Hold the Baby: A Sermon on Luke 2:1-20

A couple years ago when my cousin’s son was born, my brother and I went to visit them in the hospital. When we got in their room, Shane was fussing a bit and the way the bassinet was positioned, my cousin couldn’t reach him. So she asked me if I would pick him up for her. And of course, as a twelve-hour-old infant, that change of scenery distracted him enough for him to immediately calm down. So I held him a bit, marveling at this tiny fragile human.

Which was great, except I hadn’t taken my coat off yet and it was pretty warm in the room. And sometimes when I get too warm, I can get a little light-headed. So, not wanting to pass out while holding a twelve-hour old infant, I asked my brother if he wanted to take a turn and hold the baby. David had been leaning forward looking at Shane, but immediately when I said this he put his hands up as if to block me, took several steps back, leaned back, and then sort of stretched his neck forward and said, “no thanks, I’m good. I can see him just fine from here.”

Tonight is the night that we celebrate the birth of our infant savior, and I don’t know about all of you, but after the last year, I don’t know if I feel like I’m ready to hold a baby tonight. It has been a difficult year of mixed messages and tangled thoughts. Concepts I’d long considered universal suddenly seem not only to be up for discussion, but to be legitimate grounds for disagreement. I find myself watching my words more and more, but not in ways that feel helpful or constructive. And when I have spoken, I can look back at a string of miscommunications and mixed messages, of things I should have said and didn’t, or did say and ought not to have. Times my feelings have been hurt, and when I have, intentionally or unintentionally, hurt others.

I’ve been talking on a personal scale, but this feels like a problem on a global scale, and part of my anguish with this year is a sense of powerlessness in the face of it. This does not seem like a place or a time where I feel confident welcoming something so tiny and frail as an infant.

I heard an interview last year, where a pastor in Texas talked about how he didn’t want “some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek.” In fairness, he was talking about political leaders, but I found myself both cringing from and relating to his words. Cringing, because for those of you who know me, it’s fairly obvious that this pastor and I have basically opposite theological and political opinions. But relating to, because I understood his desire to have someone just show up on the scene and fix things. Like the psalmist, I have found myself crying out to God this year, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come.” Come and fix this broken world, come and mend us broken people, come and solve all the hurt and the pain and the anger and bring us into your kingdom of peace. I want God to show up in this world and set things right. Make the bad people stop being bad, keep the oppressed people from being hurt, and just generally get this straight. The problem with this is as simple as recognizing that the pastor from Texas and I probably have very different ideas of what making things right might look like. So whose version of right would the meanest, toughest leader come to bring? And is it possible that both of our views of God’s kingdom have places where we’re right, and places where we’re not. The problem with might-based solutions is that they don’t have space for ambiguity. Might-based solutions by nature establish winners and losers, heroes and villains. If I am right, then you, by virtue of your disagreement, have to be wrong. But in the actual world we live in, it is rarely, I would say even never that clear. In our actual lives, there are no true heroes and villains. The greatest hero has some selfish edge, the worst villain has at some point been a victim. The world is not good and evil, it is varying shades of grey, and the might that we long for does not have space for such nuance to grow.

But tonight we celebrate that God did not come in might, God came in the way that is the only way for the best parts of our broken selves to thrive. God came in weakness and vulnerability and love. Tonight we celebrate that when the Creator of the Universe slipped into skin to enter into relationship with us, the skin God slipped into was the paper-thin almost translucent skin of a tiny baby. Not as an independent and powerful ruler did God come, but in the most dependent form of a refugee baby. God came in this way because might may bring submission, but only love can bring conversion. Only by creating a space of unconditional grace can we put aside our defenses and truly flourish.

It seems so counter-intuitive for God to have come in this way, but if we look back in our sacred scriptures, we can see that in weakness and vulnerability is always the way that God comes and transforms. God came to Abraham in travelers in need of shelter. God showed to Moses the cries of God’s people. Isaiah spoke of peace confirmed by the birth of a child who would be king. And it is in love and grace and ordinary miracles that God still comes to us today. In the waters of baptism, in the bread broken and wine poured of communion, our creative, redeeming, loving and infinite God slips again into tangible, finite form and comes to us today. Even as we look around a hurting world and long for God to come, we can take hope in the promise that God has already come, and is still here. In this place, in our lives, in this gathered community, we experience the promise of God made flesh among us. So tonight, when you gather around the altar, when you extend your hands to take the bread, to drink the wine, may you hear the soft voice of God whispering to you, “here I am, take your turn, hold the baby.” Amen.

Conversation Points for Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; and Titus 2:11-14

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Isaiah 9:2-7
• Isaiah is a complicated book to place in one specific time frame, because it is really a compilation of many sources, from as early as 1000 BCE to as late as the fourth or fifth centuries BCE. Isaiah 9:2-7 comes mainly from the time following the Syro-Ephraimitic War of 734 BCE. Prior to this time, Assyria (the massive empire to Israel’s north) had been engaged in internal conflicts that had kept them occupied for the early part of the 8th Century. When Tigleth-pileser III ursurped the throne, he brought order to Assyria and refocused them on external conquest, leading to Assyria’s conquest of Syria and the northern country of Israel in the Syro-Epraimitic War. Most of Isaiah 1-39 is oracles against the southern country of Judah, warning them that if they do not repent and straighten up their lives, they will go the same way as Israel.
• A bit of history. During the reign of Tigleth-pileser III, Ahaz was the king of Judah. Both Isaiah and 2 Kings present Ahaz as faithless and fearful because in the face of Assyrian aggression, Ahaz chose to become a vassal of the Assyrian empire rather than join with the kings of Damascus and Samaria to oppose Assyrian rule. After Ahaz’s death in 715 BCE, his son Hezekiah ascended the throne. Hezekiah is viewed by the Deuteronomistic histories (Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings) as one of the most important kings of Judah. Per 2 Kings 18:5, “there was no one like him among all the kings of Judah after him, or among those who were before him.” Part of the reason for Hezekiah’s importance was his faithfulness to the Deuteronomistic interpretation of proper religious life. From 2 Kings 18:3-4, 6, “[Hezekiah] did what was right in the sight of the Lord just as his ancestor David had done. He removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the sacred pole [places of idol worship]. He broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it; it was called Nehustan… He held fast to the Lord; he did not depart from following him but kept the commandments that the Lord had commanded Moses.” The other reason for Hezekiah’s importance was unlike his father, Hezekiah asserted Judah’s independence from Assyria. He was a daring nationalist who exploited the influx of refugees into Judah from the fall of Israel to the north to reestablish a central Judean monarchy.
• There are two major theories on the purpose for this poem. Some scholars see it as part of the coronation ritual for King Hezekiah. The more likely purpose is to announce the birth of a new crown prince, possibly still Hezekiah. Even with the impending threat of Assyria, the birth of a new descendant of David is a sign of God’s continued presence with and deliverance of God’s people.
• The poem structure is that of a hymn of thanksgiving. The first section outlines the trouble and what God has done (v. 2-3), and the second offers praise by listing the reasons for celebration (4-7). The first two reasons given for celebration are release from military and political danger. The third is also political, the birth of a new king who will bring a reign of justice and righteousness.
• The tense of this poem is the past (ex. “the people who walked,” “have seen,” “saw,” “you have shattered,” “a child has been born,” etc.). The only switch is in v. 7, “the zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.” This poem is about reflecting on what God has done in the past as a basis for confidence in what God will do in the future.
• Per Dr. Tucker: “The central message of this text is that the birth and its celebration are signs of hope, grounds for confidence in God’s future… In Isaiah’s view, God’s will for justice, righteousness, and peace is made flesh in the weakest of human creatures, a little baby.”
• The nature of a king’s reign, as described in Isaiah, is one of perpetual peace founded on justice and righteousness.

Psalm 96
• Psalm 96 is part of a collection of enthronement psalms, psalms that exalt God as King and emphasize God’s reign. As is typical for an enthronement psalm, Psalm 96 is structured as a song of praise, starting with an invitation to praise, and following with reasons for praise.
• One potential use for Psalm 96 was that it might have been sung in the Temple at the annual New Year festival (1 Chr 16:23-33 includes most of Psalm 96 as part of the praises accompanying David moving the ark of Jerusalem).

Titus 2:11-14
• Paul (or someone writing from the tradition of Paul) wrote this letter to Titus to encourage and guide him as he established a Christian church in Crete. The beginning of the letter deals mostly with basic ethics of behavior for church leaders. They are strict and can read as harsh to a modern audience. Parts of Titus have regularly been used to subjugate women and support slavery. Even dealing with the historical context, Titus seems to be very much about what we are to do instead of what God has done. It is very works oriented.
• So why read Titus? Because of these verses. These verses provide the theological framework to hang the behavior lesson. “Simply put, Christians should live in right relationship with each other and society because God’s grace, or gift (charis), has already appeared in the person of Jesus Christ, bringing salvation for all (understanding soterios, “bringing salvation,” in verse 11 as linked with soter, “Savior,” in verse 13; see also Titus 3:4).”
• There is action expected of believers, but v. 14 makes clear that action is not in order to earn salvation, but as a response to what God has done. “Christians are to be zealous for good deeds as a living, grateful expression of who they already are by divine grace: part of God’s chosen people.”

