Saturday, December 28, 2019

“In Every Respect” - December 29, 2019



Hebrews 2:10-18



            On Christmas Eve, we remember and we contemplate Jesus as a newborn baby, held by his mother or all wrapped up and asleep.  It’s heartwarming.  Then this Sunday we come to a verse like Hebrews 2:17 that says,

“He had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God; to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.”

It seems almost blasphemous, and to many people it is exactly that, to say that Jesus would be “like his brothers and sisters [that would be us – you and me] in every respect”.  That sweet little Jesus boy, born in a manger; that sweet little, holy child – what happened when he hit the terrible twos?  Did he ever refuse to go to bed when he was four?  Did he ever throw a tantrum?  Luke does give us a story about when he was twelve and his family went to Jerusalem.  He became engaged in debate with the teachers in the Temple and completely ignored that his family had no idea where he was for three whole days.  Really?  Three days?  Luke 2:48 says that Mary asked him,

“Child, why have you treated us like this?”

He was a real, human child.  He was not an adult in a child’s body.  He did not wear humanity like a costume.

            There was nothing static and finished about him.  After that incident in Jerusalem, Luke 2:52 says,

“Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”

He was like us.  Really and truly.  Fully.  There were things he had to learn, and he learned them.  If there’s any difference between us, it’s the difference there is among all people as individuals – some people make their mistakes and learn from them, some people have to do it two or three times, and for some people the lessons just never sink in.  Jesus was often weak, like us, he faced the same challenges, but God was within him from the start, and he got them right.  This whole family thing shows that.  He may have hurt Mary and Joseph deeply when he stayed in the Temple, but there is no suggestion that he ever failed to love them. 

            It’s the failure of love – first of all love for God, and after that love for God’s creation and the people made in God’s image – that is the very definition of sin.  And failure can mean not only the lack of love, but love expressed in the wrong measure or the wrong fashion.  It is tricky to be human.  Jesus got it right, but faced all the difficulties and temptations that we face.  Like us, he had to go through times of conflicting loyalties and make choices. 

That Temple he visited as a child remained an important part of his spiritual life and he returned there as a man, not as a student anymore but as a teacher himself.  Some of what he saw there disturbed him deeply, to the point where one day he lost it, and started chasing out the moneychangers and overturning their tables.  Have you never had those feelings about the Church?  Have you never wanted simply to chase out people you think may be using it as a vehicle for their own desire for wealth or fame or control?  (Confession time: there are times when I see a church where the service is being led by somebody who has to have a band for back-up and practices the lighting cues, and I feel the impulse to run up front and start tossing the drums around and unplugging the amps.  But I am not Jesus.  I know that there’s no purity to my motives and that part of it is jealousy and part of it is a sense that they’ve rejected my own way of worship.  In Jesus’ case, it was true zeal for God that set him off.)

            Or family, again: When Jesus was dying on the cross, some of his family and some of his friends were there. 

“his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.  When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’  Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’  And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” [John 19:25-27]

So, this is a demonstration of love offered even at the moment of his torture and death, and of the love Jesus creates among his followers.  I in no way mean to downplay that.  My question, though, is where Jesus’ brother James was.  Wouldn’t it be up to him to care for their mother?  He became a leader in the early Church in Jerusalem – it’s all right there in Acts and Galatians – and one of his letters is even in the New Testament.  What happened in the family that Jesus had to assign guardianship to his friend John rather than to his own brother?

            My entire point in this isn’t to figure it out.  My point is that when we hear that Jesus “had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect” it means more than just that God took on our biology, with all the limitations that entails, or that God entered into a philosophical category that had previously been separate – that human and divine life came to coexist in Jesus – but that in Jesus, in Jesus’ entire life and being, God was working to engage all the messiest and most wounded parts of human lives, as well as to lift up and sanctify all the most beautiful and good.

            We cannot set Jesus apart in a manger as if it were a box.  We cannot have just some idea of a loving, sentimental scene and say that it fully pictures God’s love.  God’s love is a suffering love that leaves the manger for the cross.  It is a love that recognizes the pain involved in restoring broken lives – the addict who only comes back to health through the pain of detox, the spouses who can only rebuild a marriage by addressing the ways it has been torn apart, the abused child who can only survive by asking someone for protection but has no words to do that.  Jesus is a Savior in the midst of that, because he does not stand apart from us in any way, but beside us and sometimes in our place.

            That love, in a manger and on a cross, changes everything.

“Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.” [Hebrews 2:18]

He came to be one of us, and his death was a part of his birth.  There is no surprise in that.  But when his life and ours become entwined, the meaning of birth and death themselves change, and the life that lies between them as well as the life that lies beyond them become opened in every way to the grace of God, because he is there in all of it.

“Once in royal David’s city
Stood a lowly cattle shed
Where a mother laid her baby
With a manger for a bed:
Mary, loving mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little child.

He came down to earth from heaven
Who was God and Lord of all,
And his shelter was a stable,
And his cradle was a stall.
With the poor, the scorned, the lowly
Lived on earth our Savior holy.

Jesus is our childhood’s pattern.
Day by day, like us, he grew;
He was little, weak, and helpless,
Tears and smiles like us he knew;
And he feeleth for our sadness,
And he shareth in our gladness.

And our eyes at last shall see him,
Through his own redeeming love;
For that child so dear and gentle
Is our Lord in heaven above;
And he leads his children on
To the place where he is gone.”

Saturday, December 14, 2019




James 5:7-10
“Joy When You Can’t Sing”
December 15, 2019

On Black Friday I was in my kitchen doing dishes when my next door neighbor started one of his projects in the garage.  He’s very quiet most of the time, but I can usually catch the sound of his bandsaw or belt sander.  This time, though, he was playing music and if it had gone on too long I would have gone over to see if he was okay, because I was hearing “Same Old Lang Syne”.  Even if you think you don’t know the song, you’d probably recognize it.  It’s Dan Fogelberg’s classic holiday ode to regret and loss.  He runs into a long-ago love in the grocery store on Christmas Eve, they talk, they talk some more, and then the conversation stalls.  She drives away, and as Fogelberg watches her pull out of the parking lot, he says,

“Just for a moment I was
Back at school
And felt that old, familiar pain
And as I tuned to make
My way back home
The snow turned into rain –”

Cue the saxophone.  If someone plays that song more than once, twice at the outside, you know something is seriously going on.
           
            It isn’t that people don’t feel loneliness or regret or loss at other times of the year.  They do.  But there’s an expectation of forced hilarity that I blame on Charles Dickens.  If you don’t feel all ho-ho-ho you must be a Charlie Brown.  We’ve all heard him say,

“I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus.  Christmas is coming but I’m not happy.  I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.”

Of course, Linus will let him in on the not-so-secret secret of the season at the end of the half hour, but Charlie Brown has to dig down further.  He has to reject the false promises of Snoopy’s decorated doghouse and Sally’s self-serving letter to Santa, and Lucy’s opportunity to take control of the pageant before he can hear the tidings of great joy.

            Henri Nouwen wrote about what turns ritual into celebration, and what he said is that truly to celebrate life means recognizing the alternative.  The fullness of joy comes to those who are up against the deepest sadness.  Let me read his words, not summarize them:

“When we speak about celebration we tend rather easily to bring to mind happy, pleasant, gay festivities in which we can forget for a while the hardships of life and immerse ourselves in an atmosphere of music, dance, drinks, laughter, and a lot of cozy small-talk.  But celebration in the Christian sense has very little to do with this.  Celebration is only possible through the deep realization that life and death are never found completely separate.  Celebration can only really come about where fear and love, joy and sorrow, tears and smiles can exist together.  Celebration is the acceptance of life in a constantly increasing awareness of its preciousness.”[1]

            The text for this sermon is from James, who wrote to encourage faithfulness in the face of difficulty, and said,

“As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.” [James 5:10]

So let’s do that.  Let’s see what we see in, for instance, the passage from Isaiah that we heard at the start of the service.

            First off, he was sent to speak to people who were in trouble.  Geographically, they were in exile.  Emotionally, they were scared.  Spiritually, they were a wreck.  They had lost their country, they saw their familiar ways of life destroyed.  They saw their families killed or enslaved.  They saw the Temple that they identified as their point of contact with God destroyed.  They were cut off, set adrift.  They were dying or dead inside, and maybe outside, too. 

            The message for such people was and is, “Hold on.”  Too often, I suspect, we overlook what a success it can be for someone who is at the end of their rope to do something as seemingly simple as that.  Isaiah recognized that God was sending him to speak to people who were the walking wounded.  They had “weak hands” and “feeble knees” and “a fearful heart”.  That makes it hard to see beyond the pain of the present and the struggle just to get by.  In the effort to endure, all anybody can see is what is in front of them.  There is no extra energy to give to what is on the right or the left.  There is only disappointment in looking back.  So the good news begins, “Here is your God.” [Isaiah 35:4]  Here!  Not back in the rubble that was Jerusalem.  Here!  Not in the wiped-out glories of the past.  Here!  God is the reinforcement you have been waiting for. 

