You Call This An Invitation? (Sermon - Advent 2)

Have any of you been invited to someone’s home for a Christmas celebration?  Or are any of you hosting this year, perhaps a pre-Christmas party, or a Christmas dinner?

 

You know what to expect, right?  A home decorated with poinsettias and greens, a colorfully decorated and lighted tree, people dressed to the nines, and a delicious meal, right? 

 

How about Christmas Eve services?  You have expectations about those, too, don’t you?  A beautiful sanctuary, candlelight and sacred music, a message of hope and joy?  If you invite someone to join you for Christmas Eve here at Boulevard – and I hope that you all will – you will do so at least in part because you have some confidence in what to expect.

 

Well, here we are, preparing for Christmas, paying attention to the invitation of Scripture to be alert to the coming of Christ, and what happens?  We are invited to prepare ourselves by heading into the wilderness.  We are invited to prepare ourselves by changing our lives.  We are invited to prepare ourselves – not for more of the same old stuff, but for something new! 

 

Let’s listen to what the Gospel of Matthew has to tell us in 3:1-12:

 

3:1 In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 3:2 "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." 3:3 This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'" 3:4 Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 3:5 Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, 3:6 and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 3:7 But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 3:8 Bear fruit worthy of repentance. 3:9 Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 3:10 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 3:11 "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

 

John the Baptist was Jesus’s cousin, the son of Elizabeth and Zechariah.  One day, as a man growing into his calling, he recognized that he was the one designated to prepare his people for the imminent coming of the messiah.  And so off to the wilderness he trudged, and that is where we are invited to follow.

 

What kind of an invitation is this?  The wilderness?  The Jordanian wilderness was a bleak and barren place, indeed.  Wilderness in Scripture is synonymous with desert, and desert it is – dry and dusty, little in the way of plant life, hot in the daytime and cold at night.  Nothing pleasant about it.  Why would we go to the wilderness?  What happened to the welcoming front door bearing a wreath, the beautifully decorated family room, the tree with the star on top?  How did we end up in the desert wilderness?

 

And the clothing!  You thought you were supposed to dress up, right?  But John is decked out in a camel’s hair tunic.  What kind of a host is this?

 

And if all that weren’t enough – the food!  What about the food?  Locusts and wild honey?  Locusts?  That sounds disgusting.  Holiday time is supposed to mean tray after tray of sumptuous  . . . well, everything, right?  That’s how we celebrate the coming of the Lord! 

 

John the Baptist seems to have different preparations in mind than the ones we’re accustomed to. He calls us into the desert, into the wilderness, to prepare for the coming of Christ.  Why do you suppose that is?  Could it be because the deserts of life are where Jesus is found?  Could it be because the deserts of life are where we come to know who God is, and who we are?

 

What are your own deserts this holiday season?  Where do you find yourself pulled, like it or not?  To a hospital waiting room?  Into a decades-long family argument?  To an empty apartment?  To a broken relationship?  To a period of unemployment?  To the challenges of the aging process, or of illness?

 

And what about the deserts that surround us?  Have you visited a nursing home lately?  A jail?  A hospice room?  A homeless shelter?

 

There was a drug-related fatal shooting in Euclid this past week.  A desert place, right here.  South African leader Nelson Mandela died on Thursday, reminding us all that South Africa was not so long ago a desert place in which the culture and the restrictions of apartheid reigned.

 

Where are the deserts in our lives?  And why are we being called to those deserts? 

 

We are called to the desert so that we might prepare the way of the Lord, and we prepare the way of the Lord by repenting.    When we begin to know the God of the desert, and when we begin to know who we are in the starkness of the desert, we hear the call to repent.  “Repent!” roars John the Baptist, our wilderness host.  

 

Repent!  – which means:  Change!  In  Hebrew, that language John the Baptist would have spoken, the words for repent mean to turn – to turn in a new direction.  In Greek, the language in which the Gospel of Matthew was written, the word for repent is metanoia – which means a change of heart or, perhaps originally, a change of mind.  To repent does not mean merely to say that we are sorry and to seek forgiveness.  To repent means to change -- by turning from the wrongheaded ways in which we have been directed and to turn toward a new and life-giving way, the way of Jesus Christ,

 

And if we change, what happens?  If we change, our families and our neighborhoods change.  If we change, our cities and our nations change.  If we change, our world changes. 

 

This past week, the world lost a towering figure and a master, a great leader of change: Nelson Mandela.  This was a man who emerged from the horrors of apartheid in South Africa to lead a major resistance movement, one of the most successful movements the world has ever seen.  He was already leading that movement from prison, where for twenty-seven years, held in the desert of the confines of an 8’ by  8’, prison cell, he earned the respect of a nation and was transformed into the man who, after his release,  would lead that nation as it became Africa’s first genuinely multiracial democracy.

