Now Hiring, Will Train

Matthew 3:13-17
January 9, 2011 (Baptism of the Lord)

1.  When I was a little boy, like most little boys, I loved to watch my father shave his whiskers.  I liked it so much that my folks bought me a little toy shaving set.  It had a little fake can of shaving cream, a hand mirror, and a plastic razor (of course with no blade!).  If he was in the mood and I was lucky, my dad would give me some actual shaving cream—not just the pretend stuff—and I would take my toy razor and wipe the shaving cream off just like an adult.  Shaving was fun!  Nowadays, if I could get away without ever shaving I would!  Come to think of it, I also had a toy lawnmower, and believe you me, lawn-mowing is no longer a fun game!  But you know, my kids have these kinds of toys too.  They have a toy vacuum cleaner, and a toy kitchen, and other toys that are based on real, not so fun, adult work.  And so kids play house or play school or play other kinds of adult work settings.

If you watch nature programs, you know that it’s the same with animal babies.  When kittens pounce on each other, they are learning hunting skills for when they are older.  And when fawns bounce around and play, they too are learning the agile movements of their mothers and fathers to escape predators.

As children, it would seem we play to become good versions of our elders.  We practice skills when we pretend. 

2.  Baptism is a bit like this.  When we splash in the water, when we play with a wash basin in the middle of a church, or go out to a river, or dunk ourselves in a tub as part of our worship, we are practicing for a very big and very serious job.  In the Presbyterian Church, we believe that baptism:

• initiates us into the church;
• bestows the promise of God’s grace upon us;
• assures us that God forgives our sins;
• and calls us to a life of Christian service and fulfillment.

In other words, baptism both marks our entrance into the Christian community and helps form us for the work we will need to do once we are Christians.  We could hang a sign on the baptismal font that read: “Now Hiring, Will Train.”  The promises we make for ourselves and for the care of others in baptism are playful rehearsals of real commitments in the mature years of our faith. 

3.  So, since baptism is about neophytes getting ready for the big time, it is disconcerting to us—just as it was to John the Baptist—that Jesus shows up to get baptized in the Jordan River.  John realizes as soon as he sees Jesus that he, John, is out of his depth.  He stutters, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”  Compared to Jesus, John is the little boy with a can of fake shaving cream.  He is still in training—why would he be called on to baptize the master? 

This scenario of tension between the Lord and the follower is one that is utterly commonplace for the Christian.  We all live in this tense place where we know that Jesus is Lord and King and at the same time we know that we are supposed to be like him.  He sits on the right hand of God the Almighty and is himself part of the Trinitarian Godhead.  Yet, he is also our brother and friend.  This tension is why I have never been totally convinced by the slogan WWJD.  You know, it stands for “What Would Jesus Do?”  The idea is basically a  good one:  before you make decisions, or when you’re trying to figure out how to act, ask yourself, “what would Jesus do?”  We all ought to do this—we all ought to strive to model our own lives on Jesus’ selfless compassion and love for neighbor.  But at some point, as the John the Baptist knew, the question fails.  As some point, when we ask, “what would Jesus do?” the answer is, “Come to earth as God Incarnate, perform hundreds of miracles, die on the cross for the sins of the world, and rise again from the dead to bring the promise of new life to all people.”  Obviously, none of us is going to be doing that, and so like John the Baptist, we realize that we are playing at being something greater than us. 

But then, our brother and our God Jesus comes to us in the midst of our play and blesses what we are doing by joining us in the game.  He goes under the water.  He begins.  He shows us the way.  And, glory be, our play-acting becomes holy and the very essence of the Christian life! 

4.  Given this good news that Jesus is with us and Jesus guides us, there’s pretty much only one thing left to us as we splash around in the baptismal waters:  Get busy! 

It is clear from Jesus’ own baptism that baptism is the beginning of something, not the end. 

In our own experience in the church, this is not always the case.  Too often, we treat baptism (and also confirmation, which is a similar rite) as a capstone event rather than a mere beginning.  Too often, someone is baptized or confirmed, and we never see that person again. 

This simply should not be the case, and we should all work to embrace all the baptized into the work and ministry of the church.  Likewise, those of us who are here, we need to be ready to serve compassionately and reach out in love to a broken world.  Like Jesus himself, we need to find our beginning, not our end, in the waters of baptism.  We need to feel the clean feeling, we need to be refreshed, we need to hear the promises.  Not so we can sit back and relax but so that we can continue to do the ministry of Jesus Christ.  We need to keep playing, keep practicing, as we grow and mature and grow some more as children of God.  The elders and deacons who were ordained and installed this morning set a good example for all of us with their willingness and joy in serving.  All of us can listen for God’s call and, like Christ, be ready to “fulfill all righteousness,” that is, to carry out God’s will in our lives and in our world. 

5.  And the best news of all is that God is pleased already!  Before we are even out of the gate, God is pleased.  Before Jesus even begins his incredible ministry, God is pleased.  How much more will be God pleased and glorified when we move ahead into ministry!  How much happier a parent will God be when we bear fruit, when we love each other, when we serve the needy!  When all of our playing and pretending leads to the real deal!  With Jesus, then, let us come up out of the water, embraced by the Spirit, to do the good work of God.  Amen.

