Things weren’t good in Jeremiah’s Jerusalem. The city itself had broken down into the kind of factions we see today — the wealthy oppressed the poor, the powerful ignored the plight of the weak, widows and orphans were left to fend for themselves. It had been this way for years; and the consequences were about to unfold. The LORD had warned his people that disobeying his commands and turning aside from his way would result in death and destruction; and death and destruction were on the way. Nebuchadnezzar himself was coming to lay siege to the city, and the survivors would be forced to return to Babylon with him, leaving their homes, their temple, and their land.
Everything was in chaos. And yet this is the time that God chooses to share his promise, the hope of a new covenant, with Israel. We’ve talked for the last month or so about the ways God has blessed his people, Israel, and through them, the world. We’ve looked at the promises made to Noah and Abraham and Moses, and all of them have been remarkable and beautiful. But this one is different. Or perhaps we should call it surprising or counterintuitive — because it comes while the people of God are embroiled in the consequences of their own disobedience. It comes before they’ve figured out what they have done, before they have repented of their sins. God makes this new promise — a promise that features him as the only one doing anything — while humankind is still at odds with the one who made them. Why? C.S. Lewis once called the story of the Bible, which is the story of everything there is, a comedy — in the classical sense. Unlike a tragedy, which begins with everything being semi-okay and ends with most everyone dead, a comedy begins with everything wrong and ends with everything finally coming to rights. The road to that conclusion doesn’t have to be funny; it can actually be quite tragic. But we know, or the author knows, that the marriage feast awaits. Ever since that fateful day in the Garden, God has been working to bring his people back to him — and we’ve fought him every step of the way. And yet he’s been forging ahead regardless, using imperfect and sometimes wicked human beings to accomplish his work, to bring us to the end he desires: that we should willingly, happily, joyfully be his people and recognize him as our God. “Behold, the day is coming when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. . . . I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. . . . For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” God doesn’t wait until his people are perfect, until they’ve recognized their sin and repented, to save them. As St. Paul writes, “when we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus, God’s own Son, put his life on the line because he wanted more than anything in the world to restore the community we once had with the LORD. The day is coming for us, too, when we will see God face-to-face. Until then, though, know that however messed up we are, however imperfectly we live our lives, however unloveable we think we are, God is for us. He loves that which he has made, and he is working every minute of every day to save us, to bring us all to the happy end, when we will feast together at the wedding banquet of the Lamb. AMEN.
0 Comments
“ And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” This morning, the fourth Sunday in Lent is the half-way point between Ash Wednesday and Easter. It is also known as Laetare Sunday, laetare meaning rejoice. Other names for the day are refreshment Sunday, and if you are in England, mothering Sunday. Being mid- way in the season the liturgical color is rose, a lighter version of the darker purple. Today I am reminded to thank Lil Larivee and Patti Gruber who made these particularly beautiful vestments that we only wear twice a year. Looking forward on this rose Sunday, we celebrate the hope that is to come at Easter. And pausing at this mid-point we are prompted to make use of the season before Lent is over until next year. While it is nice to have a set end to the season we know that much of life does not give us an exact mid point where we can say, four more weeks and this trial or tribulation will be done. Yet, while we may not be able to pinpoint the exact middle of something it is good practice for us to realize in other trying times of life, that this too will pass; there will be an end. There is hope that comes with acknowledging the finish. If you were to find the most reliable, most level-headed person in your life, and you were to ask them if you should go into a high-stakes real estate venture with someone who constantly messes up, who can’t manage to be on time to anything, and who doesn’t know the difference between weekdays and the weekend, your friend would almost certainly say don’t do it. In fact, I don’t think you’d need to find your wisest friend or mentor. Most people would say that committing yourself to a person like that is a bad idea. Just go find someone different, someone better or more mature. There are plenty of people like that out there. Take your pick.
But then, what if you decided to just ignore their advice and go ahead with the partnership? Would you blame your mentor for thinking you foolish? You knew what you were getting into before signing the dotted line; and yet you did it anyway. Curiously enough, we see a very similar situation playing out in our OT reading this morning. Except this time, it’s not a business proposition between you and your neighbor down the street — it’s a covenant between God, the creator of the world and everything in it, and Israel, a people who will quickly prove that they just can’t get it right, whether or not they try to do so. Three months after the Israelites escaped from Egypt, they arrived at the base of Mount Sinai. Bedraggled and footsore, they set up camp while Moses climbed the mountain to talk to God. And the LORD said: “Tell this to the house of Israel: You have seen what I did to Egypt. You have seen how I brought you out of slavery. Now, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you will and always shall be my treasured possession, a jewel among all people; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Now, it’s interesting that God would say this, would so willingly enter into a covenant with the Hebrew people — because the Israelites have spent the last three months grumbling, forgetting entirely what God has done for them, even going so far as to say to Moses: “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert.” But despite all this, God chose to commit himself to them anyway. “If you will obey my voice and keep my covenant,” he says, “you will be mine, and I will love you more than anything else I have made.” And in a storm of thunder and lightning, the LORD does so, giving his people the 10 familiar commands that will shape their relationship, that will allow a sinful people to live with a holy God. And Israel, terrified of the storm and of the idea of a God being so involved with them, fell to their knees and worshiped, awed and honored at the beginning of this new covenant. Now, if we were to stop there, it looks like things will turn out well. The Israelites are amazed and thankful at their change in fortunes, and God has chosen a people to be his people. They will move forward together, traveling out of the desert and into the land of Canaan, the land God had promised to Abraham all those long years ago. But, and there is always some kind of caveat in this fallen world of ours, the Israelites had already proven that they weren’t up to the task. They had doubted, forgotten, grumbled, failed. Within a few short days of this new beginning, the Israelites will have already built an idol, a golden calf, thinking that this was the god for them. What was God thinking to get involved with such a people? Another nation, another family would definitely have done better. We would have done better. Would we have done better? It can be easy for us at this point to think that if we had been in the same situation as the Hebrew people, we would never have been so unfaithful, so difficult. If we were hungry and afraid, we would rely on God to feed us, to protect us. If we were impatient, thinking that God had forgotten us, of course we would remember the deeds he has done in the past. But would we, though? It really only takes a second, a moment of introspection to realize that we are no different than the people of Israel. We grumble. We doubt. We forget. We fail. As St. Paul writes, all have been consigned to disobedience . . . no one is righteous, no not one. So what was God thinking? God knew what he was getting into, when he bound himself to such a stubborn people. He knew that the Israelites would stray from him, and he knew that we wouldn’t be much better. What, then, does that make of God’s promise? If we were to return to our wise friend, who told us from the very beginning that we shouldn’t trust someone unreliable with anything important, they would be justified in saying that we should just end our partnership and look out for better options. Some folks just won’t change. Better to abandon them than to continue digging ourselves into a hole. But that’s not what God does. He ignores such seemingly wise counsel and continues to commit and recommit himself to people who have a very bad habit of taking him for granted. In fact, as the story continues, we find that the LORD is so intent on saving the Israelites that he will actually die for them. For us. The logic of God’s actions, as St. Paul describes it, is totally foolish according to the world’s standards. No matter what we say or think about ourselves, in our heart of hearts, we would never willingly die for a people, let alone a person, who constantly insulted us, disrespected us, took us for granted. We don’t want anything to do with people like that. We actively try to get away from them. Yet God did the opposite. He does the opposite. He not only didn’t abandon the creatures who betrayed him in the garden, he came to earth so that he could lead their children — Jew, Gentile, you, me — out of the wilderness of sin and into the promised land of eternal life. “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Throughout the story of Scripture, throughout the history of the Church, God chooses the weak and the foolish, the inept and the unreliable to accomplish his work. In short, he chooses to work through human beings like you and me. He knows that we have “no power in ourselves to help ourselves,” yet he commits himself to us regardless. Because of that commitment, because God is radical, relentless love, we are today his kingdom of priests, his holy people regardless of the fact that we just can’t get it right, whether or not we try to do so. No matter what we have done, no matter the regrets we have or the mistakes we’ve made, God will not abandon us. He has staked his very life on it. His is a purpose we may not understand, but his is a Word that is unshakeable. “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” AMEN. “I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.”
The Old Testament readings for Lent in this year B encourage us to think about covenants, which are special kinds of promises or commitments. Last week we heard of Noah. In that covenant God promised to never destroy the entire earth again by a flood. Today the covenant is with Abram whom God renames Abraham in this lesson to mark God’s promise to make him the father of many nations. We are told that Abraham and Sara will become the ancestors of God’s people, both the famous and the common. (Into that lineage David and eventually Jesus will be born.) As a preview, next week the first lesson will be about Moses and the Ten Commandments. In fact, each of the Old Testament stories in year B is about covenants. A common theme in these lessons is that the promises being made come first and most strongly from God rather than what human beings such as Noah, Abraham, Sara and Moses promise in return. So, I wonder this morning, what exactly is a covenant and how does this type of a promise work? Is it like a pact or a treaty or simply an obligation? Is it the same as a contract, which my thesaurus uses as a synonym? Personally I don’t think so. A contract carries a legal aspect to it, at least in our society. Each party involved signs on to exactly what is written on the document. In a contract each party agrees that I have to do certain things and in return you have to do certain things. If one of us breaks the contract there will be consequences which are usually spelled out in the document. We agree to exactly what is stated in the contract, nothing more. What we sign to is the minimum—we are not required to go beyond what is on the paper. You can make a contract with someone without caring for them or without really even knowing them. It is a “business” arrangement. You can sign a contract with someone you despise and still fulfill the provisions of the agreement. Linus and Lucy are standing at the window watching it rain. You know who they are, I’m sure -- two of the children from the classic comic strip Peanuts. The cartoon I’m thinking of is based on today’s Old Testament lesson from Genesis 9. Lucy says, "If it doesn't stop raining everything will be washed away."
