Stealing Jesus (Christmas Eve Meditation, Dec. 24, 2010)

Isaiah 9:2-7
Luke 2:1-20

For many of us, Christmas Eve just isn’t Christmas Eve until we sing Silent Night by candlelight. Although this hymn was written in 1816 by an Austrian minister, Joseph Mohr it wasn’t put to music until Christmas Eve 1818, when the organ at Mohr’s church broke at the worst possible time: Christmas Eve. Like most churches, the music had been carefully planned and rehearsed, and a broken organ was the last thing anyone had anticipated. In a panic, Mohr took the text he had written two years before and gave it to his organist, Franz Gruber. That day, Gruber composed a simple tune which he played that night on a guitar. (1)

Thanks to the fiasco of a broken organ on Christmas Eve, the world has this beloved Christmas hymn...a hymn that, let’s face it, perpetuates a lie.

Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. What happened on that night is what has happened multiple times every day since: a woman had a baby. And unless there are some serious drugs involved -- and sometimes even when there are -- childbirth is far from silent. And newborn babies aren’t so quiet, either -- in fact, doctors and nurses start to get really worried when a baby emerges from the dark quiet comfort of the womb and doesn’t start making a ruckus.

But even beyond Mary and Jesus’ cries, Luke’s description of the first Christmas is, simply put, noisy. The shepherds are in the fields when a whole host of angels appear, singing. There couldn’t have been anything silent about that.

We may cherish this hymn’s images of silence and peace, but the reality is, Christ’s entrance into the world was anything but silent or peaceful. But one of the reasons we love this hymn so much, especially on Christmas Eve, is because we so desperately want to come to church on this night and escape the chaos of this season -- the lines, the traffic, the planning, the gathering, the cooking and cleaning and preparing and anticipating. We want to come and hear beautiful music and look at a lovely manger scene and forget, for just a moment, all that isn’t right in our lives and in the world. Regardless of whether that first Christmas night was silent, silence and peace are what we long for tonight.

The problem is, when we do that, we miss the whole point of what we’re celebrating. We risk forgetting that what we are here to celebrate is the incarnation, God taking on human flesh.

The incarnation has always been a controversial idea. In the days of the early church, there were many heated arguments about just exactly how Jesus was both human and divine. One of these arguments was between two theologians, Marcion and Tertullian. Marcion and his followers had a strong belief that God was perfect, immortal, and entirely good. Because of this, the Marcionites really struggled with the idea that God, good and perfect God, would actually become part of our sinful, fallen creation. That seemed to them to be beneath God. So they argued that Jesus wasn’t really human, more that he was a fully divine being who took on humanity kind of like a Halloween costume; it was never really what he was.

On the other side of this debate was Tertullian, who argued vehemently against the so-called Marcionites. Tertullian published a paper in which he urges Marcion to imagine Jesus growing in the womb. Tertullian uses vivid descriptions of body fluid and blood, of a fetus growing in an ever-expanding womb, of a baby born on straw and hay and followed by a messy afterbirth.

Not exactly the bleached-white, porcelain manger scene we usually imagine, is it?

Tertullian wants to make Marcion squirm, and after this gruesome description, he gets personal. “I know you reject this whole idea,” he says, “But how were you born?”

In other words, if we believe that the reality of conception, development, and childbirth are too messy, too pedestrian for God, then we risk believing that we ourselves are too messy for God. (2) And when we think this way, that we are not good enough for God to get involved with, then we come to church thinking that we can only meet God here, where everything is neat and clean, where we wear our best clothes and use our best manners, where the music and the lights and the decorations are meant to inspire us with God’s beauty and goodness. And from here, we’ll go home, back to the messiness of our lives, back to the brokenness of the world, and most of us will leave God here, a clean, silent, sweet, baby boy sleeping in heavenly peace.

For years, John and Joan Leising put a lighted manger scene in front of their home in Buffalo as part of their Christmas decorations. But on Dec. 23, 2005, they looked outside only to discover that the 18-inch tall plastic statue of the baby Jesus was missing from the manger. In its place was a note, that the statue was needed for something and would be returned in three days. But three days passed, then three weeks, months, and half a year. Finally, one morning in late August, John opened the front door to find the statue with another note and a photo album. The album was full of pictures of the Jesus statue taken at various locations all over New York state...in front of Thruway signs, on bridges, at rest stops, and even at a psychiatric center.

Although the whole incident was deeply disturbing to the Leisings, it is a wonderful reminder of what the incarnation is really about, of what this night is about. Yes, it is first and foremost a celebration of God’s incredible love for us, a love so deep and sacrificial that God chose to enter the world as one of us, not as a great king or ruler, but as the child of poor peasants who grew up to be a peasant himself and who reveals to us the true nature of God. But if we leave all that knowledge here at church, if we leave Jesus here in the manger, we have missed the point. We should all be stealing Jesus, taking the Christ child out of the relative peace and safety of the stable and with us into all the messiness of our lives -- the chaos of the holidays with too many presents and too much rich food, the challenges of our relationships with the arguments and uncertainties and old wounds, the fears that -- for all of us -- lurk just beneath the surface of the polished appearance we show the world. Because if Jesus isn’t there, in the messiness of human life -- my life and your life -- then it doesn’t matter at all if Jesus is in the manger, silent or not.

Without a broken organ, we wouldn’t have our beloved Silent Night. And without a broken, messy world, and a first Christmas night that surely was not silent, we would not have a God that stands with us, as one of us, and loves us not just at our Christmas Eve best but in all the messiness of life. So don’t leave Jesus here when you go tonight. Take him with you. After all, that’s why he came. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Robert Morgan, Then Sings My Soul, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003, p. 93.
2. Thanks to David Lose for making available online the chapter “God con Carne: Incarnation” from Making Sense of the Christian Faith that includes a helpful overview of the debate between Marcion and Tertullian.

Parting the Curtain (sermon, fourth Sunday of Advent, Dec. 19, 2010)

Isaiah 35:1-10
Matthew 1:18-25

Two weeks ago, we heard Isaiah’s astonishing vision of hope: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks...” Last week we were treated to startling images of peace: “The wolf shall live with the lamb...and a little child shall lead them.” Those passages are probably more familiar to us than today’s, but, familiar or not, with this description of God’s appearance in the midst of wilderness, despair, and fear, Isaiah has outdone himself. It’s hard to imagine how we could improve on the majesty and poetry of this passage. Listen again:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing...Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.”
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert...And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

A recent article in the Christian Century describes this time leading up to Christmas as “the numbing season.” As the author puts it: “There are the ceaseless rounds of Christmas parties, each requiring preparation of food and gift-buying, each surfeited with expectations of obligatory Christmas cheer. There is the flood of commerce, requiring a careful parsing of which are the newest and most "necessary" toys or clothes for children and grandchildren. There are the travel and the visits to family, spiked with all the stresses attendant upon such endeavors. Finally (and almost as an afterthought), there are added church responsibilities of nativity programs, Christmas Eve services and so forth.” [For us I would add the cookie sale, the Christmas tea, the Christmas Families projects...] The writer concludes, “No wonder many of us are likely to dread Christmas almost as much as we look forward to it.” (1)

If you think this sounds like an exaggeration, let me assure you, in my experience, it’s not. As hard as we may try to numb ourselves to the pain and dread and grief and, yes, fear, that surfaces for many of us this time of year, I often hear comments at church like, “I’m just not looking forward to the holidays this year.” “I wish we didn’t have to celebrate at all.” “This season is just too hard since...” since Dad died, since I lost my job, since the diagnosis, since my marriage is falling apart.

Lest we think that longing for God in the midst of our pain and despair is a new thing, remember that Isaiah too is speaking to a people in a numbing, wilderness season. And it is into this wilderness, this numbness that Isaiah speaks: “Be strong! Do not fear! Here is your God...God will come...God will come and save you!”

God will come. Hopefully, we believe at least that. In Jesus God came, in the Holy Spirit, God comes to us now; and someday, somehow, Christ will come again. Maybe what we fear the most, though, this time of year, in spite of our faith, is that for all the prophets’ glorious predictions, for all the lovely hymns about the child in the manger, God’s coming won’t change a thing. Our loved ones who died will still be gone, the job lost won’t magically be returned, the diagnosis won’t miraculously be reversed, the severed relationship won’t be restored. Christmas will come, God will come, and we will sing the songs and make the food and exchange the gifts, and our hearts will still be broken.

The preacher John Buchanan suggests that the whole Bible could be distilled into two words: “Fear not.” From the beginning until the end of the biblical story we constantly see human beings who are afraid and hear God, angels, and Jesus telling them they don’t need to be. Every time an angel appears, what’s the first thing they say: “Fear not!” “Do not be afraid!” And yet the shepherds in the fields were “sore afraid” the Bible tells us. Even Jesus’ disciples, who had the luxury of walking and talking and learning from Jesus, were constantly afraid -- that he could not save them from a storm at sea, that he was going to die and leave them alone...and when he did die, they were at first so afraid that they ran away from all the stories of the empty tomb and hid themselves in a locked room. (2)

So maybe instead of having Advent candles that stand for peace, hope, love, and joy, we should designate one for courage. After all, remember the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz? He was sure that he was a coward because he so often felt afraid. What he didn’t realize was that he displayed courage over and over again by acting in the face of fear. This is the very thing we are called to do this season, to move through Advent, through the pain and fear and numbness, toward the promise of God who is coming to save us.

