw in those two pennies, she gave more than all those other moneybags who made a big deal out of their giving-a-plenty. Because they gave out of their abundance – out of what they had left over, or didn’t need – but she, she gave out of her poverty, everything she had … literally, her whole life.”
It’s abundance set on its end. The abundance of the showy rich scribes was all a show…their gluttony for more more more was never sated, and that’s why Jesus says they even went after the houses of the poorest of the poor, the widows. Their abundance was really … scarcity. They could never get enough because “enough” wasn’t a word in their vocabulary. It might all be taken away tomorrow, so better go for more of it today. No matter how much money’s in the bank, how fat’s the portfolio, go foreclose on poor widow Smith because who knows, you might be out on the street licking butter wrappers for your dinner tomorrow.
Hmn.
That makes it sound like what those scribes loved the most was their stuff; what they trusted most was their wealth; and what they feared most was losing it.
Silly me! I thought those places were reserved for … God.
And so they are.
But the god of these scribes is not the same as the widow’s. Their god is a god of scarcity … the way they think and talk and act, shows a theology of scarcity, not abundance. Fear drives them to speak, and act, in the exact opposite way of the “greatest commandments” which one of the scribes’ number so publicly agreed with Jesus, in last week’s Gospel:
The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
The widow gets it right where the scribes once again don’t. She doesn’t give ten or twenty percent of her income … she doesn’t keep one penny back for herself and throw the other in … although that would have been the prudent thing to do … NO! In an incredible act of defiance to the powers and authorities who are trying to run and ruin her life … she throws the whole thing in … her whole life … everything she has. She is the one living in abundance … she has the God of abundance; or rather, the God of abundance has her … so she rests in the trust, the faith, the assurance that what she’s put in … her whole life … which she realizes belongs not to her, but to the God who made and sustains her … what she puts in is stewarded back to God, and she trusts that God will take care of her and give her all she needs.
Wow.
True abundance. She believed it.
Do we believe it?
Make no mistake. Fearful living, scarcity living, it’s exhausting living. It is so much more freeing to believe that God is a God of abundance like the widow believes … not the sham, plastic, phoney baloney god of scarcity that the scribes slavishly serve.
But it’s tough. We see the poor, and we want to be generous … we hear of the needs of orphans and widows, storm victims and people on the streets … and we’d like to help … but we have our mortgages and student loans, taxes and car payments, credit cards and doctor bills to pay. We need to put something away for a rainy day. We want to be generous … but what if we run short?
In some ways, this is a miserable text for us today. We can feel guilty when we hear it because maybe we feel we’re more like the scribes than the widow. I know I do. So I do what I can. You do what you can. Our giving here reflects this – it’s generous and increasing, and for that we should be … and are … very thankful.
But the widow threw in “her whole life.”
Do we believe it?
So should I feel guilty about that? Not giving enough, not believing or trusting enough, that there will still be enough even after I give my ten percent or more back?
No. That’s not the point of this text. Giving out of guilt or shame isn’t it. It’s not what the widow does, and it’s not what Jesus is looking for here either.
This is not a text, a word, a “stewardship Sunday” cattle-prodding motivator, simply meant to drive us to empty our wallets into the collection plate this week.
Remember ... the widow throws in everything she has, literally her whole life.
What this text is all about ... is the abundance of God, for us. It all starts with what God does … God, the giver – the One who creates and gives to us out of abundance, everything …earth, sea and stars … animals and fish … food and clothing … home and family … health and safety … all there is.
God, who gives his only Son, so that we would not die forever, but have eternal life.
God, who one day will gather everything and everyone to himself, in a feast that has no end.
Do we believe it?
Once again, we’re going to need some help to believe. Help that comes in water and word ... flowing streams of living water, welcoming, forgiving, freeing us in Jesus’ name to be the people he creates and calls us to be ... bread and wine broken and poured out for us ... hearts and hands to hold and care for us.
And so we have them here. And so we have them here. Abundantly.
And knowing how God’s story for us ends gives us what we need to live abundantly and give abundantly now.
A story I have shared before … about a decorated American veteran … on this weekend we recognize our nation’s veterans … illustrates this well. Admiral Jim Stockdale was Ross Perot’s vice-presidential candidate in 1992. Some may recall the Saturday Night Live skits of the time which made fun of him – but Admiral Stockdale was a real-life hero. He was the highest-ranking US military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Imprisoned from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale was repeatedly tortured but refused to give in, and helped create conditions so that the most prisoners would survive captivity unbroken.
When he was asked how he survived eight years as a prisoner of war, Admiral Stockdale answered:
I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end.
Who didn’t make it out of the “Hanoi Hilton?” Stockdale said,
The optimists. The ones who said ‘we’re going to be out by Christmas,’ and Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘we’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.
