Matthew 4:17-23
Presbyterian pastor Rodger Nishioka recalls watching a Nova documentary about elephant seals when he was a child. The cameras followed one particular female seal who had just given birth on the shores off the coast of Argentina. Soon after, the famished mother abandoned her newborn pup to go find food. The pup stayed on the shore while the mother fed in the waters off the coast.
But when the mother came out of the water, she was on a different part of the beach than her baby. Not only that, but because elephant seals all breed and give birth around the same time, there was a multitude of mothers and babies on the same beach, all searching for one another. The cameras stayed on this one mother seal, who kept calling to her baby, and listening for her pup who called back with cries of its own. Using their senses of hearing and smell, the mother and baby were finally reunited. The host explained that, from the moment of birth, the sound and scent of the pup are imprinted on the mother’s memory, so that there is no question in her mind which baby seal is hers. Eventually, she will find her baby.
At this, Nishioka’s father, also a Presbyterian minister, remarked, “You know, that’s how it is with God. We are imprinted with a memory of God, and God is imprinted with a memory of us, and even if it takes a lifetime, we will find each other.” (1)
Even if it takes a lifetime, God will find us.
In Matthew’s story of the call of the first disciples, it is as if nothing less than an imprinted memory of God is sparked in the minds of Jesus’ first followers. “Follow me,” Jesus says as he walks along the beach and sees Peter and Andrew fishing in the sea. And “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” What could possibly have compelled these hardworking fishermen to leave behind their livelihood, their stability, everything familiar, to follow this man they had never seen before?
It is as if Peter and Andrew recognize in Jesus the answer to the deepest longings of their hearts, the longings that nothing else in their lives had been able to fill, not their work or their family life or their hobbies or even their faith. Matthew doesn’t tell us what Jesus says next to James and his brother John, but whatever it is, their response is as dramatic as Peter and Andrew’s: “Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.”
It wasn’t so different then as it is for us now. You simply don’t turn your back on a decent job or on the family that job supports to follow after some guy who happens to walk past your office and invite you to follow him. And besides, no teacher worth his salt has to go out and recruit his own students -- teachers, then and now, are supposed to be sought out by students who have heard of their reputations, not the other way around.
But clearly, that’s not how Jesus works. He doesn’t find a place to settle down, join the faculty of the local seminary, build a reputation, and sit back and wait for students to come to him. He goes out, preaching the same short message we heard from John the Baptist: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Or, as Dale Bruner puts it, “Turn your lives around, because here comes the kingdom of the heavens!” (2)
It’s as if this gospel, this good news, is simply too good for Jesus to sit around and wait for people to discover for themselves. He has to go out and tell people about it. And when he does, there is just something about him -- whether it’s the man himself, or the words he speaks -- there is something about Jesus that compels people -- immediately! -- to leave behind everything and follow him.
Tom Brady is the quarterback for the New England Patriots and the winner of three Super Bowls. Until last Sunday’s upset, the Patriots appeared to be well on their way to another Super Bowl victory. Regardless, Tom Brady is considered to be one of the best to ever play the game. He’s well liked by fans and teammates, and he's been named one of People Magazine’s Most Beautiful People - more than once. He’s also married to a supermodel.
By all our society’s measures of success, Tom Brady should be happy and content and at peace. But a few years ago, during his team’s quest for a perfect season, Brady was interviewed on 60 Minutes.
He told the interviewer: “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there's something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey man, this is what it is.’ I reached my goal, my dream, my life. Me, I think, ‘God, it's got to be more than this.’ I mean this isn't, this can't be, what it's all cracked up to be?”
“What's the answer?” the interviewer asked him.
“I wish I knew. I wish I knew,” Brady answered.
Three Super Bowl rings.
Married to a supermodel.
And he’s convinced there’s something more, something else, something different. (3)
We all feel it at some point in our lives. Some of us feel it most of our lives. That persistent ache. That restlessness. We too are convinced there is something deeper, something more.
It is almost as if God created us that way, with a God-shaped hole in our souls that nothing but God can ever fill. More than sixteen centuries ago, Augustine of Hippo put it this way: “Thou hast made us for thyself, so that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Even longer ago than that, the psalmist wrote, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb...In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.”
It’s as if there is something innate in all of us that is primed to respond to what was imprinted in our memories at birth, something primed to recognize God and to know that only with God can the deepest longings of our heart be satisfied.