Years ago, in Alaska, there was a visitors’ center built with the sole purpose of showcasing one of Alaska’s largest and most beautiful glaciers. A whole wall of windows faced the glacier, and huge curtains covered the windows. The idea was that a tour of the visitors center would end in front of the windows. After learning all about the glacier, the curtains would dramatically part and the visitors would get to see the magnificent sheet of ice for themselves.

Sadly, though, the effects of climate changed intervened. The windows are still there and the curtain still parts, but instead of a glacier, visitors see only a three-mile lake of water, much of which came from the glacier melting. (3)

Reading today’s passages together has the same effect. First we hear Isaiah’s dramatic proclamation: “Look! Here is your God! God will come...God will come and save you!” And then the curtain parts and THERE...IS...Joseph, a young man full of fear and despair. The woman he is supposed to marry is pregnant. He knows he isn’t the father. He’s going to take the high road, but because in that culture engagement was a contractual agreement, he’s going to have to officially break the contract, in other words, divorce her. No matter how quietly he does that, it’s a small town. People are going to know, and people are going to talk.

Then, in the middle of one of many nights of fitful sleep, Joseph has an extraordinary dream in which the Lord speaks to him and essentially repeats the words of Isaiah: “Be strong. Do not fear. Look! Here is your God. God is coming to save you...to save everyone.” But in this version, gone is the drama, gone is the transformation of all creation, gone are the blind who see, the deaf who hear, the lame who leap, and the mute who sing. In this version, there is simply a young, pregnant woman, and a young man willing to stake his reputation on a dream. In this version, God is coming not in power and might and glory, but the same way all of do, growing in a woman’s womb. Yes, here is our God, who is coming to save us, but certainly not in the way we might have expected or even hoped.

Near the end of World War II, the Allies gathered together many of the English children who had been orphaned during the war. They provided the children with three meals a day and a bed to sleep in at night. The problem was, the children couldn’t sleep. After all the trauma they had been through -- the bombings, the loss of their parents, hunger and malnutrition, they simply were afraid to close their eyes and go to sleep; after all, who knew what the night might bring. Who knew if they would get to eat again tomorrow. After weeks of this, someone suggested that each child be given a piece of bread at night, a piece they could hold onto while they slept, a tangible reminder that they had eaten today and they would eat again tomorrow, that they could close their eyes, even in the face of all the fear and tragedy around them, they could hold their bread, and close their eyes, and sleep in peace.

A piece of bread. It may not sound like much, but it gave those children the courage they needed to sleep through the night in the face of the fear and uncertainty they faced. Joseph was a faithful Jew. He knew the prophets and the predictions. He trusted that someday God’s Messiah would come to save God’s people. What he got instead was little more than a piece of bread. As Joseph’s hopes for his future crumbled, he got a promise from God that, “it’s not the way you thought I would come, but this is how I am coming to be with you, to be one of you, to save you...to save the world.”

Advent and Christmas do not come each year to take away our fears, they come to offer us something to hold onto that we too might have courage. Look! you who are grieving! Look! you who are afraid of what the future holds. Look! you who struggle to find hope or peace or anything like joy. Look! Here is your God. God is coming...as one of us. To be with us. To stand with us in our pain and grief and fear, and, yes, in our courage. It may not be what we expected, even what we hoped for. But this year, may it be enough. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Rodney Clapp, The Christian Century, Dec. 8, 2010. Synopsis online here.
2. John Buchanan, Journal for Preachers, Vol. 24, No. 1, Advent 2010, p. 11.
3. Barbara R. Rossing, Journeys Through Revelation, 2010-2011 Horizons Bible Study, pp.31-32.

The Long Pause (sermon, 3rd Sunday of Advent, Dec. 12, 2010)

Isaiah 11:1-10
Romans 15:4-13

Imagine a Christmas pageant put on by kindergartners. There they are, a group of five and six year-olds, fidgeting on risers, pulling at their Christmas collars, but with beaming faces belting out the words to their song, words from Isaiah: “You be the lion strong and wild, I’ll be the lamb, meek and mild; we’ll live together happily, ‘cause that’s how it ought to be.”

Children aren’t the only ones whose eyes light up when they imagine a world at peace. Peace is something human beings have always longed for -- peace in our families, communities, nations, world. The Quaker preacher and artist Edward Hicks was so captivated by the vision of peace described by Isaiah that he painted more than one hundred versions of it. He put all the animals together: the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and kid, the calf and the lion, and a child among them. All of the animals have wide-open eyes that look almost human. They also look somewhat startled, as if this change in their reality from relationships of predator and prey to mutuality and respect has surprised them as much as anyone.

This vision of peace is certainly surprising, but no more so than the prediction that begins this passage -- that from a devastated wasteland of tree stumps, new life will grow: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of its roots.” Just before this passage, at the end of chapter 10, Isaiah describes a devastated battlefield, one that God has taken an ax to and cut down all the powers of the day which are depicted as towering trees. Nothing is left of Israel or its enemies except a mass of decaying stumps.

And yet, from one of those stumps, the stump that represents God’s people, Isaiah sees something: a tiny, fragile green shoot, a sign of new life. This is no ordinary crocus, improbably poking up through the late winter snow; this tiny sign of life is rooted in the lineage of Jesse, the father of David, Israel’s greatest king. Out of all the suffering and devastation God’s people have known, Isaiah declares there will be a new day, a new ruler, one greater than the people have yet seen.

“He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.” In other words, this new ruler will do what God’s people have failed to do: he will look out for the least and the lost, he will not judge as we human beings inevitably judge -- by the way people look or the way people talk -- instead he will see the suffering of the poor and he will be their protector, bringing them into the family of God.

This week I had a training session with the new elders and deacons and as we talked about our faith journeys some of us answered the question, “What do you love about Jesus?” Here are some of the answers: “I love how Jesus turned everything upside-down.” “I love how Jesus doesn’t judge people the way we do but loves even those we find hard to love.” “I love how Jesus challenges authority.” All of these answers speak to who we believe Jesus to be: God here on earth, reaching out to the least and the lost, protecting the poor and the downtrodden, reminding all people of their status as beloved children of the one true God.

It’s probably hard to say what’s harder for us to imagine: a truly righteous ruler who looks out for those who cannot fend for themselves, or peace in the animal kingdom. A woman watching that kindergarten Christmas pageant was moved to tears as those children sang with passion and idealism about the lion and the lamb peacefully coexisting. She cried, not because of the beauty of what they described, but because she could sense her own resistance to believing that such a thing could possibly happen: “As I watched that throng of kindergartners singing,” she wrote later, “something immensely powerful washed over me; it was like a monsoon of hope and sadness, all these children so certain the world ought to be this way, and me so certain of all the ways it isn’t. It moved me to tears, really; a jumbled mix of bittersweet tears — Advent tears — for that long pause between what is and what should be, what is and what we Jesus-followers believe will be.” (1)

In his book Peace, Walter Brueggemann expresses the same kind of skepticism about the picture Isaiah describes: “Unheard of and unimaginable!” he writes, “All these images of unity sound to me so abnormal they are not worth reflecting on. But then I look again and notice something else. [Isaiah] means to say that in the new age, these are the normal things. And the effect...is to expose the real abnormalities of life, which we have taken for granted. We have lived with things abnormal so long that we have gotten used to them and we think they are normal.” (2)

Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Our knowledge tells us that the peace Isaiah describes in this text is impossible. But in this season of Advent -- this long pause during which we wait on tiptoe for the promises of God to be revealed again -- God calls us to let go of what we think we know and use our imaginations to envision a whole new normal, to look around and see that the things we take for granted don’t have to be that way.

In our passages from Isaiah from Romans, we receive two images of what this new normal might look like. And, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas argues, if we really want to change ourselves or the world, acquiring the right image is far more important than diligently exercising our willpower. (3) In addition to Isaiah’s images of a righteous ruler and the peaceable kingdom, the apostle Paul offers us another image of a new normal in the passage we heard today from Romans. “May God...grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” How do we do that, you ask? Paul answers: “Welcome one another...just as Christ has welcomed you...”

It may sound like Paul is asking us to do the impossible -- live in harmony with one another, not just those who mildly irritate us, but those who deeply offend us by the ways their views and beliefs and lifestyles clash with ours. It may sound impossible, but the reason Paul calls us to extend that kind of radical hospitality and acceptance is because that is precisely what Jesus did...he was born into the devastated remnant of God’s chosen people and broke God’s promises wide open so that they included, not just the Jews, but everyone, all the children of the earth, the poor, the rich, the righteous, the sinner, you, me, everyone.

That God could extend God’s love and mercy and grace to all people was once as impossible for people to imagine as a wolf snuggling up to a lamb or a small child playing safely by the den of a poisonous snake. In this long pause of Advent while we wait, God calls us to use our imaginations to envision how what seems so impossible could become possible, that we could coexist with our worst enemies, in peace.

