“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life that you and your descendants may live.” Thanks to this line from Deuteronomy being in our reading this morning, I’ve had an early nineties Christian praise song stuck in my head all week. Now, I’ll tell you I’m not a huge fan of a lot of early nineties Christian praise music because a lot of it is pretty theologically questionable. And this song is for the most part no exception to that concern, but there is one line it in that I think gets, possibly unintentionally, right to the heart of what Moses was saying to the Israelites. The line I’ve been singing all week goes like this: “Choose life, the way that is true / From the One who chose you, your Father in heaven.” It’s the second half of that which gets me. “Choose life… From the One who chose you.” What we hear there is this statement that the choice we are invited to make is the response to already having been chosen. We don’t choose to BE God’s chosen, that choice was already made. Rather we choose because we ARE God’s chosen.
That’s what’s happening in the Deuteronomy text Teresa read this morning. The whole book of Deuteronomy is basically Moses’ farewell address to the Israelites. Having rescued them from slavery in Egypt, having led them across the desert to the very cusp of the Promised Land, having put up with forty years of their whining, Moses is about to send them off into their promised yet unknown future. Before he does that, he wants to send them off as prepared as possible, so he delivers this very long speech, in which he recounts their history, outlines rules to live by, and stresses their responsibilities and obligations. This is not unlike the lecture a parent might deliver to their pre-adolescent child about to be left home alone for the first time.
Today we heard the very end of this speech. Chapter thirty, verses fifteen through twenty are literally the very last words of Moses’ exhortation to these people whom he has loved and cared about for so long. I had a housemate who whenever I left the house would yell out the door after me, “make good choices,” and that’s basically what Moses left the Israelites with. Make good choices. If we think back to the parent-pre-adolescent child analogy, that lecture is not “here are all the things you need to do in order to earn the right to be my child.” Rather, that list of expectations and obligations are made out of love. Here are the things you need to do so that you, and any younger siblings, pets, houseplants, you’ve been left responsible for can live and thrive while I am gone.
For Moses, choosing life meant choosing God. It meant loving God, walking with God, listening to God’s voice, and following God. Some translations translate this act of listening as “obey God.” But in our modern context, blind, unexamined obedience to authority is at best short sighted and at worst dangerous. What Moses refers to here is not “do whatever God says because God is God,” but it’s be in relationship with God. It is the active practice of walking, listening, learning, of growing deeper and clearer into who you are and how God is calling you to be.
Choosing life is also not an individual action. We do not choose life simply by choosing God and ignoring others. Choosing life means choosing, loving, each other, both friends and neighbors and foreigners and strangers, and loving and caring for God’s creation. As Christians we tend to have the unfortunate habit of seeing the Law as this very legalistic, moralistic list of prerequisites to be met. It is either this thing that absolutely must be kept exactly as written in order for God to accept us, or it is so impossible as to be completely ignored, Christ died for me, so I get to live however I want and you have to live how I say. This is true today—whoever you’re considering voting for in the next election, democrat or republican, liberal, moderate, or conservative, has certainly told you that God is on their side—and has been true throughout our history. Arguing about whether and how the law applies to us is like the favorite theological struggle of the Christian movement. So it’s important to remember as we’re hearing these words from Moses that our Israelite forebears did not have the same fraught relationship with the law that we have. For them, the commandments of God were not seen as burdensome or impossible, rather they were spiritual practices to be followed as best one could. They were ways to remain faithful, to mark their identity of people of God, and to respond to the gift of God’s claiming them as God’s chosen people. I’m sure I’ve shared before that my Old Testament professor in seminary referred to the Ten Commandments not as the regulations which decided who was in, but the rules of the playpen to help the people of God, those who were already in, live well together.
Which gets us to our Gospel reading for this morning and this next chunk of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. After grounding us in our identity as blessed, salty, light-bearers, Jesus now digs in to what that identity looks like in practice. “You have heard it said” Jesus starts, listing off various commandments, “do not murder, do not commit adultery, get divorced in this way, do not swear falsely. But I say to you,” this much harder thing. It is not enough to just not murder people, if you so much as are at odds with someone, you must seek reconciliation. It is not enough to not commit adultery, if you even look at someone with lust, you must cut off your hand or pluck out your eye. It is not enough to get divorced legally. It is not enough to not swear falsely, you must not swear at all. What Jesus did here wasn’t about replacing the law with something harder, what he was doing was intensifying the law, drilling down into the heart of why it had existed in the first place. Remember what Moses said to the Israelites so many years back, “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life that you and your descendants may live.” Let’s think about this command to not murder. My first thought on reflection is this is a ridiculously low bar. But I started drafting this sermon on Lincoln’s Birthday and I thought about the Civil War and the hundreds of thousands of people who died, and killed, defending our freedom and fighting for freedom for all people. Certainly we don’t consider that murder, but lives were taken. What does it mean to choose life on the field of battle? Can the choice of and for life at times require taking life? My friend Pastor Chris is an army chaplain and I give thanks every day that he helps the young men and women of our military sit with the results of those questions every day, a choice often made for them by leaders far away from the actual places and people where those choices play out. Or I was walking through St. Philip the other day, and I noticed they have a suicide prevention bench in the hallway. The idea being if someone is feeling alone or depressed they can sit on that bench as a signal that they need a friend. Are you choosing life if you walk past someone seated on that bench? Yes, you are not murdering anyone, but certainly someone is being left in need.
“You shall not commit adultery” is a seemingly low bar, but what about the harmless banter, locker-room talk, and the effects of our Instagram happy society on the self-perception of both men and women? Are Snapchat filters choosing life? Which side of the Super Bowl halftime show debate was choosing life, the side that said it was a disgusting objectification of women’s bodies or the side that saw a powerful display of strength, and a call for justice and inclusion? How should we consider divorce now that marriage is a decision between two consenting adults rather than, as it was in the time of Moses, a land contract between two men often involving the sale of a woman in exchange for camels. How is choosing life different now than it was then, when a divorced woman was a pariah to society? What does it mean to not just swear falsely, but to not swear at all? Our Pledge of Allegiance, only since 1954 I might add, has included the phrase “one nation, under God,” before “with liberty and justice for all.” Does God belong in our national allegiance? To be clear, I’m not arguing yes or no, I’m merely raising the question of what God are we pledging to, and who decides the ideas and beliefs that allegiance to that God contains.
These are hard questions, dear people of God. Hard questions with no easy answers. And do I wish some days that ours was a God who just spelled out for us how we have to live in with a very clearly delineated list of rules and requirements, yeah, some days I do. But I also know that the world is not that simple, there is too much complexity for any rule to work perfectly one hundred percent of the time. And the good news for us in this text is we have a God who knows that. We have a God who gets that no law can just work perfectly every time, in every case. And so instead of a list of hard and fast dos and don’ts, ours is a God who gives us the tools to make good choices. And a God who knows that the choices we make, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, will not always be good choices. And when we fail at this. When we get caught up in our own doubts, fears, egos, or idealism, and we do not make good choices, ours is a God who meets us again and again at the font and at the table, with this unending promise of forgiveness, grace, and love. So choose life, dear people of God. Choose life, because you have already been chosen. God has chosen you. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, February 17, 2020
Monday, February 10, 2020
Shine On - A Sermon on Matthew 5.13-20 and Isaiah 58.1-12
We’re in a section of readings for the next couple weeks that has us working our way through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. So before we get to today’s reading, let’s really quick recap what we heard Jesus say last week.
The Sermon on the Mount starts with the Beatitudes, this list of unexpected people whom Jesus calls blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, who are merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted. And blessed are you, when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.
Wait, what? It was one thing when Jesus was blessing all those unfortunate people, the poor, the meek, the mourning, but now it’s getting personal. Blessed are you, Jesus said, when people revile you. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of being reviled. Being reviled, persecuted, having falsehoods uttered about me, none of this feels like blessing to me.
And yet, Jesus said, we are blessed. We are blessed, as are the poor, the meek, the mourning, the hungry, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, we are blessed because people do not define our identity, and our identity is salt and light.
That’s what Jesus declared in the first section of the reading we heard today. You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world. You. I noticed something new this week, which is the clarifiers Jesus put on these declarations are kind of ridiculous. Salt can’t have its saltiness restored because salt can’t lose its saltiness. Saltiness is in its chemical makeup; it is the defining characteristic of salt. And light shines, that’s what it does. Notice you turn on a light, but you cannot turn on dark. Dark only exists in the absence of light, it has no definition outside of that relationship. And actually, verse fifteen gets even more extreme than that. The verse says, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket…” On first read we think, of course no one would do that, that would entirely defeat the purpose of having lit the lamp. But, think about what a lamp was in the first century, a lamp was something that was on fire. And if you put a bushel basket over a flame, you’re eventually going to have a flaming bushel basket. Which would produce more light than just leaving the lamp lit in the first place. So when Jesus said, let your light shine, that isn’t so much a command as it is an inevitability. You are light. Light shines. That’s what it does.
Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t work to be done. That’s not to say that we can just sit around and do nothing, or worse, catch things on fire. It’s just to say that the starting point, the jumping off point for all that we do, is this solid, grounded, unshakable identity as ones who are blessed by God, and who use that blessedness to bring light to the world.
So how do we do that? What does that look like? For that, we need Isaiah. Isaiah fifty-eight, like most of the other Isaiah readings we’ve heard recently, comes from the final section of Isaiah after the people of Israel have returned from exile and are trying to learn to live again. This Isaiah passage is a little tricky at first because it starts with God announcing the rebellion of a people who “seek [God] and delight to know [God’s] ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness.” In other words, they think they’re doing everything right. They’re fasting, they’re humbling themselves, they’re knocking each other over in their shows of piety. To which God responds, that in and of itself is the problem. The problem is their piety is selfish, it’s self-centered. They are not fasting to please God or to serve their neighbor, they are fasting to make themselves look good, to draw attention to how great they are. Yes their light is shining, but not like a lamp on a lampstand, or even a flaming bushel basket burning out of control, their light is shining like a spotlight, illuminating only themselves. And so God calls them to a different kind of fast. A fast to ‘”remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil…[to] offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” If you do these things, if you fast in this way, God says, “then your light shall rise from the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”
As Lutherans we, rightly, get a little concerned with this if/then language of faith. It is dangerously easy to read these words as requirements for salvation, the work necessary to get God to love us. But remember the identity we heard God declare to us in Matthew, the promise given to us at baptism, that we are blessed, we are salt, we are light. This ultimate conviction that we are God’s, that through Christ’s death and resurrection we are children of God, and nothing can change that. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians, our faith rests “not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” With this identity of blessedness firmly in our hearts, we can hear this fast for justice for what it is, not the entry fee to heaven, but a call to partnership with the God of the universe. Friends, that is faith, God’s faith in us. God is not asking us to sit back and watch as God makes things good, God is inviting us into the work. God is inviting us to walk alongside God, to be God’s hands and feet, heart and voice. To be “repairers of the breach, restorers of the streets to live in.”
Dear friends in Christ, the work that we do in the world is the work of God. When we speak out against injustice, when we pray for those in need. When we put food in the wagon for the pantry, or listen to the story of the Co-op members, or offer a smile to someone who is hurting, these actions may feel small and insignificant, but this passage tells us that these actions are the very work of God. So let your light shine, dear people of God. Shine on. Amen.
The Sermon on the Mount starts with the Beatitudes, this list of unexpected people whom Jesus calls blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, who are merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted. And blessed are you, when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.
Wait, what? It was one thing when Jesus was blessing all those unfortunate people, the poor, the meek, the mourning, but now it’s getting personal. Blessed are you, Jesus said, when people revile you. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of being reviled. Being reviled, persecuted, having falsehoods uttered about me, none of this feels like blessing to me.
And yet, Jesus said, we are blessed. We are blessed, as are the poor, the meek, the mourning, the hungry, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, we are blessed because people do not define our identity, and our identity is salt and light.
That’s what Jesus declared in the first section of the reading we heard today. You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world. You. I noticed something new this week, which is the clarifiers Jesus put on these declarations are kind of ridiculous. Salt can’t have its saltiness restored because salt can’t lose its saltiness. Saltiness is in its chemical makeup; it is the defining characteristic of salt. And light shines, that’s what it does. Notice you turn on a light, but you cannot turn on dark. Dark only exists in the absence of light, it has no definition outside of that relationship. And actually, verse fifteen gets even more extreme than that. The verse says, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket…” On first read we think, of course no one would do that, that would entirely defeat the purpose of having lit the lamp. But, think about what a lamp was in the first century, a lamp was something that was on fire. And if you put a bushel basket over a flame, you’re eventually going to have a flaming bushel basket. Which would produce more light than just leaving the lamp lit in the first place. So when Jesus said, let your light shine, that isn’t so much a command as it is an inevitability. You are light. Light shines. That’s what it does.
Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t work to be done. That’s not to say that we can just sit around and do nothing, or worse, catch things on fire. It’s just to say that the starting point, the jumping off point for all that we do, is this solid, grounded, unshakable identity as ones who are blessed by God, and who use that blessedness to bring light to the world.
So how do we do that? What does that look like? For that, we need Isaiah. Isaiah fifty-eight, like most of the other Isaiah readings we’ve heard recently, comes from the final section of Isaiah after the people of Israel have returned from exile and are trying to learn to live again. This Isaiah passage is a little tricky at first because it starts with God announcing the rebellion of a people who “seek [God] and delight to know [God’s] ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness.” In other words, they think they’re doing everything right. They’re fasting, they’re humbling themselves, they’re knocking each other over in their shows of piety. To which God responds, that in and of itself is the problem. The problem is their piety is selfish, it’s self-centered. They are not fasting to please God or to serve their neighbor, they are fasting to make themselves look good, to draw attention to how great they are. Yes their light is shining, but not like a lamp on a lampstand, or even a flaming bushel basket burning out of control, their light is shining like a spotlight, illuminating only themselves. And so God calls them to a different kind of fast. A fast to ‘”remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil…[to] offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” If you do these things, if you fast in this way, God says, “then your light shall rise from the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”
As Lutherans we, rightly, get a little concerned with this if/then language of faith. It is dangerously easy to read these words as requirements for salvation, the work necessary to get God to love us. But remember the identity we heard God declare to us in Matthew, the promise given to us at baptism, that we are blessed, we are salt, we are light. This ultimate conviction that we are God’s, that through Christ’s death and resurrection we are children of God, and nothing can change that. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians, our faith rests “not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” With this identity of blessedness firmly in our hearts, we can hear this fast for justice for what it is, not the entry fee to heaven, but a call to partnership with the God of the universe. Friends, that is faith, God’s faith in us. God is not asking us to sit back and watch as God makes things good, God is inviting us into the work. God is inviting us to walk alongside God, to be God’s hands and feet, heart and voice. To be “repairers of the breach, restorers of the streets to live in.”
Dear friends in Christ, the work that we do in the world is the work of God. When we speak out against injustice, when we pray for those in need. When we put food in the wagon for the pantry, or listen to the story of the Co-op members, or offer a smile to someone who is hurting, these actions may feel small and insignificant, but this passage tells us that these actions are the very work of God. So let your light shine, dear people of God. Shine on. Amen.
Monday, February 3, 2020
Justice, Kindness, and Humility - A Sermon on Micah 6:1-8 and Matthew 5:1-12
I think I’ve shared before that part of my sermon prep process includes listening to a lectionary podcast that comes out of Luther seminary. This week when they got to the Micah reading, theologian Rolf Jacobson quipped, “Micah, that’s a nice verse.”
Micah, of course, is not a verse, but a seven-chapter long book of the prophetic teachings of the eighth century prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea. But that mostly gets lost in the popular familiarity of that basis of so many camp songs and wall hangings, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Now that is, undeniably, a great verse. We pulled from it to describe our Core Value of Social Justice, where we declare that at Trinity “we take seriously God’s mandate in Micah to ‘do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.’”
So yeah, I’m all for Micah 6:8. But Dr. Jacobson’s quip about Micah being a “nice verse” challenged me to do what I always encourage the bible study group to do and think about the context from which the verse came. So I just want to read for you how my Harper Collins Study Bible described the historical situation at the time of Micah. Because I read this and I thought, well now, that sounds uncomfortably familiar.
The start of the book locates Micah as having been a prophet during “the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah.” Here’s what Harper Collins had to say about Hezekiah: “A vigorous ruler, Hezekiah initiated several religious reforms. He took many precautions to safeguard Judah against the threat of an Assyrian invasion, including forming a coalition with Phoenicia and Philistia against Sennacherib, Assyria’s king…” OK, that was a bunch of names, but listen now, here’s where it gets interesting. “Under Hezekiah, Judah experienced an economic revolution. Wealth, invested in the land, led to the growth of vast estates and the collapse of small holdings. Wealthy landowners thrived at the expense of small peasant farmers. This shift from a bartering to a monetary, mercantile economy increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, many priests and prophets viewed their ministry as a business rather than a vocation and acted accordingly.” And here’s the clinching summary for me, “Thus, Micah preached during a time when Judah was experiencing radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion.”
I don’t know about you, but for me, “a time… [of] radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion” sounded achingly familiar. To pull from a completely different source, it reminded me of a line from a Nadia Bolz-Weber sermon that I love where she remarked about the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth “guess what… Elizabeth has also conceived a weird Holy Spirit baby. Is it exactly what’s happening with you? No but close enough…go hang out with her.” Is Micah’s situation exactly our situation? No, but close enough, here is a friend who can also be prophet for our time.
We could meander through all of Micah, but the section the lectionary gave us this morning starts with God challenging Israel to explain what went wrong with their relationship that so much pain has taken place. Which, if you think about it, that in and of itself is a pretty remarkable act of love. Because what this says is we have a God who rather than demanding our blind loyalty is willing, even eager, to be in conversation with us, to take our thoughts and feelings into account, to hear our side of the story. When we talk about God wanting a relationship with us, that’s what relationship means. Relationship isn’t “I’m God and you’re not, worship me.” Relationship is, “ok, this isn’t working, let’s be in this together, let’s figure this out.”