            Suddenly the verbs all change to future tense.  God is here, and things are about to happen.

“He will come with vengeance,
with terrible recompense.
            He will come and save you.” [Isaiah 35:4]

What’s more, the tunnel vision that so dominates a moment of suffering begins to go away.  The prophet points to those around them who have their own sufferings.  God will help them, too.

“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.” [Isaiah 35:5-6]

The whole people together are invited to be part of a future that is based on what God can do, not on what we expect.

“For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
            and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
            and the thirsty ground springs of water;
the haunt of the jackal shall become a swamp,
            the grass shall become reeds and rushes.

A highway shall be there,
            and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,
            but it shall be for God’s people;
no traveler, not even fools,
            shall go astray.” [Isaiah 35:6-8]

I like the thought that God even makes provisions for fools.  I find it personally consoling.

            Maybe, for you, now may not be the time for singing.  But be assured, the time will come.  Maybe the best you can do right now is to hum a little bit.  That’s okay.  Just don’t forget that God is already on your side; there’s no need to win him over.  He may be as quiet as a baby sleeping, but he is with us.  Maybe he is crying, like a baby cries, but he is with us.  Maybe you cannot sing because right now is the time for you to listen.  So do that.  One day

“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.”  [Isaiah 35:10]




[1] Henri Nouwen, Creative Ministry (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1978), 94-95.

Saturday, December 7, 2019

“Peace When There’s Conflict” - December 8, 2019



Romans 15:4-13


            Be totally honest.  Do you expect to see peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians in your lifetime?  Do you think that the Russians can ever be trusted?  For that matter, do you think that people from this country are fully “over” the Civil War?  It wasn’t that long ago that I went to church with friends in southwestern Virginia.  After church we were in the car and one of them apologized to me; I hadn’t heard it but when I was introduced as being from Philadelphia, someone sniffed and said, “A Yankee!”  I told her, “That’s okay, Tammie.  Where I come from, that’s a compliment.”  Division, stereotyping, fear of the stranger, dislike of foreign ways, distrust of motives, and outright hostility seem to be baked into human nature.  I would be wasting your time if I gave a lot of examples, because we all know them and see them every day. 

            Yet deep down we know that cannot be right.  We are stirred by the idea, as crazy as it is, that there might come a time when the notion that some people are just natural enemies won’t apply.  I don’t just mean that over the centuries the English and French will stop making jokes about each other and will pick on the Spaniards instead.  I don’t mean that the Albanians and Croats and Serbs will decide that the Turks are their real enemy and band together against them.  I’m talking about the poetic prophecies of Isaiah:

“The wolf shall live with the lamb,
            the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” [Isaiah 11:6-7]

“The peaceable kingdom,” we call it.  It was one of the things that William Penn hoped to create in Pennsylvania when he opened it up to religious groups from all across Europe who had been killing each other for a century.  This Peaceable Kingdom, as Isaiah sings of it, is an unnatural place.  It goes directly against experience and natural instinct.  Woody Allen said, “The lion shall lay down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.” 

            It isn’t about the animals, though.  It’s about us.  It’s about what can happen, must happen, for peace to show up on earth and good will to be found among its peoples.  Peace comes from God, not from us.  We speak about being “peacemakers” and cite Jesus’ blessing:

“Blessed are the peacemakers,
            for they shall be called children of God.” [Matthew 5:9]

They are called “children of God” because they take after their heavenly Parent, who gives them the seeds of peace to plant and tend and nurture.  Peace does not come from us, but it is ours to experience, to share, and to bear witness.

            The early Church struggled to deal with the fact that it encompassed, at first, both Jews and Samaritans.  (Ha!  You thought I would say, “Jews and Gentiles, right?)  The gospels, especially John’s gospel, contain stories of how Jesus and the Samaritans reached out to one another even though they were culturally and religiously expected to stay on their sides of a centuries-old feud.  Then, when they had begun to get over that, suddenly the Holy Spirit began doing wonders in Jesus’ name among the Gentiles.  The book of Acts is filled with those stories and what it took for the Jewish believers (among whom there were likely Samaritans) to recognize that the Gentiles were also welcome as full participants and partners in the Kingdom. 