To Admiral Stockdale, this was the most important lesson.
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
It’s a good lesson for us. Life was brutal for both widows of our texts.
The widow of Zarephath was saved, rescued by the Word of God … through Elijah … the word which brought the light and warmth of the love and care of God into the dark and gloom of her scarcity-existence.
And the widow at the temple treasury … she knew whose she was … so she could be truly abundant, trusting her whole life back to the One who gave it to her … who made her, who claimed her … who knew her and loved her when no one else cared.
The same is true for us. Life can be brutal sometimes. Some of us here today are deeply disappointed over election results … others, over health test results … some, thinking and worrying about our personal economics ... employment or lack of it, for spouse, child, loved one, or maybe self.
And yet, the God who has us … who gives us a name and claims us in his flowing streams of living water, YOU ARE MINE … this God, our God, is the One who gives us all we have and all we are … always, in all ways.
Do we believe it?
May we have hearts ready to believe, and hands ready to serve - lives given to us out of the Abundance of our Creator God … lives that reflect the abundance of our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer God … lives that are good soil, lives that bear much good fruit. Amen.
1 Kings 17:8-16 / Mark 12:38-44
11 November 2012
Today ... in our continued walk through our end of the church year “basics of faith” review ... we have a tale of two widows.
One widow is the victim of a drought; a drought sent by God upon his people Israel, to convince their king and the other rulers that indeed, God is God, and that the false gods and goddesses of their neighbors, which the King has adopted as his own gods … God is out to prove that those false gods are no gods at all. And this widow is caught up in the results of the king’s poor choices.
The other widow … she is a victim of the religious establishment, those who openly prey on women such as her, to make themselves rich at her expense.
However, both widows end up being for us examples of … and witnesses to … God’s abundance; full, rich, plentiful living, cup filled to overflowing blessings which God so wants and wills to shower on all of us … and for which we are called to offer thanks and praise to God.
Abundance. It’s all around us. It’s all of what God so richly wants to give us.
And yet … abundance is so often the furthest thing from us.
Because we live in a world, a culture, often, with a theology … a way of thinking, and talking about God which is all about … scarcity.
The theology of scarcity … really, it’s embodied fear that there won’t be enough to go around, there won’t be enough for me, and therefore I have to amass more and more and more.
Scarcity is the byword in both of our texts for today.
In the Word from Kings, the woman known as the “Widow of Zarephath” is living scarcity. There is a drought in Israel, sent by God because King Ahab has put his faith and trust in his neighbors’ false god Ba’al, instead of the God who brought his people from slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. The prophet Elijah, sent by God into the wilderness, comes across the Widow of Zarephath -- a foreigner, it must be pointed out – and Elijah makes that request of her,
Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.
The Widow of Zarephath’s objection is understandable. There’s nothing left, only enough for a last meal for her and her son. To be a widow in these Bible times meant suffering … a husband’s premature death was seen as divine punishment for some kind of horrible sin husband or wife had committed … and when her husband died, the widow had no means of support or livelihood other than begging or relying on the grace, the charity of others. Now even that had run out … or so she thought.
Yet God had other plans, through Elijah, for her.
Do not be afraid!
That’s the way Elijah prefaces his word to this Widow of Zarephath. In the face of so much scarcity, he goes right to the heart of it all, for her and for us … fear drives scarcity, and just serves to make things worse. So do not be afraid … trust in this word I bring to you in my body … do as I ask of you, and you will have enough … this is what Elijah says to her.
And so the Widow of Zarephath she went and did what Elijah said … and she, and her son, and Elijah had enough.
This is a fine story of God’s abundance casting out scarcity and fear … on so many levels … religious fear, national fear (the Widow of Zarephath isn’t an Israelite in faith or nationality) … and, especially, fear that there won’t be enough.
To all that fear ... God says ... turn around, my people. Turn and look, turn and receive, turn and hear and follow and do and be, in the richness of my abundance ... which is, for you.
Fear is also at work in the lives of those scribes in our Gospel reading today … the ones of which Jesus warns,
Beware! Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.
Here … Jesus wraps up his case against them … their theology … their way of thinking and talking and acting and living about God … the God they claim to worship … they may say one thing with their lips, but their actions shout loud and clear, “I don’t trust this God to give me what I need … I need more. More stuff … more respect … more honor.”
So much more, so great was their need and their greed, that they needed to devour widow’s houses – taking from even the poorest of the poor.
Oh yeah, these scribes, these religious leaders and authorities of Israel ... they had the best seats in the synagogues – they prayed long prayers – but their lifestyles spoke even louder and longer than their voices.
We don’t believe that God will provide … that God is in charge … that God is God … so it’s every scribe for himself … survival of the fittest, the fattest, the most financially flush.