God moves from there into a remembering of God’s saving acts throughout history. Essentially God does for Israel, what God is using Micah to do for us. Remember when things were bad before. Remember when you were enslaved in Egypt, and I led you to freedom. Remember when you were threatened by Moab. Remember how I was with you then; remember how I am with you now.
Then in verse six the speaker shifts from God to Israel. “With what shall I come before the Lord… Shall I come with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? …with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn?” This classic all-or-nothing way that we humans so often respond says so much about us, and what went wrong in the first place. To respond to God’s greatness, God’s goodness, with excess demonstrates how we see this relationship with God not as relationship, but as a transaction. So often we find ourselves treating God as a vending machine, if I put in this very particular set of prayers, worship practices, beliefs, ideas, etc. then I will get back salvation. But God is not a bean-counter, withholding grace until we put in the right amount of worship. And so, verse eight: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Friends, this call to justice, kindness, and humility is not a new set of requirements for salvation. It is the response of those who have already been saved. This isn’t a call to earn God’s goodness, it is a reminder that we already have it. That we are already changed, valued, transformed by God, that we are already free to live into this new reality. It’s also a reminder that the thing which God wants for us, what God wants from us, is not impossibly hard, it is almost aching simple. Achingly simple, and yet entirely transformative.
Which brings us to Matthew, and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The Gospel started with Jesus seeing the crowds and going up the mountain. Matthew’s Jesus goes up mountains a lot, as a way to get away, gather himself, and prepare to move forward. We saw that just last week when after John’s arrest, Jesus withdrew to Galilee. However, I heard this week another layer that could be in this mountaintop location. Palestine is flat, which means that mountains are excellent locations for gaining perspective. From a mountain, Jesus could see the whole of his mission field stretched out before him. The text doesn’t specify which mountain he went up, if it was near the Sea of Galilee, he might have been able to see the Roman city of Tiberius rising on the shoreline, if it was more inland, maybe the struggles of the people in the harsh, arid climate.
Whatever struggles Jesus saw as he looked out over that rush of humanity, what Jesus then did was describe for his disciples a new and different reality. A world in which the poor dwell in the kingdom of heaven, where those who mourn are comforted, where the meek inherit, where the hungry are filled and the merciful receive mercy. If this vision sounds familiar, maybe not in words but in ideas, that’s because this radical new vision is not unique to Jesus or even all that new. It is rooted in God’s ancient promise to God’s people. It is Micah’s call for justice, it is Isaiah’s walking in light. It is what happened “from Shittim to Gilgal... the saving acts of the Lord.” It is the burning bush for Moses, it is the covenant with Abram. It is the voice of the Lord, moving across the waters, calling forth light and declaring it good.
And so the question again, dear people of God, is the question not of what will we do to earn this new vision, but how would we live if we truly believed in it’s promise? How will we live, who will we be, what will this relationship with God look like in this world that is already unfolding. Dwell in the wonder of this possibility, dear people of God, that the promises God made are promises God keeps, and that what looks like despair is nothing more than the canvas on which God is painting the future. What does it mean if you, we, and this whole world, is blessed? Amen.
Micah, of course, is not a verse, but a seven-chapter long book of the prophetic teachings of the eighth century prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea. But that mostly gets lost in the popular familiarity of that basis of so many camp songs and wall hangings, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Now that is, undeniably, a great verse. We pulled from it to describe our Core Value of Social Justice, where we declare that at Trinity “we take seriously God’s mandate in Micah to ‘do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.’”
So yeah, I’m all for Micah 6:8. But Dr. Jacobson’s quip about Micah being a “nice verse” challenged me to do what I always encourage the bible study group to do and think about the context from which the verse came. So I just want to read for you how my Harper Collins Study Bible described the historical situation at the time of Micah. Because I read this and I thought, well now, that sounds uncomfortably familiar.
The start of the book locates Micah as having been a prophet during “the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah.” Here’s what Harper Collins had to say about Hezekiah: “A vigorous ruler, Hezekiah initiated several religious reforms. He took many precautions to safeguard Judah against the threat of an Assyrian invasion, including forming a coalition with Phoenicia and Philistia against Sennacherib, Assyria’s king…” OK, that was a bunch of names, but listen now, here’s where it gets interesting. “Under Hezekiah, Judah experienced an economic revolution. Wealth, invested in the land, led to the growth of vast estates and the collapse of small holdings. Wealthy landowners thrived at the expense of small peasant farmers. This shift from a bartering to a monetary, mercantile economy increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, many priests and prophets viewed their ministry as a business rather than a vocation and acted accordingly.” And here’s the clinching summary for me, “Thus, Micah preached during a time when Judah was experiencing radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion.”
I don’t know about you, but for me, “a time… [of] radical internal change while living under the threat of a foreign military invasion” sounded achingly familiar. To pull from a completely different source, it reminded me of a line from a Nadia Bolz-Weber sermon that I love where she remarked about the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth “guess what… Elizabeth has also conceived a weird Holy Spirit baby. Is it exactly what’s happening with you? No but close enough…go hang out with her.” Is Micah’s situation exactly our situation? No, but close enough, here is a friend who can also be prophet for our time.
We could meander through all of Micah, but the section the lectionary gave us this morning starts with God challenging Israel to explain what went wrong with their relationship that so much pain has taken place. Which, if you think about it, that in and of itself is a pretty remarkable act of love. Because what this says is we have a God who rather than demanding our blind loyalty is willing, even eager, to be in conversation with us, to take our thoughts and feelings into account, to hear our side of the story. When we talk about God wanting a relationship with us, that’s what relationship means. Relationship isn’t “I’m God and you’re not, worship me.” Relationship is, “ok, this isn’t working, let’s be in this together, let’s figure this out.”
God moves from there into a remembering of God’s saving acts throughout history. Essentially God does for Israel, what God is using Micah to do for us. Remember when things were bad before. Remember when you were enslaved in Egypt, and I led you to freedom. Remember when you were threatened by Moab. Remember how I was with you then; remember how I am with you now.
Then in verse six the speaker shifts from God to Israel. “With what shall I come before the Lord… Shall I come with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? …with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn?” This classic all-or-nothing way that we humans so often respond says so much about us, and what went wrong in the first place. To respond to God’s greatness, God’s goodness, with excess demonstrates how we see this relationship with God not as relationship, but as a transaction. So often we find ourselves treating God as a vending machine, if I put in this very particular set of prayers, worship practices, beliefs, ideas, etc. then I will get back salvation. But God is not a bean-counter, withholding grace until we put in the right amount of worship. And so, verse eight: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Friends, this call to justice, kindness, and humility is not a new set of requirements for salvation. It is the response of those who have already been saved. This isn’t a call to earn God’s goodness, it is a reminder that we already have it. That we are already changed, valued, transformed by God, that we are already free to live into this new reality. It’s also a reminder that the thing which God wants for us, what God wants from us, is not impossibly hard, it is almost aching simple. Achingly simple, and yet entirely transformative.
Which brings us to Matthew, and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The Gospel started with Jesus seeing the crowds and going up the mountain. Matthew’s Jesus goes up mountains a lot, as a way to get away, gather himself, and prepare to move forward. We saw that just last week when after John’s arrest, Jesus withdrew to Galilee. However, I heard this week another layer that could be in this mountaintop location. Palestine is flat, which means that mountains are excellent locations for gaining perspective. From a mountain, Jesus could see the whole of his mission field stretched out before him. The text doesn’t specify which mountain he went up, if it was near the Sea of Galilee, he might have been able to see the Roman city of Tiberius rising on the shoreline, if it was more inland, maybe the struggles of the people in the harsh, arid climate.
Whatever struggles Jesus saw as he looked out over that rush of humanity, what Jesus then did was describe for his disciples a new and different reality. A world in which the poor dwell in the kingdom of heaven, where those who mourn are comforted, where the meek inherit, where the hungry are filled and the merciful receive mercy. If this vision sounds familiar, maybe not in words but in ideas, that’s because this radical new vision is not unique to Jesus or even all that new. It is rooted in God’s ancient promise to God’s people. It is Micah’s call for justice, it is Isaiah’s walking in light. It is what happened “from Shittim to Gilgal... the saving acts of the Lord.” It is the burning bush for Moses, it is the covenant with Abram. It is the voice of the Lord, moving across the waters, calling forth light and declaring it good.