Works Sourced:
McCann Jr., J. Clinton. “The Book of Psalms.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IV. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996.

Pietz, Jenny. “Commentary on Titus 2:1-11.” Working Preacher. < http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3511>. Accessed: 20 December 2017.

Tucker, Gene M. “The Book of Isaiah 1-39.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VI. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2001.

Bearing Witness: A Sermon on John 1:6-8, 19-28

Of all the descriptions of John the Baptist in scripture, the version in John’s Gospel is my favorite. Yes, it lacks the colorful imagery of the crazy guy in the wilderness, wearing camel skins and eating bugs. But what it loses in memorability, it gains in relatability. The John the Baptist of the synoptic Gospels is someone who calls me to attention, but not someone I feel called to be. But this John, whose job is to testify to the light, that is a calling I can place myself in.

The testimony of John begins with the Jews sending an envoy out to the Jordan River to figure out what this John guy is up to. It’s important to note here, as it’s always important to remember when we’re reading the Gospel of John, that the word translated as “the Jews” almost always refers to the religious elite. The Greek word is hoi juidois, which literally translates “the Judeans.” When the Gospel says “the Jews,” it is not referring to a particular religious group, and it is certainly not referring to what we understand today to be the modern Jewish faith. “The Jews” in this story are the religious and political leadership whose power is being questioned by John’s message about a coming Lord. The conflict in this story is not between two competing religious ideas. This is a conflict about power, plain and simple. Who has it, who wants it, and who is afraid they might be losing it.

So this envoy came to John in the wilderness and asked him, “Who are you?” Remember, this is a story about power, so the answer the envoy was looking for was something they could use to accuse John of inciting rebellion. But instead of answering their question, John “confessed and did not deny, but confessed.” Which, as an aside, I always find to be a lot of build up, especially as John then doesn’t answer their question at all, but instead tells them who he is not, “I am not the Messiah.” Now Messiah in and of itself is a political term. The Hebrew word “messiah” refers to someone who was anointed by God to be king of Israel. Which, in the time of Rome’s occupation of Israel, was a direct challenge to the ruling authority. But more than just a political statement, there is a theological statement imbedded in this. The phrase “I am” is an important refrain in the Gospel of John. Jesus will say, “I am the bread of life,” “I am the gate for the sheep,” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” All of the “I am” statements help to build Jesus identity as the Son of God, by calling on the name God used in the Exodus story, when a voice from the burning bush told Moses, “I am who I am… Tell them that I am has sent you.” In contrast to the religious leaders’ thirst for power, John was very clear about his lack of it. In the question of who he was, all that mattered to John was who he was not, he was not the Word made flesh, he was not the Light, he was merely the one sent to testify to the light.

I use the word “merely” because it feels like John was deliberately clarifying his lower status to Jesus. But while John makes clear he was not the Messiah, we should not hear that as a lessening of John’s importance. Because John had a job in the bringing forth of the Kingdom of God, and it was a very important job, and John did it very well. John’s job was to testify, John’s job was to give witness. John testified to the truth that he knew, that the one coming after him was the one to be alert for, the one who was the Lamb of God, the salvation of the world.

What I find so powerful about John the Baptist’s witness is that it is a task in the salvation story that I can not only relate to, but understand and see my place in. So often when we read scripture, the stories call us to be like Jesus, to model our discipleship after Jesus. And don’t get me wrong, that’s right. As followers of Christ, we are supposed to follow Christ, to mold our lives after Christ’s example. But from a purely practical sense, Jesus did a whole lot of things that are just simply outside of my skill set. There are a lot of hungry people in the world, and with five loaves and two fish I cannot feed them. There are a lot of hurting people in the world, and as many times as I might lay hands on them, I cannot heal them. There is plenty of water in the world, and unless it is frozen, I cannot walk on it. I try my best to model my life after the life and teachings of Jesus, to care for the sick, to heal the hurting, to visit the imprisoned, and to love the outcast. But at the end of the day, I’m human, and my best efforts fall short. When I try to set Jesus as the bar for success, all I get is discouraged.

But when I get discouraged at how little I seem to be able to accomplish, it is John the Baptist who gives me hope. John reminds us that we do not need to save the world, because the world already has a savior. The world already has a savior, and the savior is not us. It’s Jesus. Our job is not to save the world, our job is to testify, is to give witness to the one who already has. We give witness through our actions, when we feed the hungry, cloth the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned, yes, but the value of those actions are not based on the actions themselves, they are based on the power those simple actions have to reveal the presence of Christ.

We witness in our actions, we also witness in our words, when we, like Jesus, give voice to those around us whose voices have been silenced, when we lift up the oppressed, and use our words and our witness to shed light in places of darkness. It may seem insignificant, like not enough, to speak out, but what John the Baptist promises is that our words and our witness have power. This year Time Magazine awarded its person of the year to a group they’re calling “the Silence Breakers,” the women who spoke out the violence they had experienced by men in power and in doing so unveiled the open secret of a culture violence fueled by misogyny and power. I say “open secret,” because when one in four women experience sexual assault, that this is a rampant problem in our society should not be a surprise. I have to tell you that ever since the person of the year announcement, I’ve been thinking differently about the text from the first Sunday of Advent, the one that talked about how the stars would be falling. I’ve always thought about the stars falling as frightening, but what if it’s not? What if the stars were falling because the stars were threats, and their fall made space for the Kingdom of Heaven to be revealed? I have been harassed and threatened because of my gender, and it causes me to move differently through the world, and I would guess that I am not alone in this room in making that statement. And while we have a long way to go, that sexual assault and harassment are on the table right now as viable topics for conversation makes me feel safer as a part of this society. And let’s be abundantly clear this is an issue of power, when I talk to the men in my life who I love and who love me, those men make it abundantly clear that insinuating violence against another human being is not locker room talk, and it’s not boys will be boys, it is abuse. It makes me feel safer now that the people who have used their power to keep others in fear are being called to account. Grace is not always peaceful, grace is the powerful convicting presence of God to bring down the mighty and lift up the lowly. The Kingdom of God has no space for those who prey on the weakness of others, and true grace is found in the courage to hold others accountable for their actions. Evil grows in secrecy and it can only be dismantled by being brought into view.

There is, of course, a danger to our witness. That is the flip side of the John the Baptist story. The word translated as “witness” or “testimony” is the Greek word martyria, where we get the English word “martyr.” Witnessing, testifying, to the truth can be dangerous. Think about John the Baptist, he was very clear that he was not the Messiah, not Elijah, not the Prophet, and he still ended up being killed on account of his witness.

There is danger, but when I look around the world I see the power of our witness outweighing the risk. Just in this building I think about how the Woman’s Co-op has given voice to poor and marginalized women in our community, and how those women have used their voices to change our community for the better. Street court, improved lighting and neighborhood safety, a real and concerted effort to bring job training and opportunities into neighborhood, attention to childcare, and the need for help navigating the justice system are just a few of the successes that their witness has brought to Battle Creek. Their witness and their courage to speak has made and is making a better community for us all. They are not the savior, but they are witnessing to their value as children of God, and their witness brings light to the darkness and reveals God’s presence in this place. Last Sunday Laurie shared how Faith Lutheran in Okemos is bearing witness by opening their church to be a family for refugee children, and we can bear witness by sharing their story, by sharing this conviction that children fleeing certain death are precious to God, and we as a denomination serve God by caring for and about them. It feels like a small action, six children against a huge crisis. But it is a witness to who God is and to how we believe God acts in the world. And, dear people of God, as John the Baptist assured us, it matters. It matters to God and it matters to the world. So in these waning days of Advent, as we await the coming of our infant savior, let us not be afraid to bear witness to the way God is already present in the world, and to the places where we still need God to be. Because the promise of this Gospel text is that wherever we bear witness, God is there. Amen.

Conversation Points for John 1:6-8, 19-28

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• John has a different role in the Gospel of John than he does in the synoptic Gospels. While he does baptize, he is never identified as “the Baptist,” nor is he ever described as the one who announces the coming of Jesus. Rather, his whole role is to witness to Jesus.
• The words translated as “testimony” and “witness” are the same Greek word, martyria. Interestingly, this is where the English word “martyr” comes from. In English, we think of a martyr as someone who is killed for their faith, but its Greek root is one who gives witness.
• John’s Gospel is set up as an extended courtroom scene, which gives “testimony” both religious and juridical dimensions. John’s testimony leads others to faith, but it also is offered as first evidence in the trial being held against Jesus, a trial which comes to its final scene in the Passion. The people questioning John are not curious passersby, but specifically a delegation sent by Jewish leaders.
• The Johaninne community had a complicated relationship with the more traditional Jewish community, especially the Jewish leadership. As such, the phrase “the Jews” (hoi Ioudaioi) has a lot of different meanings in John’s Gospel. Sometimes it means just a group of Judean people. However, most often it relates specifically to the religious leaders who were in cahoots with Rome and were persecuting Jesus, and later the Johaninne community, as is the case with this group sent to interrogate John.
• The central question of the interrogation is the identity of John, a question which must be solved before the central question of the whole Gospel, who is Jesus, can be addressed.
• The language of John’s response (“He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed”) communicates the seriousness of John’s response.
• The Greek of John’s answer (I am not the Messiah), is a specific contrast to the language Jesus used to speak of his own identity. Several times in John’s Gospel, Jesus will use the phrase “I am…” (ex. “I am the bread of life,” “I am the gate for the sheep,” etc.). I am (ego eimi) is meant to evoke the name of God from the Old Testament, when God, speaking to Moses from the burning bush said, “I am who I am.” John uses the same phrasing to say who he is not (ego ouk eimi).
• When John answers “Who are you” by saying he is not the Messiah, the delegation then inserts other prophets with potential messianic expectations. Elijah didn’t die, but was transported to heaven, and many Jews believed he would return to usher in the new age. “The prophet” is a reference to Moses.