Peter Storey was the former Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and President of the South African Council of Churches. He tells of a land where the impossible eventually become possible, where sworn enemies imagined themselves to a place of peace.

Storey writes: “One of our important tasks in South Africa’s long struggle for liberation was to help people imagine what they found unimaginable: a South Africa where black and white lived together hand in hand and at peace. It was crucial for the church to incarnate that dream in the life of the Christian community so we could say to an unwilling nation, “There! That is what we mean when we talk about God’s future for South Africa! That is the new South Africa!”

He then tells this story: Some of the most powerful moments in my life have been of Communion in places where people have been divided from one another. I once received a phone call in the early hours of the morning telling me that one of my black clergy in a very racist town . . . had been arrested by the secret police. I got up and drove out there, picked up another minister, and then went looking for him. When we found the prison where he was and demanded to see him, we were accompanied by a large white Afrikaner guard to a little room where we found Ike Moloabi sitting on a bench wearing a sweatsuit and looking quite terrified. He had been pulled out of bed in the early hours of a freezing winter morning and dragged off like that.

I said to the guard, “We are going to have Communion,” and I took out of my pocket a little chalice and a tiny little bottle of Communion wine and some bread in a plastic sachet. I spread my pocket handkerchief on the bench between us and made the table ready, and we began the Liturgy. When it was time to give the Invitation, I said to the guard, “This table is open to all, so if you would like to share with us, please feel free to do so.” This must have touched some place in his religious self, because he took the line of least resistance and nodded rather curtly. I consecrated the bread and the wine and noticed that Ike was beginning to come to life a little. He could see what was happening here. Then I handed the bread and the cup to Ike because one always gives the Sacrament first to the least of Christ’s brothers or sisters—the ones that are hurting the most—and Ike ate and drank.

Next must surely be the stranger in your midst, so I offered bread and the cup to the guard. You don’t need to know too much about South Africa to understand what white Afrikaner racists felt about letting their lips touch a cup from which a black person had just drunk. The guard was in crisis: he would either have to overcome his prejudice or refuse the means of grace. After a long pause, he took the cup and sipped from it, and for the first time I saw a glimmer of a smile on Ike’s face. Then I took something of a liberty with the truth and said, “In the Methodist liturgy, we always hold hands when we say the grace,” and very stiffly, the ward reached out his hand and took Ike’s, and there we were in a little circle, holding hands, while I said the ancient words of benediction, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all.”
 . . . From that moment the power equation between that guard and Ike was changed forever. God’s shalom had broken through at that makeshift Table. (4)

Advent is God’s gift to us, a long pause during which we wait and anticipate and imagine and participate in the impossible being made possible: righteousness and justice for all, harmony among enemies, peace on earth, good will toward all. May you know God’s peace as you wait and may you find ways, no matter how small they may seem, to extend that peace to one of God’s children you could not imagine living in harmony with. When you do, you will satisfy Paul’s command that we welcome one another as Christ has welcomed even us. You will glorify God and bring God’s presence here on earth again, as surely as it arrived in the manger that very first Christmas night, a night when all creation paused and knew peace. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Danielle Shroyer, online here.
2. Quoted by Kate Huey in her reflections on the lectionary passages online here.
3. Eugene Peterson summarizes Hauerwas’ argument in his book Under the Unpredictable Planet, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994, p. 6.
4. Calum McLeod relates this story in his sermon “The Teachable Kingdom,” at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, IL, November 28, 2010. The story is quoted from Peter Storey’s article “Table Manners for Peacebuilders” in Conflict and Communion, pp. 61-62.

There Will Come a Day

Isaiah 2:1-5

It was the summer of 1969 and the creators of the children’s television show Sesame Street were just six weeks away from the air date of the first episode. To make sure they had a product that was going to be successful, the producers created five full-length episodes and showed them to groups of preschoolers around the city of Philadelphia. They wanted see how well the show held the attention of its intended audience.

But right away, there were problems. When the show was originally created, the writers and producers followed the advice of child psychologists who said they needed to separate the fantasy elements of the show from the real elements. When there were real human beings on the screen, the talking puppets should be nowhere in sight. In these test runs Muppets were filmed interacting only with other Muppets, and the street scenes showed only real adults and children. The psychologists were worried that mixing fantasy and reality would be misleading to the children watching the show.

The problem was, when the first episodes of Sesame Street were shown to groups of preschoolers in Philadelphia, the children lost interest in the show every time there was a street scene with only real people. Levels of attention would increase again when the Muppets came back on, but the producers knew the show would never be successful if the attention of its audience waxed and waned like that. So they defied the psychologists. They created puppets that could walk and talk and interact with human beings on the street and they re-shot all the street scenes. And that’s how Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and Snuffalupagos were born. (1)

Spend any time around young children and it becomes obvious that they have an innate capacity to mix fantasy and reality. They accept without question books and movies whose main characters are talking animals or fantastical creatures that could never exist in the so-called “real world.” But there comes a time when they start to question -- what is real? what is pretend? And how can they figure out the difference?

The image Isaiah paints in our reading today sounds wonderful: the house of the Lord elevated on a mountain above all other mountains; people from all over the world and every nation peacefully traveling towards it; the ringing sound, not of jingle bells, but of metal weapons being pounded and reshaped into productive tools of agriculture. But most of us are way past the point at which we view such an image as anything less than a fantasy. Sure, it’s a nice idea, but how can we possibly take it seriously? How can this picture Isaiah paints ever be a reality?

One of the reasons we have such a hard time taking the prophet’s words seriously is that this Advent season feels no different than any other. Globally and nationally, things look disastrous. Wars and conflicts seem never-ending, politicians won’t work together to solve problems, citizens cast blame on everyone but themselves, the economic recovery has stalled, and environmental disasters threaten our present and future way of life. For many of us, things at home are no better. There is conflict in our families, fear about the future, and grief that always seems to creep into our hearts and take up residence this time of year, just when we are trying to make it seem like everything is merry and bright.

So it might help us to remember that when Isaiah first spoke these words to the Israelites, things were equally bleak. The world was filled with violence and war. Israel had been conquered and occupied by the frightful Assyrian empire and pretty much everyone from the king on down was shivering in dread and fear, feeling helpless and hopeless.

And yet it is in the face of that very fear and hopelessness that Isaiah speaks this prophecy:

God shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

Into the darkness of war and uncertainty about the future, Isaiah, God’s prophet, offers God’s people -- then and now -- hope.

A Sunday School class of fifth graders was recently talking about the concept of hope. The kids in the class had a hard time coming up with a definition of hope, but finally they settled on two ideas: hope can either be wishful thinking, or hope is what helps you when you’re down and out. (2) In other words, paradoxical as it might sound, what these fifth graders realized is that hope is most real when we are in despair. We worship a God who, in the very birth of Jesus Christ in a tiny, conflicted, impoverished corner of the world, promised to be with us when we need it most, promised to be with us at those very times when things look the most bleak and hope-less. Viewed that way, the hope we cling to in the midst of the communal and individual struggles of our time is not the fantasy of children, but the reality we are called to proclaim.

Ruby Bridges may have been young, but at six years old she taught a lot of people about the reality of hope in the face of despair. Ruby was one of the first African-American children to integrate the New Orleans public schools. For months, federal marshals had to escort Ruby, every morning and afternoon, through crowds of angry parents hurling insults, racial slurs and violent words at this little girl. Finally, nearly every white family had withdrawn their children from the school. So Ruby went to school by herself for nearly the whole term.

A child psychologist named Robert Coles heard about Ruby and wanted to understand her better, so he spent some time with her and her parents. He also interviewed her teacher, trying to understand how Ruby could have withstood the adversity and abuse thrown at her. This is what her teacher said: “I was standing in the classroom looking out the window. I saw Ruby coming down the street with the federal marshals on both sides of her. The crowd was there shouting as usual. A woman spat at Ruby, but missed. Ruby smiled at her. A man shook his fist at her. Ruby smiled. And then she walked up the steps, and she stopped and turned around and smiled one more time. You know what she told one of those marshals? She told him she prays for those people, the ones in that mob. She prays for them every night before going to sleep.”

Coles asked Ruby directly about her prayers. “Yes,” Ruby said, “I do pray for them.” “Why?” Coles asked. “Why would you pray for people who are so mean to you and say such bad things about you?” “Because Mama said I should,” Ruby responded. “I go to church. I go to church every Sunday, and we’re told to pray for people, even bad people. Mama says it’s true. My minister says the same thing. ‘We don’t have to worry,’ he says. He came to our house and he says, ‘God is watching over us.’ He says if I forgive the people and smile at them and pray for them, God will keep a good eye on everything and he’ll protect us.”

Coles asked if Ruby thought the minister was right. “Oh, yes,” Ruby said. And then she explained, “I’m sure God knows what is happening. God’s got a lot to worry about, but there’s bad trouble here. God can’t help but notice. He may not do anything right now, but there will come a day, like they say in church, there will come a day. You can count on it. That’s what they say in church.” (3)

There will come a day. That’s what we say here in church. Perhaps even more importantly, that’s what the Bible promises, here in Isaiah and throughout Scripture. There will come a day.