The problem is, there are so many things in our lives and in our world that we mistake for the something more we’re longing for. Sometimes we think all we need to finally be satisfied is more knowledge -- more awareness of how the world works. We see this tendency all too often now in elementary schools, which keep cutting out time for play and creativity in favor of more time for instruction, when the science clearly shows that kids learn more and concentrate better when they have had time for physical and imaginative play. Or we think that we could fill the emptiness by perfecting our physical selves with the right diet or exercise plan...which is precisely why every year there is a new fad for how to eat or how to exercise. Or maybe we’re like Tom Brady on a smaller scale, we know that we have everything we could want -- food, shelter, work, family, resources -- and yet still we cannot shake the feeling that “there’s got to be more than this.”
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” Jesus says. “Turn your lives around, because here comes the kingdom of the heavens!”...”Follow me!” God finds them, God invites them to follow, and Andrew and Peter and James and John drop their nets and wave goodbye to their father and follow after Jesus like people in a trance.
God finds us, and we show up at church Sunday after Sunday and give our time and energy and money toward this institution that certainly has its flaws. Why? With all the options we have for self-improvement or even for entertainment on a Sunday morning, why are we here?
The answer might just be in the last verse of today’s reading. What happened after the first disciples followed Jesus? Well, we don’t know what happened to the disciples, at least not right away. Matthew tells us instead what Jesus did: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” Teaching...proclaiming the good news...curing every disease. Later, these very tasks are the ones Jesus will call his disciples to do. These are the tasks Jesus calls us to do.
And isn’t that why we are here today? Because at some point we discovered that the only true satisfaction in life is found in following the one who shows us that the most important thing is being a part of something bigger than ourselves, finding meaning in something beyond our insulated circle of work and family and friends. We are here because we follow the One who shows us that the most important thing is love in action, love that teaches and proclaims and heals. We are here because at some point, that love found us, perhaps just when we needed it the most, and that memory compels us to do what we can to share that love with others.
Nishioka tells another story that happened when he was a speaker at a youth conference in California. One night, after preaching a sermon on discerning God’s call, an adult leader of a youth group came to see him with a teenage boy, asking if Nishioka would talk to the young man. Nishioka agreed. The young man told Nishioka and his youth group leader that for some time he had been hearing God speak to him. And what this voice -- which he was sure was the voice of God -- kept telling him was that he should end his life, that the world would be better off if he were dead. At this, the young man broke down sobbing. Nishioka and the leader held onto the young man and prayed with him and for him.
Then, after a few moments, Nishioka told that man that although he believed he had heard God telling him to kill himself, there was simply no way that voice was God’s. “Are you sure?” the young man asked. “I am absolutely certain,” Nishioka responded. “But how do you know?”
“I know because the Bible says that we are made in God’s own image. I know because Psalm 139 promises that God knit you together in your mother’s womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. I know because God sent Jesus that you might have life. I know that those voices you are hearing are not coming from God.” (4)
“Follow me,” says Jesus, “and I will make you fish for people.” When we follow Jesus, we follow the one who calls us to turn around and turn away from all the voices in our lives and in our culture that make false promises and false accusations. When we follow Jesus, we receive the privileges but also the responsibilities of discipleship, for to follow him means to imitate him...teaching, proclaiming the good news, curing disease, sharing God’s love with all people. It can be as drastic as Nishioka’s encounter with a suicidal teenager or as ordinary as sharing a meal at the annual meeting with someone you don’t already know. When we follow Jesus, we discover the truth: from the first disciples to the ones who will be baptized today, we are all created, loved, found, and called by the God...to share God’s love with all. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Rodger Nishioka in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 1, WJK Press, 2010, p. 284, 286.
2. Dale Bruner, Matthew, A Commentary, Vol 1: The Christ Book, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004.
3. From a sermon by the Rev. Amy Miracle, “Asking the Right Questions,” Westminster Presbyterian Church, Des Moines, Iowa, January 20, 2008.
4. Rodger Nishioka in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 1, WJK Press, 2010, p. 288.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Beginnings (sermon on Baptism of the Lord Sunday, January 9, 2011)
Matthew 3:13-17
The first Sunday Kyle didn’t show up to church no one thought much about it. After a year of participating in classes, retreats, and mission work with the confirmation class, Kyle had been baptized and confirmed the week before. But then another week went by and Kyle and his family weren’t in church...then another week...then another. Worried that something was wrong, the pastor finally called Kyle’s house and spoke to his mother. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay,” he said to her. “We’ve really missed having Kyle at church.”
His mother sounded genuinely surprised when she responded, “Oh, well, I guess I thought Kyle was all done. I mean, he was baptized and confirmed and everything. Doesn’t that mean he’s done?”