 

In one of the news reports I heard this past week, another leader of resistance against oppression, the Myanmar woman Aung San Suu Kyi  said of Nelson Mandela, “ He made us understand that we can change the world -- we can change the world by changing attitudes, by changing perceptions.”  And we start changing attitudes and perceptions, of course, by changing our own.

 

I want you to listen to what former President Bill Clinton said this past week in his tribute to Nelson Mandela:

 

"In his 27 years of imprisonment, Mandela endured physical and emotional abuse, isolation and degradation. His trials purified his spirit and clarified his vision, giving him the strength to be a free man even behind bars, and to remain free of anger and hatred when he was at last released. Mandela's enduring legacy is that, under a crushing burden of oppression he saw through differences, discrimination and destruction to embrace our common humanity. "

 

Isn’t this exactly the sort of experience that John the Baptist is talking about?  Repent – be changed – and then bear fruit worthy of repentance.  Repent – proceed into the desert and know that the chaff of your life, the extraneous burdens to which you cling, the old baggage you carry, the unnecessary and useless husks of brokenness, of resentment, and of self-centeredness that trap you in lives that do not bear fruit, those will all be be winnowed away and cast into the wind.

 

In the desert, that barren place of transformation, that place in which we repent, in which we embrace change, in which we turn toward new directions, we become people capable of bearing good fruit. 

 

Fruit which the prophet Isaiah describes in terms of a world in which “[t]he 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. “ A world in which “[t]hey will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. “  Fruit in the form of a world of reconciliation, of community, of peace among all of creation.

 

We saw one version, one image of this kind of a world in one of the famous Edward Hicks paintings that appeared on the screen during the Isaiah reading this morning.  A world in which all animals and all peoples live in peace.

We see another version of the same thing in the work of Nelson Mandela who, like John the Baptist, was a prophet of the desert.

And we heard it yet again, a description of the fruit we are called to bear, in the words of Paul to the Romans when he said, “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. “

The world as we know it is not the world with which God is satisfied.  The deserts of the world – its wildernesses of warfare, its pockets of poverty, its worn down neighborhoods and broken streets, its bastions of hunger and despair – these are not God’s goals for creation.  But they are places to which we are called in order to be transformed and to generate transformation.

The church as we know it is not the church with which God is satisfied.  John the Baptist does not call us into the wilderness in order to applaud us.  John the Baptist tells us:  Do not rest on your laurels.  Do not say, “We are the children of Abraham and Sarah; thanks to our heritage, we are safe.”  Do not say, “We go to church, we support the church; we are fine.”  You are always, always, always beloved in the sight of God.  But you are also called into the wilderness to change, to be transformed: to repent. 

Our Advent readings are not always comfortable ones.  They don’t point us right to the department store shelves of ornaments, to the gift-wrapping department, to the holiday specialties at the grocery.  I got a laugh out of one of the commentators I read as I prepared this sermon, who pointed out that John the Baptist plays no role in commercial holiday celebrations.  And no – we don’t get to wear sparkly dresses and new jackets to the wilderness.

But these readings are crucial to our understanding of Advent.  These readings tells us what the world of big box stores leaves out: We are preparing for transformation.    We are preparing to be changed, and to create change.  We are called to come face-to-face with ourselves in preparation for coming face-to-face with the newborn Christ.    John the Baptist extends to us the most profound, the most astonishing, the most hopeful of all invitations:  Come out to the desert and repent!  Co.me out to the desert and be changed!  Prepare the way of the Lord!

Amen.

Practicing Resurrection ~ Easter Sermon (Isaiah and Luke)

What does it mean, to practice Resurrection?

The gospel of Luke doesn’t offer us many clues.

Did any of you read it this morning, or perhaps yesterday, in preparation for today?  If you did, perhaps you were left with a feeling of dissatisfaction, with a sense that much of the story is missing, with an empty feeling of having been left hanging.

Luke, nearly 2000 years ago, wrote what seems on the first reading, or perhaps on the hundredth reading as well, a simple story.

There are some women, three of them named –Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Joanna – and at least two of them not.  They have prepared spices with which to tend to the body of their beloved friend Jesus, the one who was killed by crucifixion two days earlier.  If you were there, or if you had been following the story with Luke as your guide, you would know that Jesus had been crucified on a Friday and that by the time his body was removed from the cross, the Sabbath would have been about to begin and it would have been too late for anyone to do much of anything beyond placing it in a tomb.  The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and continues until sundown on Saturday, so the women would not have been able to travel safely to an isolated cemetery until Sunday morning.