As we journey deeper into Advent and closer to Christmas we have a choice. We can put up decorations, cook and bake, go to parties, and buy gifts as a means of constructing a fantasy -- if only for this season -- that everything in the world and in our lives is fine. Or we can do all those things in a way that proclaims our deep hope, our firm belief that there will come a day when all the pain and grief and violence in the world is transformed into peace and harmony and the house of God towers over everything else in the world. We proclaim this now, in this season of Advent, because we believe that in the birth of Jesus Christ God does something completely new, something that redefines reality for us, something that proves to us that no matter how bleak things seem, God is with us.

And so we can come together to this table, proclaiming our faith as we receive the feast God offers. Today we also have an opportunity to receive prayers for healing and wholeness, for ourselves or for someone we know. We do this to as a reminder that we can bring our deepest pain and sorrow to God, whatever is within us that God already sees, already forgives, already accepts, already loves. In the face of it all, we feast, we pray, not in denial, but with hope. As Ruby Bridges says, there’s bad trouble here, but God can’t help but notice...and act. So we act too, proclaiming our hope in Emmanuel, God with us, proclaiming in the midst of our despair the hope, even the sure and certain belief, that there will come a day. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. from an online excerpt of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, Back Bay Books, 2002. Read it here.
2. As recounted by David Lose in the Sermon Brainwave podcast for Dec. 5, online here.
3. Quoted in a sermon entitled “Peace Is More Than a Christmas Wish” by the Rev. Dr. P.C. Ennis, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, GA, Dec. 9, 2007.

How God Reigns (sermon for Christ the King Sunday, November 21, 2010)

Luke 23:33-43

One of the things many Christians find challenging about the different books of the Bible and especially about the gospels, is that at times they completely contradict each other. So if we are supposed to believe, as many of us were taught, that the Bible is true, then how do we reconcile these differences?

One way is to try and figure out why a particular author chose to present a particular episode in a particular way. What is the author trying to tell us with the details he or she includes?

We have spent quite a bit of time over the last months in the gospel of Luke. This is a gospel that has a lot in common with both Matthew and Mark, but with distinct differences. For one thing, time and time again, Luke’s gospel shows Jesus interacting with people on the margins: the poor, the outcast, women, children, tax collectors, refugees. Not only does Jesus interact with them, he heals them, forgives them, socializes with them, and tells parables in which they come out on top. Luke also talks about repentance more than any of the other gospels. Many of the beloved parables that are unique to the gospel of Luke -- the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the lost sheep and the lost coin -- Jesus tells to make a point about how important it is to repent, or turn back to God.

Today, on this last Sunday of the church year, also known as “Christ the King” Sunday, our reading is Luke’s version of the crucifixion, and again, his version is different from Matthew, Mark, and John’s versions in ways that reveal to us just what kind of king Luke understands Jesus to be.

The first thing that happens when Jesus is nailed to the cross is that he asks God to forgive his executioners: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they are doing.” Jesus asking God’s forgiveness even for those who participate in his torture and murder emphasizes Luke’s claim throughout this gospel that God willingly and sometimes even foolishly forgives the most wayward of God’s children.

Then we have three different characters challenging Jesus to “save himself.” First “the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God!’” Then, “the soldiers also mocked him...saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’” And finally, one of the criminals being crucified with him “kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’”

If we had read Luke’s gospel straight through, it might occur to us that these three challenges to Jesus to save himself and prove that he is God’s Messiah echo the three challenges Jesus faced from Satan at the very beginning of his ministry. After his baptism, Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness, where Satan challenges him three times to prove that he is indeed God’s son.

So from the beginning of Luke’s account of the life and ministry of Jesus, Satan and others have pressured Jesus to prove that he is the Messiah, God’s anointed one. Can we blame them? If we were God’s chosen people, continually oppressed and persecuted but convinced that one day, the Messiah would come and overthrow our oppressors, wouldn’t we also find this Jesus confusing? Because Jesus acts as if he is powerless in the face of the injustice being done to him. As one commentator says, “how can we receive a Messiah who does not act like a Messiah? How can you see salvation if no one is being saved?”

How can a king that forgives his oppressors and does nothing to save himself from destruction save anyone? For many of us who have dealt with what God is unable to do in the face of suffering, sickness, or death, we may have wondered the same thing. If God is so powerful, then why didn’t God save my loved one, fix my relationship, or give me the one thing I wanted the most? Where was God’s power when I needed saving? It’s a good question to ask how this kind of king can possibly save the world. It’s a good question, but it’s the wrong one.

The question we should be asking is not ‘how’, but ‘what’. What is Luke trying to tell us about our salvation? What is the message behind the story of a Messiah who suffers and dies? (1)

Galileo was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. Perhaps his greatest contribution to this revolution was providing proof through the powerful telescopes he built that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of the universe, around which other celestial bodies (including the earth) orbited.

Many people in Galileo’s day simply refused to accept this theory, not the least the authorities of the Catholic Church, who denounced Galileo’s view as “false and contrary to Scripture.” To anyone who challenged him, whose imagination refused to admit that Galileo’s theory could be true, Galileo would offer an opportunity to look through the telescope and see for themselves what he had seen. But most of those who disagreed with him not only refused to admit that he might be right, they refused to even look through his telescope! They suffered from a total lack of imagination and they were paralyzed by fear. They were simply too afraid that changing their understanding of the universe might change everything they knew about the world and their place in it.

The salvation we long for is real, but it is not what we imagined it to be. What we discover about Jesus at his crucifixion defies our expectations and forces us to imagine the unimaginable, because if this Jesus, this forgiving, parable-telling, outcast-loving, dying Jesus is the heir to God’s kingdom, then that kingdom must look completely different than what we expected. In this kingdom God loves, forgives, and saves everyone, everyone -- even a convicted criminal -- not with power and might and force, but by coming alongside us and being with us, in all the pain and suffering and confusion and wonder of our human lives.

The problem is, once we look through that telescope, once we allow ourselves to glimpse who this Jesus is and what he reveals about God, things will never be the same again. Not only are we forced to re-imagine who God is and what God’s kingdom looks like, we cannot help but recognize that our role in this kingdom is totally different than we imagined it, for we are not just the ones saved but also the ones called to share the good news of salvation with others. And God calls us to fulfill this role not someday in some heavenly realm, but right here and now. Like the thief who proclaimed that Jesus was indeed innocent, God calls us to join Christ in Paradise today by extending Christ’s love and grace to all people.

*****

Will Willimon was once the pastor of a small church in a dying neighborhood, which is to say that the people moving into the neighborhood were quite different than the people who had always attended that church. The church had long been losing members and so they decided it was time to embark on a new effort of evangelism. One Sunday after worship, a handful of brave souls gathered together, and Willimon specifically heard someone tell two elderly women, Sarah and Mary, to go down Summit, turn right, and then knock on the doors of the houses on that street.

A couple of hours later, after many discouraging conversations -- not to mention all the houses whose occupants refused to converse with the church members at all -- the band of evangelists returned to the church and shared their stories. People hadn’t answered their doors, others hadn’t wanted to talk about church, others already had a church home and weren’t interested in hearing about a new one.

Then, in walked Sarah and Mary, breathless and excited. “we went down Summit,” they said, “and then we turned left and then we started knocking on doors.”

“Wait a minute,” Willimon interrupted. “You were supposed to go down Summit and then turn right, not left.” “Yeah,” someone else chimed in, “you weren’t supposed to go into that neighborhood. That’s the projects!”

“Well, anyway,” Mary and Sarah went on, “there were lots of people who didn’t answer the doors or who weren’t interested, but there was this one lady -- Verlene. She came to the door and she had two little kids and we told her about our church and she said she was just desperate and we told her that was just the kind of person we needed at our church! We invited her to come to the Wednesday morning Ladies’ Bible study!” Mary and Sarah were beaming, but everyone else looked skeptical.

“What about the kids?” someone asked. “We told her to bring them,” they said. “We said we’d provide childcare.”

And sure enough, on Wednesday morning, Verlene showed up at the church, kids in tow. The Bible study that day was about temptation and after they had read the passage, Willimon asked the women to share about a time they had faced temptation. At first, no one spoke. Then one lady told about going to the grocery store the day before and discovering in the parking lot that she had a loaf of bread in her bag she hadn’t paid for. “At first I wasn’t going to do anything about it,” she said. “I mean, really, is one loaf of bread going to make or break that big store? But I knew I had to do the right thing, so I went back and returned it.”

Everyone around the table nodded their approval. Then Verlene spoke up. “Well, there was this one time,” she started. “I was living with this guy, not the father of my second child, but the man before that, and we were doing a lot of coke, you know, and that stuff if really messes with your head, and one day we needed some cash, and he talked me into robbing this little service station. And we went in and he put a gun to the man’s head and we made out with about $200...easy as taking candy from a baby. But something about it just didn’t feel right to me. Then a few weeks later, he came up with another plan to rob a convenience store. And I thought about it and I just couldn’t do it. I told him no, I’m not going to do it. And he beat me the hell out of me. But that was the first time in my life I said no to anybody, about anything. It was the first time in my life I felt like somebody.”