Works Sourced:
O’Day, Gail R. “The Gospel of John.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.

The Beginning: A Sermon on Mark 1:1-8

Advent one is always a bit of a weird start to the Christmas season. But we’re past it now, and into Advent two. And Advent two in Mark starts right where it seems like it ought, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The beginning. One could wonder why the lectionary waits until the second week of Advent for the beginning, but hey, we’re here now. And since it’s Advent, since it’s the season we are preparing for Christmas, preparing for the birth of Christ, “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ” means its time to get ready for some manger scenes, right. Time for angels appearing to Joseph and Mary, or the appearance of a star, or at the very least, some shepherds. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, starts with the birth of Jesus Christ, after all.

Except in Mark, it doesn’t. One of the things that sets Mark apart from Matthew and Luke is there is no birth narrative in Mark. No angels, no journey to Bethlehem, no wise men. In fact, Mark doesn’t even begin with Jesus at all. In Mark, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ actually begins in the Judean wilderness, with John. And John, at least at first glance, does not seem like all that good of a starting place for a narrative that purports to be good news. Just a few of the knocks against him. One, he’s dressed weird. Folk in the first century dressed differently than we do today, but even then camel’s hair was not a first choice for garments. It is as scratchy and uncomfortable as you might imagine. Two, his diet. Who wants to hang out with the guy who’s eating bugs for lunch? There is no amount of honey that makes a locust seem appetizing. Three, his location. The historically recognized location of Jesus’ baptism is remote even by first century standards. It is a section of the Jordan river just a little bit north of the Dead Sea, an area of trackless desert wilderness, marked by rough and rugged terrain, extreme heat, and a decided lack of things considered necessary for human life, namely food and water. The location raises the interesting question of what the locusts that John ate were eating. There is barely food for insects out there, let alone the throngs of people who flocked to the river to be baptized by John. And last, but maybe the strongest knock against John the Baptist. John came preaching a message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The word translated as repentance is the Greek word metanoia, which literally means to be turned around and go in a different direction. The idea of baptism as ritual washing was not new to John; most major religions have some sort of a practice of ritual washing. What was unique about John’s message was the idea that this baptism would change those who experienced it. The message was not “repent and be baptized,” but “be baptized and be repented, be turned, be reoriented to a new way of being.” This invitation to be reoriented in a different direction seems like many not the smartest invitation to accept from the crazy guy eating bugs and yelling in the wilderness. This might be the reason for the decided lack of John the Baptist themed Christmas cards. Why highlight John, when if we hold out just a couple of weeks there will be a cute baby, fluffy sheep, and angels? Even camels seem like a better Hallmark card then the guy in camel hair with a mouth full of locusts.

But I actually think the greeting card industry is the poorer for its lack of John the Baptist Christmas cards, and here’s why. I think John the Baptist offers us a powerful message of hope that babies and mangers and fluffy sheep just can’t give us. Or at least, can’t give us alone. I think John the Baptist, as the words from the prophet Isaiah assert, offers us a messenger who helps us see what we might have otherwise missed, the gift of the Christ child born among us, and how much we desperately need this infant God.

One of the unique traits of humans is that we are incredibly adaptable. Scientists say we may be the most adaptable species on earth. Think about it, there is not another species on the planet whose range stretches from above the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America and everywhere in between. We can live in the most rural of settings, and we can live in densely populated urban areas. We adapt to our surroundings, and our surroundings become normal. I experienced our innate adaptability in college. As you know, I grew up in California, and the winter of my freshman year of college was the first real winter of my life. On the first really nice day in the spring, you know, that first day when it’s legitimately warm, and everyone blows off whatever they were doing in favor of wearing shorts and being outside, I called a friend back in California. Wow, I told him, it’s such a gorgeous day here today, so warm and sunny. Really, he replied, it’s pretty cold here. That’s weird, I said, what’s the temperature? Sixty-five. I looked at the weather gauge. Huh, I remarked, it’s sixty-two here.

The gift of this adaptability is that we can survive, even thrive, in a large number of places. But like any gift, there can also be a downside. And that downside is we can normalize things that really shouldn’t become normal. Like the metaphorical frog in a pot slowly raised to boiling, we can adapt to situations that are not actually healthy for us, but because they are all we know, they can seem normal. We can normalize fear, normalize pain, normalize injustice and violence and suffering, until it seems like it is just the way of the world, and there’s nothing we can do to change it.

That is why we need John the Baptist to come in and shake up our complacency. John the Baptist shows up right in the middle of our status quo with this message of hope that a Savior is coming. His unexpected appearance and urgent calls to prepare the way, to make straight the paths, to repent and to be turned, startles us to attention and opens us to see the subtle grace of the one whose power is displayed in humility and weakness. Around this time of year, we often hear the question, would we recognize Jesus if he came today, a refugee infant born to an unwed teenage mother. The answer, of course, is no, and while it’s a good question, I don’t think it is a fair one. No, we would not recognize Jesus, but neither did the people in the time that Christ was born. We won’t, we can’t recognize Jesus, it is the very nature of Jesus to be an outsider, and that is why God first sent us John the Baptist. Jesus’ arrival was not designed to be some great secret to be known only to those who were paying attention. God knew we were not going to be expecting the birth of the Word mad flesh, and had promised since the days of old, that we would not miss it, because first there would be a messenger to prepare the way. John’s whole job is to make us alert to the one who is coming, to startle us into awareness. That’s the first piece of good news at the start of Mark’s gospel. We won’t miss Jesus, because John whole purpose is to be impossible to miss.

But wait, you may be arguing. Sure John is a crazy character, but one of the knocks against him was his location. So there’s still a fair amount of sleuthing and effort that has to go into this, the crowds had to go out into the middle of the trackless Judean wilderness. It may be a baptism of repentance, but we still have to get to the river. Well, yes and no. The key to this is the little word “of” in that first verse of Mark, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ. The “of” in English is what is known in Greek as the genetive case. The genetive case indicates close association or belonging. What this means is that the good news of Jesus was not the message Jesus was bringing, it was the very presence of Jesus himself. Jesus, the God made flesh, was, is, the embodied good news. If Jesus had said nothing at all, had just shown up in anonymity, died and been raised, he would still have been the good news. Everything Jesus did on earth, all his teaching, his healings, every word and action, all of that was just extra, just bonus, just icing on the cake of the salvation of the world. The message John brought to the middle of the wilderness, as much as it was about Jesus, was not the good news, it was just an announcement of the coming of the good news. The good news, the only good news that mattered, was not news at all in the way we think of it. It was a person, Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.

The other thing that’s key is role of John’s location. Like most settings in the Gospels, John’s location was as much theological as it was geographical. John’s appearance in the wilderness placed John in a long line of the prophets of old whose stories were centered in the wilderness. Moses, Elijah, and David, to name a few, all announced the presence of God in the middle of the wilderness. What John’s location assures us is that salvation comes out of the wilderness. Not just physical, but social, emotional, spiritual. Moses led people from slavery to freedom through wilderness, Elijah found water and never-ending wheat, David escaped his enemies and even his own evil deeds. John’s location promises us that God meets us in the wilderness, wherever it is, with a message so strong, so powerful, so strange, and so compelling, that we cannot miss the one who is to come. This is the promise God makes to us this advent. Into the wilderness of our lives, the savior of the world is coming. No matter how lost or alone or afraid we might feel. Or on the flip side how accustomed we may have gotten to our own brokenness, Jesus is coming here to save us. And don’t worry, you won’t miss it. Because John is coming first, and he will make sure that you don’t. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Conversation Points for Mark 1:1-8