Ah … but I said this would be “a tale of two widows,” not Slap a Scribe.
So let’s see, let’s hear Jesus’ word about this widow.
Once again, and ... just like Elijah in our Old Testament reading ... Jesus is caught up with an outsider … one who, by her very living, is not part of “the crowd” that Jesus sees passing by the Temple treasury, throwing in money as they pass by. Just like blind Bartimaeus from our reading a couple of weeks ago, this woman was invisible to everyone else … her clothes, ratty and threadbare; her wealth, a pittance. Two copper pennies don’t make much noise when they fall into the collection box.
But large sums do. And when the rich people came by, and threw in their bags of coins, everyone knew it, and surely turned, smiling approvingly in their direction. CLANK!
But Jesus hears with different ears and sees with different eyes than the spellbound crowd. He noticed this unnamed, unassuming, beggarly widow. Calling his disciples over to him, he points her out and says, “See her? When she threw in those two pennies, she gave more than all those other moneybags who made a big deal out of their giving-a-plenty. Because they gave out of their abundance – out of what they had left over, or didn’t need – but she, she gave out of her poverty, everything she had … literally, her whole life.”
It’s abundance set on its end. The abundance of the showy rich scribes was all a show…their gluttony for more more more was never sated, and that’s why Jesus says they even went after the houses of the poorest of the poor, the widows. Their abundance was really … scarcity. They could never get enough because “enough” wasn’t a word in their vocabulary. It might all be taken away tomorrow, so better go for more of it today. No matter how much money’s in the bank, how fat’s the portfolio, go foreclose on poor widow Smith because who knows, you might be out on the street licking butter wrappers for your dinner tomorrow.
Hmn.
That makes it sound like what those scribes loved the most was their stuff; what they trusted most was their wealth; and what they feared most was losing it.
Silly me! I thought those places were reserved for … God.
And so they are.
But the god of these scribes is not the same as the widow’s. Their god is a god of scarcity … the way they think and talk and act, shows a theology of scarcity, not abundance. Fear drives them to speak, and act, in the exact opposite way of the “greatest commandments” which one of the scribes’ number so publicly agreed with Jesus, in last week’s Gospel:
The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
The widow gets it right where the scribes once again don’t. She doesn’t give ten or twenty percent of her income … she doesn’t keep one penny back for herself and throw the other in … although that would have been the prudent thing to do … NO! In an incredible act of defiance to the powers and authorities who are trying to run and ruin her life … she throws the whole thing in … her whole life … everything she has. She is the one living in abundance … she has the God of abundance; or rather, the God of abundance has her … so she rests in the trust, the faith, the assurance that what she’s put in … her whole life … which she realizes belongs not to her, but to the God who made and sustains her … what she puts in is stewarded back to God, and she trusts that God will take care of her and give her all she needs.
Wow.
True abundance. She believed it.
Do we believe it?
Make no mistake. Fearful living, scarcity living, it’s exhausting living. It is so much more freeing to believe that God is a God of abundance like the widow believes … not the sham, plastic, phoney baloney god of scarcity that the scribes slavishly serve.
But it’s tough. We see the poor, and we want to be generous … we hear of the needs of orphans and widows, storm victims and people on the streets … and we’d like to help … but we have our mortgages and student loans, taxes and car payments, credit cards and doctor bills to pay. We need to put something away for a rainy day. We want to be generous … but what if we run short?
In some ways, this is a miserable text for us today. We can feel guilty when we hear it because maybe we feel we’re more like the scribes than the widow. I know I do. So I do what I can. You do what you can. Our giving here reflects this – it’s generous and increasing, and for that we should be … and are … very thankful.
But the widow threw in “her whole life.”
Do we believe it?
So should I feel guilty about that? Not giving enough, not believing or trusting enough, that there will still be enough even after I give my ten percent or more back?
No. That’s not the point of this text. Giving out of guilt or shame isn’t it. It’s not what the widow does, and it’s not what Jesus is looking for here either.
This is not a text, a word, a “stewardship Sunday” cattle-prodding motivator, simply meant to drive us to empty our wallets into the collection plate this week.
Remember ... the widow throws in everything she has, literally her whole life.
What this text is all about ... is the abundance of God, for us. It all starts with what God does … God, the giver – the One who creates and gives to us out of abundance, everything …earth, sea and stars … animals and fish … food and clothing … home and family … health and safety … all there is.
God, who gives his only Son, so that we would not die forever, but have eternal life.
God, who one day will gather everything and everyone to himself, in a feast that has no end.
Do we believe it?
Once again, we’re going to need some help to believe. Help that comes in water and word ... flowing streams of living water, welcoming, forgiving, freeing us in Jesus’ name to be the people he creates and calls us to be ... bread and wine broken and poured out for us ... hearts and hands to hold and care for us.