Power to Become Children

John 1:10-18
January 2, 2011 (2nd Sunday after Christmas Day)

1.  An assignment that teachers sometimes give to their students is to produce a family tree.  Lots of kids have to do this at some point in their education—I had to do it for an introduction to anthropology class.  The idea, I guess, is that the student learns not only about his or her relatives but also about the different ways that we might think about kinship and family. 

The easiest, Beaver Cleaver-type of family tree has a mom and a dad and kids.  The mom and dad have their own moms and dads and brothers and sisters.  So it’s a simple diagram of a few generations of immediate family as well as aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. 

But making your family tree is normally a lot trickier than this.  There are all sorts of circumstances that can complicate a family tree.  What if your parents get divorced?  Does your step-parent’s extended family belong?  What if you are adopted?  What if there are people you call grandma or grandpa or auntie that are not biologically related to you?  Do really close friends belong on your family tree if they treat you like family?  Do blood relatives deserve a place on your family tree even if they don’t act like family ought to act?  Sure, so and so is my biological father, but someone else actually treats me like his child.  Or, I love Auntie So and So, but she’s not my mother’s actual sister, just an old friend.  Who is in your family?  Who has a place on your family tree?  How do you imagine the web of relationships that surrounds you? 

2.  The incredibly beautiful passage we heard this morning from the gospel of John suggests that we are part of God’s family now because of Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh.  Verses 12 and 13 read: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of  man, but of God.” 

The gist of the passage from John’s gospel is that we become God’s family when we get to know God in Jesus Christ.  What I was suggesting with the whole discussion of family trees was just that:  human biological connection does not guarantee loving relationships.  Instead, the people we know best and care most about as well as those who know us best and care most about us; those people are our family.  So when God so loved the world to send God’s only begotten Son to us, we received indelible knowledge of God.  A knowledge that opened up a relationship.  And true and gracious relationship creates family.

The story of Christmas  that we hear again in John is precisely this: When God came to us in the human flesh of Jesus Christ, we learned something radically new and more intimate about God. 

3.  The story of the Bible and the story of our faith is basically the story of God wanting us to know God better and better.  As the gospel reading indicated, this goes back even to Moses.  Moses went up onto Mt. Sinai into God’s very presence where he received God’s law.  Of course, Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from that mountain, but he also brought back many other laws that guided the Israelites—and these laws still guide the Jewish and Christian communities.  Knowing God’s law, that is, God’s requirements for our behavior, is certainly one way of knowing God.  When we consider the Ten Commandments, which advise us to hold God above all else and to be good to our fellow human beings, we can know that our God is a God who wants to be worshiped and revered and is also a God who wants us to live as a mutually supportive and just community.  Another way to think about this is that the Bible itself is a gateway onto knowledge of God.  The words of the Bible are words of description and introduction to the person and character of God.

4.  Besides the law and the Bible, we also know God by what God gives us.  In our Old Testament reading from the prophet Jeremiah, God promises to give the people bounty and joyfulness.  “They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.”  God gives us life, God gives us strength and intelligence.  God gives us the beautiful world to live in.  And as John’s gospel reminds us, God gives us grace upon grace as well as truth.  We know God then by the good gifts that God gives us even as we know God by the laws and stories that God places on our lives and society.

5.  But above, all, and this is the gospel of Christmas, we know God because God came to us in human form in the person of Jesus Christ.  A paraphrase of our gospel reading today says, “The Word was made flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.  We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.”  That’s it right there.  When God came to our neighborhood to live beside us, we became a family.  We received the power to become children of the will of God.  We can see God and know God so much more fully now that before when all we had was the Bible.  In Christmas, we also have Jesus to be with us and show us what God is like—what God’s eternal love is like. 

The great Dutch master Rembrandt painted a scene called the “Holy Family” in which Mary is seen with a well-read Bible in one hand and her other hand gently rocking a cradle in which the baby Jesus lies.  She has evidently been reading the Bible but is now gazing lovingly into our Savior’s beatific little face.  Professor Thomas Troeger, writing about this painting, says, “[Mary] does not ponder the page alone.  She also ponders the infant beside her, ‘the Word made flesh,’ rather than the Word made paper and ink. The Word is a blood-warmed, breath-enlivened creature sleeping beside his mother. When Mary returns to her reading, she will understand what she reads at greater depth because she has encountered the Word through the Word made flesh.  When she tends to the child, she will understand the child at greater depth because she has encountered the Word through the Words in the book.”

And, says the gospel writer John, when we know God, through Word in book and Word in flesh, we become part of God’s family.

6.  To make it more explicitly clear, we can turn to the letter to the Ephesians.  In that letter, which we heard earlier, we find this:  “God destined us for adoption as God’s children through Jesus Christ.”  We have been adopted into a family of faith and of care that will never falter.  The exercise of writing out our family tree, on the one hand, becomes exponentially  more difficult when we consider that all of us who know Jesus Christ are related in the bond of God’s love.  On the other hand, the whole idea of family becomes easier, more pure, more profound when we embrace this adoption.  Through God’s free gift of Jesus, we are brothers and sisters.  Ethicist Gilbert Meilander writes, “Has it occurred to you that every Christian is adopted?...Because we have become God’s children by adoption, he has ‘sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba!  Father!”’  Each one of us has been rescued from our natural state; each has experienced the love of a new and better father; each has become part of a new and better family.” 