They arrive at the cemetery, they find the cave-like tomb open, and inside, instead of the broken body for which they hope to care, they are confronted by two men who appear, dressed in dazzling clothing,who ask them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, but he is risen.”  Then the men remind them of what Jesus had told them in the past about this event – that he would be handed over to sinners and crucified and rise again.

The women do remember, and so they leave to find the other disciples, and to tell them what has happened.  The other disciples don’t believe them; they call the women’s story “an idle tale,” or “nonsense.”  But Peter, apparently wanting to see for himself, dashes to the graveyard to look inside the tomb and then, finding nothing but the grave clothes lying limply where a body should be, goes home.

And that’s it. That’s the story as we have it from Luke.

The women do not flee from the tomb in terror as they do in Mark.  There is no earthquake and no sudden appearance of Jesus to the women as there is in Matthew.  There is no dramatic encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene as there is in John.  There is simply this story of an empty tomb, of a group of women who are described as “perplexed” or “wondering,” a group of disciples who don’t believe them, and one disciple who comes to see for himself and, seeing nothing, is as baffled as were the women. And the words of two dazzling figures who remind the women that Jesus had told them to expect this.

It’s not much to go on.  If this were all that we had, if we were a group of first century folks reading or listening to the  Gospel of Luke, hearing this story for the first time, and if we stopped at this point for the day, what would we have?  If we wanted to practice resurrection, how would we know what to do?

We would have this simple story of a few characters, several of them not even named, in a desolate setting, having some sort of supernatural encounter. 

And we would have the verbs that the gospel writer used to describe these few people, these few followers of a man who has been killed and whose body has now mysteriously disappeared.  Depending upon your translation, the women and the other disciples are variously described as:

Perplexed. Terrified.  Frightened.  Amazed. Wondering.

Maybe those are our clues.  Maybe, more than in the events themselves, we find in the words describing these immediate reactions and responses our instructions about how to begin to practice resurrection.

Be perplexed.  Be frightened; terrified, even.  Be amazed.  Wonder.

Not because a terrible or menacing event has occurred.  Not because your grief threatens to undo you.  Not because there is no hope, or because evil has gained the upper hand, stealing body as well as soul and spirit. 

But because God is doing a completely new thing.  A completely different thing. Something so new and different that it will take days, years, a lifetime, all of history, to comprehend.

Something for which we use words like:

Salvation. Reconciliation.  Healing.  Restoration. 

Something so vast, so powerful, so all-encompassing, that we can only begin to grasp it by allowing ourselves to be perplexed and terrified and frightened and amazed and wondering. 

Can we put this something into a box and say, “Now we have been saved from hell, from the possibility of a forever separation from the love of God” – well, that’s part of it.  Can we contain this something by saying. “The kingdom of God has come among us and we need to share that news” –that’s part of it, too.  Can we define this something by saying that “Love and justice and mercy now live among us in Jesus Christ and we are called to live those gifts to the fullest” – that, too, is part of it. 

As disciples of Jesus practicing resurrection, we are invited to do all of those things and more.  We are invited to proclaim that salvation is at hand.  We are invited to the deep and sure knowledge that, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, God’s kingdom of love reigns over all other kingdoms of self-centeredness and acquisitiveness and materialism and manipulation and politics and violence.  We are invited to get out there and live into God’s gifts of love and justice and mercy by assisting homeless people and feeding hungry people and repairing the homes of our neighbors and supporting the education of children in Liberia and in Rwanda.

We are invited to practice resurrection in all of those ways. But most of all, we are invited, this day, to join the women and men who followed Jesus in their excitement, in their bewilderment, in their fears, and in their astonishment, because what that empty tomb represents, what those limp and useless grave clothes tell us, is that: Things are not as they were.  History has been challenged.  The course of events for all of creation has been altered by a God who will. not. be. satisfied. to let sin and destruction and hopelessness and death have the last word.

I don’t know what Jesus’ followers talked about among themselves that morning after they went home.  I don’t know what they did.  I imagine that much of the conversation was like that which follows any death.  “What now?”  And that it was heightened by the missing body.  And by the words of those dazzling men, whom we presume to have been angels: “Remember what he told you.”

How would they have put that morning together?  What do you do when, as the poet William Butler Yeats described it in another devastating, heart-wrenching, and bewildering context, “things fall apart [and] the center does not hold.”  Where do you find a new center?  How do you practice resurrection?