Paul reached back to Isaiah’s vision to find words for what was going on.  Unity among people wasn’t because they all liked each other.  It wasn’t some sort of Rodney King “why-don’t-we-all-just-get-along” moment.  There’s enough of that kind of papering over real hurt and ugly history, and ignoring or denying it never brings true healing.  Instead, he saw it as God’s grace showing up in our lives because of Jesus.  If one person could, in himself, reconcile humanity and God, then that person could and would reconcile people to one another.  He points out what the Hebrew scriptures say:

“‘Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,
and let all peoples praise him’;
and again Isaiah says,
‘The root of Jesse shall come,
the one who rises to rule the Gentiles;
in him the Gentiles shall hope.’” [Romans 15:11-12]

            Another expression for this Peaceable Kingdom comes from an American poet and preacher and prophet, who called it the Beloved Community.  In his essay Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote (and bear with the language of a previous generation):

“Men are not easily moved from their mental ruts or purged of their prejudiced and irrational feelings.  When the underprivileged demand freedom, the privileged at first react with bitterness and resistance.  Even when the demands are couched in non-violent terms, the initial response is substantially the same.  …But the nonviolent approach does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it.  It gives them new self-respect.  It calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.  Finally, it so stirs the conscience of the opponent that reconciliation becomes a reality.”[1]

And you know that this man was ready to die to see that happen.  Even more did Jesus before him die to see God’s love shared with all people. 

            Peace always requires sacrifice.  At the most basic level, when there is conflict someone has to give something up.  Usually, everyone involved has to give somewhere.  Compromise is not a sign of weakness, but of strength.  It is only to be avoided when it asks someone to surrender their integrity or to excuse an injustice.  When it is a matter of respecting your opponent, it keeps an opponent from becoming an enemy.  Think of the way that families negotiate where and how to spend holidays.  Thanksgiving is at one house and Christmas at another; or maybe Christmas Eve is for the extended family and Christmas Day is for the household.  A really trivial example from my own family, where a lot of people like dark meat, is that we give the youngest person a chance to have the turkey leg, since the younger you are, the more likely you will want to eat with your fingers anyway.  Why not let them have the piece that comes with its own handle?

            To go to the other end of the spectrum, the ultimate peace came to us when Jesus surrendered the glory of heaven and lay aside his complete power, his equality with God the Father, to walk us back out of our sin and death into eternal life.  That is real sacrifice, that sealed peace between God and us.  And what it asks of us is to live into the reality that Jesus creates, the Peaceable Kingdom, the Beloved Community, to be centered no longer on ourselves, but on God, along with the many others whose voices together with ours form a symphony of praise and worship, of love and service.  Said Paul,

“May the God of steadfastness and encouragement 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.” [Romans 15:5-6]

And let all God’s children say, “Amen.”



[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 139.

Friday, November 29, 2019

“Light When It’s Dark” - December 1, 2019


Romans 13:11-14



This is one of those Sundays when we are trying to squeeze a lot into a short time, so I am going to take advantage of that to split my sermon into two sections for two groups and make each of them short.


First, here’s a message for the younger folks.  

The Bible reading we heard earlier talks about what it’s like “the moment for you to wake from sleep” [Romans 13:11].  A lot of the time you probably depend on your parents to wake you up, and tell you it’s time to get up and get ready.  Most of the time you probably grumble a little, and some days you take your time to the point where you’re trying to finish your breakfast but the adults are saying, “Come on!  We have to get going!” and they’re standing by the closet door with your jacket and telling you to put your shoes on and grab your bookbag or your backpack.

The worst part of it can be when you do try to rush, and they get annoyed and tell you that you should have had everything in place before you went to bed, or you should have gotten up without being called three times and you would have had more time.  But the fact is that right then the time you have is the time you have and you’re doing what you can to keep up or to catch up.

What this Bible message tells us, though, is something like that.  Jesus loves us very much, and wants us to be ready for a lot of the good things he has for us to do, and to spend time with us like our friends spend time with us.  That means that it’s not good to get too wrapped up in other things that aren’t as important in the long run as he is.



Now, here’s the message for the older folks.

Paul talks in Romans about how we very often want to remain in the dark, but how faith works to make us people of the light instead.  There are things that he identifies as “the works of darkness” and gives a list of some of them: “reveling and drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness, quarreling and jealousy”.  They’re the sort of things that make someone want to pull the covers over their heads and say, “No, I didn’t do that, did I?  I didn’t say that.  Really?”