"Oh no!" Linus assures her. "Genesis chapter 9 says that never again will God wash everything away." A relieved Lucy says, "Thank you, that is a great comfort to me." Linus replies, "Sound theology will do that." The story of the flood, despite the fact that it comes from the most ancient and murkiest period of stories handed down in Scripture, actually has a lot to teach us. It is full of sound theology -- which, as Linus reminds us, is the only kind that really works because it is the only kind that describes reality. The story goes that God looked down on earth and saw what a mess people had made of everything -- of the ecosystem, their government, their communities, and their own lives. So, they say, God decided to try and solve that problem by ditching his whole "creation experiment," flooding the world out, and starting over again with a better gene pool. (We may smile at how simple this sounds, but let's remember that stories like this have played an important role in people's spiritual lives for centuries.) Only Noah and his family, who had so far shown nothing but obedience to God's Word, were allowed to take refuge from the flood and save their lives. Surely a planet with nice folks like this as its ancestors would turn out better. So they build their ark, load on enough animals to repopulate the world, and set sail. They pass through the waters, and the ark keeps them safe, and when they have made it to dry land everything starts over again. But then what happens? Just a few verses later, good-guy Noah reveals himself as bad-guy Noah, getting blind drunk and passing out in the living room, and his family in turn begins behaving as dysfunctionally as you might expect the family of such a man to. So much for the idea of starting a new world with only the nice people. And in fact, as Genesis goes on to the story of the tower of Babel and of the patriarchs and matriarchs, it's clear that the world is just as full of violence and lies and bigotry as it was before the flood. So where’s the comfort and the sound theology Linus is talking about in this story? Well, it all turns on God's choice to make a promise. You probably noticed that Genesis 9 repeated several times the word "Covenant." God says over and over that now that the flood is finished, he is making a covenant. A covenant in Hebrew society usually was a two-way deal, like a contract. This covenant, however, is different. It's not a two-way deal. God promises something, but Noah doesn't have to promise anything back. He doesn't have to earn the benefits of the covenant. He just has to be in the covenant -- like all he had to do to be saved from the flood was to be in the ark -- and like all we have to do to be saved from nothingness is to be in Christ. And in fact, God says the covenant is not just for Noah and his family, but for every living creature, the entire earth. So note that God doesn't tell Noah, "If you do these sacrifices and don't sleep around and don't tell lies and don’t miss worship too much, I will be good to you." He says, "I myself unconditionally am making a promise. Here is what I covenant with you: I will be for you, not against you. And I am putting a rainbow in the sky as a reminder to you and to me and to the entire creation of what kind of God I am." The story reads almost as if God has figured out something very important: that relying on human goodness will not produce reliable results. We can't be counted on to behave the way we ought, and even when you think you have managed to create an environment which will exclude the so-called bad people, badness just crops up again. So rather than promising to give people what they deserve, God promises not to give us what we deserve. He promises to be for us, to take the responsibility for goodness himself. Throughout this Lent we will see in our first reading a series of Old Testament covenants. And what they show, and Scripture in general shows, and our own daily lives show, is that no matter how much people try to better ourselves and live our best lives, or to exclude and cancel others whom we think have transgressed, God does not deal with us that way. God’s love and forgiveness are never because of what we do but always because of who he is. God's solution to the problem of people being so unreliable is to be reliable himself, and invite us to rely on him. The ultimate invitation to rely on God comes in the story this season of Lent leads up to: God goes to the Cross to die for our sins and rise for our redemption, and he welcomes us all into the living ark of salvation that is Jesus Christ. We are saved not because of what we do, but because of who God is. That's a great comfort to me, but no surprise there -- sound theology will do that. One of the great Presbyterian preachers of the past generation, Horace Allen, used to talk about how uncomfortable it is to hear the Gospel of Ash Wednesday right before ashes are administered. He’d put it this way: “So, first you proclaim the words of Our Lord: And whenever you fast, do not look dismal and disfigure your faces, and then you say: now kindly please come up and disfigure your faces.”
A seeming irony, but one that doesn’t go very deep. As usual, Jesus is not really giving a command that can be fulfilled by following one specific outward rule, by controlling what you do to the skin on your face. He’s not a simplistic thinker like that. Instead he’s talking about the attitude of the will. What Jesus is warning against is using self-presentation as a way to feel superior to others. In his day if you showed off that you were keeping a fast for God, that self-presentation won you acclaim; you would likely feel very proud to go out in public visibly marked with a sign that you were under a religious vow of fasting. I doubt there are many people here who feel like that about the blotch you’ll have put on your foreheads when you leave. If you will be out in public in any way, my wager is you’re much more likely to feel a little embarrassed about your black stain than proud of it. The era when American culture admired the Christian way of life and honored its symbols is over; few people have any idea what this sign of ashes even means anymore. Lots will just think you forgot to clean your face. As so often with Jesus, we need to read his specific commands looking for the intention of the will he is getting at: Whenever you give alms, he says today, do not sound a trumpet before you. And whenever you pray, do not…stand and pray at the street corners, so that you may be seen. And whenever you fast, do not look dismal and disfigure your faces so as to show others. What’s the intention he’s looking for? What kind of person would you be if it would never occur to you to do any of those kinds of things? One that doesn’t need to feed your own ego with self-presentation, but is free to act for God alone. So in our day, it may actually fulfill the point of Jesus’ teaching better if you deliberately do leave the ashes on your face, to feel that ego embarrassment that comes with caring what others think. I think it also fulfills his point to have to receive ashes in the contactless way we are doing it this year, from individual cups. It’s awkward. It will probably not work as well as having the clergy put our thumbs on your foreheads. Your cross may not be as well-formed and dark as it might have been last Ash Wednesday. But again – all of this makes it just a little less possible for us to feel pleased with ourselves that we are keeping Lent. And a little more aware of the sting of our own egos wanting to be gratified, and thus a little more able to notice our need for God’s grace. And noticing our need for God’s grace is what this season is all about. So I invite you to stand now as we enter into this holy season, and then we will kindly come on up, and disfigure our faces. Have you ever been reading a book, a good book, and you’re going along, mildly interested, when suddenly, something pops up—it could be a gun in the first act or a riddle on the lips of a wise old woman—and gives you this feeling that you can’t shake. Something big is going to happen before the end of this story, something that we can’t necessarily predict but that will no doubt have us completely engrossed until we turn the last page and realize it’s two in the morning.
That hint of what’s to come, that foreshadowing, keeps us reading, keeps us interested whether out of delight or morbid curiosity. It gives us something to look forward to, something to hold onto as we slog through the battlefields and hunt down the clues alongside our favorite characters. When Peter, James, and John hiked up the mountain beside Jesus so long ago, we might wonder what kinds of hints and foreshadowing occupied their minds. They had known since the beginning that Jesus was different. They watched as he healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, and released the demon-possessed from their captors. And when he spoke about the Scriptures, even his enemies listened because of the authority in his voice. Could this be the Messiah? they wondered. But none had gotten so far as Peter, whose sudden revelation even he could not explain. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” And he was right. Jesus was their long-awaited savior, their much anticipated king. But just as the news began to sink in, Jesus said that he would suffer and die before rising again. He was a king who would not ride into Jerusalem on the back of a warhorse with an army marching behind him. He was a king who, rather than leading his troops to victory, was taking them toward what appeared to be utter disaster: “If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps he must give up all right to himself, take up his cross and follow me. For the man who wants to save his life will lose it; but the man who loses his life for my sake will find it.” The memory of that moment and of Jesus’ words continued to reverberate through the minds of Peter, James, and John as they climbed the mountain that morning. What good was a king who seemed so intent on dying? What good could this man accomplish for the nation of Israel and for the world when he lay cold and dead in a tomb, his followers hiding for fear of the crowds. It looked hopeless, pointless. Heads down, watching the trail for loose stones and shifting sand, the three disciples hardly noticed that they had reached the top of the mountain because a light brighter than the sun suddenly shown before them. Jesus stood only a few steps away, yet they could barely recognize him—for he radiated with the power and glory of the God who spoke at Mt. Sinai. “This is my Son,” came a voice from on high. “Listen to him.” And in that light, the ending of this story was revealed. Jesus showed the disciples his glory, not only the glory he once had, but the glory he would have once more in his kingdom. Peter, James, and John couldn’t have known as they hiked down from the mountain that day that what Jesus said about his suffering and death was inextricably linked with the vision they saw. It wasn’t until after Jesus’ resurrection that they began to look back, to reread his story and their memories of Jesus, looking for the clues and hints they had missed along the way. For, in the end, it was precisely Jesus’ road of suffering and pain and death that would lead to his glorification, his radiance and exaltation. That is the reality to which we cling. Our Lord suffered and died so that we might be saved, that we might join with him and all the saints in life everlasting. And on that day, when we see his face, the light of his countenance will also become ours. For Christ’s glory was only part of what God revealed on that mountain. The future glory of Jesus belongs not only to Christ, but also to his disciples, to you and to me. Our day-to-day suffering and the afflictions that plague us are actually preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison to what we have experienced in this life. In his transfiguration, Jesus shows us the outcome, the finale of taking up our cross and following him. As Christians, Christ’s life is our life. And we are not only baptized into his death, but also into his resurrection and glory. Our lives can often seem like a mystery, filled with ominous forebodings and strange signs that try to loosen our grasp on the hope we have in Jesus. But what we have today, what we see on that mountain, is resurrected glory. It is an utterly reliable promise from God himself that—even before he steps foot in Jerusalem, before the bread and the wine and the kiss and the cross—he will be glorified in the end, that all will work out as he intended. Jesus knows that suffering and death await him, and we know that the same may wait for us. But we have this promise, God’s promise, that the light of Jesus Christ “shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never put it out.” AMEN. If we are to take the way St. Mark writes things up for us at face value, the verses we hear in today’s reading may actually be Jesus’ first real day in public. Mark just gives us a blizzard of vignettes here in chapter one of his Gospel. Jesus comes into Galilee “saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe.” He abruptly calls Simon and Andrew to follow him, and then James and John.