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark 1:1
• V. 1 seems to be a title for the whole Gospel. There is a lot packed into this one sentence, so this first section is going to look closely at just this one verse.
• The opening word “beginning” (arche), could refer to either a temporal beginning (the beginning of Jesus’ ministry) or the opening of a narrative (the beginning of this account of Jesus ministry).
• The phrase translated as “good news” in the NRSV, is the Greek word euangelion. Another common translation of euangelion is “gospel.” Although we commonly associate the word gospel with the four gospels in the Bible, as a narrative account of Jesus’ life and ministry, the word in the original Greek means “good news” or “proclamation.” The English “gospel” comes from the Old English “god” meaning “good”, “spel” meaning “story” or “message.” This word next appears in v. 14, when Jesus began to travel around Galilee at the start of his preaching ministry. In the letters of Paul, the word gospel refers to the preaching message of Jesus as the source of salvation.
• “of Jesus Christ” is written in what is called the genitive case, which is a case in the Greek language that indicates possession or close association. This indicates that Jesus himself is the good news, not that Jesus is delivering a record of the good news.
• “Christ” (Christos) is a Greek word for the Hebrew messiah or anointed one. [Totally unrelated fun fact: the “ch” sound in the Greek alphabet is the letter chi, which looks like this χ. It is where the abbreviation Merry X-mas comes from, the X standing for the Greek chi, the first letter in the word Christ. If someone tells you that “Merry X-mas” is a war on Christmas, explain to them that they are not well-versed in their knowledge of Koine Greek. I’m sure that will go over swimmingly, but you will be right]. In the first century, the term Christ often referred to a person who claimed to be a political leader in the Davidic tradition, essentially a claim to the kingship of Israel. This would have been a basis for execution based on the political threat to the Empire. The gospels use Christ as a title to indicate that Jesus was the anointed one of God (Hebrew messiah).
• The second title assigned in this sentence is “Son of God.” For early Christians, the title “messiah/Christ” and “Son of God” were closely associated. The expression has origins in ancient Israel’s understanding of the close relationship between God and the Davidic kings. The Davidic kings were understood as sons of God by adoption. In the gospels, first here in Mark and then in the others, the title “Son of God” takes on the meaning we are familiar with today, connoting Jesus’ unique relationship with God the Father, and the divinity of Jesus.
• The first thing Mark does after starting his telling of the good news of Jesus is to connect it to the Old Testament prophesies about salvation. The citation attributed to Isaiah is actually a combination of the reference to a messenger in Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah’s description of the wilderness in Isaiah 40:3.
• Other Old Testament imagery is found in the description of John himself. His clothing is reminiscent of Elijah in 2 Kings 1:8 (“a hairy man, with a leather belt around his waist”), and his diet, locusts and honey instead of meat and wine, call to mind Daniel 1:8. • The wilderness is an important location theologically. In the Old Testament, salvation usually comes from the wilderness. The wilderness is a setting in the stories of Moses, Elijah, and David.
• The idea of baptism as a ritual washing was not unique to John. What was unique was the idea of baptism as a vehicle for repentance and forgiveness. Also unique about John’s baptism was the idea that it was not an individual purification ritual but a way that a community was gathered and created.

Works Sourced:
Perkins, Pheme. “The Gospel of Mark.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.

From the Ends of the Earth: A Sermon on Mark 13:24-37

The text for the first Sunday in Advent always seems so out of place. After all, it’s Advent, it’s the season where we are all eagerly preparing for the birth of the baby Jesus, and the text for the first Sunday of Advent always sounds terrifying. All of the talk of days of suffering, darkened sun, and the powers in the heavens being shaken. At least, read out of context, they sound terrifying. But the word advent means coming into being. This season is not actually about waiting patiently for the historical birthday of a cute baby a long time ago, it is about the long expected promise that Christ is coming to us, today, in the flesh. And when we look around us at the suffering of God’s people in the world today, we probably find that we share in Isaiah’s hope that God in fact would “tear open the heavens and come.” Viewed in that lens, we find that these seemingly frightening texts are not just good news, but deep and powerful hope for us. So let’s take a few minutes now and orient ourselves to both the time of the Gospel of Mark, and to the time in Jesus’ ministry that he was speaking. Because, like all of the Gospels, Mark too is written to function on many levels, on the level of the historical life of Jesus, the level of the disciples who followed after Jesus, and as good news for our own lives.

First let’s look at Mark. Since we’ll be spending the next year with him, it’s good to orient ourselves to his context. The Gospel of Mark was the first of the four Gospels to be written, most scholars date it from during the time of the Roman-Jewish War, between 66 and 70 CE. This was a war so violent that the ancient scholar Josephus described the streets as running with blood. Also during this time the great Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance the Temple played in the life of first century Judeans. More than just a place of worship, it was the social and political center of life. And as the center of religious life, that too cannot be overstated. If our church was destroyed, it would be hard and we would be sad, but our faith could survive. After all, as important as this building is, it is in the end just a building. But for the first century Judeans, the Temple was not just a building, it was the literal home of God. The destruction of the Temple called into question the very existence of God. For Mark’s original audience, the line about “the powers in the heavens [being] shaken” was not metaphorical, it was happening before their very eyes with the threat to the Temple.

So when Mark’s audience heard that when the sun was darkened, and the stars were falling, and the powers in the heavens were shaking, then the Son of Man was coming in glory, that news brought not terror but hope. Imagine yourself in their shoes. The uneasy peace that you’ve existed under for so long is over, and Rome, the most powerful force in the entire world is standing at the gates of the city ready to destroy everything you hold dear. Not just your home, not just your family, not even just your life, but even your God, your faith, your source of being, is facing destruction. Imagine that everything you know and love, everything you use to make meaning of this world, is crumbling around you, and then hear Mark say that the Son of Man is coming in glory, and that “he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heaven.” This is a powerful promise that you have not been forgotten and you cannot be lost. From the four winds, from the ends of the earth and even to the ends of the heaven, that is how far God will go to gather up God’s people. Notice there is no judgment language in Mark’s account of this gathering. The focus is not on what we need to do, it is completely and totally on the all-encompassing, overreaching expanse of God’s power. The sun cannot darken enough, the heavens cannot shake enough, for you to be in a place where God cannot find you.

The same promise holds true when we read it in the time of Jesus’ message to his disciples. Like the reading from last week, this reading is Jesus final speech before the Passion narrative begins. The start of chapter fourteen places this two days before the Passover; we’re two days out from the crucifixion. The disciples don’t know it yet, but they are about to enter a time when it feels like the sun has darkened, the stars are falling, and the powers in heaven are shaken, when they see their leader and teacher handed over to the Romans and put to death before their eyes. And what the disciples won’t know, but we know, is that indescribable truth that Jesus’ death on the cross is in fact his coming in glory. The cross is the place where the power of God is made known; it is from the cross that God gathers up the elect, from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens. The disciples wouldn’t believe it for three days, but we can find hope in it now, that the powers in heaven are shaken by the power and the glory and the might of God, who will not allow even death to stand in the way of drawing near God’s people.

It was good news then, and it is good news now. Because all of us can think of a time when we felt the earth shift beneath our feet. All of us can imagine that moment when everything we thought we knew was gone. The middle of the night phone call, the frightening diagnosis, the knock at the door. And all we need to do is look at the paper or turn on the television, and we can see that moment happening in the lives of others. The crisis in Myanmar, the epidemic of sexual assault, the continued growing threat of North Korea, heroin and gun violence in our own communities, we do not have to look far to feel like the sun is darkened and the starts falling, and the very powers of heaven are shaking. And what these first Sunday of Advent texts promise us is that the Son of Man is coming. Not as a soft, cuddly baby, though babies are nice. But the Son of Man is coming in power and glory. The God who formed the universe, who shaped the heavens, and who called creation into being will tear open those same heavens to get to us, to be with us. No matter what is happening in your life, what fear you are holding, what grief you are carrying, what uncertainty you are staring into, the promise of this passage is that you will be gathered up by the Son of Man, because from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heaven, that is how far God will go to get to you.

So keep awake, the reading from today ended. Keep awake, because we do not know the day or the hour. Read in a single moment in time, this too can seem frightening, keep awake or you might miss it. But think about it throughout the scope of history. The disciples missed it, the first time they saw the Son of Man come in glory on the cross. But that didn’t stop Jesus from rising from the dead. The first readers of Mark probably missed it, when the Temple was destroyed and they wondered if God had been destroyed too, but God was not destroyed and God did not leave them. When bad things happen and heaven feels like it’s shaking, it can be hard to feel the presence of God around us, but this command to keep awake invites us to look for the places where God’s glory is still shining. To even at the grave say Alleluia, because we know that God’s power is still triumphing. As the great theologian Mr. Rogers once said, when we see scary things we can “look for the helpers,” and know that God is still in control.

This text is not just good news for the disciples, who would see God’s glory displayed on the cross. It was not just good news for Mark’s readers, who could watch the destruction of the Temple and know that God was still with them. And it is not just good news for us today, when we feel the earth shake beneath our feet and hold on to the promise of Christ’s victory over death. It is also good news for the future. Because what this text promises us is that God is unshakably in control. We live in the liminal already and not yet, already Christ is with us, and not yet has God’s kingdom come. And this passage declares that God’s kingdom will come. “Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words” this declaration of God’s presence us, “will not.” It is this coming, this powerful, unshakable rending of the earth to come to us, to be with us, that we await this advent season. Thanks be to God, who has not, will not, and will never leave us. Amen.