Perhaps as they sat together, made breakfast, drank their coffee, expressed their fears to one another, perhaps those early followers of Jesus recalled not only his words, but other words they had learned.  Who knows?  Perhaps they even recalled those other words given to us this morning, from the prophet Isaiah:

"I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.  . . .  I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.  . . . They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.  . . . Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.   . . .   They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord."

New heavens and a new earth.  Joy.  Delight.  The building of houses and the planting of vineyards and the lusciousness of fruit.  The peaceful cooperation of those who were once predator and prey.  The absence of hurt and destruction.  A God who answers before we call.  A God who hears before we speak.

What happens when things fall apart and the center no longer holds?

God creates anew.  God revises.  God heals. 

God creates not just a new heaven, or new heavens, someplace far from here to which we will be transported when we die, someplace far, far away where we will no longer suffer as we do here.  God creates a new earth!  New lives for all of creation!  New lives in which all will care for one another, all the way down to the wolf and the lamb.  New lives in which cities and gardens alike will be teeming with joy and with nourishment.

No wonder Luke leaves us hanging on Easter morning, pauses us in a moment of stunned silence.  No wonder the women and men who followed Jesus are a bit bewildered and lost, wandering back to their homes in a state of confused apprehension.  No wonder.  No wonder at all.

The wonder is not that they respond as they do.  The wonder is reserved for what has happened.  Death has been conquered.  Love has triumphed.

Jesus, who accompanied us through the delights and rigors of human life, who continues to walk with us through our own triumphs and failures, our own joys and sorrows, who can be present to us because he has lived as we do – Jesus who did not turn back but followed us even into the end which we must all endure – Jesus has completely, powerfully, overwhelmingly, defeated death by transforming it into life.

Jesus has taken the horror of death -- the torment, the bodily disintegration, the despair, the grief – and demolished them all.  He has begun the work of the new creation; in his rising he has flung open the door that leads to the light and life of new heavens and a new earth, to the full presence of God in which we, too, will be transformed by love.

Go ahead:  Be stunned.  Be amazed.  But let the fear go.  Practice resurrection.  Because love wins.

Happy Easter.

Claimed and Called: Beloved - Sermon(Isaiah and Luke)

Today we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus, which means that we also celebrate our own baptisms in Christ.  And  there are basically three things I want you to know about baptism, about Jesus’ baptism and about your own:

You are called by God –

                Your identity comes from God –

                                You are named by God --

That, in a nutshell, is the Christian life.

You are called by God.  What’s that mean? 

It means that God is the one who initiates our relationship with him.  God is the one who gets things started.  God is the one who creates us, who continually re-creates and renews us.  God knows us, God loves us, God redeems us through God’s Son, and God fills us with light and life through God’s Spirit.    That’s what it means to be called by God.

If your childhood was anything like mine, you had a lot of freedom.  It’s more difficult today; we are much more alert to danger, and many children – mine were included in this – are much more restricted in how and where they’re allowed to go without supervision.  But back in the fifties, in rural Ohio, the world was ours.  Once we had bikes and reached the age of about ten, my brothers and I were free to roam wherever we pleased.  (Perhaps we would not have been quite so free had our parents known just how far afield we went.)

And what was the one thing that reined us in?  It was the voice of a mother or father, calling across the fields or, in the city, down the block, calling us back for dinnertime or bedtime. 

W didn’t have to do or be anything in particular to be called home.  We didn’t have to have been good – in fact, sometimes we hadn’t been good at all.  We didn’t have to be clean, or well dressed – in fact, we almost never were.  We didn’t have to want or ask to come home – in fact, we were seldom paying any attention to the time, and we usually wanted to keep on with whatever it was we were doing.  And we didn’t have to bring anything with us – not a good report card, or a freshly caught fish, or money, or any other form of achievement or contribution – to be called in for dinner or a bath. 

We were called because we were part of the family.  Because we were loved.  Because we were wanted.

So it is with God.  God calls us and claims us as pure, free gift.  And our baptism is the sign and seal on that very simple and very profound reality.

Oh, we might do a lot of things in response that make it look like it was all our idea.  We might, for instance, think that we need to get all shined up in our best clothes in order to be baptized – but it’s baptism that makes us clean and shiny.  When we welcome Jesus into our hearts and our lives, we are able to do so because he was already there; he creates in us the inclination to open our lives to him,  and it’s his presence in us that causes us to long to greet him.  We might think that we need to do or be or achieve a certain something in order for God to call us– but no.  Our parents right here call us because we are part of the family, because we are loved and wanted – and how much wider and deeper and broader is God’s love for us!  We get things backward sometimes –  but in God’s scheme of things, we want to do and be and achieve for God because God loves us and saves us, not in order to get God to love us and save us.