As Mark tells it, the first thing they do is go to synagogue together, where Jesus has a public confrontation with evil and sets someone free from an unclean spirit right in front of the whole congregation. Everyone sees this. Capernaum is a small city. It would to be hard to believe that there are more than a couple people who don’t know the guy. And that’s where this morning’s Gospel reading came in, partway through that day, still on page one of the book, with the blizzard of vignettes continuing. They’ve been to synagogue, and when they come home, it turns out Peter’s mother in law has a fever. Jesus reaches out his hand to her and she too is healed, and then finally they get a little break to engage in whatever the average family does at home on a Sabbath afternoon in Capernaum. But then at sundown, Mark tells us, this huge crowd shows up. Word of what happened in the synagogue has gotten around. Why sundown? Well, on the Sabbath of course, you can’t work, and work includes carrying things. So the villagers wait until the sun recedes beyond the horizon, and then they start to work, to carry their loads. They pick up the broken bodies of their aging relatives and ease them onto stretchers, they hoist their feverish, wailing babies onto their shoulders, and they come. They can’t wait till morning. They’ve been waiting too long already. They come to Jesus the moment it’s possible for them to come, at sundown. “The whole city,” it says, “was gathered around the door.” So Jesus goes about the work of setting them all free. As the night wears on and these newly minted disciples (Simon, Andrew, James and John) sit there, I assume, gaping in astonishment, Jesus over and over reaches out to person after person, and everyone who takes his hand that night is raised up, set free, made whole. How long does this take? If the whole city gathered around the door at sundown, what time is it when Jesus bids the last weeping, grateful family farewell? Midnight? The text doesn’t say but it does tell us that later on, “while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” You sometimes hear a modern interpretation of this verse preached that basically uses it to induce guilt for our self-care routines not being good enough, suggesting that we ought to work harder to emulate some disciplined regimen of self-care that Jesus allegedly held himself to. Apart from the issue that prayer isn’t about self, I’ve long found that use of the verse really implausible. If the day Mark shows us on page one is the day as it was, I wonder if Jesus may have been up so early for a different reason. If his first day started by coming face to face with evil, and ended with a line of human anguish that stretched around the block three times, might it have been more likely that he just couldn’t sleep? It’s actually a rather important part of Christianity, you know, that Jesus doesn’t float tranquil and unmoved above the daily pressures and concerns of human beings. He is a human being, not just God in a costume. At any rate, for whatever reason, Jesus is awake before dawn, and eventually he gets up and tiptoes out of the house. And he walks for awhile in the dark, until he is far away, until he feels himself safe from observation by anyone who won’t understand, out in the middle of this ocean of divine Life and Truth that is in him as it has never been in anybody else, and he prays. But eventually the disciples come find him, and what does he say? OK, he tells them, let’s keep going. That’s why I’m here. This – from gathering a community, to worship in the synagogue, to victory over evil, to healing and mercy, to responding to the needs of a city, to deep union with the Father, to renewed mission each morning – this blizzard of vignettes on the very first page of the earliest Gospel to be written shows us through Mark’s eyes who Jesus is. We see here the most compelling, fascinating person who has ever lived, launching the most important work anyone has ever had. We see someone who is caring enough to take the time to tend to one woman with a fever, and someone who is focused and competent enough to address the issues of a whole town. And when we look at him, we see God. There’s nobody else like Jesus. And even more astonishingly, he is there to be met every time you pick up your Bible. This unique person who is God and man, Jesus Christ, is right there, just as he is right there when you come to an in-person Mass or receive contactless communion at home. It’s never too late to start really taking in these Words of Scripture, to ask God questions about them, to come to this Jesus who is every bit as extraordinary in person as he is in Mark’s description. Even if you’ve been waiting for years to get to know him, it’s never, ever too late. Conflict has always been a part of group life. And discussion and resolution of conflict is how relationships stay together. This is true of couples, of families, of churches, of work environments, and of governments. Conflict happens.
Recently I have been wondering what the Bible might have to say about how we deal with opposing viewpoints in peaceful ways? How might we come to resolution of differences without violence? How do we exist with those with whom we disagree and how might scripture help us as we wrestle with these questions. Today’s Epistle, I think, has some relevance to this. What we have heard today is part of a lengthy letter Paul wrote to the early church in Corinth. This letter, as do most of Paul’s letters, speaks of actual life in a particular church at a particular time. While the questions and disagreements of that place and time are not ours now, I think we can learn from Paul’s approach to their conflict. “After the arrest of John, Jesus went into Galilee and proclaimed the gospel of God.‘The time is fulfilled,’ he said, ‘and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe in the gospel!’”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. It took a little while for the news to filter down to John’s prison cell; but it did after a few days, thanks to some gossipy prison guards. There was a man—a wandering rabbi from Galilee named Jesus—who was going from town to town saying that the time was fulfilled and the kingdom of God was at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel was his message. The guards themselves didn’t know exactly what that meant; but they had a guy in Cell B who might. After all, he had been doing something very similar just a few days earlier. What does this mean, this good news? they asked John. It means that God has come to set his people free. The guards laughed. Tough luck for you. What is it like to hear the good news of the dominion of God — the vanquishing of Satan, the return of God’s rule, the glorification of an oppressed people — when imprisoned? Happily for us, we are not literally chained to the wall in a prison cell awaiting who-knows-what-verdict from a king with a grudge against us. Though I think we can empathize in small part with John. Because it must have been disappointing if not devastating to hear that God’s kingdom had come only moments after his arrest had taken place. The good news from Galilee might be good news, but it wasn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. John still faced one of several nasty ends. He would possibly not even see the effects of Jesus’ proclamation. While most of us, I hope, haven’t been in a situation that is literally like John’s, I think it’s fair to say that many of us have felt the weight of chains — be they financial issues, health scares, or a season of overwhelming sadness — locking our minds or our hearts in something like a figural prison. We have heard the stories of Christ, perhaps even witnessed a miracle and yet we can’t quite reconcile our circumstances with the promises Jesus represents. If we flip over to Luke’s gospel, we’ll find that John himself may have felt that same kind of tension. Sending two disciples to question Jesus, John asked, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” And Jesus, after giving the blind sight, healing the lame, and cleansing the lepers, said, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard.” But the next time we hear of John, his head is being served to Herod on a platter. John the Baptist, whom Jesus called the “greatest of men,” doubted the good news. For his entire life, John had been prepared to make way for the One Who Was to Come, the Messiah of the Jewish people. We can imagine his mother telling him stories of his cousin, who had been born in a stable with angels singing overhead. John would have begun his ministry knowing that this was a pivotal moment in time and that he was on the right side of history. And then, of course, he himself baptized Jesus. John himself saw a dove descend from heaven and a voice from on high call out that Jesus was the beloved Son with whom God was well pleased. John witnessed all of this and still he sat in his prison cell and wondered if something had gone wrong somewhere. What are we to make of that? After John was arrested, Jesus traveled through Galilee proclaiming the arrival of the dominion of God. Repent and believe in the gospel, he said. Was this good news for everyone but the Baptizer? We can feel the tension in John’s heart when he says through his disciples, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” When we are tempted to doubt, when we can’t see God’s grace for the pain in our lives, Jesus tells us, just as he told John’s disciples, that God is forever working to overcome sin, slavery, and death, and that he himself is at the center of it. The reign of God is bound up in this man from Galilee who would willingly walk to the cross for the sake of a people who shouted “Crucify him!” And the gospel does not fail, though the devil does all he can to stop it, though death comes for the ones who bear it. Because death is not the end anymore in the kingdom of God. Death does not have the final say when God sits on the throne. There will be times in each of our lives when we struggle to accept God’s promises, struggle to trust the one who lets us stay in whatever prison confines us. When that time comes, when we ask “Are you really the one who will save us, or should we look for someone else?” Jesus is always there, ready to respond, holding out his hands, hands that have healed the sick and raised the dead, hands that are forever marked by the nails that held him to the cross. “Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God, and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love.” “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.” And it is on that Word we can rely, for he reigns even now while we await his return. AMEN. Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called, “Samuel! Samuel!” and he said, “Here I am!” and ran to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” So he went and lay down. The Lord called again, “Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went and lay down in his place.
Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” This reading from the Old Testament book of 1st Samuel shows us the character who eventually became the namesake of the book itself, the great prophet Samuel, as a boy. In this passage we see him being spiritually mentored by Eli. God is actively calling Samuel, but Samuel isn’t able to imagine what’s going on. He tries to find a natural explanation – it must be the old man Eli calling him from the next room. And so not once, not twice, but three times, Samuel interprets God’s action as a natural human action, until finally Eli realizes that Samuel needs help understanding the reality of a God who speaks, who acts, who calls, who sends. So we contemporary Western people are not alone in having a problem taking seriously the notion that God does speak, act, call and send, and that he could do those things to and for us. All we have to do is look around to see the effects of our not taking that seriously. We have the chance to listen to and learn from God as part of God’s community, and instead God gets co-opted as a symbol for already-held individual opinions, even opinions that directly contradict what God has revealed to his church or said in Scripture. More than once in history the name of Jesus has been invoked over nationalist or racial or religious violence, for example. We saw it in the Crusades, we saw it at the lynching tree, we saw it in the Rwandan genocide, and we saw it at the Capitol. There is a term for that in our tradition, and the term is blasphemy. Blasphemy is showing contempt for what God is and treating him as secondary to something else. It always goes hand in hand with idolatry: if anything other than God holds ultimate title to who we are, our identity, where we get meaning and purpose, and then what we as a consequence do, we are in thrall to an idol. And the less we really know about who God is and what he has revealed, the more likely we are to let our thoughts and behaviors be determined by idols. The more likely we are to treat God as an adjunct, or to claim him for something he has already told us in Scripture he finds repugnant. But today’s reading reminds us, and our whole shared way of life as disciples reminds us, that it is possible in the community of Christ’s Body to know God, to learn who he is and what he has revealed, and to put that first in our actions. This God who spoke three times to Samuel before being noticed as God is still revealing himself in community to people today. This God who acted in the lives of Mary and Moses and Lydia and Isaiah and Samuel and Eli is still acting today. This God who called Eli as a prophet and a mentor is still calling people today. This God who sent Mary Magdalene to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus to the apostles is still sending his church today. This God whom we see in the Old Testament is the same God whom we see in the New Testament who is the same God we see in the myriad communities who have followed Jesus since then, and the same God whom we see right now in our discipleship and our daily lives. That is, unless we’ve remained unable to notice God. Unless we assume that any so called deity that was out there would so obviously have to be on our side that it isn’t even worth seeking God or studying his word to find out who he is and what he teaches and how we can live in him. See, when we do that together, we are going to find things we don’t already agree with. It’s inevitable, and it’s a good thing, to have your point of view corrected by your Creator. God is not you. God is not me. God is not a footnote to another agenda. God has revealed himself and we can learn to pay attention. God reached out over and over to Samuel, trying to help him learn what relationship with God is like, but it took help from someone who had known God longer, from Eli, for Samuel to understand what was going on. It took learning to listen in community. Have you ever taken time, with someone like that, to learn how to notice God’s dealings with you? Have sisters or brothers in a Bible study, or perhaps one of your clergy, or a more mature Christian friend, listened to you as you talked about your moral decisions, or about an inexplicable moment of beauty at Communion, or about the sense of someone invisible standing by you at the hospital bed? It’s so important, if you are not used to living as if we do have a God who speaks, acts, calls, and sends, to put moments like these into words with other people who know Jesus. To let others who are a bit further along in the journey teach you or remind you who God is and how he acts in our lives. Yes, we should also consult the primary sources in Scripture, and do that regularly all our life long, but we need mentors. We need reality checks. If you are a baptized Christian, God is seeking to reveal himself in your life. God is acting in your life. God is calling you and sending you in his name. This is already happening; you may just not know how to perceive it. You may be like Samuel. You may need an Eli, a mentor in Christ, to talk with – most of us do. Who might that be? Are you aware of your need for a reality check? Are you aware that God may have already answered your question? And are you willing to treat God as God, and to say “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Today we keep the feast of the baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus comes down to the Judean desert, along with hundreds of others, to hear an eccentric preacher named John, and to step into the muddy waters of the Jordan River and be baptized. He wouldn’t have stood out from the crowd. Jesus wasn’t famous yet. He was just an unknown carpenter from an obscure Galilean village. Yet, as we know, by virtue of his identity and by virtue of his destiny, Jesus was not just like all the others who came for baptism. He should have stood out from the crowd.
Even the most skeptical of biblical scholars, even those of no personal faith, whose interest in the New Testament is purely academic, those for whom the crucifixion has no meaning, and the resurrection has no reality—even these skeptics do not doubt the historicity of today’s gospel account. Whoever Jesus was, he did get baptized. The early church was embarrassed by this event because it implied that Jesus was subservient to John, that he had a need to repent of his sins, which is what everybody else who got baptized was doing. What was embarrassing to the early church is more likely to make us just say, “So what?” But this is something worth taking a closer look at. There is a larger context into which we must put our understanding of the baptism of Christ. Jesus’ baptism was a critical turning point. Before he went into the Jordan, Jesus was a private citizen who minded his own business. After the event, he was a charismatic public figure whose fame spread rapidly and who eventually became so popular that the civil and religious establishment considered him a dire threat and had him killed. Before the baptism—no preaching or teaching, no disciples, no healing, no miracles. After the baptism—he wears himself out talking to crowds, he attracts a loyal band of followers, and he is constantly healing and casting out demons. From a purely biographical perspective, the baptism of Jesus looms pretty large. There’s also the larger context of our prayer and worship as his latter-day disciples. We are about to bring down the curtain on that part of our annual cycle in which we anticipate and celebrate the coming of the Messiah, the incarnation of the eternal Word of God. The feast of our Lord’s baptism brings Advent and Christmas to a head, and reveals, as it were, a “mature” savior—one who can actually do something for us, one who can actually be effective on our behalf. It’s nice to sing carols about our “newborn King” and our “infant redeemer,” but before he could become really either a redeemer or a king, Jesus had to grow up. In the Eastern Church, a wet Jesus standing in the Jordan River is the primary image of Epiphany, and rightly so. A few weeks from now, we will begin that part of our yearly cycle in which we anticipate and celebrate the Paschal Mystery—Christ our Paschal Lamb, the one who is both priest and victim on Calvary, in whose death and resurrection we participate as we renew our baptismal vows and celebrate this very Mass. Our celebration of the Lord’s baptism today helps prepare us for that very important work. We see that the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry in his baptism is a model for the inauguration of our ministry in our baptism. When we are baptized, we are baptized into nothing less than the life, death, resurrection, and ministry of Jesus. In the incarnation, God shares our human life. In baptism, we share God’s divine life. This is a simple declaration, but it has profound and far-reaching consequences. It affects our basic understanding of what the Church is, and what our place in the Church is. Jesus’ experience becomes a model for ours. At his baptism, Jesus inaugurates his public ministry. He’s now a man with a mission. In effect, Jesus takes his “mission statement” from the prophet Isaiah: I have put my Spirit upon him, he will bring forth justice to the nations. …he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not fail or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth… I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. And our mission, the mission each of us received on the day of our baptism, is not really anything less. If we need to flesh out the details, we need look no further than our Baptismal Covenant, which we are about to renew together. In it, we promise to remain faithful to the teaching of the apostles, the community of the Church, the Holy Eucharist, and to a life of prayer. We also promise to work for justice, freedom, and peace; to seek and serve Christ in every person; and to respect the dignity of every human being. That’s our mission; that’s our shared ministry. It takes place in hundreds of thousands of different ways, but that’s the core. After his baptism, Jesus discovered that his Father had blessed him abundantly, through the Holy Spirit, for the work he had taken on. He discovered his gifts, and he began to exercise his gifts for ministry. And since his baptism and ministry make up the model for our baptism and ministry, that’s what we need to be about as well. For us, the discovery of our ministerial gifts, and the exercise of those gifts, is critical. It is well past time for a flourishing church culture that is grounded in the notion that “all members are ministers.” Yes, I’m a minister, Mother Beth is a minister, but not any more than you are. Our ministry may be more visible, but yours is probably more important. All baptized persons are ministers; all have a ministry. Relatively few have discovered that ministry and begun to exercise it, and to the extent that the church has “problems,” that fact is where most of the problems originate. Yet, it need not be so. We need not operate in fear, fear of taking the plunge into ministry. The Spirit rested on Jesus at his baptism, taking the form of a dove, and the voice of the Father approved him: "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” And if Jesus’ baptism is the model for ours, how can we go without those same blessings? The Spirit also rests on us, my sisters and brothers, and the voice of the Father gives His approval of our ministry. Praised be Jesus Christ. Amen. Happy 10th day of Christmas! Again this year, I am grateful to be an Episcopalian to celebrate the full 12 days of the season, and to be able to reflect and give thanks for the incarnation of our Lord for a longer time.
Today’s lectionary offers three possible gospels, all dealing with events in our Lord’s life after his birth and before his public ministry began. They are rich passages and give much material to think about. I had some difficulty with my choice of texts to use today because each is so wonderful. I finally decided to use the passage from Matthew 2:1-12, the wise men coming from the east. In part I made the choice because of the recent convergence of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. I hope you were able to see that and experience how bright they were. As I read the material in the modern press regarding this convergence I was reminded of the book that came out about twenty years ago, titled “In the Fullness of Time”. This is an historian’s account of events that correspond with several Biblical stories and in part speaks to the convergence of these planets. You might remember that I have talked about this book before, though it has been some time. The gospel at the beginning of the second chapter of Matthew tells of wise men coming from the east looking for the child who had been born King of the Jews. They were wealthy astronomers, scientists of their time, whose curiosity sent them out to find the one whose star they had seen. They traveled long and far following that star, seeking to meet the king that they thought the star predicted. In the beginning was God. There was nothing except God.