That’s when the pastor realized that somewhere along the way the confirmation teachers and mentors, the pastors, and the membership of the church itself had somehow failed to communicate a fundamental truth about baptism and confirmation: it’s not an end, it’s a beginning. (1)
If there is any lingering question in our minds whether that is really so, we need to look no further than Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism. So far, all that’s happened in Matthew’s gospel is that Jesus is born, visited by the magi, flees to Egypt, then returns to Nazareth. At this point, Matthew focuses his story on John the Baptist, who appears in the desert preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin and predicting that one more powerful than he is coming.
And sure enough, Jesus does come, but he doesn’t exactly live up to John’s fiery predictions. Instead, he gets in line with all the sinners waiting to be baptized by John in the river Jordan. And when it’s his turn, he steps up to John for his dunking. “No way,” John says. “No. Way. I can’t baptize you -- I need you to baptize me.” But Jesus insists: this is the way it is supposed to happen. This is part of what it means for God to become human. Jesus needs to be baptized so that his ministry and mission can begin.
The original Toy Story movie is the story of the toys belonging to a boy named Andy. The opening of the movie clearly establishes that one toy, a floppy cowboy named Woody, is Andy’s favorite, most-beloved toy. But then, for his birthday, Andy receives a spaceman named Buzz Lightyear. Buzz is a toy with all the latest bells and whistles. Where Andy has a pull string on his back that causes him to say one of a few cowboy phrases in a staticy voice, Buzz has a digital voice box activated at the touch of a button. Where Andy has an empty holster where his toy gun used to be before it was lost, Buzz has a pulsating red “laser” on his arm. While Woody could only pretend to ride a toy horse, Buzz has wings that sprout out of his back, allowing him to “fly” around the room.
Woody, is of course, insanely jealous of Buzz, especially when the rest of Andy’s toys are in awe of him. Buzz quickly becomes the most popular toy in the room, not just among the other toys, but for Andy too, who replaces his cowboy-themed sheets and pajamas with Buzz Lightyear ones, and begins sleeping with Buzz in his bed while Woody is relegated to the toy box.
Then something happens that reveals to Woody just how far things have gone: Andy writes his name on the bottom of Buzz’s foot with permanent marker. Woody’s foot has the very same mark and Woody knows exactly what this means: Andy is claiming Buzz as his own, marking him, giving him a new identity. He’s not just one of a million other Buzz Lightyears; he is now Andy’s Buzz Lightyear.
In baptism, God writes God’s name on our hearts in the permanent marker of the Holy Spirit. But notice what happens in Jesus’ baptism. The heavens open, the dove comes down, and God speaks: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” The problem is, we tend to read back into this event all that we know about the rest of Jesus’ journey -- his ministry and teachings, miracles and healings, the Last Supper and his betrayal, the cross and the empty tomb. But remember what has happened to Jesus so far in this story: he was born, he went to Egypt, he returned to Nazareth, he came to John to be baptized. That’s it. That’s all Jesus has done in his life. And yet listen to what God says: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” God claims Jesus, God favors Jesus, God pours out his love on Jesus, not because he has proven himself more special than all the other sinners waiting in line, but before Jesus has done anything to earn or deserve God’s love and favor. Baptism marks the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and mission, not the end.
And so it is with us. God doesn’t write God’s name on our hearts in baptism because God looks at all the other toys in the toy box and decides we are the best; God does it because from the very beginning, we are God’s, beloved before we are even capable of earning or deserving God’s love. Baptism is not the result of something we have done; it is the beginning of a new phase in our journey with God. On this journey our circumstances will change, even our relationship with God and our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus will change. What stays the same is the truth we proclaim in baptism: we are God’s beloved.
For the next two Sundays we will have the distinct privilege of celebrating the sacrament of baptism, of setting two people on the path of discipleship where they are guided and claimed and loved by God. Next week we will have an infant baptism for Kellan and the week after we will have an adult baptism for Scott. These two celebrations will certainly have similarities -- both will involve water and vows -- but they will also have distinct differences.
Obviously, as a baby, Kellan will not be able to take vows for himself. Theologically speaking, we Presbyterians have no problem with this. The whole reason we baptize infants is not to extend to them some magical protection, but because we believe that God loves us and claims us before we have done anything to deserve it -- in fact before we are even capable of comprehending what God, the church, or baptism even is. In infant baptism, the parents take vows on behalf of the child, which means the parents take on a whole new responsibility -- they are no longer just responsible for making sure he eats, sleeps, dresses warmly, and learns his ABC’s; they now pledge to bring him up with the awareness that he is first and foremost God’s beloved child, even before he is theirs. Baptism marks the beginning of Kellan’s journey of faith and it is a beginning for which his parents take responsibility.