“I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.”   So the prophet Isaiah tells us.  “I have created you; I have formed you; you are precious in my sight and I love you.”  God’s redemption, God’s call, God’s love – all free gift.  You are called. 

And you are given your identity by God – what does that mean to us?

That might be harder to grasp than it sounds.

We are accustomed to understanding our identity as coming from the sources of this world.  We get our names  from our families.  In our culture, our last names usually come from fathers and husbands – and those names themselves come from occupations and places by which people were identified many centuries ago: the smith, the barber, the miller, the hill.  Our first and middle names are chosen for us by our parents, and often reflect people or places or things meaningful to them.  Think of all those early Puritan names reflecting virtues: Charity, Hope, Prudence.

Sometimes we receive identities in the form of nicknames – for good or ill.  And sometimes we are identified by others in terms of what we do, or where we live: She’s a nurse; he lives in Sullivan.

How often do we remember that our first and most important identity comes to us from God?  That it is God who claims us long before our jobs do, or our friends, or even our parents?

Teenagers often speak of the need “to find themselves.”  Literature is filled with stories of individuals who set off on journeys, seeking, ultimately, to discover who they are.  Even if these heroes and heroines did not initially intend it, their journeys become opportunities for the formation and establishment of identity.  Think of The Hobbit – has anyone seen it yet, or read the novel? Bilbo Baggins sets off to seek treasure guarded by a dragon, and in the adventure quest that follows, he is honed and matured into a man of experience and wisdom.  Even if the journey of self-discovery itself is a matter of compulsion rather than choice, we understand identity to be developed through its trials.  In The Hunger Games, the heroine Katniss, forced to engage in almost unspeakable violence in order to survive, grows as a woman of courage and loyalty and self-sacrifice.

And yet, our Christian story tells us that even the identities forged in these demanding, challenging, risky journeys are not our ultimate source of identity.  The poet T.S. Elliot, in “Little Gidding,” one of a group of great poems addressing issues of time and salvation, tells us that

"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

The end of our exploring, of the lengthy and arduous journey we make, will be a recognition of our starting place, and our starting self – because our identity, because who we are, is a gift bestowed upon each of us by God – long before we ever journeyed forth.  “You are precious in my sight and honored and I love you” – so expounds the prophet Isaiah.  “You are my Son” – so comes the voice of the Spirit as Jesus rises from the waters of baptism and the heavens open above him.   

We are called by God, and we are given our identity by God – and that identity, that name, that calling is – Beloved.  Each of us is named Beloved.  Each of us is a beloved child of God.  “You are my Son, the Beloved” – those are the words relayed to us by Luke, the Spirit’s words to Jesus, and the Spirit’s words to us.

What is it, to be beloved of God?  To be beloved is to be gifted with love, by love – and for love.  To be beloved – it’s an interesting form of the word, for it’s a past participle, which means that it refers to a completed action.  If we are beloved: it’s completed, finished, achieved – by someone else, by God.  We don’t have to do or be anything else to be beloved by God.   We don’t have to choose God – God has chosen us.  We don’t have to check off a list of requirements or accomplishments – there’s no Scouting badge or report card for God’s love.  God’s love has already been given to us.

When we baptize someone, whether a baby or a child or an adult, we use the person’s first names – and not their last – because we know that their last name has been given to them:  Beloved child of God.  Our calling, our identity, our very name, is a completed reality, and has been since before we were born.  The God who, as Psalm 139 tells us, created our innermost beings and knit us together in our mother’s wombs, has always, from the time we were first imagined, claimed us, called us, and named us Beloved. 

This is a magnificent faith – itself a gift – that we are God’s beloved.  We sometimes take it for granted, I think.  We forget that in past times – think about the pantheon, the cluster, of Greek and Roman gods, for instance --people have imagined gods of vengeance, of petulance, of arbitrary claims and gifts.  Sometimes those gods are generous and kind; at other times they are selfish and capricious.  Gods made in the image of human beings, rather than vice versa.

But the God we know – ours is a God who drenches the universe in love.  Ours is a God whose Spirit’s first recorded words to the Son who represents God to us and us to God are “You are beloved.  My beloved.  My beloved child.” 

Ours is a God who tells us from the start, You are gifted by love, in love, and for love.  Ours is a God who offers us an identity in Baptism: Beloved Child.   Theologian John Leith tells us that “[i]n baptism the child’s name is called because our faith is that God thought of this child before the child was,  that God gave to this child an identity, an individuality, a name, and a dignity that no one  should dare abuse.  Human existence has its origin  . . . in the will and the intention of the Lord God, creator of heaven and earth.”