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God. In the beginning, God spoke. He spoke a Word, and the Word was the means of creation. He said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. Light that shines and illumines, light that reveals and gives life. Light that defeats darkness, and confusion, and chaos. In the Word was light—not just the physical light, but true light that enlightens the heart and the mind and the soul as well. The light of God that illumines every dark corner of our souls and minds and hearts. The light of God shining on a world that chose darkness is what Christmas is all about. In the beginning, the first word of all creation was “be light.” And there was light. God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. Throughout Scripture, God reveals himself through light. When God revealed himself to Moses at the burning bush, it was in the light of the supernatural fire of God that burns but does not consume that God was present. God was present with the people of Israel in the desert, revealed in the fire that consumed and accepted their sacrifices; and in the pillar of fire that gave them light by night. When Moses returned from speaking with God face to face on the mountain, the reflected light of God left Moses’ face so bright that he had to cover his face with a veil so as not to terrify the Israelites. Moses’ face shone with the reflected glory of God’s light. When God gave the Israelites the blueprint of the tabernacle and the temple, which was a microcosm of God’s heavenly dwelling, he commanded that the light of the golden lamp stands never go out to show a glimpse of what the eternal, unchangeable, heavenly glory was like. When the prophets had visions of that heavenly temple, and they saw God seated on his heavenly throne in unimaginable and truly terrifying glory, they saw a figure of a man so bright that eyes could not behold him, like glowing molten metal, on a pavement of refracted rainbow light. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That glorious figure in the heavenly visions was the same that the disciples saw on the mountain of Transfiguration, when Jesus was revealed to them in his nature as truly God. When the disciples saw who Jesus truly was, he was illumined, transfigured, even his clothing was whiter and brighter than any bleach can ever get it. The glory of the one and only Son of the Father, the Godhead made human was revealed in the flesh of a mortal man. And unlike Moses, this was not the reflected light of having spoken with God, but the very source of all light revealing himself to them. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. On the day when Christ, the light of the world, took our sin upon himself and died upon the cross, darkness fell. He took our darkness on himself that by his power he might destroy our death, our darkness so that the people who walked in darkness might see a great light. On that day, the darkness pursued the light of the world to destroy it or chase it away. But on that day, when the darkness seemed to have won, the light of Christ set an ambush for the darkness. When darkness had killed the light of the world, the darkness itself was destroyed. In Christ’s resurrection, darkness is defeated. On the day of Pentecost, when the followers of Jesus were assembled, the Holy Spirit came on them in the form of the holy fire of God—not on the sacrifices of the temple anymore, but resting on the living people, transforming them into children of the light, boldly proclaiming the good news of Jesus. When Stephen, the first martyr and deacon of the church, was being stoned to death for his faith in Jesus, he looked and saw heaven opened, and the light of God shone reflected in his face as he beheld the glory of his beloved Savior. When the Apostle Paul, persecutor of the church, was on the road to Damascus, he saw a vision of the risen Christ—a vision that blinded him and transformed him into Christ’s most ardent witness. And the Apostle John saw visions of Jesus coming again in glory to rule the world and judge it and make it new; he saw it purified and made spotless by that same fire of God which consumes the dross but purifies the gold. And he saw the new heaven and the new earth in which there was no more need for lamps, for there was no more night, no more sin, no more darkness or hiding or shame or death or despair. He saw a city shining like gold, lit by the presence of the glory of God himself—the glory of the Lamb who was slain for us and rose again in glory. In the Beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. The true light that enlightens everything was coming into the world. That light shines into our darkened hearts and transforms us: it shows up the darkness in our hearts and, for all who believe in the Light of Christ, transforms us into children of God—children of the light who can see and hear and know the transcendent, glorious God. The true light, the Glory, the Word of God, the fullness of the God who encompasses all creation, became on Christmas one of the created. All the glory of God was encompassed in a tiny baby, fully human and fully God. And that is what we celebrate. Just as Moses and Stephen looked on the face of God and were themselves illumined with the glory, so we, who partake in his Spirit, his Body, his Blood, we who are members of his Body, we are illumined with the glory of God. And unlike Moses’ reflected glory which faded, we bear in ourselves the Spirit of the living God, the light of Christ and the glory of the Godhead. We have received into ourselves that light, which shines on our darkness—and our darkness cannot overcome it. It shines into every corner of our lives, purifying, cleansing, revealing, and redeeming. And someday, when our purification is made complete, we will look on his face, the burning brightness of our Lord and God, and we will witness the fullness of the glory of God which our mortal frames cannot now bear. We will be made like Him, the Word, who became mortal that we might become immortal, and who allowed darkness to overcome him in death that he might vanquish death for us forever. That is our goal, that is our purpose—to become glorified with the glory of the Son of God. So as we live in this world where there is much darkness, let us keep our eyes on Jesus, who for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of God in glory. Because in him is the light of the world, and if we fix our eyes on him, we bear the light of his glory out into this dark and broken world. Therefore let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. Because his light is in us, let us repent of the darkness in our hearts, imploring our God to burn it out of us with the fire of his love, making us pure and holy—making us worthy reflections of his most glorious light. And let us live in hope, awaiting the day when we shall see his glory face to face. Amen. For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us; and his name shall be called Emmanuel, God with us. For us, to us, with us. It’s hard, this time we’re living through. Everything is so different, and in some ways it just doesn’t feel like Christmas. Over the strange, painful, and challenging months of this past year, and perhaps especially recently as the days have grown shorter and the weather colder, we’re seeing more and more advice on what we should do to improve how we’re coping. And now that it’s Christmas, on what we should do to make this season merry and bright.
In pandemic days just as much as ordinary days, the human heart gravitates to the illusion that I make my Christmas, I make my comfort and joy, I make my meaning, I make my identity, I make my community. Theories on how to do all that are endless and self-contradictory, but they have one thing in common: the subject of the sentence is always me. Eugene Peterson in an old article in the Christian Century poins out, “Christian spirituality… is not about us. It is about God. The great weakness of American spirituality is that it is all about us: fulfilling our potential… expanding our influence, finding our gifts, getting a handle on principles by which we can get an edge over the competition…. [But] Christian spirituality is not a life-project for becoming a better person. It is not about developing a so-called [better] life. We are in on it, to be sure, but we are not the subject. Nor are we the action. We get included by means of a few prepositions.” For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; and his name shall be called Emmanuel, God with us. For us, to us, with us. Peterson goes on: “[These] are powerful, connecting, relation-forming words, but none of them makes us either the subject or the predicate. We are the tag-end of a prepositional phrase… The prepositions that join us to God and God’s action in us within the world” [the for, the to, the with]… “are very important, but they are essentially a matter of … participating in what God is doing.” Christmas – either this year amidst the sparse calendars of the pandemic or any year amidst the overstuffed calendars of family and social obligations – Christmas can sometimes seem like it’s about what we do, who we gather with, what decorations we put up, what celebrations we attend or host, whether we go to church and with whom, what gifts we buy, what foods we cook. If that’s what really makes Christmas for us, if without those things Christmas will just not come, then we are not yet fully inside what Christianity means by Christmas, and our comfort and joy are both at risk. If Christmas depends on us, Christmas can be lost. If we are sick, or completely alone, if we burn the cookies, if there’s a fight about which party to prioritize or we can’t even have a party this year. All that stuff is painful, of course, but Christmas doesn’t depend on it. But, if what really makes Christmas for us is what Christianity means by Christmas, nothing can take it away. Whatever happens, it will come just the same. If Christmas – either this year amidst the sparse calendars of the pandemic or any year amidst the overstuffed calendars of family and social obligations – if Christmas is about what God does for us, to us, with us, nobody can touch it. Nobody can take it away. We cannot do it wrong, or lose it, or improve it, or make it happen, or fail to make it happen. Nobody can do one thing to change Christmas in the sense of what Christianity means by Christmas, because God already did everything. God already came in Jesus Christ, for us, to us, and with us. In Jesus Christ, God already made another world possible. It’s a world we are invited into at every moment by his grace and truth, and a gift nobody can ever take away. Those are the tidings of comfort and joy that come and stay, when you are not the subject of the sentence, when your Christmas - when your life! - isn’t about what you do, but what God has done for you, to you, and with you. This gift, these tidings, God offers over and over for us, to us, with us. For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; and his name shall be called Emmanuel, God with us. Thanks be to God for his glorious Gospel. Merry Christmas. Just a few days ago, I spent an entire afternoon singing to my daughter, Pepper, because she’s decided that she a) will be cheerful just long enough for me to finish dinner if I’m singing and b) absolutely won’t sleep unless I sing to her—which has essentially turned my life into a movie musical when Trent’s not home. I’ve cycled through my favorite hymns and sampled July Andrews’ repertoire and eventually just googled famous lullabies because I was tired of singing the Sound of Music. One of the first songs to pop up was Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
It’s a song I’ve always loved, if only for Judy Garland’s velvety voice and the memories I have watching The Wizard of Oz as a kid. But I had never really thought about the lyrics until I was singing it to my daughter in the late afternoon sunlight. What had once been simply a beautiful song sung by a beautiful woman unfolded into a moment where I realized—or admitted to myself—that I, too, wanted to escape, to fly away to a land where troubles melt away like a piece of candy on your tongue. Our world feels like too much sometimes. We go about our lives trying to make the best of things when an unexpected bill shows up in the mail or we hear from our loved ones that no, they can’t make it for Christmas. Yet just as we think we can’t take much more of this, just as we turn toward our various habits of denial or depression, that is when the Church tugs us in another direction entirely. Advent is a season to reorient ourselves, to take stock and change direction. It’s a bit of godly choreography that this in-between season happens at an in-between time of the year, when the days have grown short and the weather capricious, when we’re all exhausted from holiday preparations and end-of-the-year considerations—because the reality of the world’s brokenness can no longer hide. The summer isn’t here with sunshine and late-night barbecues to smooth away old regrets, and the hope of springtime is months away. We are stuck, perhaps to our dismay, in a time of unveiling, of reckoning, and of dealing with the consequences. Faced with that pressure, we get the itch to find some kind of deliverance at the end of our yellow-brick road, whether that’s a bottle of wine or the latest television hit. But Advent insists we look elsewhere. It dares us to look at our world and ask: Where is God in all this mess? Where is God in all this mess? We might first think to look around, to try and find the bright spots in our lives, the early morning snowfalls and surprise letters in the mail. Which wouldn’t be wrong—all good gifts do come from God. But if we want an answer that will counter the temptation to escape or deny reality, that will cut through the fog of depression or despair, we need something stronger than that, something that we are actually given in our Gospel lesson today. “Greetings, O favored one,” Gabriel tells a very surprised and fairly frightened Mary. “The Lord is with you.” And he begins to unfold the story of Jesus’ imminent arrival on earth. He wasn’t to leap fully formed from the sky, nor was he to be born into wealth or royalty. He was instead placed in the womb of a young and unmarried woman who could offer him no protection but her own body and her own love. Oddly enough, the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, decided to send the savior of Israel into the world in such a way that he was set up to experience the worst the world could give. And yet rather than cave under the weight of what could go wrong—the imagined terrors and the real fears—Mary bursts into song. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Mary sings with such jubilation because God’s entry into this world in just this way proves that he loves the least and even the lost. He has not forgotten his promise to David, that a son shall establish his throne forever; but he has gone about answering it in such a way that the Messiah will be one with the poor and with the powerless. By choosing to come as a baby, to come into this world as the son of a laborer, our Lord has chosen to identify himself with each and every one of us in our weakness and our poverty, chosen to bestow riches and goodness on us even though we doubt him, even though we sin. On this last Sunday of Advent, we remember how, in that one moment, everything changed for us and for our world. Where is God in the mess? He is with us. God himself has entered into the mess, into our mess. He knows what it’s like for family to disappoint us. He knows what it’s like to wonder if life will ever get better. He knows because he’s here with us in every moment of weakness and in every moment of strength. Life may not be the easiest in the coming weeks and months. We may feel as though we are powerless, as though there’s no hope for it but to escape to another place entirely. In those moments, may we remember Gabriel’s words: “Do not be afraid. The Lord is with you.” AMEN. As a part of a get-to-know-you event some years ago the question was asked to name our favorite day of the year. Some said the last day of the school year, others their birthday and so on. I was so intrigued by people’s answers that I began asking everyone I knew, “What is your favorite day?” I still remember my mother’s choice: Dec. 21. I was amazed because that is the darkest day of the year—the one with the least daylight. My mother loves the sun; I was not sure why that would be her answer and so she explained. That day is the shortest but it also means that the light will begin to return; it cannot get any darker. The light is returning!