In Scott’s baptism, things are a little different. When an adult is baptized we refer to it as a “believer’s baptism,” since, unlike an infant, an adult chooses baptism as a public proclamation that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior and that he knows himself to be, first and foremost, God’s beloved child. We believe that God has been intimately involved in Scott’s life for years, but baptism still marks a turning point and a new beginning. What Kellan and Scott’s baptisms have in common is that they both set the baptized on a new beginning in the lifelong journey of faith.
The movie “Tender Mercies” tells the story of Mac Sledge, a one-time country-western singing star whose life dissolves into a fog of alcohol and shiftlessness. Divorced from his wife and estranged from his only daughter, Mac staggers through life until one night he collapses onto the porch of a small, lonely motel out in the middle of nowhere on the Texas prairie. The motel is run by Rosa Lee, a young widow who is raising her boy, Sonny, and trying to make ends meet. Even though Mac is a shipwreck of a human being, grizzled, drunk, and despairing, Rosa Lee takes him in, sets him to work for her, and through this, transformation comes to Mac’s life. He kicks his drinking habit, becomes a kind of father figure to young Sonny, ends up marrying Rosa Lee, and begins to attend the Baptist church in which Rosa Lee is a member of the choir.
In one scene, both Mac and Sonny are baptized one Sunday morning. After the pastor dunks him into the waters of baptism, Mac stands back up, blinking and drenched, water dripping down off his balding head and glistening on his grizzled beard. It’s a portrait of grace. But after the service, Sonny and Mac are sitting outside the motel and Sonny says, “Well, we done it. We got baptized.” “Yup, we sure did,” Mac replies. “You feel any different?” the boy asks. Mac laughs and says, “I can’t say I do, not really.” (2)
Baptism doesn’t suddenly turn us into holy people. As Tom Long puts it, “baptism is a call to set out on a moral adventure in the name of Christ, but all Christians travel this path of discipleship hobbling and stumbling.” (3) If we were baptized as infants, we probably don’t even remember it. But even for Kyle, the teenager who was baptized on the day of his confirmation, it is sometimes an event that feels more like an ending, a culmination of a special year in his faith journey rather than the sign that a new phase of this journey has begun. His life may not look or feel much different, but we know the truth: everything has changed. Kyle’s identity, his life, is no longer defined by being a son or brother or friend or football player; what matters most now is that he is God’s beloved, and nothing he has done or will do can change that. No matter how much Kyle might hobble and stumble on this new path, nothing can change the fundamental truth of his existence: he is God’s beloved. With him, God is well pleased.
What is true for Jesus, and for Kyle, and for Kellan and for Scott is also true for you. God is well pleased with you.
Not because you are good, or smart, or beautiful, which you very well may be. No, God loves you because you belong to God, who made you and claimed you, who has written God’s name on your heart, in indelible ink.
God is well pleased with you, right now, at this very moment.
These are the first words that Jesus hears from God before he beings his ministry, and surely this is no accident. If Jesus thought he had to earn God’s love, he would have found it impossible be intimate with God on his journey, and the same is true for us. The only way that we -- mortal, frail, and broken as we are -- can have an intimate relationship with the divine is if God first claims us, as we are, whether we are helpless infants, or full-fledged adults with whole lists of regrets and mistakes.
Over the next two weeks we have the wonderful opportunity to witness two of God’s beloved children embark on a new beginning, a new journey of faith. As we watch and take our vows to support them as fellow saints on the journey, may we also remember that no matter when or where or by whom we were baptized, we too have been claimed by God, named as God’s beloved, placed on this path. Sometimes we have strayed but just as we did nothing to earn the gift of baptism, there is nothing we -- or anyone else -- can do that can take that gift away. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. from Rodger Nishioka’s commentary in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 1, WJK Press, 2010, pp. 236-240.
2. Thanks to Scott Hoezee for this illustration idea on the Center for Excellence in Preaching website, online here.
The first Sunday Kyle didn’t show up to church no one thought much about it. After a year of participating in classes, retreats, and mission work with the confirmation class, Kyle had been baptized and confirmed the week before. But then another week went by and Kyle and his family weren’t in church...then another week...then another. Worried that something was wrong, the pastor finally called Kyle’s house and spoke to his mother. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay,” he said to her. “We’ve really missed having Kyle at church.”