And so the question again, dear people of God, is the question not of what will we do to earn this new vision, but how would we live if we truly believed in it’s promise? How will we live, who will we be, what will this relationship with God look like in this world that is already unfolding. Dwell in the wonder of this possibility, dear people of God, that the promises God made are promises God keeps, and that what looks like despair is nothing more than the canvas on which God is painting the future. What does it mean if you, we, and this whole world, is blessed? Amen.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
Darkness and Light - A Sermon on Isaiah 9:1-4 and Matthew 4:12-23
I heard on the news this week that last Monday was what is known as Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. Normally the third Monday of January, this date is apparently not arbitrary. A brief search through that great bastion of all absolute facts, the Google, produced a formula for how this date is selected, taking into account the following factors: “weather conditions, debt level (the difference between debt accumulated and our ability to pay), time since Christmas, time since failing our new year’s resolutions, low motivational levels and feeling of a need to take action.”
Further Google research uncovered, probably to no surprise, that there is actually no scientific proof of January 20th as the most depressing day of the year. In fact, apparently the whole thing started in 2005 as a publicity stunt by a UK travel agency to get people to book vacations. Fun fact: the same guy who invented Blue Monday was also sponsored by an ice cream company to come up with a formula to calculate the happiest day of the year, sometime in mid-June. But, while Blue Monday may be nothing more than an unsuccessful marketing campaign, it is true that winter is hard because we humans need light. Our bodies are attuned to the rhythms of the sun and when, like in winter, our actual schedules do not line up with the sun’s schedule, the result can be a chemical imbalance in our brains that leads to increased fatigue and depression.
We need light. We need light because we are by and large a visual species. Our preference for light is not a modern pop-psychology excuse to stay in bed and watch Netflix in the winter, it is an evolutionary trait honed from the time when the things that hid in the dark could, and probably wanted to, eat us. A time like that of the writer of Isaiah.
Isaiah was talking metaphorically about the people walking in darkness, but it wouldn’t have been a hard metaphor for his audience to understand because the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali were pretty metaphorically dark places. If you’re up on your Old Testament Bible stories or your Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals, you may recognize Zebulun and Naphtali as two of the twelve tribes of Israel. According to scripture, after the conquest of the Promised Land, Joshua allotted land to each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Naphtali was given the northeastern most corner, north of the sea of Galilee, and Zebulun the land directly below it, what after the time of King David became the northern kingdom of Israel. This location meant when the Assyrian Empire started to strengthen and expand in the 8th century BCE, Zebulun and Naphtali were the first line of defense, and the first, therefore, to fall. And Isaiah, if you remember, was a prophet sent to get the southern kingdom to change their ways before what happened to the northern kingdom would happen to them. Which means these people who were in “anguish” and “contempt,” these were a people conquered people, people without safety or security, people without hope. This was what it meant to be people who “lived in a land of deep darkness.”
And to the southern kingdom of Isaiah’s time, these people sort of had this coming. There was great rivalry between the northern and southern kingdoms of what had been Israel, and the south saw the north’s fall as proof that their wicked ways had caused God to turn God’s back on them.
It is these dark and weary people whom Isaiah announced had “seen a great light.” This light comes not from the foreign powers, nor from the people’s efforts, this light comes from the God who had never left them, dark and alone as things had seemed. Because that is one of the cruel characteristics of darkness, when you are in the midst of it you often cannot see what is there alongside you, that potential for light that is just about to break through.
This is the power of the Epiphany season. Epiphany, this season of light, reminds us that even in the midst of darkness, when we cannot see our way through, the light of Christ is with us, just waiting for the right moment of illumination. The light of Christ is not a switch we can turn on; it is not waiting for our action. Rather, it is there beside us, moving in the darkness, though we cannot sense it, until finally we are drawn into recognition of the in-breaking presence of the kingdom of God.
This in-breaking presence is what the writer of Matthew was referring to in quoting Isaiah in our Gospel reading for this morning. We are only just a few verses out from the adult Jesus’ first appearance on the scene following the bold declarations of John the Baptist, yet already things seem to have taken a turn. Verse twelve informs us that John, who had built such a following in announcing Jesus’ arrival as the one “who will baptize…with the Holy Spirit and fire,” had been arrested by Herod and is in prison.
In the face of this setback, Jesus “withdrew [pause]… He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali.” This withdrawal may seem like retreat at first, which is why the writer of Matthew reminded us of the words of the prophet Isaiah. Because “from that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”
Repentance, this demand by Jesus to repent, feels loaded because we’re used to hearing it from one another. Calls to repent often come from those with very specific definitions of who is in need of it and what such repentance should look like. But remember the one who is doing the calling here is not a person, it is the Word made flesh. The one who is making this call to repentance is Jesus. And repentance to Jesus is restoration to relationship. Jesus, who the writer of Matthew takes pains to remind us, is God with us, is always the actor, always the subject of any sentence, the one whom is driving the transformation of us. To repent there for is not to transform ourselves but to be transformed. To be drawn in to the light of Christ that is already breaking through the horizon.
Like John, Jesus suggests in this passage that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The Greek word here is engidzo, which has this sense of impending to it, like the first hints of grey in the dark of the eastern night sky, like the shifts in the soil of springtime before the crocuses burst forth from the snow. Engidzo says that this thing is coming already and though we cannot yet see it, like a freight train it cannot be stopped.
This thing that is coming is the kingdom of heaven, a new state of affairs in which all are “united in the same mind and the same purpose.” This invitation to repent is not so that we can receive the benefit of this kingdom, for that, remember, is already ours. That is the action that is the grace and the gift of Christ Jesus. Rather, this invitation to repent is so we can be about the work of spreading this kingdom, of sharing this gift with others. We see this call to repentance lived out in the rest of this morning’s Gospel reading when from his withdrawn location in Capernaum, Jesus called Simon and Andrew, who immediately left their nets and followed Jesus as he “went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” The lectionary would stop us here, but if we go on two more verses we find this great light dawning further and further as Jesus’ “fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics”—read here all those whom society had cast aside as not worth the effort—“and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.”
Dear friends in Christ, do not believe the lie that the darkness wins. For the pattern of dawn in night, the pattern of winter to spring, the movement of Advent to Epiphany, reminds us again and again, that Christ is with us, though we cannot yet see it. But the in-breaking of the kingdom is at hand. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Further Google research uncovered, probably to no surprise, that there is actually no scientific proof of January 20th as the most depressing day of the year. In fact, apparently the whole thing started in 2005 as a publicity stunt by a UK travel agency to get people to book vacations. Fun fact: the same guy who invented Blue Monday was also sponsored by an ice cream company to come up with a formula to calculate the happiest day of the year, sometime in mid-June. But, while Blue Monday may be nothing more than an unsuccessful marketing campaign, it is true that winter is hard because we humans need light. Our bodies are attuned to the rhythms of the sun and when, like in winter, our actual schedules do not line up with the sun’s schedule, the result can be a chemical imbalance in our brains that leads to increased fatigue and depression.
We need light. We need light because we are by and large a visual species. Our preference for light is not a modern pop-psychology excuse to stay in bed and watch Netflix in the winter, it is an evolutionary trait honed from the time when the things that hid in the dark could, and probably wanted to, eat us. A time like that of the writer of Isaiah.
Isaiah was talking metaphorically about the people walking in darkness, but it wouldn’t have been a hard metaphor for his audience to understand because the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali were pretty metaphorically dark places. If you’re up on your Old Testament Bible stories or your Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals, you may recognize Zebulun and Naphtali as two of the twelve tribes of Israel. According to scripture, after the conquest of the Promised Land, Joshua allotted land to each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Naphtali was given the northeastern most corner, north of the sea of Galilee, and Zebulun the land directly below it, what after the time of King David became the northern kingdom of Israel. This location meant when the Assyrian Empire started to strengthen and expand in the 8th century BCE, Zebulun and Naphtali were the first line of defense, and the first, therefore, to fall. And Isaiah, if you remember, was a prophet sent to get the southern kingdom to change their ways before what happened to the northern kingdom would happen to them. Which means these people who were in “anguish” and “contempt,” these were a people conquered people, people without safety or security, people without hope. This was what it meant to be people who “lived in a land of deep darkness.”
And to the southern kingdom of Isaiah’s time, these people sort of had this coming. There was great rivalry between the northern and southern kingdoms of what had been Israel, and the south saw the north’s fall as proof that their wicked ways had caused God to turn God’s back on them.
It is these dark and weary people whom Isaiah announced had “seen a great light.” This light comes not from the foreign powers, nor from the people’s efforts, this light comes from the God who had never left them, dark and alone as things had seemed. Because that is one of the cruel characteristics of darkness, when you are in the midst of it you often cannot see what is there alongside you, that potential for light that is just about to break through.
This is the power of the Epiphany season. Epiphany, this season of light, reminds us that even in the midst of darkness, when we cannot see our way through, the light of Christ is with us, just waiting for the right moment of illumination. The light of Christ is not a switch we can turn on; it is not waiting for our action. Rather, it is there beside us, moving in the darkness, though we cannot sense it, until finally we are drawn into recognition of the in-breaking presence of the kingdom of God.
This in-breaking presence is what the writer of Matthew was referring to in quoting Isaiah in our Gospel reading for this morning. We are only just a few verses out from the adult Jesus’ first appearance on the scene following the bold declarations of John the Baptist, yet already things seem to have taken a turn. Verse twelve informs us that John, who had built such a following in announcing Jesus’ arrival as the one “who will baptize…with the Holy Spirit and fire,” had been arrested by Herod and is in prison.