Today is Gaudete Sunday, Rose Sunday. The third Sunday of Advent, when the color is a little lighter to remind us that the true light is coming into the world! Advent is a time of darkness and of waiting, waiting with expectation of the coming of the light of our Lord. Waiting is never easy, at least at first, until we settle into the rhythm that it holds. In a lot of ways this time of the pandemic is an extended advent. We are waiting: waiting for this time of separation, fear, and grief to be over, waiting with expectation for the development and distribution of a vaccine, waiting and expecting our lives to find some sense of normalcy. Waiting and expectation. At times the waiting is frustrating even painful and often we want to be distracted from it and that is ok. But, hopefully we can learn from the liturgical season of Advent and use some of this time of waiting to pray and seek God’s presence in our lives. The joy we can experience in this time is precious and comes directly from our relationship with God and the love he has for each of us. Of all the dreams I can remember, I’d say probably 45 to 55 percent of them have to do with sleeping through my alarm and missing an important meeting or arriving at school only to find that I’m the lead in a play I’ve never heard of. I particularly hate these dreams because I wake up stressed out, sure that I’ve forgotten something, that the deadline is past, or that I’m definitely not going to graduate from high school regardless of the fact that I did 10 years ago.
I’m guessing that we’ve all had dreams like that or, heaven forbid, experiences like that. A crisis is at hand, and no matter how hard we try, no matter how fast we talk, we are still going to have to walk out onto that stage when the curtain rises. When I first began preparing for this Sunday, that same kind of ominous feeling crept over me as Jesus spoke to his disciples about the end of all things, the final coming of the Son of Man. In those days, the sun will be darkened, and the stars will fall. Children will betray their parents, and parents will turn against their children. All of the beauty and power we see in the world will come crashing down just before the Son of Man returns in glory. “But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come.” Which sounds sort of like a nightmare. How many of us can imagine ourselves dozing off and then waking up, dozing off and then waking up, torn between the need and desire to sleep and our anxiety at being caught sleeping when the boss gets home. The master in the parable doesn’t sound like a particularly understanding guy. “I’m leaving,” he says, “and I don’t know when I’m getting back, so stay awake because I don’t want to get home and catch you sleeping.” There’s no caveat, no get-out-of-jail-free card. Just stay awake until I return. To be fair, the parable doesn’t actually tell us how the story will end—and the foreboding feelings may just come from Jesus’ description of all the terrible things that will happen before he gets back. But if we really think about it, if we look hard at ourselves and ask why we feel so nervous about this brief story, we may realize that we’re anxious and resentful because we know we would fail. It’s not that we’re undisciplined or lazy. It’s not even that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we know our limitations. And I, at least, like the bridesmaids in a previous parable, would absolutely fall asleep. What will happen, then, when the master returns? Will we luck out and be awake, with all our work done and our affairs arranged? Or will we be asleep and thus liable to whatever punishment the master can cook up? When I look at my life, I have to conclude that my odds are not good. I am too conscious of my failings to feel sure that I will succeed in the task our Lord has set. After all, I’m human and I live in a fallen world. I’m sinful, selfish, and sleepy—which makes me, which makes everybody, not really that different than the exiled Israelites, whose plea we hear in our OT reading. “Behold, you were angry, and we sinned; in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved? We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.” The Jewish people knew all too well what sins they had committed—sins of pride, of greed, of idolatry. They knew how noxious they had become to a holy God. They sensed that he had turned away from them once and for all because he was tired of always finding them sleeping. “We have become like those over whom you have never ruled, like those who are not called by your name. . . . But now, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Be not so terribly angry, O LORD, and remember not iniquity forever. Behold, please look, we are all your people.” The Jewish people beg the Lord to rend the heavens and come down just as he once did. But in the end, he doesn’t—or, at least, he didn’t come back in the way they expected. When the Jewish exiles finally returned to Jerusalem, when they finally rebuilt its walls and finished its temple, they waited for the Lord to descend, to manifest himself, to rekindle the glory that they had once known. And they waited. And waited. And continued to wait for 400 years—only to find that, in the end, God didn’t come in lightning and thunder as he once had at Sinai; but instead came into the world as a baby boy, whose precarious life ended in a horrible death. Stay awake, for you do not know the day nor the hour. The people of Israel and each one of us here today have the same thing in common: we’re all waiting for the Lord’s return, and we don’t know when he’ll get back. Until that day, we go about our business as best we can, checking and rechecking ourselves to make sure that we’re awake, that we’re doing enough to please our master, so that when he gets back, he won’t reject us. Stay awake, we mutter to ourselves. Try harder. Do what you’ve been told to do. But is that really what the master wants? What he intends for our lives to look like? Not a single one of us, not even the saintliest of saints, not even Jesus’ own disciples can stay awake through sheer striving. We are weak, we are sinful. And we are constantly distracted by our own needs and wants and problems and pain. Where, then, does that leave us? “I give thanks to my God always for you,” the Apostle Paul tells us, “because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus . . . . who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of [his return].” We do not know when that end will come. We may even think anxiously that when it does we won’t be ready. Our confidence in ourselves is brittle—we know how bad we can be. But it is just when that realization hits us, just when we confess that our iniquities have taken us away, that we find the truth and find our hope. Because it’s not ultimately up to us to save ourselves. Only Christ can do so. And he has done so, waking us from the sleep of sin and death. The master has gone, it is true, and we don’t know when he will return. But that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to wander the world in perpetual aimlessness. It doesn’t mean that we’re left to fend for ourselves. Every time we open our Bibles, every time we gather as a Body, every time we reach out our hands and hear “the Body of Christ, given for you,” Jesus shakes us gently awake, saying, “Here I am. Don’t be afraid.” We worship a holy God who wants perfection, who will settle for nothing less than utter devotion—and Lord knows we can’t give it to him. But there is someone who can, someone who is for us, someone to whom we can cling when we’re afraid, who will lift us up when we stumble. Stay awake, he tells us, because you don’t know when I’ll be back. When you’re tired—and I know that you will be—don’t be afraid. Just think of me. And when you’re frightened, when you wake up without knowing that you had been sleeping, remember me, ask me for strength. I have overcome death. Can I not also overcome a little sleepiness? Christ will return to judge the living and the dead. Until then, we wait for him, relying not on our own strength but on his perfect obedience, for he will not rest until all are gathered under his wings. AMEN. Around the time Paul wrote our epistle from today, Ephesians, the Roman Empire was abuzz with excitement over the new emperor who had taken office. He was full of energy, popular with the common people, eloquent and charming. Since they didn’t have Twitter or cable networks in those days, in case you had somehow missed the news, coins were issued with his image, showing him wearing a crown symbolizing his divinity. Statues of him went up in outlying towns, so that you would remember whose subject you were. I think I should tell you his name: It was Nero, who became one of the greatest persecutors of Christians.