And so we have them here. And so we have them here. Abundantly.
And knowing how God’s story for us ends gives us what we need to live abundantly and give abundantly now.
A story I have shared before … about a decorated American veteran … on this weekend we recognize our nation’s veterans … illustrates this well. Admiral Jim Stockdale was Ross Perot’s vice-presidential candidate in 1992. Some may recall the Saturday Night Live skits of the time which made fun of him – but Admiral Stockdale was a real-life hero. He was the highest-ranking US military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Imprisoned from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale was repeatedly tortured but refused to give in, and helped create conditions so that the most prisoners would survive captivity unbroken.
When he was asked how he survived eight years as a prisoner of war, Admiral Stockdale answered:
I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end.
Who didn’t make it out of the “Hanoi Hilton?” Stockdale said,
The optimists. The ones who said ‘we’re going to be out by Christmas,’ and Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘we’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.
To Admiral Stockdale, this was the most important lesson.
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
It’s a good lesson for us. Life was brutal for both widows of our texts.
The widow of Zarephath was saved, rescued by the Word of God … through Elijah … the word which brought the light and warmth of the love and care of God into the dark and gloom of her scarcity-existence.
And the widow at the temple treasury … she knew whose she was … so she could be truly abundant, trusting her whole life back to the One who gave it to her … who made her, who claimed her … who knew her and loved her when no one else cared.
The same is true for us. Life can be brutal sometimes. Some of us here today are deeply disappointed over election results … others, over health test results … some, thinking and worrying about our personal economics ... employment or lack of it, for spouse, child, loved one, or maybe self.
And yet, the God who has us … who gives us a name and claims us in his flowing streams of living water, YOU ARE MINE … this God, our God, is the One who gives us all we have and all we are … always, in all ways.
Do we believe it?
May we have hearts ready to believe, and hands ready to serve - lives given to us out of the Abundance of our Creator God … lives that reflect the abundance of our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer God … lives that are good soil, lives that bear much good fruit. Amen.
Sunday, November 04, 2012
4 November 2012
31st Sunday in Ordinary Time / All Saints’ Sunday
Ruth 1:1-18 / Mark 12:28-34
4 November 2012
Today we enter the final four Sundays of the Christian calendar year … the church calendar, just slightly “off” from our January-December one, the church calendar runs from the first Sunday in Advent through the last Sunday in the Ordinary Time / after Pentecost cycle which we call Christ the King.
I hope you noticed a shift in the emphasis of the texts we just heard. Where, over the past month, we’ve been sinking our teeth into some substantial theological concepts each week … working our way through Job, one of the most intricate and difficult books of the Bible … and meeting some challenging characters, challenging in the questions they’ve asked of Jesus, and the situations they’ve put him in: the rich man, wanting to climb his gold plated ladder to eternal life; James and John, wanting to sit immediately with Jesus in eternity ...
... well, now, these final 4 Sundays of the church year, we go “back to the basics,” as if to signal that we’re wrapping it all up, and getting ready for something new.
That old – yet ever new story is the Advent of our Lord, the Messiah … which, once again, is coming soon ... in four short weeks. But first, we have some review work to do … good review work, especially, as we also close out our year-long Nativity emphasis on Holy Baptism, those “flowing streams of living water” which move us to grow in our discipleship journey in Jesus.
Today … we start at the beginning, a very good place to start … with the Word that is Greatest of All.
After last week’s brief encounter with a Gospel character – the blind beggar Bartimaeus – who actually “gets it right” about Jesus ... acknowledging his, our proper place, following Christ’s call to repentance ... this week, we’re right back to another challenging character, like the rich man, like James and John.
Oh, certainly, this scribe, on the surface, doesn’t seem very challenging to Jesus. Indeed, he’s quite complementary.
Or is he?
His question of Jesus often gets misinterpreted as a question about “the first or greatest commandment.” Meaning, that this gets interpreted as a question about LAW. In reality, though, the scribe “gets” that Torah – that Hebrew word which gets interpreted as LAW – Torah is really about a whole way of living, The Way of living – the first, of ALL living that is to follow it, into which the Lord has called his people Israel.
Jesus answers the scribe, reciting back two passages of Hebrew Scripture, from Deuteronomy and Leviticus:
The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
Jesus follows this with the words, there is no other commandment greater than these.
It is an understandable, though at the same time, confusing answer from Jesus.
Being “commanded to love” sounds rather odd.
The word for “love” which Jesus uses here ... it’s that “God-love” word ... you may recall, a sermon of mine from some time ago, when I went over those different Greek words for love ... where our American English only has the one word, “love,” the Greek language of Jesus’ time had three ... erotic love, philanthropic or good-will love, and agape or “God-love,” the self-giving love which has its source in the heart of God.