In the face of this setback, Jesus “withdrew [pause]… He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali.” This withdrawal may seem like retreat at first, which is why the writer of Matthew reminded us of the words of the prophet Isaiah. Because “from that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”
Repentance, this demand by Jesus to repent, feels loaded because we’re used to hearing it from one another. Calls to repent often come from those with very specific definitions of who is in need of it and what such repentance should look like. But remember the one who is doing the calling here is not a person, it is the Word made flesh. The one who is making this call to repentance is Jesus. And repentance to Jesus is restoration to relationship. Jesus, who the writer of Matthew takes pains to remind us, is God with us, is always the actor, always the subject of any sentence, the one whom is driving the transformation of us. To repent there for is not to transform ourselves but to be transformed. To be drawn in to the light of Christ that is already breaking through the horizon.
Like John, Jesus suggests in this passage that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The Greek word here is engidzo, which has this sense of impending to it, like the first hints of grey in the dark of the eastern night sky, like the shifts in the soil of springtime before the crocuses burst forth from the snow. Engidzo says that this thing is coming already and though we cannot yet see it, like a freight train it cannot be stopped.
This thing that is coming is the kingdom of heaven, a new state of affairs in which all are “united in the same mind and the same purpose.” This invitation to repent is not so that we can receive the benefit of this kingdom, for that, remember, is already ours. That is the action that is the grace and the gift of Christ Jesus. Rather, this invitation to repent is so we can be about the work of spreading this kingdom, of sharing this gift with others. We see this call to repentance lived out in the rest of this morning’s Gospel reading when from his withdrawn location in Capernaum, Jesus called Simon and Andrew, who immediately left their nets and followed Jesus as he “went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” The lectionary would stop us here, but if we go on two more verses we find this great light dawning further and further as Jesus’ “fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics”—read here all those whom society had cast aside as not worth the effort—“and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.”
Dear friends in Christ, do not believe the lie that the darkness wins. For the pattern of dawn in night, the pattern of winter to spring, the movement of Advent to Epiphany, reminds us again and again, that Christ is with us, though we cannot yet see it. But the in-breaking of the kingdom is at hand. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Bearing Witness - A Sermon on Isaiah 49:1-7 and John 1:29-42
I am fast becoming a fan of Dr. Juliana Claassens, the professor of Old Testament from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. Last Sunday I basically read her commentary on the Isaiah text to you. This week, her commentary started with what is apparently a famous quote from theologian Soren Kierkegaard, though I’d never heard it before, “the door to happiness opens outward.”
Like last week our Isaiah reading for this morning places us among a people whose lives had been upended. Israel returned from the bonds of exile and is now trying to rebuild a community from the ruins. Which is a complicated place to be, because Israel is looking around, as one often does after a major disaster and finds itself faced with conflicting emotions. On one hand, they’re back in Israel. The exile is over and they survived. Things are not as bad as they were, not as bad as they could have been. But on the other hand, things are pretty darn bad. In Isaiah we see a person who is trying to make sense of how both of these conflicting realities could be true, how there could be both gratitude and despair. If it is possible for one to recognize blessing and still honor loss.
Short answer, yes. Yes blessing and grief can co-exist. Yes you can be grateful that things are not as bad as they could be and devastated that things are as bad as they are. Just like we can in fact walk and chew gum at the same time, we have the capacity to be both thankful and heartbroken. The way through this is balance. It is not enough to wallow in the grief, but nor is it helpful to pretend the grief is not real and focus only on the positive. And when faced with two extremes, sometimes the way to find balance is to introduce a third thing.
The thing God introduced for Israel was to turn their focus outward, Kierkegaard’s door to happiness. As we talked about last week, when we are afraid or uncertain our natural human tendency is toward self-preservation. We look inward, trying to bolster our own resources, ensure our own survival. Some of us at least. Others of us try to live in total denial that the bad thing ever happened and focus only on the positive. Friends, hard truth, neither work.
You know how on a plane the flight attendant tells you to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting other people. That is great wisdom for within the confined space of an aircraft, you have to look out for yourself first or you will be unable to look out for others. Fortunately and unfortunately, in the vast open complexity of the world, the strategy of looking out for yourself first before assisting others is often not only inefficient, it more often than not will hasten your own destruction. Because outside of a closed system, we need each other. It is in fact impossible to be fully self-sufficient, to make sure you have everything you need before you help. And if you try, you’ll miss the gifts others have to offer. Take our congregation for an example. The moment we decide we are too important to fail, that we have to make sure we have everything we need to ensure our own survival, that we have adequate resources, training, support, etc. for ourselves before we serve others, that is the moment our doors will shut. Yes, depending on the help, support, and resources of others, people we don’t know, people who might be different than us, who might challenge us, might change us, is scary. But the fact is God created us for each other, God created us to be in relationship with each other. So if you’re on a plane, yes, put your oxygen mask on first. But when you’re not, turns out the mask won’t work if it isn’t connected to another.
Now granted the people God was speaking to in Isaiah weren’t on a plane, or for that matter had any idea what a plane was, but that was essentially God’s message to Israel. The way to survive the upheaval of everything you knew is to reach out to others. Listen to the flow of this text. “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away. And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” So here we have Israel declared God’s servant, in whom God will be glorified, hidden away. Think of the history of Israel. Way way back, Abraham had been promised his descendant would number the stars, and it was a rough road from then on. They ended up slaves in Egypt. God led them out of Egypt and established for them a nation. They wanted a king. God gave them Saul, he wasn’t a winner. Then they got David, he was better but definitely still had his down moments. Israel split into two, the northern kingdom was destroyed, then the southern, and then the people went into exile. This history of struggle and failure is clear in verse four, “But I said, ‘I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.’” Listen to the despair in that, God you said we were your people, we tried to do what you wanted, to remain faithful. But here we are, amidst the ruins of your city, Jerusalem your jewel now destroyed, so what was the point of it all. But God, who remember in verse three just declared them to be God’s servant, goes on: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant[,] to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel. [No,] I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” Friends, how would we live if we truly believed that? What would we do, who would we be, how would we live if we truly believed that the door to happiness, to fulfillment, to not just survival but satisfaction and faith and wholeness, lay in the opportunity to share with others? In this Isaiah text we have a God who says to us, you are not my servant, you are more than that. And this promise is not to Israel, it is wider than that. Friends to me that just feels like freedom because it means it’s out of my hands. It feels like freedom, it feels like purpose, and it feels like trust.
Which brings us to John. First, just as a point of clarification, let’s remember that John is a super common name in the Bible. You might remember from the Passion story on Good Friday there were three women all named Mary. Jesus’ “mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene.” The name John is like that. There’s a million of them. So the John we’re reading about in this story is not the same John who wrote the Gospel of John. So we’ve got John who, like I mentioned last week, is an important enough character to appear in all four Gospel accounts. But John in the Gospel of John differs from John in Matthew, Mark, and Luke in this way. In John’s Gospel, John talks about baptism but we never actually see him baptizing. John’s real role in John’s Gospel is not baptizer but witness. John’s job is to witness to who Jesus is, John baptizes in order to witness.
The John from John’s Gospel is a great one to start Epiphany with because this John is one we can emulate. Obviously, the call to travel to the wilderness to begin a mission of baptizing people in the river and eventually baptize the son of God himself is not something we can all aspire to. But we can all aspire to do what John does in this text, we can all aspire to witness. We can all aspire to look for the presence, the action, the spirit of God in the world and to say, “Look, here is the Lamb of God.”
Pointing out God’s presence in the world may seem so simple, too simple, to matter. But look how this story unfolded. Jesus’ first disciples did not begin to follow because Jesus called them. They were not impressed with Christ’s message or transformed by his power. Jesus didn’t heal them or feed them or even speak to them. Verse thirty-five: “John was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.” One of those two turned out be Andrew, who brought his brother Simon, soon to be called Peter. Then through Andrew and Simon, Jesus met Philip, and Philip brought Nathanael, and you see where this is going, a long string of witnesses across time and space that leads all the way to us. All because John said, “Look.”
Dear friends in Christ, our witness matters. Our words matter. When we speak out against injustice, when we lift our voices to point out God’s presence, when we support each other, when we serve our neighbor, these things change things. Verse thirty-seven is the last appearance John makes in the Gospel of John, as he watched his own disciples walk away from him at his own command. We know from the synoptics that John won’t even live to see the resurrection, so it is very likely that John never knew the impact his words, his witness had on the world. But we know that they did, for we gather today as heirs of that first call to look and to follow.
So again, the same question the Isaiah text left us with, in Epiphany we become witnesses to the presence of Christ in the world. What would you do if you truly saw Christ? And what will you do now that you have? Amen.