And Willimon said, “Oh, okay, well, I think it’s time for us to pray now.”

Later, in the parking lot, Mary said to Willimon, “Wow, your Bible study just got a whole lot more interesting. I’m going to go home and get on the phone, because I think I can get a crowd there. I mean, this is good, this is good stuff.”

Willimon said, “Look, you were told to go down Summit and turn right, not left!”
And Mary said, “Preacher, I am as bored with this church as you are. I think Verlene was sent to us by God to remind us what the gospel is really about. I believe I can get a crowd for this.” (2)

God’s reign defies our expectations time and time again...in the Bible, in the church, in our own lives. Right up until the end, when he is hanging on a cross, when he is suffering an agonizing death, Jesus is showing us that how God reigns changes everything. It forces us to see things we refused to believe could be true...that the meek and the lowly might in fact be the very ones who reveal God to us...that admitting when we were wrong might be the very moment we receive the blessing of forgiveness...that even in this dark and hurting world we ordinary people can reach out to each other and in doing so bring the kingdom of God -- Paradise indeed! -- even here, even now, today. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Thanks to the Rev. Derek Starr Redwine for his thoughts on how it helps to reframe the question from “how” to “what”.
2. Will Willimon tells this story in the sermon “A Little Yeast,” which he delivered on July 23, 2010 at the Lakeside, Ohio Chautauqua community. Listen to or download it here.

Fumbling for Flashlights (sermon, November 14, 2010)

Luke 21:5-19

One Saturday morning, the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor visited a colleague at his church. After looking at the newly renovated fellowship hall, her colleague led her to the sanctuary, where she noticed something strange on the communion table: a fat white candle sitting in a dish with rusted barbed wire climbing the air around it. “What is that?” she asked, thinking maybe it had something to do with the church’s prison ministry. “It’s a symbol I came across that really spoke to me,” her colleague said as he reached over and gently touched one of the steel barbs. “See, the light has already come into the world, but there is still work to be done. There is still darkness between us and the light.” (1)

There is still darkness between us and the light. This time of year, we begin to experience this truth in a very present way, as Daylight Savings Time ends and the days grow shorter and shorter from now until late December. It is an accident of our location in the world that this time of increasing darkness also corresponds both with the very end and the very beginning of the church year.

Today is the second to last Sunday in the church year. Now, I know that very few of us really live our lives according to the church calendar. We tend to mark time by the change of seasons or the cycles of the school year or which sports season it is or the dates on the calendar. Nothing is wrong with any of these ways of keeping time, of course; it’s only natural that the things that dominate our daily lives are the ones by which we keep track of time’s passage. But the church calendar is important because it focuses on the life of Christ and by doing so it helps us to focus on what it means to be Christ’s followers.

As we move toward the end of the church year, we continue our travels in the gospel of Luke, which we have moved through for much of the summer and fall. For the past few months in our readings, Jesus has been traveling toward Jerusalem, which is to say he has been moving closer and closer to the place and time of his trial and his death, closer and closer to the darkest days that he and his disciples will face.

But when Jesus and his disciples first arrive in Jerusalem, they aren’t focused on darkness. What catches the disciples’ eye is the magnificent temple built by Herod Antipas. During his reign over Jerusalem, King Herod tore down the existing temple and undertook a massive renovation and reconstruction project, one of the largest construction projects of the first century. The completed temple was a sight to behold, and the disciples are in awe of its beauty and majesty, as was anyone who had the chance to see it.

Anyone, that is, except Jesus. His perspective on the temple is different: “Don’t put your faith in these things that seem so amazing now,” he tells the gawking disciples. “They aren’t going to last.”

Such a prediction would have been unthinkable, even laughable, at the time. The temple had taken decades to build, in part because it was not made of local stone but of imported white marble that gleamed in the daylight and made the whole complex even more magnificent. As the disciples stood there admiring it, they simply could not have fathomed that those marble stones would soon be reduced to a pile of rubble.

The disciples couldn’t have imagined it, but the first people to hear Luke’s gospel knew otherwise. Less than ten years after it was finally completed, the temple was destroyed in the devastating Siege of Jerusalem. In contrast to the disciples, Luke’s original audience might actually have been relieved to hear Jesus predict that the temple would fall, because they had personally experienced it. They had lived the truth that there is still darkness between us and the light.

Luke’s Jesus doesn’t stop with the temple, either, when he begins to speak of destruction and suffering. He goes on to predict that there will be false prophets, wars, earthquakes, famines, plagues...and then Jesus takes it a step further. Because the dark times ahead are going to get personal. The disciples themselves will be arrested and persecuted and brought to trial, all because of their association with Jesus. They will be abandoned, betrayed by those closest to them; some of them will even die. All in all, it’s not a ringing endorsement of discipleship. The way Jesus describes it, discipleship is a state in which we are constantly reminded that there is still darkness between us and the light, and the darkness often seems like more than could ever be overcome; more like a blackout curtain than barbed wire.

Surely Luke’s first readers weren’t the only ones for whom Jesus’ words rang true: after all, haven’t we experienced it too? There seems to be no shortage of events in the world that make us wonder: is this how the world is going to end? 9-11. The earthquake in 2004 that triggered a tsunami which decimated Indonesia and killed more than 200,000 people across 15 different countries. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. H1N1. The Gulf Coast oil spill. If we were trying to predict the end of the world, there are no shortage of signs that could point to it.

Add to those events all the ways the world ends for individuals every day as their personal temples, the ones they thought could never fall, crumble: the death of a child, the diagnosis of disease, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a job, the devastation of addiction. Whether these things happen to us personally or to someone we know, we are constantly reminded: there is still darkness between and the light.

We find our attention riveted to such things in the same way the disciples were riveted by the sight of Herod’s temple. Whether it is something so magnificent or so terrifying that we can’t turn away, the point is, we get sucked in to these global and personal events. We become consumed by them, whether by grief of fear or amazement. And when that happens we risk forgetting who we are, we risk focusing on the darkness, and fearing that the light itself no longer exists.

“Things are not as they seem,” Jesus tells his followers. “Be careful that the false prophets and the natural disasters and the personal trials don’t distract you from what is real.” Instead, Jesus promises, all of these things, these dark moments when temples crumble, are, in fact, opportunities to testify...to testify that even when it looks otherwise -- perhaps especially when it looks otherwise -- the light is still there. God is still with us.

Now when Jesus speaks to his disciples about testifying, he means it literally, for many of the original followers of Jesus would indeed be arrested, persecuted, and handed over to authorities. The trials we face will probably look very different from this, but they are no less challenging. And what Jesus says to the disciples is true for us to: in our darkest moments, no matter how bleak things may seem, we can cling to the truth that God is with us, that Jesus himself is giving us words and wisdom to endure, that ultimately, in some sense, not a head of our heads will perish. We can testify to the light.

One problem with this word “testify,” though, is that for most of us it implies using words, and, as any of us who have experienced times of deep suffering know, at those times, words can often do more harm than good. Just as Jesus advises the disciples against trying to read signs and make predictions, so we should avoid trying to figuring out exactly what God might be trying to teach us through various events. Darkness and suffering are simply a part of life, every life. Even the most carefully constructed temples we have built may unexpectedly fall. And when they do we do not need anyone to explain the meaning of the darkness to us. What we need is for someone to point past the darkness to the light.

Pedro’s life was full of persecutions and dreadful portents. As a young kid, caught in gang life on the streets of LA, Pedro was filled with rage and resentment that he covered up with heavy drinking and eventually an addiction to crack cocaine.

Whenever Father Boyle saw Pedro on the streets he would offer to take him to rehab, but every time Pedro would gently decline. “Thanks, G, but I’m okay.”

Well, one day, Pedro changed his answer and got in the car with Father Boyle and began his long, hard journey of returning to himself.

Thirty days into Pedro’s rehab his younger brother, caught up in similar demons, did the unthinkable. He took his own life. The world around him was just too much to handle. When Father Boyle called Pedro with the news, of course, Pedro was devastated, but now that he was thirty days sober and thinking with a clear head and feeling with a clear heart he allowed the pain to settle into his core, instead of putting it in some corner to fester.

When Father Boyle arrived at the rehab center to take Pedro to the funeral, they didn’t speak. Before Father Boyle can figure out what to say, the silence was punctured by Pedro’s intense retelling of a dream he had the night before.

In the dream, Pedro and Father Boyle are in a large empty room, alone. There are no lights, no illuminated exit signs, no light creeping in from under a door. There are no windows. It is complete, total darkness.

But despite the darkness, Pedro knows that Father Boyle is there in the room with him, even though no words are spoken. Suddenly, in the dark silence, Father Boyle retrieves a flashlight from his pocket and turns it on. Slowly, deliberately, he shines the flashlight around the room until its narrow beam illuminates a light switch on the wall. No words are spoken, no explanation offered, no promise of a better tomorrow, just a beam of light revealing a switch on the wall.