Conversation Points for Mark 13:24-37

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• As we switch from Matthew to Mark, let’s first orient ourselves into the Markan Gospel. Written around the time of the Jewish War (66-70 CE), Mark is believed to be the first of the Gospels to be written. Matthew and Luke both pull heavily from Mark in setting the action and order of the narrative. Mark’s Gospel is characterized by a sense of urgency. “Immediately” is a key word in the narrative. Another uniquely Markan trait is the “messianic secret.” Jesus often urged his disciples and others to “tell no one” about who he was or what he was doing.
• Mark 13 especially seems to be addressing the time in which it was written, the unrest and uncertainty of the Jewish War. David Hellholm calls this “crisis literature,” written to address a particular crisis moment in which the righteousness of God is called into question. The destruction of the Temple was just such a moment. The Temple was not only the religious, but also the social and political center of Jewish life. Its destruction called into question whether God was, or could be, still present with the people of Israel. Mark 13 sought to assure its listeners that even though in this moment of the destruction of the Temple it felt as if “the sun [was] darkened, and the moon [would] not give its light, and the stars [were] falling from heaven, and the powers of the heaven [were] shaken” (Mark 13:24-25), God was still with them, and “the Son of Man [would still be] coming in clouds with great power and glory” (Mark 13:26).
• The images in v. 24-27 pull from a variety of common prophetic sayings (cf. Isaiah 13:10; 34:4; Ezekiel 32:7-8; Joel 2:10-11; 3:4, 15). The coming of the Son of Man in v. 26 and the gathering of all the elect in v. 27 encourage the followers of Jesus not to concern themselves with what will happen to their enemies. No explicit judgment occurs in Mark’s apocalyptic account. Instead they are to focus on their own participation and the promise that no one will be left out when the Son of Man comes.

Works Sourced:
Jacobsen, David Schnasa. “Commentary on Mark 13:24-37.” Working Preacher. . Accessed: 27 November 2017.
Perkins, Pheme. “The Gospel of Mark.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Powell, Mark Allan. Fortress Introduction to the Gospels. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998.

Ordinary Miracles: A Sermon on Matthew 25:31-46

Today is the New Year’s Eve of the liturgical calendar. Next Sunday we switch from Matthew to Mark and start the cycle of Year B readings. I used to always feel like we should celebrate Christ the King Sunday with some sort of a bang. The white vestments and the weird readings always seemed to warrant that. And I will admit, I was probably also swayed by the way calendar year New Year’s Eve is celebrated. If the world gets fireworks and streamers for New Year, how come the church doesn’t?

But I actually don’t really like or care about New Year’s Eve. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like fireworks and streamers as much as the next guy. But I don’t really like being cold or staying up late or traffic, so the whole holiday ends up kind of anti-climactic to me. I would much rather be in bed at a decent hour, and then wake up and watch the Rose Parade in my pajamas. It hasn’t helped that last year New Year’s Day was a Sunday, and the year before that I had the flu, so I’ve totally gotten out of the habit of New Year’s Eve anyway.

The other thing I struggle with about the New Year is that I’m not a big resolution person. As you have probably noticed from my ministry style here, I prefer slow, measured consistent steps to big, bold moves. I’m a marathon runner, and you don’t train for a marathon by all of a sudden going out and running twenty miles. You build it, one mile at a time. So for me, part of the New Year is two weeks of riding out the sudden increase in Y membership until I can consistently snag a treadmill again.

Before you think I’ve become some grumpy, fun-hater, there is one thing I love about New Year. I love the retrospectiveness of the holiday. I love the invitation to look back on the year, both the joys and the sadness, and to think deeply about what those next small, consistent steps will be, so that in this next year, the joys will be increased and the sadnesses decreased. I don’t tend to make New Year’s Resolutions, as those feel too big and overwhelming to my fairly risk averse temperament. But I do love a good “January resolution.” I like to use this holiday think about what is the next small thing I should tackle. This tends to lead to a resolution list like, “get a haircut, get new shoes, get a mattress.” But let me tell you, as unexciting as that list sounds, those three resolutions marked the start of the year I was called to be pastor here, so that year turned out pretty darn awesome.

All this to say, I’ve been changing my mind recently on how to celebrate Christ the King Sunday. Part of that shift comes from the design of the liturgical calendar itself.

What you’ll notice about this calendar is that it is a circle. Each year and season does not stand in isolation to each other, but we can look clockwise around the circle to see where we’re going, Advent into Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and so on. And looking back we can see how we got here, Easter coming out of Lent, Lent contrasting with Epiphany, the light of Epiphany the afterglow of the birth of Christ.

Today we are right here, this little white wedge of Christ the King Sunday. And looking at its place in the calendar we can see how it is just another piece of our journey, the shift between the harvest of the end of the season of the church and the stillness of beginning of the season of Christ. In fact the readings of late November and the readings of Advent don’t even differ all that much from each other, despite coming from different Gospels. We pick up next week in Mark just about where we leave off this week in Matthew. Some liturgical scholars have stopped making the distinction altogether, morphing the end of November and the beginning of December together in a season of apocalyptic hopefulness, an unveiling of the promise of the coming of the Savior.

Apocalypse literally means unveiling. From the Greek apo meaning under and kalypto meaning veil or covering, these apocalyptic Matthew and Mark readings are Jesus’ final revelation to the disciples before his crucifixion of who he is and what the coming kingdom of heaven will be. This morning’s reading gives us a vision of that kingdom. Like all of Jesus’ parables, the intention here is for us to read this seriously but not literally. With this image, Jesus offers the disciples, offers us, a peek behind the curtain into the promised reign of God.

The reading starts out with a grand vision. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him…” This description conjures for me a vast throne room bedecked in gold, stretching beyond measure with people from all corners of the globe. From this vast array of humanity, the Son of Man begins to sort the sheep from the goats. And here we have to acknowledge a bit of a translation error. Verse thirty-two in the NRSV reads, “All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another…” This makes it sound like a separating of individuals. But the Greek doesn’t have the word “people,” the Greek reads “he will separate them,” the “them” being the nations. So the judgment described here isn’t a judgment of individuals, but of the collective whole. The question to ask ourselves is not what did I do, but what did we do? How well did we, collectively, as a community, as a nation, as the world, do in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger? Yet again, Jesus described a relationship that is not individual, but collective. As God so long ago pronounced to Cain, we are our brothers’ keepers. Rugged individualism has no place in the kingdom of heaven. We are responsible for each other, for caring for each other, for lifting each other up, and also for holding each other accountable. An interesting thing I didn’t know until Laurie pointed it out to me, Christ the King Sunday is a fairly recent holiday. It was established by Pope Pius the Sixth in 1925, at a time when rising global nationalism was becoming an increasing concern. As nations increasingly turned inward, putting their own needs above the needs of the global community, Pope Pius’ hope for the holiday was that it would help remind us that Christ is our King, and that both the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of this world are under the sovereignty of God.

But what strikes me the most about this reading is the sheep’s response to being blessed. “When was it,” they asked, “when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink, a stranger and we welcomed you, sick or in prison and visited you?” When was it that we did these things? And the goats too, when they were accursed asked, “When was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?” When would we have not done such a thing? The amazing thing about the required tasks is the overwhelming ordinariness of them. So simple, so commonplace were the events that led to judgment that neither side recognized them. The sheep didn’t know the power of their simple acts, while the goats missed simple opportunities as they looked for something greater.

Both the hope and the challenge of this description of judgment is that Jesus isn’t asking us to change the world here. Or, he is, but he’s asking us to do it in simple ways. The sheep weren’t sheep because they figured out the solution to world peace or ended hunger or brought an end to oppression. They were sheep because they fed, clothed, cared for, visited, the people immediately in front of them. These small acts of care are insignificant on an individual scale, but remember Jesus wasn’t talking on an individual scale, he was talking about nations. It may not matter much to the world if I feed one hungry person. But if I feed one hungry person, and you do, and you do, and you do, and then those once hungry people who are now no longer hungry also go out and start feeding people, that’s the way change happens. There isn’t a magic formula for bringing about the kingdom of God; rather this story describes it as a million tiny actions, a million little gestures, that one by one change the course of our existence.

So as we gather here this morning, on this closing of one church year and the dawning of another, the invitation this passage offers to us is to reflect back on the year with wonder. What were the overlooked acts that may have been part of the unveiling of the kingdom of God? We did a lot of things this year. Things we may not realize mattered as much as they will prove to matter. We increased our welcome to neighborhood kids. We became the neighborhood spot for fresh vegetables. We built tighter relationships with the Co-op and St. Peter in Family Camp. We put in new furnaces, and soon a new roof. We joined together just last week with over eighty people to celebrate the joint ministry of Trinity and Co-op.

And the flip side of New Year, the looking forward. If these are our reflections, what are the next small steps we are being called to take? This passage allows us to resist the temptation to become overwhelmed by the seeming size of the work and instead focus on the next small victory. Where are we going from here? Who is the next one hungry, thirsty, sick, lonely, or in prison person whom we are being called to serve? The apocalypse, the unveiling of the kingdom of heaven is not one grand gesture, but a million tiny peeks until the whole creation is revealed. This apocalypse has been happening since the beginning of creation, and it will continue until all is clothed in God’s glory. So this year, dear people of God, what small revelation are we being called to uncover? For the mystery of God is in the power of the ordinary miracle. Amen.