7.  Christmas, in this sense, is not only the birthday of Christ—it is also the anniversary of our adoption into this family.  In our family tree, the strongest branches are between you and me in the bond of God’s love made known to us in Jesus.  It is cause for a Merry Christmas!  It is cause for song.  In this family of faith, in this church given to us, grace upon grace, by Christ himself, we know that auld acquaintances will never be forgot.  They will always  be brought to mind.  By our brother Christ, we are given the power to be family forever.  Praise be to God!  Amen

Finding Jesus

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
December 5, 2010 (2nd Sunday of Advent)

1.  It’s only been two Sundays now since our celebration of Christ the King, but the image of kingdom, of a just and timeless reign of God’s love, is pretty much a constant in the scriptural witness.  We can’t just talk about kingship of Christ once a year and be done with it.  In fact, Advent continues to be a great time to discuss the promise of Christ’s eternal reign since in Advent we wait for Christ to come again and usher in the justice, peace, and love of his kingdom.  Of course, one of the other reasons we like to think about Christ as a leader—at any time of year—is because our own leaders, even the good ones, could really stand to improve drastically.  In this vein, Rev. Tod Mundo writes:

George Washington's likeness appears on our dollar bills and our quarters, and he is revered as the Father of Our Country. George Washington owned slaves. Andrew Jackson was one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history. Andrew Jackson promised the Choctaw and Cherokee peoples, "they shall possess [their land] as long as Grass grows or water runs"; when gold was discovered on their lands, his forgot his promises and drove them from their lands so that the white people could prosper. Theodore Roosevelt was a man with a reputation larger than life, and his face is carved on Mt. Rushmore. Theodore Roosevelt pushed the notorious Platt Amendment into the Cuban constitution, thereby stealing a measure of Cuba's sovereignty under the pretense of caring about the Cuban people. Great leaders sometimes have great faults. Poor leaders sometimes have even greater faults. Jim Hightower quips, "If God had meant for people to vote, he would have given us candidates."

The leaders in the Bible, with the one obvious exception of Jesus, are not too hot either.  King David is an adulterer and a murderer, his son Solomon has absolutely no self-control, the other kings of Israel and Judah mostly betray God and the religion of their ancestors.  In the New Testament, we have King Herod and Pontius Pilate not to mention all the other Roman authorities who keep Paul in and out of jail. 

Since the Bible, we Christians have long had a problematic relationship with our earthly leaders.  Worship professor Christian Scharen suggests that, “The worst moments in the long history of God’s people across history come to pass when leaders throw their lot in with the politically powerful.  Solomon and Herod are obvious examples, but so are church leaders in Germany during National Socialism or in Chile during the reign of Augusto Pinochet.  Year after year, people watch their rulers again succumb to corruption, greed, and power—some more, some less.”

2.  Psalm 72 must have been written by a poet that knew very well that earthly kings and leaders—and any collaboration between faithful people and those leaders—was usually marked by sinful missteps, faithlessness, and subjugation of the powerless.  The psalm, however, takes a hopeful approach:  instead of bemoaning how bad almost all kings have been, it focuses rather on a perfect future king who governs with justice for the poor and commitment to the well-being of all people.  The psalm itself is wonderfully positive about the king, and the son of the king.  Hearing this psalm with Christian ears, one immediately thinks of Jesus sitting on the throne of heaven.  In the words of the psalm, this king judges the “people with righteousness and the poor with justice.”  Under his rule, “the mountains yield prosperity for the people.”  It’s an amazing vision.  The king we await in these darkening days of December will finally be a good leader, the best leader.  One commentator on Psalm 72 wondered wistfully, What would it be like if all of our leaders today had to pass this acid test to be considered good leaders?  What if they had to bring justice to the poor and prosperity to the people?  It’s all too easy in today’s world to forget that we can and ought to expect more from those who aspire to serve us as leaders.  And continuing on a theme I started to discuss last week, wouldn’t it be amazing if we measured prosperity not in terms of gross accumulation of wealth but in terms of true and equitable well-being for all people?  Way back in 1968, Bobby Kennedy made this appeal.  He said:

Too much and too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.  Our Gross National Product…--if we should judge America by that--…counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl….Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures…everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

3.  Psalm 72, as well as the other scripture readings we heard this morning from Isaiah and from Matthew’s gospel describe a future leader, a Christ, who will not measure prosperity or justice in the corrupt and limited terms of wealth and greed.  He will bring with him a peace and justice that far surpasses our meager expectations.  He will be like the “rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.  In his days…righteousness will flourish and peace [will] abound, until the moon is no more.”  The question of Advent is:  How do we wait?  How can we wait for Jesus to come and make the words of promise in Psalm 72 come true?  First, we look at the gospel of a Lord who has already come.  We pattern our lives after Jesus’ life and ministry while we wait, and we hope for a future where what God has started in Jesus comes  to a final and beautiful fullness.  Two great Methodist thinkers, Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon encourage us to do just this when they write, “The church is on the long haul, living in that difficult time between one advent and the next.  In such times, we are all the more dependent on a community that tells us we live between the times, that it is all too easy to lose sight of the way the world is, now that God has come.  Because we know something about the direction in which it is moving, we are encouraged by that picture and guided by the shape of its depiction of the way things are now that God has redeemed the world in Jesus.”