And so: this love-crazed God of ours who creates this love-drenched universe tells Jesus, as he is about to step out onto the world stage of his ministry, and tells us, who follow him and are called to the same world, bathed in the love of God and begging for us to make that love known by our own words and deeds:  You are called.  You are named.  You are beloved.

 

Enlarge Our Vision - Epiphany Sunday (Isaiah and Matthew)

My husband David acquired his first set of glasses when he was about five years old: thick, heavy glasses; the sort that you acquire when your eyesight is in much need of assistance.  And when he set forth into the world wearing those glasses, he made a couple of important discoveries.  Walls are made of bricks – of separate, individual bricks separated by mortar!  And trees have leaves – hundreds of individual leaves!  He had had no idea.

Today, we have all kinds of ways by which we can enhance our sight: glasses, contact lenses, laser surgery.  Many of us wear bi-focals or tri-focals or graduated lenses.  (Some of us, like me, are struggling to get it right as our vision undergoes a period of rapid change.)  On the whole, until the challenges of very advanced age overcome our technology, we can find ways of seeing bricks, and leaves, and the words on a page.

But, while our physical eyesight can generally be improved, we still struggle with the enhancement of vision in its broader sense.   We still struggle to see anew, to see differently , to see things we haven’t noticed before, or things we’d prefer not to recognize at all.

In our own lives, what do we not see?  What do we not want to see?  The relationship gone sour.  The behavior that needs to be addressed.  The expanding waistline.  The direction that begs for a change of course.  You know what I mean.

In the church, what do we not see?  What do we not want to see?  The smaller numbers.  The young people not here.  The former members who have drifted away.  The empty classrooms.

We don’t like change, do we?  We try to close our eyes to change. 

And yet, the truth is, we’ve all, every single one of us, we’ve all discovered that we have the wherewithal to adapt to change – even to embrace change.  We’ve all been faced with situations that have demanded that we make changes, that we adapt, that we accept new ways of doing things.   We already have lots of experience with change, which means that we all have lots of experience with seeing in new ways. 

In our own lives, when have we seen more clearly --  but perhaps forgotten to celebrate the renewed life that has come to us as a result?  Perhaps we have tried to ignore a child’s struggles, telling ourselves that “it’s just a stage; this too will pass.”  And then a friend, or a teacher, or a doctor, has insisted that we take another look – and after some testing and assessment, we see the bricks or the leaves separate.  We see the reality before us with a new clarity – and then we see the doors of opportunity open, in the form of tutors or special programs or new therapies that bring new life.

What about in the church?  We all know that numbers are down, that regular Sunday worship – or any Sunday worship at all – is no longer a given in our culture, that people are more likely to turn to a talk show than to a pastor, or to turn to a popular self-help book than to Scripture, for guidance and help in life.  But isn’t this reality also an opportunity for a renewal of vision, for a clarity of both insight and out-sight?  If the church is not merely a cultural given, if it’s no longer just part of the background noise of our lives, if it’s no longer an obvious expectation – then perhaps it can become something special.  Perhaps if it’s not just “what we do” on Sundays, it can become a focal point for genuine encounter with God.

And notice that I said “focal point” – I didn’t say “place.”  The church of Jesus Christ is not a place.  It’s not a building.  It’s not a particular group of people who sign a membership role and pay regular dues.  The church is a point – one of many – at which God and God’s people, which is to say all people, encounter one another and from which we go forth together in love. 

The magi who followed the star to find the child Jesus provide us with a paradigm for a willingness to see anew, to respond to a new vision, an enlarged vision.

What’s a paradigm? It’s a pattern, a model, an arrangement. 

And how do the magi provide us with a new one, a new paradigm?  In some ways, they might have been the kind of people expected to do so.  The story tells us only that they were wise men from the east following a star, with treasure chests of gold, frank-incense, and myrrh.  From that small bit of information we have explored the history of the time and elaborated on the basics, and often conclude that there must have been three wise men, and that they were kings and astrologers – those who knew the skies and scanned them in order to tell the future – a respected occupation in those days .  And the east – that probably meant Persia, which today we know as Iran.   It really isn’t all that surprising that men of scholarship, of wealth and means, would have noticed an unusual occurrence in the heavens and have been able to put together a caravan to make the long journey across what, on today’s map, would be the mountains of Iran, the deserts of Iraq and Syria, and on into the small towns of Galilee.

In another way, it’s quite a surprise that the magi are the ones who show up, that they are among the first to whom Jesus is revealed.  Today we celebrate Epiphany – which means a showing, a manifestation, a revelation – the day that God was revealed to the magi through Jesus.  And, remember, who are the magi?  Not Jewish princes or kings, not Jewish priests of prophets.  The magi are outsiders.  The magi are from far away, and they are not among the people to whom the promises of the one Jewish god have been made.  What is God doing with them?