Conversation Points for Matthew 25:31-46

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• This is it! The last words of the last discourse, the climactic point to which Matthew has carefully built. This scene is not a parable, it is an apocalyptic drama. Before we proceed, let’s unpack the word “apocalypse.” It is not, as commonly portrayed, a cataclysmic battle at the end of time. The Greek apokalpsis comes from the Greek apo meaning “under” and kalypto meaning “covering.” Apocalypse literally means uncovering or revealing, in religious terms it usually means the disclosure of something that had been kept hidden or secret. At the very end of his earthly ministry, Jesus reveals for the disciples what the judgment day will look like. Again, in story form, so we have to resist the urge to read it literally. But we can and should read it seriously. Jesus’ final words highlight for his disciples the importance of seemingly ordinary, this-worldly deeds.
• One of the major themes of Matthew’s Gospel is the conflict between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of the world. In this final image, Jesus reveals that the conflict of the two kingdoms is not the ultimate reality. There is, in fact, only one kingdom, the kingdom ruled by God.
• This image’s focus on humanitarianism comes not out of a general preference by God for being a good person, but is a mark of who Jesus is. Humanitarianism is a descriptor of Christology, not the other way around. Yes, we are to care for our neighbor, but it is because who Jesus is, not because love and mercy are nice things.
• For Matthew, the criteria for salvation is not right belief or correct confession of faith, but action. What counts is how one has behaved toward people in need.

Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.

Everything to Gain: A Sermon on Matthew 25:14-30

Not going to lie, my first read through of this story is always, huh? I’m never quite sure what to make of the conclusion, which seems so different from the rest of the Gospel. How did Jesus, who earlier said “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,” also say, “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” It just doesn’t seem like the same guy.

Because there are so many sayings and stories of Jesus, it is tempting, even easy, to pick and choose our favorites and downplay the ones we find more uncomfortable. To focus on the Beatitudes, or the healing miracles, or his clear preference for the outsider, and to pay less attention to all the stories that end with that classic Matthean phrase “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

But the parable of the talents and the determined sower of seed are the same person. Jesus told all of these stories. The seeming harshness of this story is no less a truth of the kingdom of God as the feeding of the five thousand. But it is also no more a truth than that. It is a piece of the picture that Jesus is painting. An important piece, but just a piece. And we know that Jesus spoke in parables because stories expand our imaginations to hear deeper truths than explanations ever could. This balanced perspective invites us to wonder, what is the piece Jesus was unveiling here, and how to we allow this piece to both change our understanding and be changed.

We hear this parable at the very end of Jesus’ ministry. After the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, after sparring with the Pharisees in the Temple, Jesus gathered his disciples together for one final lecture. The parable of the talents is from the end of that lecture. Just a few verses later, in chapter twenty-six, Jesus and his disciples will gather for a meal in an upper room. And we all know where the story goes from there. They break bread, they go to a garden, Jesus is betrayed, he is beaten, and he is killed. We have reached the end of the road. There is nothing else between this parable and the passion story. So given the location, and the urgency of the moment, what might be Jesus’ reason for telling this story?

Fun fact for you, the English word talent, meaning an innate skill or ability, derives its etymology from the Greek word talaton. This parable is very much a story about money, but even back at the creation of the English language, theologians already had a sense that Jesus had more going on. And the Greek talaton, here translated “talent” was no insignificant amount of money. A talent, you may remember, was the largest currency denomination in circulation, equal to about fifteen years wages for a day laborer. The amount of money in question here immediately raises the extravagant impossibility of this story. Even the slave who received one talent was given an impossibly generous gift. For the one who received five, the amount is astronomical. And then to take that five and turn it into another five, that’s one-hundred and fifty years worth of wages. The scope of the gift is inconceivable.

The other thing you may or may not have noticed about this parable is that no instruction was given to the three slaves. The story simply says the master “entrusted his property to them… each according to his ability. Then he went away.” The question then becomes, what was intended by the word “entrusted.” Entrust simply means to give responsibility to. Given the simplest definition of the word, the third slave absolutely completed the task. When the master returned, he was able to give back the amount of money given to him. At no point during the master’s absence was the money at risk of being lost or mishandled. One could question the third slave’s tactfulness, “I knew that you were a harsh man” is possibly not the best thing to say to one’s boss, but still, one cannot argue that the entrusted sum was kept safe.

The same degree of safety cannot be said for the money entrusted to the first and second slaves. Yes, in the end, they both were able to double the amount given, but I don’t know a single investment strategy that offers that high a reward without an equal or even greater risk. The first and second slaves too were entrusted with the master’s money, to an even larger degree than the third slave, and while their gambles paid off, it cannot be argued that it was a gamble. Now, one certainly could interpret “entrust” to mean “return this better than it was when you got it,” but it is not the safest interpretation. Any number of things could have gone wrong, that could given this story a very different conclusion. We can only wonder what the master’s response might have been, had the first and second slaves returned with nothing to show for their efforts, while the third slave triumphantly handed over his carefully guarded talent, with only a bit of dirt to show for its time away from the master’s possession.

We can only wonder, but in the end, the wondering doesn’t really matter, because that is not the story Jesus told, this is. We know in the real world that gambles don’t always pay off, that risks don’t always lead to rewards, but in the story Jesus told, they do. So what is the carry over from the world of the parable to the real world of Jesus’ disciples?

The parable tells of a man going on a journey. And what we know, though the disciples do not yet, is that Jesus himself was preparing for a journey. A journey not to a far off country; but through betrayal, suffering, and death itself. A journey that will lead through the cross, to resurrection, to accession, and beyond. A journey that, even today, has been completed by Jesus, but is not yet fulfilled until he comes again glory. So the question for the disciples is not about finances, but is what will we do with the extravagant gift which we have been given, this gift beyond measure, this gift of relationship with Christ? Will we, out of fear of losing it, hid it away and try to keep it safe? Or will we risk loosing it all, for the promise of greater reward? I almost wonder if the “ability” the parable referred to is not the ability to make skilled investments but the ability to rise beyond fear to trust. Do we trust the rest of the teachings of Jesus? That the poor, the meek, the merciful are blessed, that the kingdom of heaven is like yeast, that five loaves and two fish can feed a multitude, and that the people most in need of care are the ones most ignored by the world? Are we able to get beyond fear and trust that? Or are we so captive by fear that like the third slave we grumble, “we know you are a harsh man,” and we hid what little we have been given away, believing that if we fail, there will be no chance for forgiveness or redemption?

Of course, the twist in this story is that in the end, when the third slave hid the talent in the ground, it was at least there for him to find again. Imagine what would have happened if the disciples, held captive by the fear of Jesus’ death on the cross, had been unable to gather the courage to go to the tomb. Had never again shared his teachings with another person. Had kept the treasure of this relationship hidden among themselves out of fear of losing it. Had the disciples held their knowledge of Christ hidden they would not, like the third slave, have preserved it as is. They would have in fact lost it all. When Christ comes again, he would not have needed to take away what they had and give it to another, for they would have had nothing left. The weird truth of the kingdom of heaven is the only way to preserve it is to risk losing it all, trusting in the promise that forgiveness, redemption, and resurrection always follows even the darkest loss.

This parable is challenge for us, because it tells us that being a “good and faithful” servant in this time between Christ has come and Christ will come again is about taking initiative and being willing to risk it all. Faithfulness is not strict obedience to a set of instructions, for as much as we might wish it were so, no instructions were given. Nor is it about passively waiting for the day when Christ will come again and fix all of the things that are broken. Rather, this parable tells is that being a good and faithful servant is about wading into the brokenness, trying something, even if it may be the wrong thing, and hoping against all hope that the reward was worth the risk.

And the courage to take that risk comes from the fact that, unlike the third slave, this parable is not the only story we have. We know from the entire rest of the Bible that the slave’s description of the master was wrong. God is not “a harsh man,” or at least, that is not all God is. We hold this parable in tension with the words of Jonah, God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” And the Psalmist, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.” Even our other readings for today highlight that tension. In Zephaniah, the “Lord is bitter,” and in Psalm ninety “the Lord is our dwelling place.” In Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, the day of the Lord is both “a thief in the night” and “the hope of our salvation.” All of these descriptors are simultaneously true.

Dear brothers and sisters, the time of playing it safe has passed, if it ever really existed. And one of the things I love about being the pastor at Trinity, is you all know it already. You know the way we’ve always done things doesn’t work anymore. I tell my colleagues that as hard as redevelopment work can be, I feel blessed to be doing it, because we already know the ship of how its always been done is sinking, so we don’t have to waste any time rearranging the deck chairs. What this parable also tells us is that we also don’t have to sit around quietly, patiently hoping that God will send a new boat before this one sinks. Rather we can be about the work of building something way better than a boat. Yes, it’s a risk. It’s a huge risk. It would be way easier to hunker down in here and hope that our future looks the same as our present. But the promise of this parable is that if we take the risk, we have the chance of growing beyond our imagination, and if we hold tight, at best we end up with a talent covered in dirt. And the promise of the Gospel is that if we lose it all, we’ve really lost nothing, because there is always a new beginning after even the most decisive of ends. So let us take the risk, dear people of God. We have nothing, and everything, to lose, and we have everything to gain. Amen.