As John the Baptist teaches in our gospel reading from this morning, one greater than all of us is coming, one whose sandals we are not worthy to carry.  But in the meantime, as we await this wonderful incarnation of God, John reminds us that is our job in the here and now to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”  In other words, while we place our ultimate hope in the coming Christ, in the interim we do his work.  We love as he loves, we ally ourselves with justice and mercy, we serve the needy, the oppressed and the poor, and we look to Jesus as our moral exemplar. 

4.  To do that, we need to go to where Christ is now.  Jesus, from his birth, lived with the poor, the sick, and those in need.  Psalm 72 asks that the king “defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.”  We consider Jesus to be this king because he did and will do just that.  South African pastor Peter Storey was once addressing a group of well-off American church people.  He said something to them that I’m sure had to sting, but it is utterly true.  He said, “Those…churches struggling in places of poverty and injustice are fortunate—they are already where Jesus is.  Those who have become prosperous must find Him again.”  In our prosperity and comfort, our challenge this Advent is to go to where Jesus is, among the poor and the downtrodden.  What can you do in this season to find him?  How can you move yourself to a place where you can encounter the king of justice among the poor?  Can you give from your abundance to the needy?  Can you write letters to our leaders to encourage them to enact legislation that protects Jesus’ beloved?  Can you pray that the world will be transformed?  Can you pray that Jesus come and really want it, for your own sake and for the sake of all those on this earth who desperately need deliverance?  I’ve said it from this pulpit before but allow me to say it again:  God doesn’t help those who help themselves.  God helps those who can’t help themselves.  And you have been called to minister in Jesus’ name.  Find way to serve the poor, find a way to serve the lonely, find a way to share your prosperity, and you will find the king of peace.  You will find Jesus.  Amen. 

Thrones of Judgment

Psalm 122
November 28, 2010 (1st Sunday of Advent)

1.  It is my intention to focus our attention during this season of Advent on the Psalms that occur in the lectionary readings.  These ancient songs of temple, synagogue, and church—I hope—will provide us with just the right music for this time of expectation and preparation.  So, to get started, let me share with you a song that has become a favorite around our house, and, if I may modestly admit it, I wrote it myself.  I wrote the song as a response to my children’s frequent conviction that my decisions are not fair, or that their lives are too difficult, or that not all of their needs and wants are being met quickly enough.  The song goes like this:

There is no justice on this earth!

There is no justice on this earth!

There is no justice, there is no justice,

There is no justice on this earth!

My kids don’t really care for this song, but I like it a lot.  For me, it revives ancient themes, ones that we often see in the Psalms themselves.  When the people of Israel look around at their position among the nations, they see that they are small to the point of insignificance, and all too often they are conquered and hauled off into exile.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, their songs lament the lack of justice on earth, but they also imagine a different world where there is justice.  A world where God is in charge in the holy city of Jerusalem, and things are the way they ought to be. 

2.  In Psalm 122, which we sang this morning, the psalmist finds joy in going to the house of the Lord because in that house, it is possible to imagine a world where God’s justice is the norm rather than the exception.  The words of the psalm asks us to pray for the peace and prosperity of Jerusalem. 

Of course, for the ancient Israelites as well as for many today, Jerusalem is the centerpiece of God’s creation.  It is the holy city where God is most pleased to dwell, the home of the ancient Hebrew temple, the home of Jesus passion and resurrection, and the home of the Dome of the Rock, one of the most revered places in Islam. 

And members of all three of these religions have longed after peace for Jerusalem even as all of them have also been guilty of bringing strife and warfare to this same city.  Jerusalem today is one of the most fraught places on the planet.  Everyone seems to want the city for themselves to the exclusion of others, and perhaps this is how they feel about our God as well.  We want God for ourselves in such a way that limits God’s potential affection for or relationship with other people. 

Jerusalem, in this way, becomes much more than one particular geographical city.  It rises to be the ideal place where all history comes together and God’s promises come true.  It is the place where people from all over the earth metaphorically pin their hopes and dreams, and it is for this reason that the psalmist’s appeal to us to go up and be happy worshiping God in Jerusalem is such a timeless hymn.  At the end of the seder meal at Passover, our Jewish brothers and sisters proclaim with hope:  “Next year in Jerusalem!”  Most have no sense that they will go to the earthly city called Jerusalem, the one that straddles the border between the modern political entities of Israel and West Bank.  They instead refer to the Jerusalem of promise, the holy city where God lives, the mount of Zion where ancient hungers are satisfied, where justice flows down like a stream, where swords are beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks, where we will learn war no more. 

3.  What marks our longing for this heavenly Jerusalem is our shared conviction that this will be a place that will feature both justice and peace.  We have a sense that justice and peace ought to be related somehow—after all, most of our towns have an elected position called “the justice of the peace” who is responsible for keeping order by settling disputes.  We know, instinctively maybe, that if we have justice, we will also have peace.  But there is plenty in our world to suggest the opposite.  Plenty of judgments are made everyday in our modern world that disturb the peace.  I refer to judgments which concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, judgments which choose knowingly to pollute the environment, judgments to make war instead of to seek peace, judgments that divide the powerful from the weak, the haves from the have-nots.  These kinds of so-called justice drive a wedge between people and make peace seem like a far-away fantasy.  But we know, as the psalmist knew, as the prophets knew, and as Jesus himself knew that true and godly justice will go hand in hand with peace.  For this reason, we can understand where the psalmist was coming from when he imagined a city where “thrones of judgment” were set up.  When the one doing the judging is the source of all creation and the author of justice, this is good news indeed.  This judge creates a city so just that no more harm is done, no more alienation occurs, no more oppression is possible.  In the purview of these thrones of justice, peace spreads.  No wonder the psalmist seems to equate the practice of justice with the act of making peace as well as with the liturgical praise of the people.  Justice-seeking equals peace-making equals praise-singing. 