Pedro stands up, realizing that he is the one who has to turn on the light. Slowly, with some trepidation, he makes his way to the switch, takes a deep breath, and flips it on. The room is flooded with light.

At this point in the retelling of is dream, Pedro is sobbing. With a voice of astonishing discovery, he said, “And the light...is better...than the darkness.” As if he did not know this before. Then he said, “I guess my brother....just never found the switch.”

Father Boyle concludes this story with this: “Possessing flashlights and occasionally knowing where to aim them has to be enough for us. Fortunately, none of us can save anybody. but we all find ourselves in this dark, windowless room, fumbling for grace and flashlights. You aim the light this time, and I’ll do it the next.” (2)

I can’t think of a more powerful way to testify to God’s presence with us than that. Amen.

1. Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine. Cowley Publications, 1995, p. 133.
2. Boyle, Gregory, Tattoos on the Heart, Free Press, 2010.

Who Are the Saints? (sermon for All Saints' Day, Nov. 7, 2010)

Luke 6:20-31
Ephesians 1:11-23

After all the Halloween festivities the past couple of weeks, not to mention the stores dedicated to Halloween merchandise that opened up all over town, I doubt any of us would be that surprised to hear that as a holiday, Halloween now ranks second in consumer spending, coming only after Christmas.

I read last week that some people think Halloween has become such a popular holiday because it is completely non-controversial and non-ideological. Lord knows, we could use a little of that in an election season! Think about it: people can celebrate Halloween without worrying that they are going to offend someone of a different race or religion. It’s a kind of “equal opportunity” holiday. My aunt, a kindergarten teacher, says that the week of Halloween is the most important week of the whole school year. “It’s the one holiday we’re still allowed to celebrate in a public school,” she said, and her school goes all-out with a whole week of events.

But is Halloween really a completely secular holiday? Originally, it began as an agricultural festival in ancient Celtic society called Samhain, which means “summer’s end.” This was the time of year when the sun’s ability to offer warmth and light and growth were decreasing, and the months of darkness and cold and frost were fast approaching. Samhain represented a time in-between -- between light and darkness, warmth and cold, life and death, this world and the next.

Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that as Christianity spread across Europe and even, Samhain became tied to All Saints’ Day and was renamed All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween. All Saints’ Day is a time when we celebrate those who have died, a time when, in a sense, we the living, draw nearer to the dead. As All Saints’ Day approached, Halloween offered people an opportunity to come close to that which they often feared most: death and the powers of darkness.

In many ways, Halloween still allows people to do this. We live in a culture that is obsessed with security, that is terrified of death, and Halloween offers us the chance to face those fears head-on, if only for a night. But for Christians, there is the Sunday after Halloween, when we acknowledge that death will not have the final word, when we remember that ultimately, we have nothing to fear because we are God’s own. That is the day we celebrate today, All Saints’ Day. (1)

The challenge of this day, though, is that the very word “saint” is confusing. In the Catholic tradition, “saint” refers to someone who has been officially recognized by the Church because they were exceptionally virtuous in some way. This is not so different from the original idea of “saint” that inspired the early church celebration of All Saints’ Day. Back then there were still many who were martyrs for their faith, whose allegiance to Christ got them killed. But many of those martyred for the faith were unknown, their names were never recorded in the history books, and so All Saints’ Day was set aside to keep their memory, if not their names, alive.

In this tradition, sainthood was something that had to be earned through virtuous behavior.

There is an episode of the television show The Simpsons in which Homer Simpson dreams that he has died and gone to heaven. Just as he is about to pass through the pearly gates, Saint Peter stops him and says he hasn’t earned enough points to be admitted. But he has another chance: he can return to earth and do one good deed.

So Homer’s spirit goes back to his home, where he tells his wife Marge, “I have to do one good deed to get into heaven. Tell me what to do.” Marge says, “There’s plenty of chores that need doing -- wash the dishes, mow the lawn, feed the dog.” “Geez,” Homer fumes, “I just want to enter Heaven, I’m not running for Jesus!”

The original idea of sainthood -- and the Catholic Church’s understanding of saints -- seems to be that there is a sense in which we can all “run for Jesus” and some will get further than others. But this conception of sainthood was challenged during the Reformation, which gave birth to the Presbyterian Church as well as other denominations we refer to as “Reformed”. The leaders of the Reformation put a renewed emphasis on God’s action and God’s grace. Human beings could not earn salvation through righteous living; rather, salvation is a gracious gift from our loving God that then inspires us to live -- or at least try to live -- according to God’s ways. At this point in history, the concept of sainthood in the Reformed tradition was expanded to include all those who had been baptized into the family of God, all those who had received God’s grace. So All Saints’ Day became a day to celebrate the sainthood of all believers, and particularly those who have already died and entered God’s kingdom.

Today we heard a portion of Paul’s letters to the Ephesians. Here he has taken on the monumental task of explaining what Christians gain through their faith in Jesus Christ. First he reminds his readers of the big picture: when we heard the gospel and believed it we were “marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.” This is what we celebrate in baptism, that our primary identity in life is that we are God’s beloved children. But even more than that, when we are grafted into the family of God it means that each one of us, no matter what our background or family identity -- has a share in what Paul calls “the riches of [Christ’s] glorious inheritance.” And Paul describes these riches in amazing terms: Christ, seated at God’s right hand in heaven, above all the other authorities and power, with all things under his feet...I don’t know about you, but in our current political climate what a relief it is to remember that Christ’s authority completely surpasses all human authority.

Still, I’m not sure that this passage gives a crystal clear answer to this question of who are the saints. One of my colleagues put it this way in an email to his church about All Saints’ Day: “the saints of my life are literally those I could not live without.” The writer Frederick Beuchner refers to lines in his prayer book that talk about “the Angels and Archangles and all the company of heaven” and says that “‘all the company of heaven’ means everybody we ever loved and lost, including the ones we didn’t know we loved until we lost them or didn’t love at all. It means people we never heard of. It means everybody who ever did -- or at some unimaginable time in the future ever will -- come together at something like this table in search of something like what is offered at it.” (2) I think that explanation is exquisite, but I confess I still find it hard to wrap my head around.

Nicholas Kristoff is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and a veteran reporter who has traveled and lived all over the world. At the height of the terrible conflict in Darfur, he traveled to that region multiple times and wrote impassioned columns about what he saw there: mass violence, people driven from their homes, children massacred, women raped...but it seemed as though no matter what he wrote his columns didn’t seem to make an impact, they just disappeared without a ripple. At about that same time, there was a red-tailed hawk in New York City that was essentially evicted from its home atop an apartment building. It seemed the entire city was infuriated that this hawk had been forced from its home. Why, Kristoff wondered, why wasn’t there the same level of outrage for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Darfur as for this homeless bird?

That’s when Kristoff came across a series of studies by Paul Slovic. In these experiments, people were shown a picture of a starving girl named Rokia and given the opportunity to donate to her cause. Others were shown a picture of a starving boy named Moussa and had the opportunity to help him by donating money. Both groups responded generously and compassionately to the photographs of the individual children. But when a third group was shown one picture with the image of Rokia and Moussa together and asked to donate, their giving significantly decreased. (3)

For us to respond compassionately to those in need, we need to feel an emotional connection. And statistics, numbers, and other rational arguments just don’t do a good job of tugging at the heartstrings. Instead, they create something in us known as “compassion fatigue” -- we all know what that feels like, when the destruction and death and violence just overwhelms us and we can’t take it in. Well, it turns out that the number at which we begin to show compassion fatigue is when the number of victims goes from one to two. Show us one person in need and we will respond with compassion; but show us two and our compassion and generosity begins to wane.

So today, before we get overwhelmed with the concept of “all saints,” may we need to stop for a moment and think of that one person who defines “saint” for us. Maybe this person is a saint because we simply could not imagine our lives without them. Maybe it’s because through their actions they showed us what it means to live out the gospel, to share in that glorious inheritance that Paul writes about. As I wrote this sermon I kept thinking about the members of this community who died in the past year, Glenna Duncan, Estella Plaster, and Cristle Roney, and how their lives taught so many people the true meaning of love and sacrifice and service.

But maybe the person who defines a “saint” for you is entirely different. Maybe it’s someone that you struggle to love or even to like. Yet you know they are a saint because what matters is not whether they have earned your love and admiration, but that God loves them and extends the same glorious inheritance to them as God does to all God’s children. After all, in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus makes very clear that God blesses, not just those we like and can relate to, but the poor, the hungry, and the suffering. In a fractured and divided world, we need to remember these people as well, and remember that they too are the saints, whether we can see it or not.

No matter whom you think of today, no matter whom you remember as a saint, may you start with that one person, and may that memory spark the emotional connection that inspires you to respond compassionately to all people, for truly we are all the saints of God, moving forward on this journey that leads, not just to death, but to a place where someday, somehow, we will gather with all the saints around a table, guests of the One who lived and died and rose and reigns for us all. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. I am indebted to Tom Long’s article “Halloween: The Killing Frost and the Gospel” in Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, pp. 2-7 for these statistics and this interpretation of the relationship between Halloween and All Saints’ Day.
2. Both quotes in this paragraph are from an evotional by the Rev. Mark Ramsey at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, NC. Read it online here.
3. Kristoff told this story in an interview with Krista Tippett for her radio show “On Being.” Find the podcast here. Read a related article about Slovic’s research here.