Like last week our Isaiah reading for this morning places us among a people whose lives had been upended. Israel returned from the bonds of exile and is now trying to rebuild a community from the ruins. Which is a complicated place to be, because Israel is looking around, as one often does after a major disaster and finds itself faced with conflicting emotions. On one hand, they’re back in Israel. The exile is over and they survived. Things are not as bad as they were, not as bad as they could have been. But on the other hand, things are pretty darn bad. In Isaiah we see a person who is trying to make sense of how both of these conflicting realities could be true, how there could be both gratitude and despair. If it is possible for one to recognize blessing and still honor loss.
Short answer, yes. Yes blessing and grief can co-exist. Yes you can be grateful that things are not as bad as they could be and devastated that things are as bad as they are. Just like we can in fact walk and chew gum at the same time, we have the capacity to be both thankful and heartbroken. The way through this is balance. It is not enough to wallow in the grief, but nor is it helpful to pretend the grief is not real and focus only on the positive. And when faced with two extremes, sometimes the way to find balance is to introduce a third thing.
The thing God introduced for Israel was to turn their focus outward, Kierkegaard’s door to happiness. As we talked about last week, when we are afraid or uncertain our natural human tendency is toward self-preservation. We look inward, trying to bolster our own resources, ensure our own survival. Some of us at least. Others of us try to live in total denial that the bad thing ever happened and focus only on the positive. Friends, hard truth, neither work.
You know how on a plane the flight attendant tells you to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting other people. That is great wisdom for within the confined space of an aircraft, you have to look out for yourself first or you will be unable to look out for others. Fortunately and unfortunately, in the vast open complexity of the world, the strategy of looking out for yourself first before assisting others is often not only inefficient, it more often than not will hasten your own destruction. Because outside of a closed system, we need each other. It is in fact impossible to be fully self-sufficient, to make sure you have everything you need before you help. And if you try, you’ll miss the gifts others have to offer. Take our congregation for an example. The moment we decide we are too important to fail, that we have to make sure we have everything we need to ensure our own survival, that we have adequate resources, training, support, etc. for ourselves before we serve others, that is the moment our doors will shut. Yes, depending on the help, support, and resources of others, people we don’t know, people who might be different than us, who might challenge us, might change us, is scary. But the fact is God created us for each other, God created us to be in relationship with each other. So if you’re on a plane, yes, put your oxygen mask on first. But when you’re not, turns out the mask won’t work if it isn’t connected to another.
Now granted the people God was speaking to in Isaiah weren’t on a plane, or for that matter had any idea what a plane was, but that was essentially God’s message to Israel. The way to survive the upheaval of everything you knew is to reach out to others. Listen to the flow of this text. “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away. And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” So here we have Israel declared God’s servant, in whom God will be glorified, hidden away. Think of the history of Israel. Way way back, Abraham had been promised his descendant would number the stars, and it was a rough road from then on. They ended up slaves in Egypt. God led them out of Egypt and established for them a nation. They wanted a king. God gave them Saul, he wasn’t a winner. Then they got David, he was better but definitely still had his down moments. Israel split into two, the northern kingdom was destroyed, then the southern, and then the people went into exile. This history of struggle and failure is clear in verse four, “But I said, ‘I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.’” Listen to the despair in that, God you said we were your people, we tried to do what you wanted, to remain faithful. But here we are, amidst the ruins of your city, Jerusalem your jewel now destroyed, so what was the point of it all. But God, who remember in verse three just declared them to be God’s servant, goes on: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant[,] to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel. [No,] I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” Friends, how would we live if we truly believed that? What would we do, who would we be, how would we live if we truly believed that the door to happiness, to fulfillment, to not just survival but satisfaction and faith and wholeness, lay in the opportunity to share with others? In this Isaiah text we have a God who says to us, you are not my servant, you are more than that. And this promise is not to Israel, it is wider than that. Friends to me that just feels like freedom because it means it’s out of my hands. It feels like freedom, it feels like purpose, and it feels like trust.
Which brings us to John. First, just as a point of clarification, let’s remember that John is a super common name in the Bible. You might remember from the Passion story on Good Friday there were three women all named Mary. Jesus’ “mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene.” The name John is like that. There’s a million of them. So the John we’re reading about in this story is not the same John who wrote the Gospel of John. So we’ve got John who, like I mentioned last week, is an important enough character to appear in all four Gospel accounts. But John in the Gospel of John differs from John in Matthew, Mark, and Luke in this way. In John’s Gospel, John talks about baptism but we never actually see him baptizing. John’s real role in John’s Gospel is not baptizer but witness. John’s job is to witness to who Jesus is, John baptizes in order to witness.
The John from John’s Gospel is a great one to start Epiphany with because this John is one we can emulate. Obviously, the call to travel to the wilderness to begin a mission of baptizing people in the river and eventually baptize the son of God himself is not something we can all aspire to. But we can all aspire to do what John does in this text, we can all aspire to witness. We can all aspire to look for the presence, the action, the spirit of God in the world and to say, “Look, here is the Lamb of God.”
Pointing out God’s presence in the world may seem so simple, too simple, to matter. But look how this story unfolded. Jesus’ first disciples did not begin to follow because Jesus called them. They were not impressed with Christ’s message or transformed by his power. Jesus didn’t heal them or feed them or even speak to them. Verse thirty-five: “John was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.” One of those two turned out be Andrew, who brought his brother Simon, soon to be called Peter. Then through Andrew and Simon, Jesus met Philip, and Philip brought Nathanael, and you see where this is going, a long string of witnesses across time and space that leads all the way to us. All because John said, “Look.”
Dear friends in Christ, our witness matters. Our words matter. When we speak out against injustice, when we lift our voices to point out God’s presence, when we support each other, when we serve our neighbor, these things change things. Verse thirty-seven is the last appearance John makes in the Gospel of John, as he watched his own disciples walk away from him at his own command. We know from the synoptics that John won’t even live to see the resurrection, so it is very likely that John never knew the impact his words, his witness had on the world. But we know that they did, for we gather today as heirs of that first call to look and to follow.
So again, the same question the Isaiah text left us with, in Epiphany we become witnesses to the presence of Christ in the world. What would you do if you truly saw Christ? And what will you do now that you have? Amen.
Monday, January 13, 2020
A Map of Hope: A Sermon on Isaiah 42:1-9; Matthew 3:13-17; and Acts 10:34-43
It’s Baptism of our Lord Sunday this morning, so we’ll get to baptism eventually. But 2020 feels like it’s started with a rush. I read a commentary on Isaiah this week that gave me hope in the midst of this, so I want to start us out with Isaiah. Juliana Claassens, Professor of Old Testament at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, characterized Isaiah as “a map of hope for disoriented and dislocated people at risk of losing their bearings.” I read that and found myself taking a deep breath, thinking, “a map of hope is exactly what I’m searching for right now.”
“So,” Claassens asked, “how does a prophet go about talking to people who have been completely traumatized by seeing their city destroyed, their family and friends killed or taken away in shackles to a foreign land and who even feel that God has deserted them?” What Isaiah gives us here and throughout this book is a variety of images to help us see God in new ways, and thus see God with us in the midst of unexpected chaos, tragedy, and fear. God in Isaiah is both a mighty warrior who will deliver God’s people and a shepherd who clutches the little lamb. God is a divine warrior and a woman in labor. God is a highway in the desert, God is water in the wilderness, God is that wilderness flourishing. God is sight to the blind, God is light and life to those in dark dungeons. God is the bruised reed that will not break, the dimly burning wick that will not quench. In contrast to the image of God depicted in the psalm we read, which another commentary I read described simply as “loud,” here we see quiet, steady persistence. This one “will not cry or lift up his voice,” yet neither will he “grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.”
First off, as one who, as you know, is not one to raise my voice, I found great comfort in this idea that there is a place and a role for quiet, steady, persistence. That justice can, and in this passage is, established not by the mighty but by those whom God has “called in righteousness… taken by the hand and kept… [and] given as a covenant to the people.” But more than that, Claassens went on to note “the remarkable thing we see in this text is how the people who have been traumatized are called not to do the typical human thing of what has been called “circling the wagons”… in Isaiah 42, the prophet offers a vision of the world in which an individual or a group of people in the midst of brokenness, in spite of brokenness, or maybe because of brokenness, will be a light to the nations.”
This passage, and Claassens read of it, is hope for me in two ways. First it says that we do not have to be mighty and powerful to be the ones God takes by the hand to do justice. We do not have to be the ones who have never been knocked down, who have it all together, to be “called in righteousness.” Claassens even quoted the great theologian Leonard Cohen, “Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, but that’s where the light gets in.” And second, the message of Isaiah to the people of its time and to us is that in the midst of the most difficult times, in the midst of the times when things feel the most out of control, the most broken down, when we feel the most helpless, God is still with us. And not just with us, God is moving us. God is leading us, guiding us, moving us out, not just for ourselves but for the sake of the whole world. I don’t know about you, dear people of God, but this promise of hope and the transformative power of compassion was, is, a message I need in this time where I feel so little power and control.