4.  In front of these thrones of judgment, the sinful divisions we create unfairly between ourselves are done away with and we are all able to worship with freedom and human equality before our God.  In this act of justice, we find peace, but Psalm 122 also suggests that in this justice we will also find prosperity.  This prosperity is utterly unknown in our world, however.  Sure, there are plenty of people who are well-off today, but unlike earthly wealth, the prosperity in the psalm is not won at anyone else’s expense.  Biblical prosperity is not the accumulation of wealth in a system of scarcity.  It is rather the fair and equitable sharing of God’s gifts to us.  In this season of heightened consumerism and continuous demands that we buy more and spend more and live always at the edge if not beyond our means, it is instructive to remember that the prosperity and peace that are imagined in the Bible do not resign some people to poverty and dependence.  The peace of the house of God, where God’s justice reigns, is the kind of peace that restores the dignity of all people, that brings low the mighty and raises up the lowly; it is the dignity that comes unexpectedly both in a manger and in glory. 

5.  So, the psalmist says, “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’

Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.

Jerusalem—built as a city that is bound firmly together.”

When these words are intoned, who is it that belongs within Jerusalem’s gates?  Who is being invited to enter into this city of justice, where all is bound so firmly together?  Is it for us pious Christians gathered here this morning?  Is it for the holy?  Who can come into this city chosen by God?  In other words, who receives God’s promises?  To whom do they apply?  When Jesus says he came to seek out and restore the lost, to whom was he referring?  I suppose the thrones of judgment are for all people, ready or not.  For some, they will mean a reversal of fortune.  But for all people, the promise stands:  God’s justice will bring peace. 

6.  Well, you may be saying to yourself, “What does all this have to do with Jesus?  What does any of this have to do with Advent?”  Advent is a time when we affirm that the world can change.  Not by our own labors, but as the psalmist suggests, by the arrival of a just judge to sit on the thrones of judgment.  When Christ comes to reconcile the world for once and for all with God, the world will change.  The injustices, the grief, the inequality, will be set right.  Peace and true prosperity will reign.  We Christians must live off of this Advent hope.  It is like a song that has gotten stuck in our heads, and we can’t shake it.  We believe Christ can and will change the world. This is our story, this is our song.  Soon, little Avery Elizabeth will be baptized, and her own life will become part of this song of hope.  In her, as in all of us baptized, ancient promises are being answered.  As we await the coming of the Christ, let us see ourselves as we truly are.  Let us prepare ourselves for praise, for justice, and for peace-making.  I began with a cynical song about the lack of justice on this earth that I sing to my children.  Let us end with the hope that all of us—even our little children—will realize a new song of gladness, justice, and peace.  Amen.

King

Colossians 1:11-20 and Luke 23:33-43
November 21, 2010 (Christ the King)

1.  So did you hear the good news?  If you didn’t, you may be living under a rock!  Prince William is getting married to his long-time girlfriend, Kate Middleton!  Barring some unforeseen circumstance, William and his new wife will eventually ascend the throne of the United Kingdom.  William will be king, and his wife Kate will be Queen.  Our perennial interest in the British monarchy is fascinating—it would seem that our American democratic character cannot help but be intrigued with the romance and tradition of royalty.  We’ve all seen too many movies!  Biblical kings were more likely to be exploitative autocrats than ultra-suave, polo-playing dandies.  So what do we make of this strange Sunday at the end of the liturgical year?  What are we supposed to think about this idea that Christ is King?  Does he wear an ermine-lined cape and jeweled crown?  Does he live in a palace?  Does he rule with absolute authority, or does he leave most everything up to some celestial parliament?  And, perhaps the hardest question of all, can you accept/believe that you are subject to a monarch, no matter that it is Jesus?  Our scripture readings this morning can help us think some about what it means that Jesus Christ reigns as king.

2.  In the letter to the Colossians, our Savior Christ is described in terms of cosmic power.  The writer of this letter refers to Jesus as:

·         the image of the invisible God;

·         the firstborn of all creation;

·         head of the body, the church;

·         the beginning and the first born of the dead.

The passage declares that all things were created through Jesus Christ, meaning that you and I, the natural world around us, the air we breath, and the infinite expanse of the cosmos were all created in some mystical way through the person of Jesus.  Moreover, in this Jesus our King, the entire fullness of God has been pleased to dwell, and all of us can find reconciliation with God and with each other through him.

This vision of Christ is amazing, astounding, astonishing.  He is so far from the humble babe in the manger, far from the scruffy carpenter, far from the executed teacher and healer.  In my imagination, after reading this passage from Colossians, I imagine Jesus getting bigger and bigger until he fills my entire field of vision, until he fills the entire universe.  Even for a dyed-in-the-wool anti-authoritarian, it is not that difficult to feel like a subject of this larger-than-life Lord of Life.  It reminds me of another of my favorite New Testament passages: the hymn about Christ in the 2^nd chapter of Philippians:

“Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord”!