Conversation Points for Matthew 25:14-30

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• A talent (Greek talanton) is an amount of money equal to about fifteen year’s wages for a day laborer. The etymology of the English word “talent” (a natural aptitude or skill) comes from this parable as a term for a God-given ability.
• The conflict in this story is which characterization of the master do the hearers accept as true. Is he generous, as was indicated by his treatment of the first two slaves, giving them large sums of money and then rewarding them further? Or is he harsh, as implied by the words of the third slave and indicated by his response to the third slave?
• Matthew moved the location of Jesus telling this story to in Jerusalem immediately before the Passion (in Luke it appears in chapter 19, before the entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday). Matthew used the story to add to the image he was building in the parable of the Ten Bridesmaids about the nature of Christian life as one of active waiting. For Matthew, being “good and faithful” is not about passive waiting or strict obedience, but about active responsibility, taking initiative, and risk. The master gave no instructions to the three slaves about how they were to use the money, so faithfulness is not merely following directions. Each slave had to decide on his own how to use his time while the master was gone.
• There are two other parables in Matthew that also involve household slaves. Matthew 18:23-35 is the parable of the slave who racked up a massive debt against his master, and the master forgave him. Then the slave went out and refused to forgive a fellow slave a much lesser debt. Matthew 24:45-51 tells of a slave who took advantage of the master being gone to abuse his fellow slaves. These differing stories serve to frustrate attempts to simplify the way God works into neat, coherent systems. These parables speak of the reality of judgment and the need for decision and responsible action, while obscuring a straightforward, systemic understanding.

Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.

Thompson, Erick J. “Commentary on Matthew 22:15-22.” Working Preacher. . Accessed 16 October 2017.

Says the Lord your God: A Sermon on Amos 5:18-24

Karl Barth encouraged preachers to approach sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspapers in the other. But I have to tell you, I am finding that suggestion increasingly difficult these days. Not so much for the divisiveness, although, oh man, the divisiveness. Some days it feels like the color of the sky is up for debate. But the real struggle for me is the sheer volume of news. Mass shootings in Texas and Las Vegas, genocide in Myanmar, the uncovering of an epidemic of sexual harassment, Korea, Iran, the Paris Climate Agreement. To pick any one topic is to neglect a dozen others. So I want to dig into Amos this morning. Because, as I will share with you, the time of Amos too was a period of human history that felt dark and overwhelming.

Let’s first take some time and put Amos in his correct historical context. And here I’m going to have to apologize, because I tend to geek out on this stuff. So bear with me if we go a bit into the historical weeds here. But a) I think it’s important that we know the time in which Amos was writing in order to understand his message, and b) I think history is just super fascinating and I get carried away when I get excited.

The beginning of Amos dates itself to the reigns of King Uzziah of Judah and King Jeroboam of Israel, which would place it around 760 to 750 BCE. This was a period of relative peace for Israel. Israel had long been threatened by the growing Assyrian empire. But in the early eighth century, internal struggles turned Assyria’s attention away from conquest and left Israel and its neighbors more or less alone. Free from the Assyrian threat, Israel prospered. Archeological evidence confirms the scriptural description, the religious and political elites of Israel lived in wealth and luxury. Based on the theology prevalent at the time, that God’s favor was demonstrated by prestige and military power, it seemed like God was indeed favoring the people of Israel and not the conflict plagued Assyrians.

All of this changed very suddenly in 745 BCE, when the Tiglath-pileser the Third usurped the Assyrian throne. By 722, the luxurious capital of Israel’s northern kingdom was in ruin and the kingdom itself was a province of Assyria.

But before Tiglath-pileser came Amos. And Amos brought strong words of judgment into Israel’s wealth and prosperity. This is from chapter two: “Thus says the Lord,” said Amos. “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment… because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way… and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.” Israel’s sin was building its prosperity on the backs of the least of God’s people, the needy, the poor, and the afflicted. The covenant God made with Israel had two aspects, love of God and love of neighbor, and so much had Israel failed at this second aspect, that no amount of the first would save them. In the section we read this morning, God railed against the Israelites shallow worship, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies… Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

The message of Amos is clear, the guilt of Israel was driven by their own selfish desires. The luxury and wealth of the elite was gained at the expense of the poor and needy. It was not peace and prosperity gifted from God that the elite were experiencing, but peace and prosperity gained from the oppression of others of God’s family. Even their worship was selfish, meant not to lift up God and build the community of God’s people, but to make themselves feel good about their faithfulness. And if we’re honest with ourselves, while maybe not to the degree of the northern kingdom, we too are guilty of such selfishness. Our confession all fall has referenced it, “we confess that we turn the church inward rather than moving it outward.” We don’t always “speak for what is right and act for what is just.” Amos’ harsh words to Israel should feel challenging, because they could also convict us.

But believe it or not, this harsh condemnation is one of the reasons I love and find such deep and powerful hope in the prophets. Because here’s the thing about Amos. These words were written twenty-eight hundred years ago. Twenty-eight hundred years ago, Amos came to proclaim God’s judgment, and the fact that we are reading this judgment today is a testament to God’s love. Because what Amos threatened would happen, happened. In all of human history there have been few times as dark and dangerous as living in the northern kingdom of Israel during the rise of Tigleth-pileser the third. Israel was destroyed, completely and totally demolished and desolated. And we are still here. The book of Amos is the first glimmer of the promise of resurrection. That no matter how dark and broken and scary things get, no matter how much it looks like the end, the promise of God’s covenant is that the end is never the end, because resurrection always follows death. And we don’t even have to wait twenty-eight hundred years to see that. Amos was one of the earliest of the prophets. Even before the time of Jesus, this whole destruction and redemption thing happened a bunch more times. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hezekiah, all of these prophets brought the same harsh message and the same promised redemption. Again and again and again in the Bible we read this message of the people of God wandering away, and God firmly refusing to give up on them, to give up on us. That the harsh condemnation of Amos is the first of the prophets, and not the last, is proof of God’s unconditional, unwavering, deep, and powerful love for us. God hasn’t given up on God’s people in twenty-eight hundred years, so I have a hard time believing that God is giving up on us now.

The other powerful message of hope I find in the prophets is that God loves us enough to speak hard words to us. I don’t know about you, but I really hate conflict. I hate feeling like people are angry at me, like I have hurt someone. I am probably conflict-avoidant to a fault. And it has hurt my relationships. When faced with conflict, I would much rather walk away from the person than address my hurt and ask for forgiveness. What the prophets show us is that God loves us too much to avoid conflict with us. God did not ghost the people of Israel until they went away. God walked right into the middle of the muck and the mire and called them out on their complacency and self-absorption. The prophets’ harshness show us what real love looks like. Love is not soft and cushy and everything goes. Love can be confrontational and hard and painful. But it is from love like that, love deep enough to call us out on our failings, to speak truth to us even when it hurts, and love us through our anger, that real relationship is born. That is the kind of love God has for us.

Brothers and sisters, the hope and the promise in the prophets is that God loves us so powerfully, so deeply, and so fully, that nothing, not the powers of this world, not the attacks of our enemies, not even our own sin and failings are enough to keep God away from us. So firm, so fierce is God’s love that God will wade into the fire of conflict and anger to refine us into God’s people, that God will go to death and beyond to bring us to resurrection. This is a powerful, powerful message of hope and love and commitment in the middle of a world that feels so full of fear and death. For twenty-eight hundred years this has been God’s promise to us, and I am not so arrogant as to think that a message with such resounding historical truth could be ending today.

So that is the good news. Here is the challenge. Amos was a reluctant prophet. He was not even a professional prophet. He was a sheepherder from the southern kingdom of Judah who was called, against his will, to bring this hard and painful message to Israel. The challenge is that sometimes God calls us to be prophets. Sometimes God calls us to wade into places of conflict and pain and to speak hard words of truth of the need to care for the poor, the needy, and the afflicted. The times in which Amos spoke were not all that different from our own times, and we may be the ones God is calling to remind God’s people of God’s covenant. A covenant God set not just between us and God, but also between us and our neighbor. God’s love for us is cruciform, it is cross-shaped. It is not only lived out in this up-down relationship between us and God, but also in this side to side relationship between us and our neighbor. And friends, let me be the first to tell you, that speaking truth in love in this world is hard. It will cause conflict and it will cause division. And so again, I find hope in Amos. Because twenty-eight hundred years ago, when Tiglath-pileser the Third took the throne in Assyria and the kingdom of Israel fell, I bet Amos felt like he failed. He came with this word of warning, and the people of Israel did not hear it, and Israel was destroyed. But, here we are, twenty-eight hundred years later, and the words of Amos still ring true. The words of Amos still bring hope and challenge and promise. The words of Amos still matter and still bring justice and peace, and still lift up God’s care for the poor, the needy, and the afflicted. What the book of Amos tells us is that we do not always get to see the results of our labors. We are, as Bishop Oscar Romero famously said, “prophets of a future not our own.” God’s timing is not always like our timing. We may never get to know the effects of our actions. But our work matters, we matter, the love and the care and the challenge and the hope that we bring to this world in the name of God makes a difference. So keep on, dear sisters and brothers. Keep on in hope. Yes, it is dark right now, but it has been dark before. And let us close with the closing three verses of the book of Amos. “The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God.” Amen.