Yearning or Earning (sermon, October 24, 2010)

Luke 18:9-14

The Methodist preacher Will Willimon recently wrote about a trip he took:
“I’m driving down a road in South Carolina and a I pass a church with one of those sign boards out in front...This sign read,

“Repent! Now is the day of salvation.”

“Just down the road was a church of a different denomination from the first. It also had a sign out front. The sign proclaimed,

“Happy Mother’s Day.
Virtues are learned at Mother’s knee,
vices at some other joint.”

Willimon thought to himself, “What does the world that knows nothing about Christianity except for those signs, think about the Christian faith?”
Then he passed yet another church with a sign out front. This one read:

“Do you know what hell is?
Come and hear our preacher.”

And just down the road there was another one. “Still more churches on this road?” he asked himself, amazed. This church’s sign read,

“We’ve got room for you at our table.
Hospitality practiced here.
Everybody welcome.”

Finally! Willimon thought. Something that sounded like Jesus! No judgment, no criteria for entry, just hospitality and everyone welcome. The trouble was, Willimon looked more closely at the building as he drove past and realized that although the sign was in front of what had once been a church, it was now labeled Shady Dale Restaurant. A restaurant had the one sign that actually belonged in front of all those churches. (1)

I suppose it’s one of the perks of ministry that people like to send me emails about notable church signs. Have you seen the one about the battle between the signs at a Catholic Church and a Presbyterian Church over whether dogs go to heaven?
First there was the Catholic church’s sign that announced, simply,

“All dogs go to heaven.”

The Presbyterian church’s sign countered with,

“Only humans go to heaven
Read the Bible”

Then the Catholics changed their sign to read,

“God loves all his creatures,
dogs included”

To which the Presbyterians responded,

“Dogs don’t have souls
This is not open for debate”

Then things got personal. The Catholic church sign proclaimed,

“Catholic dogs go to heaven
Presbyterian dogs can talk to their pastor”

And the Presbyterian sign shot back,

“Converting to Catholicism does not
magically grant your dog a soul”

To which the Catholic sign replied,

“Free dog souls with conversion”

I hate to think of what Jesus might have thought of that exchange, but I suspect it wouldn’t have had much to do with dogs. It should probably come as no surprise to us that it’s incredibly complicated to try and articulate complicated theological concepts on a church sign where space is limited and which people are trying to read while driving. Yet it seems that Jesus also chose a means of explaining things that was at least as frustrating as church signs: parables. By their very nature, parables are meant to surprise, confuse, and defy easy explanation.

The parable we heard today is no exception. With this story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, Jesus attempts to teach us something about righteousness and justification. These are two big theological concepts that we often hear thrown about in worship; righteousness can simply be thought of as being in right relationship with God. Justification is the process of taking a broken relationship with God -- broken because of our sin -- and restoring it, making it whole again.

At first glance, the lesson in this story appears crystal clear and there’s hope that this parable won’t be so confusing after all: the Pharisee has a rather high opinion of himself, so high, in fact, that his self-righteousness apparently cancels out the many ways he serves God by keeping -- and even exceeding -- God’s law. He doesn’t just fast on the high holy days as the law required, he fasts twice a week. And even though there were many interpretations of the law that defined tithing as something less than a full ten percent of one’s income, he gives a tenth anyway.

Now remember, even though sometimes the Pharisees get a bad rap in the gospels, to Jesus’ first audience, the Pharisees were the good guys, the faithful, the rule followers. Surely no one, and particularly not Jesus, would argue that it is his actions that condemn the Pharisee; rather it is his preoccupation with his actions. Just listen to all the “I’s” in his so-called prayer: “I thank you that I am not like other people...I fast...I tithe...” Furthermore, his only reference to others is to pass judgment on someone he deems lesser than himself: “Thank God I am not like the tax collector.” The Pharisee is convinced that he has earned justification.

The tax collector, on the other hand, refers only to his failings: God, be merciful to me, a sinner, is his simple prayer. Luke’s original audience would have known just why he called himself a sinner, too. This is no honest IRS agent. Back then, tax collectors were the lowest of the low. They worked on behalf of the Roman government and they were notoriously corrupt, lining their pockets with money they stole from the masses. Yet the tax collector comes to the temple all too aware of his failings in God’s eyes. He begs for mercy, convinced that he can only yearn for justification.

In this parable Jesus offers us two extremes: a faithful, law-abiding Pharisee who is certain that by his actions he has earned God’s favor, and a tax collector whose daily labor is sinful and who is convinced that he will always be an outsider, yearning for God’s love and favor but never actually receiving it. And yet Jesus says that only the tax collector leaves justified, restored to right relationship with God.

The point is obvious right? We need to be more like the tax collector: not judging other people but keeping our own sin ever before us and humbling ourselves before God. But as soon as we come to that conclusion, as soon as we pray, thank you, God, that I am not like the Pharisee, we have done the very thing the parable warns against: assuming that we can earn God’s justification by our good behavior. Looks like this parable might not be so straightforward after all.

Stan Musial, one of the greatest players in the history of baseball, had his worst year in the late 1950s as a player for the St. Louis Cardinals, hitting seventy-six points below his career average. At the end of the season, Musial went to the General Manager of his team and asked for a 20 percent pay cut from his salary of one hundred thousand dollars. Later, when asked why he did it, he explained, “There wasn’t anything noble about it. I had a lousy year. I didn’t deserve the money.” (2)

Contrast this with the prevailing view of those who work on Wall Street. Almost any major bank we could name would not exist today without the bailout approved by Congress. And yet, as a group of journalists discovered in their recent interviews with Wall Street bankers, bankers have no sense of gratitude for the government’s help.

These journalists went into a bar across from the Federal Reserve late on a Friday afternoon and talked to a group of men who worked in three different fields for three different banks. Each of them declared that they are the victims, they are being scapegoated for all the government’s problems. When a journalist observed that “your banks would have gone under if not for the bailout,” one of the bankers replied, “You’re crazy!” and insisted that he still had his job “because I’m a smart person...it is not because of the bank bailout...it’s because I’m smarter than the average person” and knew how to make the best of a bad situation. (3)

As human beings we have a nearly uncontrollable urge to determine our worth by comparing ourselves to others. These days it seems there are few people willing to admit their mistakes publicly, much less, like Stan Musial, actually ask to be held accountable for them. Instead, we tend to divide the world into those we want to be like and those we are grateful not to be like -- just think back to the dueling Catholic and Presbyterian church signs. And yet, by the very act of comparing ourselves to others we end up yearning -- wishing we were better, different, more than we are -- or earning -- congratulating ourselves for what we have done that has elevated us above someone else, even if only in our own eyes.

The real problem is, our own eyes will always deceive us.

In the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship there are several examples of assurances of pardon, words of comfort that a minister offers a congregation after the confession of sin. One of them begins like this: “Who is in a position to condemn?”

How might we answer that question? When we come to church on a given Sunday, and bow our heads to pray and particularly to confess, what are the voices of condemnation that we hear? Our own? The voice of a parent or spouse or teacher? Some unknown voice from society? Well, this particular assurance of pardon sets all of those aside. “Who is in a position to condemn? Only Christ. And Christ died for us, Christ rose for us, Christ reigns in power for us, Christ prays for us.”

None of us can earn God’s love and not one of us is left in the position of simply yearning for it. Because the most important thing about justification is this: only God can do it, only God can restore our relationship; only God can take what is broken in our lives and make it whole again. And God justifies us regardless of what we done, no matter how good or bad it may be. God’s grace and love simply is...it is all around us, constantly available to us. We do not have to work tirelessly to earn it or live in fear that we will only ever yearn for it.

Father Gregory Boyle tells the story of taking two gang members, Chepe and Richie, out of the projects of LA several towns away to where he was scheduled to give a few speeches. One night, Boyle took them out to a restaurant called Coco’s for dinner. Coco’s was, as he put it, “one notch above Denny’s, one notch below everywhere else.”

When they walked in, they encountered a hostess who made no secret of the fact that she strongly disproved of Boyle’s dinner companions, whose dress and tattoos clearly marked them as gang members. Boyle is furious at the way she treats them. “I know exactly the origin of her displeasure, and I volley some of my own right back at her,” he writes. “I judge her just as surely as she judges them.” Finally, she grabs three menus and takes them through the restaurant, far into the back where there are no other diners.

Chepe and Richie haven’t missed what’s happening. “Everybody’s looking at us,” Richie says. “Don’t be ridiculous,” responds Boyle, but, he writes, everybody was looking at us.