Which brings us to Matthew and the baptism of Jesus. The passage opens with Jesus coming to John in the wilderness to be baptized. This is important because it demonstrates Jesus’ control over the situation. By having Jesus travel all the way from Galilee to the Judean wilderness in order to be baptized, we see the first sign of the upside-down nature of the kingdom of God. In Jesus’ baptism by John we see Jesus define his identity in submission to another. Jesus maintained control by placing his ministry in the hands of another. John’s mission was to baptize and bear witness, Jesus came to John in the Jordan in order that John might fulfill that mission. Dr. Eugene Boring called this a “literary preemptive strike.” Given the current state of world affairs, Dr. Boring’s description struck me because this preemptive strike of Jesus’ is so unlike the definition of a preemptive strike I’m used to. Now, this is not to say anything about the necessity or benefit of any military action. There are certainly times and places in which preemptive strikes are necessary to save lives and prevent worse violence. But the very nature of a preemptive strike is a move to retain power, and in Jesus’ preemptive strike we see a move to share power. This is a very different definition of power. This is the “power made perfect in weakness” that Paul will talk about in Romans, when Jesus the sinless came to be baptized “with water for repentance,” before taking his place as the one who will “baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
John himself questioned this move. Now wait a second here Jesus, “‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’” Let me read that again, “for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” As we saw with Joseph righteously going against the law and refusing to divorce his wife, righteousness in Matthew’s Gospel is about being in right relationship with God, it is about living in the way God has revealed even when that way of living goes completely against the religious, social, and cultural expectations of what it means to be righteous.
Jesus’ baptism is a fulfillment of righteousness because in Jesus’ baptism God is revealed. In this moment we see the heavens opened, the Spirit descending like a dove, and a voice from heaven proclaiming “This [this one, this one right here, This] is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and at his baptism, Jesus’ identity is made abundantly clear.
And baptism for us too is a fulfillment of all righteousness, because in our baptism our identities too are made clear. In the waters of baptism we bear witness to the death of Christ, which takes away the bonds of sin and death that separate us from God and the declaration that with Christ we too are resurrected, we are made new, claimed as God’s beloved children. In the Acts text, Peter declared “We are witnesses to all that [Jesus] did both in Judea and Jerusalem” and in baptism we too become witnesses to all that God has done. That, as an aside, is why we baptize infants in the Lutheran church. We baptize infants because baptism is not a choice we make, it is a promise God makes to us. In baptism, God says, this is my child, my beloved. This one can never be separated from me. The promise that God made is true whether you chose to be baptized as an adult or whether someone chose for you as an infant. Because the act of baptism is God’s declaration to us.
As Peter declared to Cornelius and his family, we have been chosen by God as witnesses to this good news: That God shows no partiality, but in every nation everyone is acceptable, everyone is welcome, everyone is a part of God’s family. As Isaiah declared to the people of Israel so long ago, so it is declared to us today. “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. I am the Lord, that is my name… See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” Dear people of God, you, we, are the ones God has called, through the waters of baptism, to be light to the world. So do not fear, persist, for God “will not faint or be crushed until justice has been established in the earth,” and we are the ones God has sent to do it. Thanks be to God. Amen.
“So,” Claassens asked, “how does a prophet go about talking to people who have been completely traumatized by seeing their city destroyed, their family and friends killed or taken away in shackles to a foreign land and who even feel that God has deserted them?” What Isaiah gives us here and throughout this book is a variety of images to help us see God in new ways, and thus see God with us in the midst of unexpected chaos, tragedy, and fear. God in Isaiah is both a mighty warrior who will deliver God’s people and a shepherd who clutches the little lamb. God is a divine warrior and a woman in labor. God is a highway in the desert, God is water in the wilderness, God is that wilderness flourishing. God is sight to the blind, God is light and life to those in dark dungeons. God is the bruised reed that will not break, the dimly burning wick that will not quench. In contrast to the image of God depicted in the psalm we read, which another commentary I read described simply as “loud,” here we see quiet, steady persistence. This one “will not cry or lift up his voice,” yet neither will he “grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.”
First off, as one who, as you know, is not one to raise my voice, I found great comfort in this idea that there is a place and a role for quiet, steady, persistence. That justice can, and in this passage is, established not by the mighty but by those whom God has “called in righteousness… taken by the hand and kept… [and] given as a covenant to the people.” But more than that, Claassens went on to note “the remarkable thing we see in this text is how the people who have been traumatized are called not to do the typical human thing of what has been called “circling the wagons”… in Isaiah 42, the prophet offers a vision of the world in which an individual or a group of people in the midst of brokenness, in spite of brokenness, or maybe because of brokenness, will be a light to the nations.”
This passage, and Claassens read of it, is hope for me in two ways. First it says that we do not have to be mighty and powerful to be the ones God takes by the hand to do justice. We do not have to be the ones who have never been knocked down, who have it all together, to be “called in righteousness.” Claassens even quoted the great theologian Leonard Cohen, “Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, but that’s where the light gets in.” And second, the message of Isaiah to the people of its time and to us is that in the midst of the most difficult times, in the midst of the times when things feel the most out of control, the most broken down, when we feel the most helpless, God is still with us. And not just with us, God is moving us. God is leading us, guiding us, moving us out, not just for ourselves but for the sake of the whole world. I don’t know about you, dear people of God, but this promise of hope and the transformative power of compassion was, is, a message I need in this time where I feel so little power and control.
Which brings us to Matthew and the baptism of Jesus. The passage opens with Jesus coming to John in the wilderness to be baptized. This is important because it demonstrates Jesus’ control over the situation. By having Jesus travel all the way from Galilee to the Judean wilderness in order to be baptized, we see the first sign of the upside-down nature of the kingdom of God. In Jesus’ baptism by John we see Jesus define his identity in submission to another. Jesus maintained control by placing his ministry in the hands of another. John’s mission was to baptize and bear witness, Jesus came to John in the Jordan in order that John might fulfill that mission. Dr. Eugene Boring called this a “literary preemptive strike.” Given the current state of world affairs, Dr. Boring’s description struck me because this preemptive strike of Jesus’ is so unlike the definition of a preemptive strike I’m used to. Now, this is not to say anything about the necessity or benefit of any military action. There are certainly times and places in which preemptive strikes are necessary to save lives and prevent worse violence. But the very nature of a preemptive strike is a move to retain power, and in Jesus’ preemptive strike we see a move to share power. This is a very different definition of power. This is the “power made perfect in weakness” that Paul will talk about in Romans, when Jesus the sinless came to be baptized “with water for repentance,” before taking his place as the one who will “baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
John himself questioned this move. Now wait a second here Jesus, “‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’” Let me read that again, “for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” As we saw with Joseph righteously going against the law and refusing to divorce his wife, righteousness in Matthew’s Gospel is about being in right relationship with God, it is about living in the way God has revealed even when that way of living goes completely against the religious, social, and cultural expectations of what it means to be righteous.
Jesus’ baptism is a fulfillment of righteousness because in Jesus’ baptism God is revealed. In this moment we see the heavens opened, the Spirit descending like a dove, and a voice from heaven proclaiming “This [this one, this one right here, This] is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and at his baptism, Jesus’ identity is made abundantly clear.
And baptism for us too is a fulfillment of all righteousness, because in our baptism our identities too are made clear. In the waters of baptism we bear witness to the death of Christ, which takes away the bonds of sin and death that separate us from God and the declaration that with Christ we too are resurrected, we are made new, claimed as God’s beloved children. In the Acts text, Peter declared “We are witnesses to all that [Jesus] did both in Judea and Jerusalem” and in baptism we too become witnesses to all that God has done. That, as an aside, is why we baptize infants in the Lutheran church. We baptize infants because baptism is not a choice we make, it is a promise God makes to us. In baptism, God says, this is my child, my beloved. This one can never be separated from me. The promise that God made is true whether you chose to be baptized as an adult or whether someone chose for you as an infant. Because the act of baptism is God’s declaration to us.
As Peter declared to Cornelius and his family, we have been chosen by God as witnesses to this good news: That God shows no partiality, but in every nation everyone is acceptable, everyone is welcome, everyone is a part of God’s family. As Isaiah declared to the people of Israel so long ago, so it is declared to us today. “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. I am the Lord, that is my name… See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” Dear people of God, you, we, are the ones God has called, through the waters of baptism, to be light to the world. So do not fear, persist, for God “will not faint or be crushed until justice has been established in the earth,” and we are the ones God has sent to do it. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Thursday, December 26, 2019
The Innkeeper's Hospitality - A Sermon on Luke 2.1-20
I listened to a story on NPR that said Virgin Mobile had a study done about how the role someone played in the Christmas pageant affected their future. Marys and Josephs were the most successful, with Marys slightly outpacing Josephs. Jesus’s did surprisingly poorly, possibly because they had no lines. Though, I was baby Jesus and never chosen for Mary, though I did play a tone-deaf star once, and I feel like I turned out alright. Donkeys did better than sheep. Shepherds slightly outpaced wise men. But the one character the story didn’t cover at all was what were the future prospects of innkeepers?