So the government sent heralds from town to town announcing the good news of this new emperor. And let me assure you that, as the NT scholar NT Wright has written, “when the emperor came to power, the imperial heralds did not go around saying, ‘There is this new experience you might like to try on for size, namely, you might like to give allegiance to Caesar if that suits you and if that’s where you are right now in your own personal journey.’ No, they said, ‘Nero is emperor! Get down on your knees!’” It is into that world, which is not really so different from our world, that Paul wrote his own good news, which boils down to: “Jesus is Lord! Get down on your knees!” Today is Christ the King Sunday, the day when we proclaim the universal rule of Jesus Christ over all nations, all principalities, all powers, all time and space, and every domain of human endeavor. When we make the great Christian confession: Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. This is a phrase we can use without anyone troubling us if we mean by it only something private and interior. Now everyone knows that the Roman empire eventually persecuted believers, but one of NT Wright’s interesting insights – I’m going to be borrowing from him a fair amount – one of his interesting insights is that this empire had no problem with believers who talked only about a personal interior experience with Jesus, something private and spiritual that gave them comfort and strength. There were believers like that, just as there are now, people who had a sort of breakaway church. To oversimplify drastically, one big part of what this breakaway group believed was that what you did on the outside, in the public sphere, didn’t really matter. You could surround yourself with wasteful decadence, or wipe out the livelihoods of your fellow countrymen with crooked loans, or have promiscuous sex, or exploit people of a different race or religion -- none of that mattered as long as you had a private spirituality. Well of course, this was perfectly fine with Nero and the empire. No threat to their agenda at all. No reason you can’t say “Jesus is Lord of my heart, but the system I live under is the practical lord of the real world and determines everything I actually do.” The Roman Empire could behave any way it wanted, crush anyone it wanted, and the privatistic believers wouldn’t care because it didn’t have any relevance to their personal spirituality. So the Roman empire liked the breakaway Christians fine. But the traditional Christians – now that was a different matter. When traditional Christians said “Jesus is Lord,” they didn’t mean ‘There is this new experience you might like to try on for size, namely, you might like to give allegiance to Jesus if that suits you and if that’s where you are right now in your own personal journey.’ No, they meant, ‘Jesus is emperor! Get down on your knees!’” And this was something very different. This was a claim that Jesus’ lordship was for every realm of life, not just for your private comfort and interior spirituality, and that it just might come into conflict with something Nero or Rome was doing. And those were the Christians who got thrown to the lions. The empire had proclaimed: There is a new world order! Nero rules! But Paul proclaims in Ephesians today: There is a new world order! And it broke into your world of death the morning Jesus Christ rose from the grave. Paul writes: God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. For mainstream Christianity, Jesus’ resurrection is the first installment of a new reality that has a public, not just an private effect. Real physical public resurrection entails belief in a God who acts to put real, physical, public things to rights. And that’s why we have Matthew 25 as our Gospel this morning, one of the Bible’s best known passages about serving the hungry and visiting the sick and making a real, physical, public difference in this age and in the age to come. In Matthew 25, we hear Jesus commending those who have already been living publicly Christian lives in the midst of the empire, for, he says, I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. If Christ is King – if Jesus is risen from the dead and bringing his Kingdom into being, we cannot but do what those people in Matthew 25 were doing, act in the world as agents of that Kingdom. We cannot but love. We cannot but serve. And we cannot but do it, not in private but in public, in the real world, the world where Christ rose from the dead and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, in this age and in the age to come. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
It is a great joy to be speaking to you from the nave of Emmanuel today. The stained glass windows, the organ, the high altar with the unique Sarum frontal, the Lady Chapel. It is all still here and such a pleasure to be in it. The quiet, calm as the sun streams through bouncing colors on the walls bring such a peace as I sense the “great cloud of witnesses” who have prayed in this space over the past 100 plus years. We have received a true gem from those who have come before us; the corner of State and University has been a beacon of Christ’s love in the downtown area for all these many years. And as has been said before, now it is our turn to see that this very special place continues to reflect Christ’s light and love into the world. Circumstances have changed since the early 1900’s and circumstances have certainly changed since March 2020 but the church’s mission and God’s love for us remains the same. God’s arms remain open to hold and help us and yes, to push us to show His love to the world. It is here for the experiencing. This morning’s gospel contains a parable that Jesus told near the end of his life on earth. He told it to those closest to him; those who would become the church, his body on earth, once he was crucified and risen. I would like to look at this lesson with this in mind. Hear it as a parable given then to the church that would be, and today as a parable given to this church, Emmanuel, at this specific time, the time of pandemic. Upon first read the gospel this morning seems to be contradictory of what we know from other scripture about Jesus and his teachings. What is a talent anyway, what is the point Jesus is making? Are these lessons about capitalism, investment strategies, how to deal with a floundering stock market, or what? This is a difficult parable, I admit, made up of powerful images, both literal and metaphorical, and one that will lend its gems only when we have worked at it some. We will need to dig a bit to see its beauty and to see what it means for us. Babies are bad at waiting, which is almost certainly not a surprise to most of you here. Try as I might, I can’t convince Pepper to calmly accept that I need to finish my spaghetti before I can feed her, nor does it work that I promise in my calmest, most loving voice that I just have to grab a load of diapers from the dryer before I can change her. For Pepper, there is no such thing as a five-minute grace period. Instead, it’s zero-to-60 tears and then screaming if I don’t catch her drift soon enough.
Despite the fact that we’re all adults here, I think it’s fair to say that we’re not very good at waiting either. Or, at least, we don’t like it. It’s tiring, uncomfortable, and often annoying; and yet so much of our lives is spent doing it. We wait for the mail to arrive. We wait for a favorite movie to come out on DVD. We wait to hear who actually won the election for POTUS. Some of us count the minutes, checking our phones for the latest updates. Others gnaw fingernails or wander from room to room in their house, unable to concentrate on one set of chores long enough to finish anything. Still others of us give up, allowing a sort of malaise to wash over us. What does it matter when this or that will happen? It hasn’t yet. Maybe it never will. In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus tells us a parable that really does nothing to contradict our dislike of waiting. It begins innocently enough. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like 10 bridesmaids who are getting ready for the year’s biggest wedding celebration. They’ve donned their best robes and their most precious jewels. They’ve thought of the right things to say to the bride and the groom to express their excitement for this new season in their lives. And they’ve trimmed their lamps in preparation for the journey to the nuptial feast. The 10 young women are ready for the ceremony to begin; but, as happens way too often in weddings, one of the two main actors isn’t ready. The bridegroom is delayed, so the bridesmaids settle down to wait. Times passes. At first, the ladies chatter quietly, looking up with expectant eyes for the appearance of a messenger at the door. But, as the minutes turn to hours, the talk ends as one by one, the women fall asleep. Suddenly, who knows how much later, the call comes: “Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.” The women shake themselves awake, readjust their clothes and check their hair, and head for the door, when they realize that their lamps are guttering. The bridegroom had taken so long that their oil has all but run out; and five of the women have forgotten to bring any backup. Looking to their fellow bridesmaids, the five women without oil ask, “Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” But these women, who had just poured the contents of their extra flasks into their own lamps said no. “There will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.” And so our 10 bridesmaids part ways, as five women head to the marriage banquet, and five head to the corner store. The ending of this parable is remarkable in its ominous severity. After obtaining enough oil to light their way to the banquet hall, the five remaining women arrive at their destination. They’re late, but light now haloes their faces. They knock on the door, expecting to be let in, only to have the Bridegroom himself open and declare with no explanation: “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.” He closes the door, leaving the women outside in the dark, too astonished to say anything as the light glistens on their tear-marked faces. And the moral of the story, Jesus tells us, is “Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” What do we do with this parable? What do we make of it? Do we, like generations of pastors and theologians, try and identify what the oil actually symbolizes? Is it good works or faith or a secret knowledge only the wise possess? And why, we might wonder, does Jesus conclude his tale by warning his listeners to “stay awake” when all 10 of the virgins—both the foolish and the wise—fell asleep? These questions, like so many in life, have no easy answers—but that doesn’t mean we’re left out in the cold with our doubt and our fear like the women at the end of this story. The key to finding the hope in this parable, I think, lies in our Epistle passage, in which St. Paul comforts the Thessalonian Christians, who worry that their loved ones who have died before Christ’s return won’t rise with him when he does. As the days slipped by following Jesus’ ascension, his followers waited for his return. “It is soon,” they thought, “very soon. Any day now.” But then their loved ones, those men and women who first heard and believed in the message of the Apostles, began to grow old and to die. The Thessalonian Christians didn’t know what to make of it. Their Bridegroom was delayed, and the wait was growing longer. Had he forgotten them? Had those who died done something wrong? How long would it be before Christ came back? And would they even survive to see him again? “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died,” Paul writes, “so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. . . .Therefore encourage one another with these words.” Their endurance was not pointless and their wait was not futile. Paul doesn’t explain why Jesus is delayed; but Paul does give his listeners hope. “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.” Take heart, Paul tells his spiritual children, the Lord won’t forget you. The difference between the quiet calm of Paul’s message and the grim ending of Jesus’ parable spark against one another, as a professor of mine once said. Here we have reassurance, and there we have tragedy. What elements are missing from one or the other? Do they have anything in common? And how in the world do we make sense of both? Ten virgins wait for the bridegroom. The Christians of Thessalonika wait for the coming of Christ. Five women have forgotten extra oil, and the elders of the church have begun to die. Will the door be shut when the party finally begins? Or will it be open? Paul tells us that Christ can overcome even death—why then does he not overcome a little tardiness? “Later the other bridesmaids came to the banquet hall also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’” What if this foreboding parable isn’t about possessing the right quantity of the right substance in order to be admitted into heaven? What if, instead, it’s about waiting and waiting well? Each woman fell asleep as the time for the Bridegroom to arrive passed. The wait was too much for them; they couldn’t help but close their eyes. And when the cry suddenly came that he was there, all of them woke up just as disoriented as the other; but five had oil and five did not. And now I want us to pause and ask a strange question: What would have happened if the five foolish virgins hadn’t left to buy more oil? What if they had just stayed, acknowledging their lack of control over the situation and risking the anger of the Bridegroom, but also banking on the chance that he might forgive them or have some light of his own? What if they had believed that this man was one whose judgment was true and terrible but who was also gracious and merciful? What if they had believed that he who can overcome death can overcome anything—even a shortage of oil. And that’s where the hope is in the midst of a hard reality: We don’t know when Jesus is coming back. We don’t know when he will return to right the wrongs and fight the final battles that will result in a world washed clean of sin and death. But we do have the promise that he is coming. The wedding has been scheduled, and no amount of delay will put it off forever. We all, each in our own way, will wait. Some may check their phones every five minutes. Others may gnaw their fingernails. Still others may give up and eventually forget. But the Lord is coming regardless, coming with justice and with mercy, that he might open the gates wide to all who would enter in. And until then, we pray just as David once did: “O LORD, make haste to help me! . . . Hasten to me, O God! You are my help and my deliverer; O LORD, do not delay!” AMEN. There was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,
"Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!" Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?" I said to him, "Sir, you are the one that knows." Then he said to me, "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Christianity has traditionally used the term saints two ways. In the New Testament, it is always used in its literal meaning, which is of someone set apart, in our case set apart in Baptism. In God’s eyes, Baptism is the way he definitively marks us as people called, chosen, and sealed as members of Jesus Christ. When God looks at a baptized person, he sees the identity we are given in Baptism; he sees us set apart from the world and marked as Christ’s own forever. If you are a Christian, if you have been wrapped up in that white baptismal robe, you are also wrapped up in the righteousness and holiness and identity of Jesus Christ, and so the New Testament recognizes that by using the term saint, or set-apart one, for all baptized Christians. So we hold on to one truth: God has already done what is needed for us to be completely his in Christ. But the term saints is also used in another way, and that’s the way our feast today is observing. When we sing “For all the saints who from their labors rest, who thee by faith before the world confessed,” or “I sing a song of the saints of God,” we’re using the word in that second sense, which means, to quote one of our Episcopal teaching documents, “men and women of outstanding holiness, heroism, and teaching in the cause of Christ, whose lives and deaths have been a continuing, conscious influence upon the on-going life of the Church in notable and well-recognized ways.” That’s probably what many of us think of when we hear the word saints. And with that use of the word we hold on to a second truth: There is always room for each and every one of us to grow more fully into the identity God gave us as baptized Christians, and we know that because we have seen people do it. Who are these, robed in white? We all receive that robe in our Baptism; however, some of us treat it as an inconvenience or pretend we don’t have it. A lot of us rather half-heartedly try, in various ways, to let our identity in Christ shape us. But some wear that robe over years so wholeheartedly, so humbly, with such love and discipline, that the dazzling, pure baptismal presence of Jesus that envelops them becomes second nature. And those, the women and men who took notable hold of what God gives us all in Baptism, are the people we celebrate today. One of the things that comes home to you, I think, as you spend time with these people through their writings or visiting the places they lived or talking to members of communities they founded, or as you spend time with people in your life that you suspect may be well on the path to that kind of sainthood, is that holiness is a path that is open to everyone. It’s just that most of us don’t choose it. The saints are signs of potential. Of yours and mine and of every Baptized person. In Christ, by grace, they prove that we can make the choices to live out the identity God gave us. I can choose to say Morning Prayer tomorrow, or I can choose to scroll through Facebook. I can choose to set aside a proportion of my income for God first, or I can choose to give away just what I think I can afford. I can choose to stop and listen for God’s guidance before an important decision, or I can do what seems best to me. I can choose to speak openly about Jesus Christ, or I can choose to skirt over being that specific. I can choose to confess my sins tonight and ask forgiveness, or I can let my head hit the pillow without meeting God’s eyes. What choices we make in all those situations will not do one thing to change the fact that a person is baptized, that God has already chosen them in Christ. But every single choice to put God’s will first, or second or third or twenty-fifth in our lives, will make a difference in who we become, in how fully we reflect the dazzling beauty and purity of Jesus that is, ultimately, what we were made for and what we long for. We know that’s true, because in the saints, we’ve seen it. They lived not only in ages past; there are hundreds of thousands still; the world is bright with the joyous saints who love to do Jesus’ will. And one was a soldier, and one was a priest, and one was slain by a fierce wild beast: and there’s not any reason, no, not the least, why I shouldn’t be one too. Not here for high and holy things
we render thanks to thee, but for the common things of earth, the purple pageantry of dawning and of dying days, the splendor of the sea, the royal robes of autumn moors, the golden gates of spring, the velvet of soft summer nights, the silver glistering of all the million million stars, the silent song they sing, One of my personal joys during the past months has been to take the time to walk outside early in the morning and to listen to God’s creatures as they begin the day. In the spring birds of all types sang out. In the summer they were joined by the cicadas and crickets. And now it is the squirrels that make the most noise. They all have reminded me to give thanks to our creator for that particular day. Surely, these “common things of earth” which I may have overlooked in past years have made such joyful noises that have reminded me to thank God for everything. God has continued to give us much this year. Over the past weeks, I have enjoyed seeing Carlos, Elizabeth, Mary, and Mark tell how they have been affected by this year’s challenges and how they have experienced the love of God, often through Emmanuel church during this same time. Particularly I was touched by listening to Craig list the joys of the year. It would be a good spiritual exercise to list your own joys found since last November. God has given much to sustain us through these difficult months. Though, admittedly, we may have to change our focus to remember them. It is good that we have had these October weeks to think about how we have been loved by God and then to reflect on what would love do. They usually call it a “gotcha question” – one posed not honestly to get an answer, but manipulatively to trick the respondent into saying something that can be used against them. The Gospels have more than one example of someone going after Jesus with a gotcha question, and today has to be one of my favorites. Matthew tells us:
The Pharisees… plotted to entrap Jesus in what he said, asking “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away. Whenever someone asks Jesus a gotcha question, they are the ones who end up gotcha’d. The Pharisees want to trick Jesus into siding with one position on a currently controversial tax – we’ve got one of those on the ballot in Illinois this year, so you can imagine the situation, I expect. Jesus explodes the short-sighted partisan focus, and points out that anyone who calls themselves a believer in God ought to be thinking like one. A believer ought to have a wider perspective. Give to God the things that are God’s, he says, and the questioners slink away speechless. Give to God the things that are God’s. Which begs the question, what things are God’s? Now that is, as I’ve said before, kindergarten level monotheism. Jews, Christians, and Muslims at a minimum should all immediately know the answer. What things are God’s? Everything. There is nothing outside his creative rule, nothing that cannot be traced back to his generosity. You and I may be taking care of some of his property for him, as Jesus has been pointing out to us in parable after parable this fall, but God owns it. We are his and everything we have is his. Despite the fact that this is kindergarten level monotheism, it’s easier to say you believe it than to act as if you believe it. Of course, that’s the case for all kinds of Christian teachings. It’s easier to say you believe in forgiveness than to forgive someone who has hurt you. It’s easier to say you believe God is all-knowing than to act like he knows better than you do. It’s easier to say you believe that all things are God’s than to treat your things as God’s. Jesus talks about all those topics, but he talks about how we use our resources more than almost anything else, because he knows how deeply it damages us to live as people who don’t know how broad and great and generous the involvement of God is in absolutely everything. That faith – that there isn’t anything bigger than God, that all things are God’s, that his involvement is broad and great and generous – is what has kept me going through these past several months of having to reinvent nearly everything about the way we do ministry because of the pandemic. It has not been at all easy on any of us, but Emmanuel has kept doing our ministry because of who God is and what God’s like. We have not missed one day of sack lunches. We have as of this week been out 115 times to take people contactless home communions. Every daily office since March has been prayed just the way it would have otherwise. We’ve gathered on Zoom and YouTube and Facebook for formation and worship several times a week as well as retooling our nave for in-person Masses that got an enthusiastic thumbs up from C-U Public Health. Why did we do that? Because all things are God’s and they’re God’s now, not later. In this time, not some other time. Because at Emmanuel we want to be people who know how broad and great and generous the involvement of God is in absolutely everything and every season, not people who wait for some other season or some other situation to consider what God requires. We want to give to God what is God’s all the time. There have been some discouraging things about this year, but I want to tell you one encouraging thing. We’ve sent out 2021 pledge cards, and, you know, please return yours soon. But as part of that naturally we look at giving for the current year, and of course some people are impacted by COVID such that they can’t do what they hoped. But what blows me away is in October to read down the column of the spreadsheet that lists the percentage fulfilled so far of the giving goals all of you set. In that column, say, if someone pledged $4000 and gave $4000, it says 100%, right? So I look down that column and of course some people couldn’t do what they hoped. But what blows me away this year is to see in October a smattering of percentages like 112%, 245%, 150%, 650%. Ordinary folks, who gradually over these past months have kept doing more than they planned because they know how important Emmanuel’s mission and ministry are, and how broad and great and generous the involvement of God is in what we do for the sake of Love. Give to God the things that are God’s. It’s kindergarten level monotheism, but do we live it out? I honestly think that in this area of the spiritual life, there is no more effective first step in learning how to do what you say you believe than to mindfully decide how much money you plan to give away, and offer that plan to God, who already owns all of it. Do that in prayer, do that in Love, do that with the God who already owns everything you have, and you’ll see. |
Archives
April 2024
Categories |