So can love be commanded?
Well, one answer would be ‘no,’ it can’t, since love necessarily means a change of heart and that can’t be commanded ... you can’t make someone love you. But ‘yes’ would also be the right answer, since “God-love” has actions implied, actions which are often at our own sacrifice, which are for the good of the other person ... our neighbor. And those actions can be, are commanded, by God.
Whichever the scribe thinks, he’s not saying. But what he does say, sounds pretty good, don’t you think?
You are right, Teacher; you have truly said ... ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ – this is much more important than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.
And doesn’t it sound like Jesus thinks he sounds pretty good too?
You are not far off from the kingdom of God.
He’s not far off.
But neither does Jesus say that the scribe is in it, either.
He’s in the vicinity, but he’s circling.
Why?
Well, think back to some of the words we’ve heard Jesus say, over the past few weeks, about entering the kingdom of God:
You enter it as a little child.
You enter it by emptying yourself, by taking up your cross and following Jesus.
You enter it through repentance; hearing God’s Word, paying attention, paying attention to how far short you, I fall from what God wants for us, and then, asking forgiveness.
This scribe, he sounds good, he speaks well, he knows what it takes ... but, perhaps, probably, likely, he just can’t go there, for whatever reason. Maybe he’s too tied to his wealth or his reasoning or his wanting to be Godlike himself.
So he’s not far off.
But neither is he in, living it, living the rich, full life of the kingdom of God which God intends, wants, wishes, wills for him ... for us.
You want to know who is?
Ruth.
Yes, that’s right, Ruth. She who is NOT an Israelite, but a FOREIGNER ... an idol worshipping foreigner, at that ... Ruth is our Scripture – illustration today of one who “gets” what “God-love” is all about ... one who is living into the Spirit of the words Jesus gives.
Ruth – the book- is a great story to read. It’s short and to the point. Coming in the Old Testament right after the book of Judges ... yes, that book of Judges, which, depending on your mood … we either enjoyed or suffered together last fall ... Ruth is a story which bridges the transition between the story of God being faithful through the patriarchs … Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Aaron … through the time of the Judges … through to the Kings … Saul, and particularly David. Indeed, at the end of the book of Ruth, we get a genealogy which shows God’s faithfulness to his people … through Ruth … to David. Ruth … this idol worshipping foreigner … she is the one God chooses to bring his kingdom into this world … to David … and yes, as we follow that story through the Scriptures … through the line of David, to Jesus Christ.
We seldom hear readings from the book of Ruth in worship … sometimes, at weddings, because of those indented words on page 8 of your worship folder …
Where you go, I will go;
Where you lodge, I will lodge,
Your people shall be my people,
And your God my God.
Where you die, I will die –
There will I be buried.
Certainly these words sound good and right and true as wishes, sentiments, hopes and dreams of a newly wedded couple … but don’t let those sentimental feelings cloud the clear, right, true, jarring nature of what’s going on here.
This is a story, these are words of life-changing conversion.
Naomi and Elimelech, along with their two sons … these people from Bethlehem in Judah, settle in the hill country of Moab … Moab, Israel’s neighbor, and oftentimes enemy.
Elimelech dies, leaving Naomi with those two sons … Mahlon and Chilion … and perhaps forebodingly, ominously, their very names point toward their future … Mahlon means “sickly” and Chilion, “frail.”
The two brothers marry Ruth and Orpah, sisters from the country of Moab … and, SURPRISE … Sickly and Frail both die, too.
So Naomi decides to go back home to Judah.
But before she goes, she does the right thing … she releases Ruth and Orpah to stay with their own people, and their own gods.
Orpah does just that … she goes back home to her people.
But Ruth stays with Naomi … indeed, she shows God-love here … loving her mother in law Naomi so much, that she acts at her own sacrifice for Naomi’s benefit.
That’s a whole lot deeper than nice words at a wedding. This is life-changing, converting God-love at work. No wonder we have this reading on All Saints’ Sunday. Ruth is a saint, for sure … whether or not she’s recognized by the church, given a medal or a day, or not … her actions, her showing of self-sacrificial God-love … that’s saintly behavior, for sure. A right, and true life example to follow.
And so often we miss this aspect of God-love.
As church consultant Bill Easum says, quite truthfully …
I’m convinced that we have confused “love others” with “being nice,” that we have taught ourselves to be nice instead of Christian. People who would rather be nice than Christian do not love enough. They do not have enough compassion. Instead they are afraid of hurting someone or of being hurt. But fear is the opposite of love: “Perfect love casts out fear” – 1 John 4:18.