His mother sounded genuinely surprised when she responded, “Oh, well, I guess I thought Kyle was all done. I mean, he was baptized and confirmed and everything. Doesn’t that mean he’s done?”
That’s when the pastor realized that somewhere along the way the confirmation teachers and mentors, the pastors, and the membership of the church itself had somehow failed to communicate a fundamental truth about baptism and confirmation: it’s not an end, it’s a beginning. (1)
If there is any lingering question in our minds whether that is really so, we need to look no further than Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism. So far, all that’s happened in Matthew’s gospel is that Jesus is born, visited by the magi, flees to Egypt, then returns to Nazareth. At this point, Matthew focuses his story on John the Baptist, who appears in the desert preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin and predicting that one more powerful than he is coming.
And sure enough, Jesus does come, but he doesn’t exactly live up to John’s fiery predictions. Instead, he gets in line with all the sinners waiting to be baptized by John in the river Jordan. And when it’s his turn, he steps up to John for his dunking. “No way,” John says. “No. Way. I can’t baptize you -- I need you to baptize me.” But Jesus insists: this is the way it is supposed to happen. This is part of what it means for God to become human. Jesus needs to be baptized so that his ministry and mission can begin.
The original Toy Story movie is the story of the toys belonging to a boy named Andy. The opening of the movie clearly establishes that one toy, a floppy cowboy named Woody, is Andy’s favorite, most-beloved toy. But then, for his birthday, Andy receives a spaceman named Buzz Lightyear. Buzz is a toy with all the latest bells and whistles. Where Andy has a pull string on his back that causes him to say one of a few cowboy phrases in a staticy voice, Buzz has a digital voice box activated at the touch of a button. Where Andy has an empty holster where his toy gun used to be before it was lost, Buzz has a pulsating red “laser” on his arm. While Woody could only pretend to ride a toy horse, Buzz has wings that sprout out of his back, allowing him to “fly” around the room.
Woody, is of course, insanely jealous of Buzz, especially when the rest of Andy’s toys are in awe of him. Buzz quickly becomes the most popular toy in the room, not just among the other toys, but for Andy too, who replaces his cowboy-themed sheets and pajamas with Buzz Lightyear ones, and begins sleeping with Buzz in his bed while Woody is relegated to the toy box.
Then something happens that reveals to Woody just how far things have gone: Andy writes his name on the bottom of Buzz’s foot with permanent marker. Woody’s foot has the very same mark and Woody knows exactly what this means: Andy is claiming Buzz as his own, marking him, giving him a new identity. He’s not just one of a million other Buzz Lightyears; he is now Andy’s Buzz Lightyear.
In baptism, God writes God’s name on our hearts in the permanent marker of the Holy Spirit. But notice what happens in Jesus’ baptism. The heavens open, the dove comes down, and God speaks: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” The problem is, we tend to read back into this event all that we know about the rest of Jesus’ journey -- his ministry and teachings, miracles and healings, the Last Supper and his betrayal, the cross and the empty tomb. But remember what has happened to Jesus so far in this story: he was born, he went to Egypt, he returned to Nazareth, he came to John to be baptized. That’s it. That’s all Jesus has done in his life. And yet listen to what God says: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” God claims Jesus, God favors Jesus, God pours out his love on Jesus, not because he has proven himself more special than all the other sinners waiting in line, but before Jesus has done anything to earn or deserve God’s love and favor. Baptism marks the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and mission, not the end.
And so it is with us. God doesn’t write God’s name on our hearts in baptism because God looks at all the other toys in the toy box and decides we are the best; God does it because from the very beginning, we are God’s, beloved before we are even capable of earning or deserving God’s love. Baptism is not the result of something we have done; it is the beginning of a new phase in our journey with God. On this journey our circumstances will change, even our relationship with God and our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus will change. What stays the same is the truth we proclaim in baptism: we are God’s beloved.
For the next two Sundays we will have the distinct privilege of celebrating the sacrament of baptism, of setting two people on the path of discipleship where they are guided and claimed and loved by God. Next week we will have an infant baptism for Kellan and the week after we will have an adult baptism for Scott. These two celebrations will certainly have similarities -- both will involve water and vows -- but they will also have distinct differences.