3.  But you may find yourself squirming with all this talk of an Almighty King.  Your relationship with Jesus isn’t like that maybe.  You don’t like the idea of bowing and scraping.  Jesus is your friend, your brother, your confidant.  Or, even if that’s not completely how you feel about him, he’s not some cosmic overlord!  If you feel this way, you are not alone.  Theologian Sallie McFague has been one of the  most trenchant critics of this way of thinking of Christ, or even God the Creator, as some Almighty Royal Figure.  She writes, “My criticism of [this monarchical model] focuses on its inability to serve as the imaginative framework for all of creation….

“The relationship of king to subject is necessarily a distant one: royalty is ‘untouchable.’  It is the distance, the difference, the otherness of God that is underscored in this imagery.  God as king in his kingdom—which is not of this earth—and we remain in another place, far from his dwelling.  In this picture God is wordless and the world is Godless: the world is empty of God’s presence, because it is too lowly to be the royal abode.”

Some of you have said something more or less like this to me, if not with McFague’s exact words.  You don’t like a king Jesus.  Thinking of Jesus as king makes him distant, out there, un-relatable. 

These criticisms suggest that Christ the King seems, at best, old-fashioned.  At worst, it takes away our own God-given human dignity and expects us to genuflect mindlessly as a way to keep us in our place.  As a lifelong Protestant, I remember how shocked I was the first time I saw news footage of the ordination service for a Catholic priest.  At one point in the service, he doesn’t merely kneel but rather complete prostrates himself face down on the floor before the altar at the front of the church.  I mean, in our churches, we don’t even have kneelers in the pews!  Our understanding of Christ simply does not call for this kind of self-abasement.  How can good democrats (lower-case “D”!) ever find any sort of comfort in a God who treats us like subjects of a king?

4.  The thing is, as our Gospel reading makes abundantly clear, Jesus is no ordinary king.  He is not far away and up above.  He is Jesus.  He died with criminals on the cross.  But even in his most agonizing moment, he was reaching out to them and inviting them into his kingdom, into his community.  This king is someone who, when confronted with earthly kings and powers, receives nothing but mocking.  They make fun of him!  “If you are the king of the Jews, then do something!  Save yourself!” 

When the author of the letter to the Colossians describes our Lord Christ as a Cosmic Lord, he must hold that vision of Jesus in tension with the King Jesus who rules from the throne of the cross with a crown of thorns.  We must also hold these two visions of king in tension.  One is the Lord to whom every knee must bow.  The other is the king who offers grace even to the criminal at the hour of his death.  If we bow to our King Jesus, we do so because he is with us and loves us.  He is not in some distant royal abode, but nor is he someone we can tuck away in our back pocket.  He is mighty, and he is kind.  He is merciful, and he is just.  All things were created through him, and he wants to know you personally.

5.  Perhaps the best wisdom I have heard concerning our celebration of Christ the King is from preaching professor David Lose.  Lose emphatically explains that when we make Christ our King, this is not just regime change.  We are not just replacing our worldly presidents and bosses and lords with Jesus.  Lose writes, “But the kingdom – or, maybe better, realm – of God that Jesus proclaims represents a whole new reality where nothing is the same – not our relationships or rules, not our view of self or others, not our priorities or principles – nothing. Everything we thought we knew about kings and kingdoms, in fact, gets turned right on its head.”  Lose continues, “If we believe that Christian faith isn't just allegiance to a different sovereign but rather is entrance into an entirely new realm, then who knows what God will expect from us. No longer can we keep our faith a private affair and ignore the need of our neighbor. No longer can we sing robust and rousing hymns about God's glory and majesty and ignore the plight of God's good earth. No longer can we pray that God's kingdom come and yet manage our wealth as if it actually belonged – rather than was entrusted – to us. And no longer can we relegate the realm of God to a comfortably distant – or for that matter frighteningly near – future. The realm and rule of God is all around us, beckoning us to live by its vision and values even now.”

6.  So, in this last week before we must absolutely get caught up in Advent and in Christmas, remember again that we exist in this church because Christ is our Head. He defines who we are and how we are to act. He welcomes us and sends us out.  He feeds us at this table, and calls us to feed others. 

I will conclude with words of praise from the book of Revelation:

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,

to receive power and wealth

and wisdom and might

and honor and glory and blessing!  Amen.

Signs of the New Creation

Isaiah 65:17-25
November 14, 2005 (33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1.  Hear again these words from the prophet Isaiah:  “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.”  Isaiah was writing to a people recently returned from their exile in Babylon.  Jerusalem was a shambles, families and farms and trades were all in disarray, and the world crowded all around as a constant threat.  The people needed to hear God’s promise again that a new creation is on its way.  Last week, we talked about heaven, and that’s part of this new creation.  But today we need to remember, like the ancient Israelites, that God is with us now.  God is creating something new and something better in our world in our lives right now.  We believe in a God who is doing a new thing, a God who puts a new heart within us, a God who rules over a place called the New Jerusalem.  We believe in a God who makes all things new. 