The scribe doesn’t get this. He is “not far from the kingdom of God” but isn’t there, because he’s circling it, observing, speculating, offering pithy aphorisms about God and love and everything that’s right and true, but he won’t jump into the flowing streams of living water himself, for whatever reason … most likely, fear. What would they say, what would they do? It’s better … easier … to offer speculation rather than life-changed proclamation … better to stand around the synagogue and talk gladiator scores or imperial politics or hasn’t the weather just been awful lately, than to ask each other in faith and love, “how have you seen God active in your life the past week?” … to listen, with care and love, to the answers … and if the answer is “well, I haven’t seen God this week,” to not let go and walk away, but to keep with and at it, to find out why, and more, to offer himself ... to offer ourselves, in that sacrificial God-love, so that the answer we get next time we ask isn’t “I didn’t” but “I did, through you.”
So you see, Ruth gets this; her saintliness comes primarily through her sacrificial God-love. What she does is God-love, and it isn’t necessarily nice to everyone … certainly not to her own people, her own sister, her own family back home in Moab, to whom she turns her back forever. But remember, this isn’t nice love, it’s God-love.
Again, think of those saints we commemorate today … saints of old, saints in our own lives. Do we think of them as saints because they were nice people … living an innocuous, polite, oops excuse me kind of faith?
No, of course not. Paul? Peter? Martin Luther? Mother Teresa? Certainly not. They were not always nice people. They were loving people, living lives of God-love into the world, but we would never say they were always nice. Peter and Paul both got arrested for getting in the faces of the local authorities. Luther was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for his theology, and his sometimes mean-spirited words and actions. Mother Teresa would stop at nothing … and no one … in her care for the poor … some of her words certainly accuse us, here, in this very wealthy country, today.
But we know other saints who have faithfully reflected that God-love, too. My grandmother, who insisted that her grandson go to the Lutheran church for confirmation … I, who much rather preferred worshipping at the church of Vince Lombardi and Roger Stauback each Sunday morning with my dad. Nope. Not nice. But I’m glad she wasn’t nice about that … I probably wouldn’t be here today if she was.
And you have similar stories.
God-love isn’t always nice-love. It’s sacrificial … self-giving … insistent … never giving up … in the words of St. Paul, it’s not arrogant or rude, or insisting on its own way … but it rejoices in the truth.
And getting to the truth of it all … isn’t always nice.
Indeed, Jesus suffered and died for The Truth of It All … that we all fall short of God’s glory, that only through him, his life, his suffering, his death, his resurrection … his call for our repentance, his word for our forgiveness … only through him, are we made right, and true, and whole … people, of and for his kingdom …
… all saints, all brought to walk wet, to splash and play in the flowing streams of living water, our hope, for the life to come, and for the life that is now.
That’s right, now. Saint-life, God-love, is meant to be lived out now. For, all the saints who from their labors rest … they don’t need our God-love. They are already and eternally immersed in it.
For all the saints who are in their labors now … that’s where we are called to be. Living like Ruth, freed by God’s Word, let go and letting go, hearing God’s call and sent to respond in God-love, to and for the sake of the world …
…the world, who so desperately needs to see and hear and experience the kind of God-love which is described in the song we sing next … with words by Bp. Desmond Tutu …
Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate;
Light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death;
Victory is ours, victory is ours, through God who loves us.
For all the saints … o saints of God, o saints of Nativity, this is our call. To live God-love into the world, all ways, in all ways.
Through and because of Christ, who is with us always.
Amen.
Ruth 1:1-18 / Mark 12:28-34
4 November 2012
Today we enter the final four Sundays of the Christian calendar year … the church calendar, just slightly “off” from our January-December one, the church calendar runs from the first Sunday in Advent through the last Sunday in the Ordinary Time / after Pentecost cycle which we call Christ the King.
I hope you noticed a shift in the emphasis of the texts we just heard. Where, over the past month, we’ve been sinking our teeth into some substantial theological concepts each week … working our way through Job, one of the most intricate and difficult books of the Bible … and meeting some challenging characters, challenging in the questions they’ve asked of Jesus, and the situations they’ve put him in: the rich man, wanting to climb his gold plated ladder to eternal life; James and John, wanting to sit immediately with Jesus in eternity ...
... well, now, these final 4 Sundays of the church year, we go “back to the basics,” as if to signal that we’re wrapping it all up, and getting ready for something new.
That old – yet ever new story is the Advent of our Lord, the Messiah … which, once again, is coming soon ... in four short weeks. But first, we have some review work to do … good review work, especially, as we also close out our year-long Nativity emphasis on Holy Baptism, those “flowing streams of living water” which move us to grow in our discipleship journey in Jesus.
Today … we start at the beginning, a very good place to start … with the Word that is Greatest of All.