Perhaps God is choosing people who have the capacity for vision.  People who are accustomed to looking for new things and seeing in new ways.    People who will put in long hours and great effort in order to search out the unexpected.  People who can embrace the surprising

So here they come, the magi.  Tired and hungry, after a long journey.  “A cold coming we had of it,” the poet T.S. Elliot tells us in the opening line of his famous poem, “The Journey of the Magi:”

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

And the camels galled, sore-footed,

refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

Imagine that journey.  Imagine the arrival: The chaos, the animals milling about and the servants shouting out greetings and directions, the unexpected discovery of a young family and a new child.  The thick darkness bespoken by the prophet Isaiah separating before the blinding light that reveals  the presence of God.   And the magi,  offering to us a paradigm, a pattern, for seeing with new eyes, for expanding our vision.  How do they do that?

 

First, they see:  “They [see] the child Mary with his mother.”  Perhaps not who or what they expected.  Perhaps they imagined celestial fireworks.  Perhaps they thought to find the most bejewelled of queens holding a newborn king in the most ostentatious of palaces.  But instead they see the revelation of God in the most humble of circumstances, in one of the most helpless forms in nature: a poor and seemingly insignificant human baby. 

 

Second, they reverence what – whom – they see.  “They [kneel] down and [pay] him homage.”  The ordinary, the unexpected , the small, the insignificant, the poor, the homeless – then, as now, these clamor for reverence.  For acknowledgement as holy.  As sacred. 

Thirdly, they open.  The Bible tells us that “they [open] their treasure chests.”  That which they possess, that which defines who they are, that which gives them identity – the containers in which they protect their wealth – those they open to the new vision.  They are willing to open themselves in ways they may not have done before.  Do you think that back in Persia, back in their palaces and gardens, they opened their gates to the poor and nondescript?  Do you think that back there their vision enabled them to see beyond the obvious to the presence of God among them?  Probably not.  But here, before this child, they see anew, and they become vulnerable – opened – to the God who has called them forth.

 

And fourthly, they offer.  They offer gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ Child.  They offer what they have – which may, with the exception of the gold, seem like worthless gifts for a child.  But they offer what gifts they have to offer, as we all might, with the hope that they will be transformed.

 

And so, the magi, the people who follow a great star, the people willing to be transformed themselves by vision:  They see, they reverence, they open, they offer.

 

What about us?

 

Let’s ask God this year to expand our vision, to enlarge our field of view.

 

What might we see and reverence if we allowed ourselves to be guided as if by a star?  To what might we open ourselves and what gifts might we have to offer if we approached others as if they were the Christ Child beside whom we kneel, bearing our treasures of skill and insight and wisdom and time, and offering them so that God might transform them?

How might monochromatic walls resolve themselves into building blocks?  How might trees leaf out into sunlit glories of God? 

In our individual lives – at home, at school. at work, in the places in which we volunteer?  How? In our church? How?  How about outside our doors – in the town of Nankin and beyond?  How? How might we see and reverence and open and offer?

The church goes where we go.  The walls of the church protect and secure us, but we are unlikely to see the vast, wide, starlit kingdom of God unless we step outside and journey forth, just as did those unlikely visitors from the east.

O God, let us be guided by your star this year.  Remind us that wise men and women in all places look up and out, seeking to know and serve you.  Enlarge our vision, and send us forth!


 

A Shepherd's Story (Isaiah and Luke)(Sermon for Christmas Eve)

I am one of the younger ones – a youngest child – which was my main qualification for becoming a shepherd.  I don’t know how much you know about shepherds in my time – the time of Jesus – but shepherding is not a preferred occupation.  It’s the older children, sons mostly, who are the focus of attention, education, training, and land. Those of us at the bottom of the heap – we become shepherds.  We stay out all night, we get dirty and smelly and tired and hungry, and we take care of animals who – well, I’ll get to them in a minute.

There  are some famous younger sons in the Bible, some famous shepherds.  Jacob, for instance – remember Jacob?  He stole his older brother Esau’s birthright and then ran away, and ended up caring for the flocks of his kinsman Laban. Then he married Laban's oldest daughter, Leah -- the oldest are always first!  before – after a long and convoluted series of eventshe also married Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel, the love of his life.  Rachel also “kept her father’s sheep.”  Now that’s an intriguing story – two younger children, two shepherds, marrying one another, and Jacob becoming the father of  the twelve sons who would become the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel.