Obviously, as a baby, Kellan will not be able to take vows for himself. Theologically speaking, we Presbyterians have no problem with this. The whole reason we baptize infants is not to extend to them some magical protection, but because we believe that God loves us and claims us before we have done anything to deserve it -- in fact before we are even capable of comprehending what God, the church, or baptism even is. In infant baptism, the parents take vows on behalf of the child, which means the parents take on a whole new responsibility -- they are no longer just responsible for making sure he eats, sleeps, dresses warmly, and learns his ABC’s; they now pledge to bring him up with the awareness that he is first and foremost God’s beloved child, even before he is theirs. Baptism marks the beginning of Kellan’s journey of faith and it is a beginning for which his parents take responsibility.
In Scott’s baptism, things are a little different. When an adult is baptized we refer to it as a “believer’s baptism,” since, unlike an infant, an adult chooses baptism as a public proclamation that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior and that he knows himself to be, first and foremost, God’s beloved child. We believe that God has been intimately involved in Scott’s life for years, but baptism still marks a turning point and a new beginning. What Kellan and Scott’s baptisms have in common is that they both set the baptized on a new beginning in the lifelong journey of faith.
The movie “Tender Mercies” tells the story of Mac Sledge, a one-time country-western singing star whose life dissolves into a fog of alcohol and shiftlessness. Divorced from his wife and estranged from his only daughter, Mac staggers through life until one night he collapses onto the porch of a small, lonely motel out in the middle of nowhere on the Texas prairie. The motel is run by Rosa Lee, a young widow who is raising her boy, Sonny, and trying to make ends meet. Even though Mac is a shipwreck of a human being, grizzled, drunk, and despairing, Rosa Lee takes him in, sets him to work for her, and through this, transformation comes to Mac’s life. He kicks his drinking habit, becomes a kind of father figure to young Sonny, ends up marrying Rosa Lee, and begins to attend the Baptist church in which Rosa Lee is a member of the choir.
In one scene, both Mac and Sonny are baptized one Sunday morning. After the pastor dunks him into the waters of baptism, Mac stands back up, blinking and drenched, water dripping down off his balding head and glistening on his grizzled beard. It’s a portrait of grace. But after the service, Sonny and Mac are sitting outside the motel and Sonny says, “Well, we done it. We got baptized.” “Yup, we sure did,” Mac replies. “You feel any different?” the boy asks. Mac laughs and says, “I can’t say I do, not really.” (2)
Baptism doesn’t suddenly turn us into holy people. As Tom Long puts it, “baptism is a call to set out on a moral adventure in the name of Christ, but all Christians travel this path of discipleship hobbling and stumbling.” (3) If we were baptized as infants, we probably don’t even remember it. But even for Kyle, the teenager who was baptized on the day of his confirmation, it is sometimes an event that feels more like an ending, a culmination of a special year in his faith journey rather than the sign that a new phase of this journey has begun. His life may not look or feel much different, but we know the truth: everything has changed. Kyle’s identity, his life, is no longer defined by being a son or brother or friend or football player; what matters most now is that he is God’s beloved, and nothing he has done or will do can change that. No matter how much Kyle might hobble and stumble on this new path, nothing can change the fundamental truth of his existence: he is God’s beloved. With him, God is well pleased.
What is true for Jesus, and for Kyle, and for Kellan and for Scott is also true for you. God is well pleased with you.
Not because you are good, or smart, or beautiful, which you very well may be. No, God loves you because you belong to God, who made you and claimed you, who has written God’s name on your heart, in indelible ink.
God is well pleased with you, right now, at this very moment.
These are the first words that Jesus hears from God before he beings his ministry, and surely this is no accident. If Jesus thought he had to earn God’s love, he would have found it impossible be intimate with God on his journey, and the same is true for us. The only way that we -- mortal, frail, and broken as we are -- can have an intimate relationship with the divine is if God first claims us, as we are, whether we are helpless infants, or full-fledged adults with whole lists of regrets and mistakes.
Over the next two weeks we have the wonderful opportunity to witness two of God’s beloved children embark on a new beginning, a new journey of faith. As we watch and take our vows to support them as fellow saints on the journey, may we also remember that no matter when or where or by whom we were baptized, we too have been claimed by God, named as God’s beloved, placed on this path. Sometimes we have strayed but just as we did nothing to earn the gift of baptism, there is nothing we -- or anyone else -- can do that can take that gift away. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. from Rodger Nishioka’s commentary in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 1, WJK Press, 2010, pp. 236-240.
2. Thanks to Scott Hoezee for this illustration idea on the Center for Excellence in Preaching website, online here.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, December 20, 2010
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:
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, December 6, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, November 22, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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