After last week’s brief encounter with a Gospel character – the blind beggar Bartimaeus – who actually “gets it right” about Jesus ... acknowledging his, our proper place, following Christ’s call to repentance ... this week, we’re right back to another challenging character, like the rich man, like James and John.
Oh, certainly, this scribe, on the surface, doesn’t seem very challenging to Jesus. Indeed, he’s quite complementary.
Or is he?
His question of Jesus often gets misinterpreted as a question about “the first or greatest commandment.” Meaning, that this gets interpreted as a question about LAW. In reality, though, the scribe “gets” that Torah – that Hebrew word which gets interpreted as LAW – Torah is really about a whole way of living, The Way of living – the first, of ALL living that is to follow it, into which the Lord has called his people Israel.
Jesus answers the scribe, reciting back two passages of Hebrew Scripture, from Deuteronomy and Leviticus:
The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
Jesus follows this with the words, there is no other commandment greater than these.
It is an understandable, though at the same time, confusing answer from Jesus.
Being “commanded to love” sounds rather odd.
The word for “love” which Jesus uses here ... it’s that “God-love” word ... you may recall, a sermon of mine from some time ago, when I went over those different Greek words for love ... where our American English only has the one word, “love,” the Greek language of Jesus’ time had three ... erotic love, philanthropic or good-will love, and agape or “God-love,” the self-giving love which has its source in the heart of God.
So can love be commanded?
Well, one answer would be ‘no,’ it can’t, since love necessarily means a change of heart and that can’t be commanded ... you can’t make someone love you. But ‘yes’ would also be the right answer, since “God-love” has actions implied, actions which are often at our own sacrifice, which are for the good of the other person ... our neighbor. And those actions can be, are commanded, by God.
Whichever the scribe thinks, he’s not saying. But what he does say, sounds pretty good, don’t you think?
You are right, Teacher; you have truly said ... ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ – this is much more important than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.
And doesn’t it sound like Jesus thinks he sounds pretty good too?
You are not far off from the kingdom of God.
He’s not far off.
But neither does Jesus say that the scribe is in it, either.
He’s in the vicinity, but he’s circling.
Why?
Well, think back to some of the words we’ve heard Jesus say, over the past few weeks, about entering the kingdom of God:
You enter it as a little child.
You enter it by emptying yourself, by taking up your cross and following Jesus.
You enter it through repentance; hearing God’s Word, paying attention, paying attention to how far short you, I fall from what God wants for us, and then, asking forgiveness.
This scribe, he sounds good, he speaks well, he knows what it takes ... but, perhaps, probably, likely, he just can’t go there, for whatever reason. Maybe he’s too tied to his wealth or his reasoning or his wanting to be Godlike himself.
So he’s not far off.
But neither is he in, living it, living the rich, full life of the kingdom of God which God intends, wants, wishes, wills for him ... for us.
You want to know who is?
Ruth.
Yes, that’s right, Ruth. She who is NOT an Israelite, but a FOREIGNER ... an idol worshipping foreigner, at that ... Ruth is our Scripture – illustration today of one who “gets” what “God-love” is all about ... one who is living into the Spirit of the words Jesus gives.
Ruth – the book- is a great story to read. It’s short and to the point. Coming in the Old Testament right after the book of Judges ... yes, that book of Judges, which, depending on your mood … we either enjoyed or suffered together last fall ... Ruth is a story which bridges the transition between the story of God being faithful through the patriarchs … Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Aaron … through the time of the Judges … through to the Kings … Saul, and particularly David. Indeed, at the end of the book of Ruth, we get a genealogy which shows God’s faithfulness to his people … through Ruth … to David. Ruth … this idol worshipping foreigner … she is the one God chooses to bring his kingdom into this world … to David … and yes, as we follow that story through the Scriptures … through the line of David, to Jesus Christ.
We seldom hear readings from the book of Ruth in worship … sometimes, at weddings, because of those indented words on page 8 of your worship folder …
Where you go, I will go;
Where you lodge, I will lodge,
Your people shall be my people,
And your God my God.
Where you die, I will die –
There will I be buried.
Certainly these words sound good and right and true as wishes, sentiments, hopes and dreams of a newly wedded couple … but don’t let those sentimental feelings cloud the clear, right, true, jarring nature of what’s going on here.
This is a story, these are words of life-changing conversion.
Naomi and Elimelech, along with their two sons … these people from Bethlehem in Judah, settle in the hill country of Moab … Moab, Israel’s neighbor, and oftentimes enemy.
Elimelech dies, leaving Naomi with those two sons … Mahlon and Chilion … and perhaps forebodingly, ominously, their very names point toward their future … Mahlon means “sickly” and Chilion, “frail.”