He urges us to live our lives in such a way that when we wake up we welcome today instead of regretting yesterday.  In fact, he tells us that we should live with expectation that Jesus will show us something good with each new day, “For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.” [Romans 13:11]  

Here’s a good exercise to recapture that feeling if it has faded.  Try to remember when Christmas morning was not a time that you wanted to sleep in.  Try to remember when the most difficult part of the day was staying in bed until you were supposed to get up, wondering what was downstairs in the living room that wasn’t there the night before, and if the milk and cookies that you left out had been eaten.

If one little sparkle of that feeling is something you remember, then realize that it is not just the celebration and the tinsel and the gifts that once were all that you knew, but it is the presence of Christ among us and in your life every single day year round that lies at the source of that kind of joy.


Then light can shine when things get really dark, and the sun can come up when night seems deepest around you.  Then the people who dwell in darkness see a great light, and it’s not the light of candles and electric bulbs and storefront or neighborhood displays.  It doesn’t need carols and cookies to flip the switch.  It’s the real thing, the light of Christ.  That light “shines in the darkness and the darkness has never overcome it.” [John 1:5]

Saturday, November 23, 2019

“’Save Yourself and Us’” - November 24, 2019



Luke 23:33-43


            The word “save” is all over this morning’s reading from the gospel of Luke.  It was being tossed around in a lot of ways while Jesus was dying.

“The leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!  The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”  [Luke 23:35-37]
“One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us!’” [Luke 23:39]
A king – any ruler – is supposed to do that, right?

            There’s the obvious level where a king is the commander-in-chief.  He was to ride out with his army and drive back invaders led by a neighboring king.  Even better, he was to be the one doing the invading, conquering territory and maybe even turning the kingdom into an empire.

            There’s the less flashy but no less vital aspect where the king was to be a wise administrator.  He would save the people from poverty with his trade and economic policies.  Czar Peter the Great left Russia at one point in the hands of his ministers so that he could travel to western Europe to learn its technology first-hand.  He himself worked in a Dutch shipyard so that he could learn what he needed to know to upgrade the Russian navy and its commercial fleet.

He would save the people from hunger with his encouragement of sound agricultural practices.  The Inca came to power in part because they understood how to terrace land in the Andes to grow potatoes on mountainsides, and their kings made the resources available to do that. 

A king would order irrigation projects that would also include reservoirs and dams and levees to save his country from drought or floods.  If his timing was right.

The king could, if he wanted, issue laws that protected the weak and vulnerable.  He could save the poor from exploitation.  In theory.  He could save the disabled from neglect and abandonment.  Sometimes.

            We still have these expectations of government, whether they are vested in one person or laid upon some formal institution (and it’s interesting that we do refer to a congress or a council or a court or an agency as a “governmental body” as if it were one person).  A good government is one that sees to these matters and more.  Thomas Jefferson boiled down what we should expect into the terms “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and said that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted”.

            We look to be saved from enemies, foreign and domestic.  Under our system, candidates seek office by promising to provide security and safety, and put themselves forward with the argument that they are the best person or the person with the best understanding of how to do that.

            Disillusionment follows when a leader cannot deliver.  In extreme cases, even the leader becomes disillusioned, and then there can be real problems for everyone.  Power becomes more important, and pride and self-preservation take over. 

            Jesus, arrested and convicted and executed, hardly presented much in the way of the power anyone has ever expected of a king.  So as he was dying, people mocked him.  He was not saving himself; what could he do for anyone else?  He had not kicked out the Romans.  Even the moneychangers he chased out of the Temple returned to their spots when he was gone.

            To call Jesus a king, or to claim that he saves, means that you have to see kingship and salvation in some way other than the usual.  It’s only in King Jesus’ willingness to set aside the usual trappings of rule that the hollowness of power and coercion and violence and pride is shown clearly once and for all.  

            It seems appropriate that the Bible starts out very early warning about the dangers of what the pharaoh wants to do to the Israelite slaves.  The symbol of the pharaoh’s world is the pyramid, with one stone on top and each row pressing down on the next one underneath.  The symbol of Jesus is the cross, with its body rooted in the earth and reaching to God while its arms stretch out in embrace, regardless of the pain.

            At the pharaoh’s order, the Bible tells us,

“The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter”.  [Exodus 1:13-14]
Jesus, in contrast, spoke to his followers,

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” [Matthew 11:28-30]
He can say that, because he takes the weight on his own shoulders.  He saves us by not saving himself.  He does the true work of a king by setting aside his privileges and prerogatives, and doing the work of a slave.

            As for us, we are called to life in a kingdom that follows those unearthly rules.

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.  Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not count equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death –
    even death on a cross.”  [Philippians 2:3-8]