Their discomfort lasts until the waitress comes. For whatever reason, she is a whole different breed of person than the hostess and all the diners whose judgment of the gang members was so palpable. She puts her arms around Chepe and Richie, calls them “sweetie” and “honey” and brings them refills they didn’t ask for. Says Boyle: “She is Jesus in an apron.” (4)

God’s love is already ours. We don’t have to earn it or just yearn for it. What we can do is share it. The best way to communicate the gospel is through the lives we live -- not lives of perfect behavior, like the Pharisee, or lives of only brokenness and pain, like the tax collector, but the perfect combination of saint and sinner that each of you is even as you is each God’s beloved. In your everyday lives, you too can be Jesus in an apron, not constantly comparing yourself to others, but by showing mercy and compassion to the lost and broken who have not heard or refuse to believe God’s love is real. That’s the only signboard any church needs. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. This story appeared in the April 24, 2010 edition of Pulpit Digest and was quoted by the Rev. Mark Ramsey in his sermon “Church Signs” at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, on August 29, 2010.
2. Told by Malcolm Gladwell in his article, “Talent Grab” in The New Yorker, October 11, 2010, p. 93.
3. This American Life, “Crybabies,” September 24, 2010, listen to it here.
4. Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, Free Press, 2010.

Staying Put (sermon, October 17, 2010)

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-14


Dan Savage is a well-known columnist, journalist, and newspaper editor. Most recently, Dan is the creator of an internet project called “It Gets Better.” In response to the rash of recent teen suicides in response to the bullying of youth who are gay or perceived to be gay, Dan and his husband, Terry, sat down together and recorded a video. In it they talk about their experiences with bullying and their life now, which is very good. They have been married for five years and together are raising an adopted son. The point they want to get across to these teenagers who are being harassed is that life does get better and that the struggling adolescents should stick around to see it. Since Dan and Terry put their video on the web it has “gone viral,” as they say, and been viewed and shared by hundreds of thousands of people. In addition, thousands of other videos by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender teens and adults have been added to the project, all with the same message of hope: “It gets better.”

Back in the sixth century BCE, there was no internet or You Tube through which people could communicate with each other. But there were prophets, who spoke on behalf of God to God’s people, and there were letters. Today we read a portion of a letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent to the Israelites who had been exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon. And what was his message?: It gets better.

The thing is, even this hopeful message from the prophet Jeremiah was NOT what the exiles wanted to hear. Because as far as they could tell, life as they knew it was over. Here’s how one commentator describes the modern equivalent of what these exiles had just experienced. Imagine if: “Our national government has just collapsed as the result of an invading foreign power. There is no remnant of the military. There is no government. The President, First Lady, Cabinet and Congress have all been exiled. All of the artists in New York and steel workers in Pittsburgh were separated from their families and exiled as well.” (1)

Essentially, this is what has happened to the Israelites. Jerusalem was invaded and taken over. The leaders of government and all the skilled workers have been taken into exile and relocated to Babylon. And Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet who was sending letters to the exiles. In chapter 28, the prophet Hananiah had just proclaimed to the exiles that they would be released from captivity very, very soon, and that God was going to break the necks of the Babylonian leaders who had caused this calamity. But here we have a case of a prophet who says what the people want to hear rather than what God wants. That unfortunate role is left to Jeremiah.

Listen again to what Jeremiah tells the exiles: “Build houses, plant gardens, take wives, have children, seek the welfare of the city and pray for it.” In other words, stay put and invest. It will get better.

Staying put is no easy thing to do. Just look at LeBron James and his decision to move to Miami. Before he announced his decision, there was not just hope that he would stay, but genuine speculation that staying put was the best option for LeBron; he had a lot to gain by sticking with the team he’d played for since graduating high school and by staying here, he could continue to give back to the community that had done so much for him. But in the end, the temptation to move on and to be part of a championship team, the pull to be part of something new and different -- all this overcame the benefits of staying put.

The temptation to move on to greener pastures is something all of us face. The “greener pasture” might be a different job, house, relationship, church, or community. Regardless of the details, we all have wondered at one time or another whether pursuing something different, somewhere different would change things for the better and help us find happiness once and for all.

Fifteen hundred years ago, a Christian monk named Benedict established a monastery not too far from Rome. Near the end of his life, after thirty years of monastic living, Benedict wrote down what he felt were the most important guidelines for life in a monastery. This book, known as the Rule of Saint Benedict, has become the leading guide in Western Christianity for monastic living in communities.

According to the rules of Benedictine monasticism, men and women are required to take three vows. The first is a vow of obedience, placing oneself under the authority the leader of a community. The second is a vow of conversion, and this includes giving up private ownership, committing to a life of celibacy, and dedicating oneself to seeking God through a balance of prayer and work. The third and final vow encompasses the other two and is what Saint Benedict calls a vow of stability. With this vow an individual commits to staying in one particular monastery for the rest of his life. Benedict believed that only by making this lifelong commitment to a particular community could both the individuals and the community thrive. (2)

It is this same kind of commitment to stability that Jeremiah prescribes for the exiled Israelites. Hananiah was flat-out wrong, Jeremiah says. The exile isn’t going to be over anytime soon; in fact, it will last for more than a generation. But instead of spending seventy years longing for greener pastures, Jeremiah tells the Israelites to make the most of today by investing in the place where they find themselves. “Build houses, plant gardens, take wives, have children, seek the welfare of the city and pray for it.”

Not only does Jeremiah tell the exiles to invest by building houses and planting crops and getting married and having children, he also tells them to work and pray for the welfare of Babylon. Nothing could have been harder for the exiles to hear. After all, the Babylonians were the very ones who had destroyed their homeland. In Psalm 137, which Becky read earlier, we get a glimpse of the emotions the exiles experienced. “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” But Jeremiah tells them to stay put, invest, and work and pray for the welfare of their enemies, not as a punishment, but because only by doing so can the Israelites experience the fullness of life. “For in [Babylon’s] welfare,” Jeremiah writes, “you will find your welfare.”

Today is the day we set apart to reflect on stewardship. This is by no means the only time in the year we talk about how God wants us to use our resources, but this is the time of the year when we as a church are beginning the process of budgeting for the future. Stewardship season is all about planning for the future...and not just the immediate future, but the future that none of us will be here to see, a future that will be seen only by the next generations.

The Bible is full of stories of people who were asked to invest and participate in the work of God even though they would not be around to see God’s promises fulfilled. Think of the many Israelites, including Moses, who escaped slavery in Egypt and spent decades wandering in the wilderness, but who didn’t live to set foot in the Promised Land. Think of the earliest disciples and followers of Jesus, those whose lives were described in the Book of Acts. Many of them risked their lives and even gave their lives in order that future generations would know about God’s work in the the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and because of them, all of us have lived in a time when we do not risk our lives by professing to be Christian.

What you as members of Firestone Park Presbyterian Church must do in these days is perhaps not quite so drastic as these examples, but it is not so different, either. When Jeremiah wrote to the exiles to tell them to stay put and invest in Babylon, he didn’t just tell them to do what was necessary for their immediate survival -- build house, plant gardens -- after all, whether they were there for two months or two decades they would need food and shelter. He also told them to make the ultimate act of investment in the future -- bear children. Through Jeremiah, God was telling the exiles that God didn’t just want them to survive in exile -- God wanted them to thrive.

I’m guessing that for some of you, there have been times in the not so distant past of FPPC where it felt like the church was in survival mode. Maybe from time to time you find yourself wondering whether the church will be here when you and your family need it most in the ways you need -- for a baptism, a wedding, a funeral. Well, when it feels like an organization is in survival mode, it can be very hard to be generous in your giving. After all, if you are giving to an organization that looks like it won’t be around much longer, then you would be wise to give just enough to keep it going for a finite period of time and no more.

It would be wise...but as God’s people, we are rarely called to be wise, we are called to be faithful. And being faithful to God’s vision for this place, this church, means that we have to be generous in ways that aren’t necessarily wise. It means we have to trust that when we give money and time and talents to this place, we are not pouring our resources down the drain, we are watering gardens which will bear fruit, even if we aren’t around to see the fruit that is borne.

I am confident that FPPC has a vibrant future. This fall, there is a task force devoted to figuring out, at least in part, what the specifics of that future are going to look like. There is also a confirmation class with young people who are learning about their faith and about this church. In other words, we are even now making investments in our future. It isn’t always clear how those investments will turn out, but this is God’s church, and one thing we know for sure is that God is preparing a future for us just like God planned a future for the exiles who could not see any way forward, a future with hope.

Right about now, maybe some of you are thinking that there is not one more thing you can do to invest in this church. In these challenging economic times, you think there is not one more penny you can give. In your busy, overscheduled life, you think there is not one more minute out of your week you can spend working for the church. That may be true. For others, I suspect that you may have more to give, but you have chosen not to because you don’t really know if giving money and time to the church is an investment or simply throwing money down the drain. Well, this stewardship season, I challenge each of you to stay put, to look around at this church -- God’s church -- with a renewed vision and find a way to increase your investment of money, time, or talents by any amount. “Build houses, plant gardens, take wives, have children, seek the welfare of the city and pray for it.” For what was true for those exiled Israelites is also true for you, in the welfare of this place you will find your welfare, in the welfare of this church you have the opportunity to see the love and grace of God at work, and to glimpse the plans God has for you and for this church...a future filled with hope. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. From Wil Gafney’s commentary on this passage at Working Preacher.
2. Read more about St. Benedict here.