The two brothers marry Ruth and Orpah, sisters from the country of Moab … and, SURPRISE … Sickly and Frail both die, too.
So Naomi decides to go back home to Judah.
But before she goes, she does the right thing … she releases Ruth and Orpah to stay with their own people, and their own gods.
Orpah does just that … she goes back home to her people.
But Ruth stays with Naomi … indeed, she shows God-love here … loving her mother in law Naomi so much, that she acts at her own sacrifice for Naomi’s benefit.
That’s a whole lot deeper than nice words at a wedding. This is life-changing, converting God-love at work. No wonder we have this reading on All Saints’ Sunday. Ruth is a saint, for sure … whether or not she’s recognized by the church, given a medal or a day, or not … her actions, her showing of self-sacrificial God-love … that’s saintly behavior, for sure. A right, and true life example to follow.
And so often we miss this aspect of God-love.
As church consultant Bill Easum says, quite truthfully …
I’m convinced that we have confused “love others” with “being nice,” that we have taught ourselves to be nice instead of Christian. People who would rather be nice than Christian do not love enough. They do not have enough compassion. Instead they are afraid of hurting someone or of being hurt. But fear is the opposite of love: “Perfect love casts out fear” – 1 John 4:18.
The scribe doesn’t get this. He is “not far from the kingdom of God” but isn’t there, because he’s circling it, observing, speculating, offering pithy aphorisms about God and love and everything that’s right and true, but he won’t jump into the flowing streams of living water himself, for whatever reason … most likely, fear. What would they say, what would they do? It’s better … easier … to offer speculation rather than life-changed proclamation … better to stand around the synagogue and talk gladiator scores or imperial politics or hasn’t the weather just been awful lately, than to ask each other in faith and love, “how have you seen God active in your life the past week?” … to listen, with care and love, to the answers … and if the answer is “well, I haven’t seen God this week,” to not let go and walk away, but to keep with and at it, to find out why, and more, to offer himself ... to offer ourselves, in that sacrificial God-love, so that the answer we get next time we ask isn’t “I didn’t” but “I did, through you.”
So you see, Ruth gets this; her saintliness comes primarily through her sacrificial God-love. What she does is God-love, and it isn’t necessarily nice to everyone … certainly not to her own people, her own sister, her own family back home in Moab, to whom she turns her back forever. But remember, this isn’t nice love, it’s God-love.
Again, think of those saints we commemorate today … saints of old, saints in our own lives. Do we think of them as saints because they were nice people … living an innocuous, polite, oops excuse me kind of faith?
No, of course not. Paul? Peter? Martin Luther? Mother Teresa? Certainly not. They were not always nice people. They were loving people, living lives of God-love into the world, but we would never say they were always nice. Peter and Paul both got arrested for getting in the faces of the local authorities. Luther was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for his theology, and his sometimes mean-spirited words and actions. Mother Teresa would stop at nothing … and no one … in her care for the poor … some of her words certainly accuse us, here, in this very wealthy country, today.
But we know other saints who have faithfully reflected that God-love, too. My grandmother, who insisted that her grandson go to the Lutheran church for confirmation … I, who much rather preferred worshipping at the church of Vince Lombardi and Roger Stauback each Sunday morning with my dad. Nope. Not nice. But I’m glad she wasn’t nice about that … I probably wouldn’t be here today if she was.
And you have similar stories.
God-love isn’t always nice-love. It’s sacrificial … self-giving … insistent … never giving up … in the words of St. Paul, it’s not arrogant or rude, or insisting on its own way … but it rejoices in the truth.
And getting to the truth of it all … isn’t always nice.
Indeed, Jesus suffered and died for The Truth of It All … that we all fall short of God’s glory, that only through him, his life, his suffering, his death, his resurrection … his call for our repentance, his word for our forgiveness … only through him, are we made right, and true, and whole … people, of and for his kingdom …
… all saints, all brought to walk wet, to splash and play in the flowing streams of living water, our hope, for the life to come, and for the life that is now.
That’s right, now. Saint-life, God-love, is meant to be lived out now. For, all the saints who from their labors rest … they don’t need our God-love. They are already and eternally immersed in it.
For all the saints who are in their labors now … that’s where we are called to be. Living like Ruth, freed by God’s Word, let go and letting go, hearing God’s call and sent to respond in God-love, to and for the sake of the world …
…the world, who so desperately needs to see and hear and experience the kind of God-love which is described in the song we sing next … with words by Bp. Desmond Tutu …
Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate;
Light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death;
Victory is ours, victory is ours, through God who loves us.
For all the saints … o saints of God, o saints of Nativity, this is our call. To live God-love into the world, all ways, in all ways.
Through and because of Christ, who is with us always.
Amen.
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