The innkeeper is a central role in any pageant, their refusal to admit the Christchild is the turning point that sets the crisis in place. A weak or easily swayed innkeeper is liable to just let the Holy Family in, ruining the setup for everything that came next and forcing some poor parent volunteer to rush onstage and redirect Mary and Joseph back to the stable scene. But is this strict regard for regulation a benefit or a detriment to future success. How do our innkeepers fare?
I learned something this week about the design of first century Palestinian houses that has me rethinking the whole Christmas story, or at least the role of the innkeeper. The word translated as “inn,” as in “there was no place for them in the inn,” that word is better translated as “upper room.” It is the same word that shows up twenty chapters later when Jesus asked his disciples to prepare the Passover in an upstairs room for what will end up being the Last Supper. “Inn” is in fact sort of an odd choice of a translation because there weren’t inns in the first century. Instead, because of the expectation of hospitality and providing a respite to travelers, visitors passing through a city would be put up in the homes of local residents, a set-up not unlike an Air bnb. The reference to the “upper room” is because first century Palestinian houses were two story. The family lived on the second floor, while the first floor was home to the family livestock. Which is practical, if you think about it, because cows don’t navigate stairs all that well. And even if they did, do you really want to live below a cow? The other benefit of living above the stable is that heat rises. Israel is a moderate climate, but it is a desert so nights can get cool. Living above the stable gave the family the radiant heat of the animals downstairs.
The other thing we know about this story is that due to the registration, many people were on the move. With “all the world” forced to return “to their own towns to be registered,” Joseph and Mary would not have been the only people seeking refuge in the homes of the people in the small town of Bethlehem that day.
So here’s the shift all this made for me. So often this story is portrayed as a tragic example of human selfishness. A pregnant woman turned away at the door. The Son of God forced to lay in a feed trough, reminiscent of how at the end of his life he will hang alone on a cross, abandoned by all whom he loved and cared for. The innkeeper is cast as the first in a long line of people who will reject the Christ, the question then posed, will you be different? But what if that’s the wrong question, what if that’s the wrong portrayal? Given the background information about houses and the expectation of care for many many travelers, what if the story of Christmas is actually a story of incredible hospitality?
Picture it this way. Joseph and Mary, and many others travel to Bethlehem. A journey forced on them from Emperor Augustus’ need for power. Think of the hubris of this request in the first place, that “all the world should be registered.” Thousands upon thousands of people counted and recorded, measured for taxes and the distribution of soldiers. This registration was about tightening the imperial grip, it was about fixing a population in place so that they could more easily be controlled. It is a striking scene to picture, people uprooted and forced on the road at the whim of one person’s word.
By the time Mary and Joseph arrive, exhausted from their long journey, many others are in town as well. The resources of this small community are already stretched thin by the influx of visitors seeking hospitality. Imagine the owner of the home of whom Mary and Joseph sought refuge. He had already taken in many others, along with his own family, there is no space available in the living quarters, no room in the “upper room,” the inn where visitors would normally stay. But our “innkeeper,” if you will, took one look at this exhausted, bedraggled couple, one look at Mary’s bulging belly, and knew he could not turn them away. And he found space for them. There was no room, but he made room, made room in his home, in his heart, for the Christ child, so that the Holy Family would have a place to lay their heads.
The Christmas story is a story of the miracle of God’s economy, the abundance that exists if we only know how to see it. So many others might have thought of their own overpacked homes and thought, we simply cannot house another. But this man, rather than turn away the Christ child, found just a little bit more to share, and in that sharing, in that expanding of his expectations of what he had to offer, played host to the greatest miracle of all time.
In a few minutes we will gather around this table, where anyone who wants it is welcome to a piece of bread, or a gluten free cracker, and a sip of wine or grape juice. If you came to church hungry, this will not be enough. No one would call the food we are about to eat a meal. And yet, for those of us who come again and again to this table, we have experienced it as so much more than what it seems. This bit of bread and sip of wine is the food that feeds our souls, that nourishes and nurtures for the journey ahead. More would not satisfy the way this simple taste will.
Dear friends in Christ, the message of our innkeeper hero is this: you have enough to share, and whatever you have to share is enough. So often it feels like we have so little, we can do so little, so why try at all. Better to leave the trying to those with a lot, those who have power, who’s actions can make a difference. But the truth in this story is that there is no such thing as a small gift in the service of God. So come to this table for the taste that satisfies. Be fed with the presence of Christ. And then go out, filled for service, knowing that who you are, what you have, what you can offer is not just enough, it is exactly what this hungry and homeless world needs. Thanks be to God. Amen.
The innkeeper is a central role in any pageant, their refusal to admit the Christchild is the turning point that sets the crisis in place. A weak or easily swayed innkeeper is liable to just let the Holy Family in, ruining the setup for everything that came next and forcing some poor parent volunteer to rush onstage and redirect Mary and Joseph back to the stable scene. But is this strict regard for regulation a benefit or a detriment to future success. How do our innkeepers fare?
I learned something this week about the design of first century Palestinian houses that has me rethinking the whole Christmas story, or at least the role of the innkeeper. The word translated as “inn,” as in “there was no place for them in the inn,” that word is better translated as “upper room.” It is the same word that shows up twenty chapters later when Jesus asked his disciples to prepare the Passover in an upstairs room for what will end up being the Last Supper. “Inn” is in fact sort of an odd choice of a translation because there weren’t inns in the first century. Instead, because of the expectation of hospitality and providing a respite to travelers, visitors passing through a city would be put up in the homes of local residents, a set-up not unlike an Air bnb. The reference to the “upper room” is because first century Palestinian houses were two story. The family lived on the second floor, while the first floor was home to the family livestock. Which is practical, if you think about it, because cows don’t navigate stairs all that well. And even if they did, do you really want to live below a cow? The other benefit of living above the stable is that heat rises. Israel is a moderate climate, but it is a desert so nights can get cool. Living above the stable gave the family the radiant heat of the animals downstairs.
The other thing we know about this story is that due to the registration, many people were on the move. With “all the world” forced to return “to their own towns to be registered,” Joseph and Mary would not have been the only people seeking refuge in the homes of the people in the small town of Bethlehem that day.
So here’s the shift all this made for me. So often this story is portrayed as a tragic example of human selfishness. A pregnant woman turned away at the door. The Son of God forced to lay in a feed trough, reminiscent of how at the end of his life he will hang alone on a cross, abandoned by all whom he loved and cared for. The innkeeper is cast as the first in a long line of people who will reject the Christ, the question then posed, will you be different? But what if that’s the wrong question, what if that’s the wrong portrayal? Given the background information about houses and the expectation of care for many many travelers, what if the story of Christmas is actually a story of incredible hospitality?
Picture it this way. Joseph and Mary, and many others travel to Bethlehem. A journey forced on them from Emperor Augustus’ need for power. Think of the hubris of this request in the first place, that “all the world should be registered.” Thousands upon thousands of people counted and recorded, measured for taxes and the distribution of soldiers. This registration was about tightening the imperial grip, it was about fixing a population in place so that they could more easily be controlled. It is a striking scene to picture, people uprooted and forced on the road at the whim of one person’s word.
By the time Mary and Joseph arrive, exhausted from their long journey, many others are in town as well. The resources of this small community are already stretched thin by the influx of visitors seeking hospitality. Imagine the owner of the home of whom Mary and Joseph sought refuge. He had already taken in many others, along with his own family, there is no space available in the living quarters, no room in the “upper room,” the inn where visitors would normally stay. But our “innkeeper,” if you will, took one look at this exhausted, bedraggled couple, one look at Mary’s bulging belly, and knew he could not turn them away. And he found space for them. There was no room, but he made room, made room in his home, in his heart, for the Christ child, so that the Holy Family would have a place to lay their heads.
The Christmas story is a story of the miracle of God’s economy, the abundance that exists if we only know how to see it. So many others might have thought of their own overpacked homes and thought, we simply cannot house another. But this man, rather than turn away the Christ child, found just a little bit more to share, and in that sharing, in that expanding of his expectations of what he had to offer, played host to the greatest miracle of all time.
In a few minutes we will gather around this table, where anyone who wants it is welcome to a piece of bread, or a gluten free cracker, and a sip of wine or grape juice. If you came to church hungry, this will not be enough. No one would call the food we are about to eat a meal. And yet, for those of us who come again and again to this table, we have experienced it as so much more than what it seems. This bit of bread and sip of wine is the food that feeds our souls, that nourishes and nurtures for the journey ahead. More would not satisfy the way this simple taste will.
Dear friends in Christ, the message of our innkeeper hero is this: you have enough to share, and whatever you have to share is enough. So often it feels like we have so little, we can do so little, so why try at all. Better to leave the trying to those with a lot, those who have power, who’s actions can make a difference. But the truth in this story is that there is no such thing as a small gift in the service of God. So come to this table for the taste that satisfies. Be fed with the presence of Christ. And then go out, filled for service, knowing that who you are, what you have, what you can offer is not just enough, it is exactly what this hungry and homeless world needs. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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