2.  One of the remarkable features of this passage from Isaiah is how specific are God’s promises concerning the new creation.  To be honest, it’s probably so specific because the prophet Isaiah was responding to specific injustices, real cases of public nastiness, particular instances of mean and sorry limitation.  In other words, the vision of the new in this passage points to some very concrete problems with the old.  And if you are a realist, what some might call a pessimist, you might not be too shy about pointing out that the old and awful world of the ancient Israelites that emerges from this passage is all too similar to our own world.  You might wonder: if God is bringing newness, if new creation is on its way, it seems to have been delayed.  Just like the experience of the Israelites, the world still crowds around us, our lives are all too often a total mess.

But don’t take my word for it.  There is proof that our world still cries out for something new. 

Isaiah promises that the new creation will not have infants who live but a few days.  While rates of infant mortality have decreased radically in the modern world, especially in developed nations, in the third world, infant mortality remains tragically high.  The CIA World Factbook puts infant mortality in the United States at the relatively low rate of 0.6%, but this still means that the U.S. is in 46^th place in the world in terms of infant mortality.  Sadly, many nations in Africa still have infant mortality rates higher than 10%. 

Isaiah promises that all old people will live out a long life.  Again, in the industrialized world, this is basically true, with the exceptions we all can name resulting from accidents, murder, and disease.  But in other parts of the world, the average life expectancy is appallingly low, generally due to the AIDS epidemic.  Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have a life expectancy hovering around 40 years. 

In the new creation in Isaiah, no one builds houses and then doesn’t live in them.  Nor does anyone plant crops and then not eat of them.  Of course, many today do not live in the houses they built.  National Geographic magazine says that in 2010 there are 35 million refugees in this world who have been forced from their homes by war and unrest.  Some agencies put that number much higher. 

And of course, in today’s global agricultural economy, few people eat the food that they plant in their fields.  Presbyterian mission co-worker Jed Koball explains that one of the key causes of hunger in the country of Peru today is the fact that many fields once used to provide food for the local population are now used to grow a cash crop, asparagus, for the North American market.  Examples like this one are unfortunately common. 

Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, in God’s new creation says Isaiah, no parents will “bear children for calamity.”  This is every parent’s most fervent hope for their children today, that they will never encounter calamity despite a world full of perils and traps.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if none of our children ever experienced calamity? 

No wonder that Isaiah’s prophecy for an ancient people still sounds fresh and attractive to us today!  So many conditions of the old world still plague our contemporary time.  We still need a new creation.  We still need a new heaven and a new earth. 

3.  Noted Christian speaker and preacher Tony Campolo makes the bold claim that when Jesus came into the world, God’s promises came to pass.  Despite all that I’ve just said about the world still being in dire need of a new creation, Campolo argues that in Jesus, we have been given new life.  Jesus, in all the gospels, proclaims that, in him, the kingdom of God is coming near to us, and this is the beginning of the new creation.  Campolo writes, “[Jesus] wants to change this world into the kind of world that it ought to be. That’s why Jesus came, to create transformed people who in turn will live in a transformed world.”  This is why Jesus teaches his disciples—and us—to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” 

In other words, Jesus among us is the turning point in history between the old world and the new, between the old life and the new life.  Ancient promises, like the one made in Isaiah to the Israelites, are answered in Jesus Christ.  And so now, even though the world can still feel awfully broken, it is on the mend.  Christ is with us, Emmanuel, in a whole new way, even in the trials and problems of modern life.

Campolo suggests that Hurricane Katrina was a good example of a new thing emerging even in the destruction of that storm.  Campolo writes, “When Katrina took place, [Jesus] was the first one who wept. He was the first one who cried. He was the one who was outraged because we didn’t build levees strong enough to hold back a hurricane force wind. He was the one who was outraged by the fact that there was so much poverty in New Orleans. To be Christian isn’t just to believe in Jesus, it’s to allow Jesus to invade you, to change your emotions, your feelings, your thinking.” 

4.  And when this transformation begins to take place, we start to be able to see signs of the new creation.  Life emerges where before there was none.  As Christians we need to remember that Jesus came to bring in the kingdom of God.  In him, the old world is being made new.  When you see new life emerge, you can be sure that is Christ at work.  When you see signs of the new creation, you are seeing the promises of God being fulfilled even now.  After the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington in 1980, scientists and other observers were astonished by how quickly the landscape regenerated.  A 1987 article from Time magazine reported that, “What they observe is nothing less than a landscape being reborn. Nature is laboring mightily to transform the scoured flanks of the mountain, its debris- filled river systems and chemically polluted ponds and lakes into a facsimile of the sylvan setting that existed before the eruption. To the untutored eye, the evidence of devastation still seems overwhelming. Scientists, however, see a glass filling itself up slowly but surely. Says James MacMahon, head of the biology department at Utah State University: ‘It's not a forest yet, but the rate of progress is amazing.’”  Maybe all of us can think of areas in our own lives where we have been surprised by the rate of growth.  Where has Jesus been making new life in you?