There’s another youngest shepherd son who became even more famous than Jacob: David.  David, the great king of Israel, was the youngest of seven or eight brothers and became – surprise! – a shepherd by trade.  But God had other plans for him, plans that no one in his family could have imagined: that he would become a great warrior, a great statesman, and the King of all Israel.

Well, those are good stories, but they don’t apply to most of us.  Most of us are out there in the fields with our sheep, and we always will be.  And the sheep themselves?  I was going to tell you about them.  Troublesome animals.  They wander off.  They get tangled up in brambles and stuck on cliffs  – sometimes they even fall off.  They don’t think for themselves; they follow anything that moves.  They won’t drink from rivers or streams – we have to use rocks to create pools of still water for them.  They are not intelligent or graceful or skilled animals.  That’s who we take care off.  Troublesome animals.

Not that we don’t develop deep affection for them – we do.  We get to know our sheep, and we love them, and we watch over them carefully and treat them kindly.  But they are difficult creatures.

Now that I’ve described something of my life and work, you might wonder how my friends and I got tangled up in the events of Christmas.  Good question!

There we were, minding our own business.  It was a usual night.  Kind of chilly, since the sky was so clear.  Thousands of stars up there.  But we had warm blankets, and the sheep were settling down, occasionally baa-ing and bleating as they bumped up close to one another for warmth.  Nothing very exciting. 

And then, out of that cold, clear, dark sky, out of the darkness in which we walked every night, out of the darkness in which stars and moon were our only companions: an angel appeared.  An angel!  We were so astonished, so taken aback – I’m not even sure that I could tell you what it looked like.  Light, surely – there was a glimmering, shimmering, radiant light, yes.  Wings? – there may have been wings.  I’m not sure.  A voice? – yes, we heard a voice.

And we were terrified.  Absolutely, unwaveringly, without a doubt: Terrified. TERRIFIED.

And the voice said, “Do NOT be afraid. I am bringing to YOU great news for ALL.”  And then the voice – the angel – told us that our Savior, the Messiah, has been born, and that we would find him a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

And then, suddenly, as suddenly as the first had appeared, the sky was filled with a multitude of angels.  LOTS of angels. They FILLED the sky.  And they were all crying out, “Glory to God! Glory to God in the highest! “

And then they were gone.

Well, what would you do?    What would you do if an angel appeared and said something completely unexpected?  Not, “I am bringing everyone else some good news from which you yourselves might snatch a crumb”?  No -  I am bringing to YOU great news for EVERYONE!

I’ll tell you what we did. We took off.  We decided that a journey was in order, and we wrapped ourselves in our blankets and we woke up the sheep and we headed for the place which had been described to us.  And when we got there, we saw exactly what we’d been told we’d see: a mother and a father, and a newborn baby, lying in a manger, warmed by the hay and by the animals huddled together inside.

That little family, those parents – they looked as unsettled and surprised as we were.  We learned later that they had come to town for the tax census; I’m sure that they’d been hoping to make it home again before the baby arrived.    And we learned that they were ordinary people, as we are -- a carpenter and a young mother far from home, as we are, with a newborn for whom they could barely provide. 

A newborn who was the Savior of the world.  The king of all creation.

It was a most unlikely occasion.

We ourselves, we shepherds, were all the youngest, the people with the least in the way of prospects. No one listened to us, admired us, even wanted us around. And as the least of people, our job was to keep the least of animals.

And yet we were called, by heavenly beings, to journey, to gather, to celebrate, and to proclaim.

Think about it: We are the least, and we care for the least. And we’re the ones who were called to see, and we’re the ones to whom the good news was first entrusted

When you are among the least, when you walk in a land of deep darkness, light shines.

When you care for the least – for those who stumble and wander away and get lost and fall down – you proclaim God with us –  God healing all – God embarking upon the labor of restoring all creation.

Someday, the baby we saw will be known as the good shepherd.

He will walk among the least, and light will shine.

He will care for the least, and God’s compassion will be revealed.

He will die as one of the least, and his alignment with us will be complete.

He will rise, and there will be rejoicing in the midst of sorrow.

And tonight it begins:

When we are among the least – when we live in the darkness of grief, of anger, of loneliness, of poverty, of frustration, of conflict -- when we like sheep have gone astray – the light shines.

And when we care for the least, when we feed and house and sit with and hope with and pray with the least – we proclaim God with us. 

We may be the youngest, the roughest, the most excluded, the most unlikely of visionaries and messengers – but the baby Jesus brings good news to us for all.

For unto us a child is born.

Merry Christmas. 




(With thanks to theologian James Alison, who raised the Scriptural theme of youngest sons for me in Broken Hearts and New Creations.)