Investing in the Kingdom: A Sermon on Matthew 22:15-22

I listened to an interview this week that has totally captivated my imagination. I’m going to resist the temptation to basically just parrot back to you the whole interview, but I posted a link to it on the Trinity Facebook page. I hope you’ll listen to it and come back and talk to me, because I’m so geeked up about it I literally could not sleep Tuesday night.

But before we get to the interview and why I couldn’t sleep, I want to talk a little bit about this Gospel reading for today. Because I think I wouldn’t have found the interview as engaging if I was not already caught up in the challenge Jesus seems to be throwing out in this reading.

The reading opened with the Pharisees plotting to entrap Jesus with some false flattery and a seemingly innocuous question about taxes. But here’s a detail you need to know. The tax the Pharisees are asking about was not just general taxes. This was a very specific tax called a census tax or head tax. It was a tax Rome levied on residents of Roman provinces. Basically, when Rome conquered a region, they then assessed a tax on the residents of that region to pay for the occupying army. It’s like, imagine if one day a giant pit bull showed up and your house and was like, hey, this looks like a sketchy neighborhood, I’m going to move in with you and “protect” you. And, you were like, thanks but no thanks pit bull. I feel pretty safe in my neighborhood, and anyway, you’re terrifying and I don’t really feel comfortable with you living in my house. And pit was like, don’t care, I’m moving in to “protect” you, and you can feed me for the privilege. Oh, and by the way, I only like the really expensive dog food from the refrigerated section. You know, the food that looks and smells better than you feed yourself, and costs twice as much.

Here’s the other thing to know about this tax. It could only be paid in Roman coin. Jerusalem had been a city for long before it became a province of Rome, it had its own currency system in operation. But one of the tools Rome used to gain control was to take over the economy by forcing the introduction of Roman currency. So now imagine the pit bull that’s taken up residence in your home will only accept payment in something they call “dog bucks.” And you have to go out and convert all your money to dog bucks in order to pay this fee for a service you don’t even want in the first place. You can begin to see how this tax was really enraging the Judean people.

The Pharisees asked Jesus about this tax because they knew there was no right answer. If Jesus said yes, you should pay the tax, then all of the people who were joining his movement because they thought he was opposed to the Roman government would be angry. But if Jesus said no, you shouldn’t pay the tax, then he was opening himself up to arrest by the Romans. Either way, the Pharisees thought, they had him.

So what did Jesus do? He said to the Pharisees, “you hypocrites. Show me the coin used to pay the tax.” Remember I said the tax had to be paid in Roman coin? Here’s what I didn’t mention. The Roman coin featured a picture of Tiberus Caesar and the words “Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest.” Written on the coin was a claim of the divinity of the Emperor, a statement which was blasphemous to the Jews who believed in the divinity of the One God. When the Pharisees stood in the Temple, the most sacred place in all of Judea, the place where the One True God was believed to dwell, and in that most sacred place pulled from their pocket a coin claiming the divinity of the emperor, the Pharisees true loyalties were revealed. This conversation was never about whether or not to pay taxes, it was about whether to engage in the system of the empire, a system ruled by fear, in which a few benefited at the expense of the rest, or the system of the kingdom of heaven, in which the mighty are brought down, the weak are lifted up, and five loaves and two fishes is enough to feed multitudes. That coin in the Pharisees pocket revealed their decision, and they were amazed and left him, temporarily at least, and went away.

I think that is really the operating question of this reading. Not, should we pay taxes, but do we want to live under the system of empire or the system of the kingdom of heaven. And because we don’t read this passage in isolation, I started thinking about all the things we’ve learned over the summer about the kingdom of heaven. Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, the tiniest of seeds that, when buried in the ground, becomes the largest of shrubs, and the birds make nests in it’s branches. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast hidden in flour, until the baker makes up the loaves and surprise, the loaves rise unexpectedly. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in the field, it is like a pearl of great price, it is like a net. It is a field of weeds and wheat. It is landowner who wanted all the crops of his tenants, and even they threw him out, he went again and again to collect from them, not withholding even his son in his desperation to gather from them the harvest. It is a party where everyone’s invited, both the good and the bad, but it is not enough to show up and eat the free food. The kingdom of heaven is mysterious, expansive, creative, it cannot be contained or constrained, but it is always just beyond our grasp, just bigger than our imagination. It is, as the prophet Isaiah said in our first reading, “the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places.” Jesus spoke in parables because the kingdom of heaven cannot be explained. Rather it is this nagging hope that there is more than we can know, and that somehow, we are being called to be a part of it. I don’t know about you, but that system, the system of yeast, and seeds, and growth, and life, that is the system I want to be a part of.

So back to this interview. And I’m going to once again resist the temptation to just read the whole thing to you, just oh man, go listen to it. But I will share this one part. The interview was with Economist Muhammad Yunus. Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work in alleviating poverty by bringing banking and microlending opportunities to people in poor, rural communities. As part of the conversation, the head of the World Bank talked about how they had changed their structures to play off the best practices that Yunus had developed through his work. At which point the interviewer cut in with a question. Ok, he said, this is all really interesting. But most of us don’t have billions of dollars that we can just loan out to create new economic systems. What can we do? And Yunus responded with these really simple things. Do the thing that you can do. Teach your children to think creatively and entrepreneurially. Build a business, and build a social enterprise on the side. Work for a company that engages in social responsibility. Learn, wonder, ask good questions.

So here’s where my imagination really went crazy. Because it’s stewardship season at Trinity. Next week, we’re all going to be asked what we are going to pledge for the upcoming year. I’ve told you before my financial pattern. Twice a month when I get paid I put ten percent of my income in my retirement account, and I give ten percent away to the church. But this week after thinking about the economic system of the kingdom of heaven, I started wondering if maybe the problem was not in my financial habits, but in the fact that I was thinking about it wrong. Check this. The money I put in my retirement account, I think about that as an investment in my future. I put money in there because I expect it to grow on its own. And I know a little bit about the market, and honestly I don’t really know exactly how Portico does it, I just trust that in forty or so years when I go to get it out, there will be more in there than I put in. I know there is risk involved in this. I was on internship in 2008 when everyone’s retirement accounts tanked, I know the whole thing could go up and I could lose everything. But I pay in, because I think that the risks are outweighed by the reward, that the potential payout is worth the gamble.

I invest in my retirement, but I give my money to the church. You notice the difference in language there. So this week, I’ve changed my mind. I’m thinking of it differently now. From here on out, the amounts stay the same but the intention changes. I’m investing in my retirement and I’m investing in the church. Here’s why that matters. If I’m investing, that means I’m expecting growth, it means I’m expecting something is going to happen. Now, bear with me now, because this is not prosperity Gospel. I’m not saying I’m going to give ten percent of my money to the church and God’s going to give me more money in return. The growth I am talking about is not monetary growth, but instead a growth in the kingdom of heaven. For example: We just bought new furnaces. Think about how that feels. Now, try this, we just invested in new furnaces. Why are the furnaces an investment? Lots of reasons. One: the new furnaces are more fuel-efficient, they are both better for the environment helping us be better stewards of God’s creation, and they are cheaper to operate, helping the money we pay in heating to go down. And if we pay less money for heating, we have more money to put toward other things. Because the furnaces cost less to operate, it costs us less to keep Co-op warm. When the bus drops kids off afterschool, they can wait inside and not be cold. When community groups want to use our space for meetings or activities, we can open it up to them without having to be as concerned about the heating bill. All these opportunities for spreading the kingdom of heaven open up to us, all because we decided to take the risk and invest in new furnaces.

We need a new roof. Not going to lie, the roof was a little tougher, because we don’t pay a monthly “roof bill” like we pay a gas bill. So what’s the return on investment in a roof? People drive by our building all the time, and believe me, they notice the roof. They will notice the new roof, and they will think, that church has life to it. A new roof will allow us to continue to open our space for community events like the movies we showed over the summer, or the candidate forums we hosted last year, without worrying about it raining on our guests. Maybe the roof will give us opportunities for things we haven’t even dreamed of yet. If there’s a crisis, like the hurricanes in Huston or the fires in California and people needed a place to stay, and we’ve invested in a roof, we can house them.

And as the “returns” from these investments start to come in, who knows where we’ll go from here. Maybe we’ll decide we need to invest some time in volunteering with the Food Pantry, or in tutoring GED students at the Woman’s Co-op, or we’ll feel a call to invest our voices as part of BC Vision. Or our relationships as we get to know our neighbors at Georgetown better. Maybe my long-lived dream will come true and we’ll end up owning a trailer park. All I know is what I’ve learned from Jesus’ parables, that the kingdom of heaven is big and messy and grace-filled, creative, and expansive and beautiful. Dear friends in Christ, I’m not giving my money to the church anymore. I am investing in the growth of the kingdom of heaven. I have no idea what God is quite doing with this investment. But I’m taking the risk, trusting in the promise that God is faithful, and that like yeast hidden in wheat it will grow in ways that are miraculous and strange. I hope you will take it along with me. Amen.


Note: You can listen to the interview with Muhammad Yunus on the 1A website: https://the1a.org/shows/2017-10-17/the-father-of-microfinance-has-a-plan-to-fix-capitalism