And sometimes, this work of new life, this constant move toward wholeness, comes in even less expected and more sudden ways.  I recently heard a radio interview with musician Sxip Shirey.  Shirey grew up in rural Ohio on 54 acres of woods.  He loved it in the country.  But to make it as a musician, he realized it was going to be necessary to move to New York City, a place he initially detested.  It was ugly and crowded and unfriendly.  But then one night, he found himself on the roof of a friend’s 36-storey apartment building overlooking downtown Manhattan.  It was a deeply foggy night, and as he looked out, he saw the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.  Their bases were covered in fog such that it looked like two enormous buildings floating in the clouds.  In the harbor, he could hear the foghorns of the boats, and to his right he could see the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges lit and floating above the mist.  To his left, he could see the Statue of Liberty, and he at once felt connected to his Albanian grandmother who had emigrated through Ellis Island.  Then and there, Shirey discovered the life and the beauty of the city.  He said, “I felt connected on a spiritual level to the city for the first time.”  What was ugly was beautiful.  What had hurt and felt like a strange land had become home. 

5.  For us too, a new world is on its way.  Even when we feel alienated and when this world feels old indeed, our God is at work.  When we see the world through the redemptive lens of Christ, we note new life springing up.  When forgiveness is extended, when beauty shines forth, when relationships flourish, it is then that “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”  Open yourselves to Jesus and to what he is doing in you and in us to usher in a new creation.  Open yourselves to these promises and trust that our God is faithful.

Let us pray:  Almighty God, attune us to see your work in your world.  Open our hearts and minds to the many ways that you are bringing us new life.  May your kingdom so inspire us that we share your love and life with all.  In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Heaven

Luke 20:27-38
November 7, 2010 (32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. The genius American folk singer Woody Guthrie once wrote some extremely moving lyrics for a song called “Heaven.” Here are a few stanzas from that song:

It’s after my work tired and weary, I lay down to rest my eyes,

I see this world change in a whirlwind and heaven flies down from the skies;

I see rising up from the wreckage cities and mansions so bright

I see my friends’ eyes and their faces lit up with a bright shining light.

Every hand works in hand with the other and not for power nor greed;

Every hand works to its fullest ability and is paid in its deepest of need;

No cancer, no tuberculosis, no paralysis or asylums are here

No bowery nor skid row of homeless, no eye that is blinded by tears.

I know as you hear such a dream, friend, you will not pass it along;

I do not expect you to sing it as I do, nor to sing such a curious song;

I wrote down this song for my own self, and sing it now to my own soul.

But if you’ll sing songs of your dreamings, then you will reap treasures untold.

Guthrie captured a vision of heaven that was meaningful to him. It was a sort of workers’ paradise without disease or madness. But Guthrie realized that his vision may not be the best for everyone—his heaven may not be your heaven—but he encourages us all to reap the benefits of dreaming of a better future.
Is that what heaven is for us in the Christian Church? Is it just an imagined perfect place to comfort us through the misfortunes and sadness of this life? Is it somewhere that we actually go? Is it real? Do we fly around on angels’ wings strumming little harps?

2. These have been questions for Jews and Christians for thousands of years. Our gospel reading this morning shows Jesus in a tricky discussion with a group of economically powerful Jews known as the Sadducees. By Jesus’ day, most Jews believed in some sort of resurrection of the body and reunion with God in something like heaven after death, but the Sadducees stubbornly maintained a more ancient skepticism in Judaism about the reality of the resurrection. So they try to trip up Jesus, who had become famous for his preaching about the coming kingdom of God where all would be resurrected for eternal life. They try to trick him with a question about Jewish marriage customs in which a widow could marry her deceased husband’s brothers to try to conceive a child to carry on the deceased’s name. In the resurrection (that is to say, in heaven), to whom would the widow be married: the original husband or one of the later husbands? It’s a disingenuous questions since the Sadducees do not believe in the resurrection at all, and Jesus customarily reframes the question and reminds us all that God is the God of the living and that the resurrection is about living in God rather than about our human relationships in this life. But, the passage in some ways raises more questions about heaven than it answers.

3. If you even believe in heaven as a place, or a state of being, or whatever, what do you think it will be like? Through most of Christian history, Christians stuck pretty closely to Jesus’ words in this passage. They did not imagine heaven to be a place where human families or relationships really mattered all that much. They did not expect a reunion with deceased loved ones to be a highlight of the afterlife. Scholars refer to this view of heaven as “theocentric,” meaning that it was centered in every regard on God. The author of a book on heaven, Lisa Miller, has explained that this kind of heaven can be imagined like a giant crowded stadium or arena where everyone is facing the center. In the center sits God on God’s throne and all present praise God continuously having no desire to look either to the right or the left at those around them. God is their one focus. St. Augustine, writing in the early 5th century, said, “The praise of God should be the object of our meditation in this life, because in the life to come it will be for ever the object of our rejoicing.” Almost a thousand years later, St. Thomas Aquinas said that even if heaven had only one person living in it, this sole inhabitant “would be happy, though having no neighbor to love.” The idea, I gather, is that if you are focused on praising God eternally in heaven, you have no need of other people.

4. I won’t lie to you—I don’t find this classical Christian idea of heaven to be all that appealing. I affirm that praising God is our highest calling, but if I praise God better with my friends and loved ones now, why would that change in heaven? And moreover, we want to be consoled by the idea of heaven. We want it to be a place where our grief and loss is done away with because we are reunited with those we love. But, in the last few hundred years, Christians have embroidered more and more into our visions of heaven. As a result, our heaven can sometimes come to feel more like a perfect earth rather than a whole new experience of life. What would your perfect heaven be like? According to some passages in the book of Revelation, its streets will be made of gold and all things will be bedecked with jewels. And popular jokes have St. Peter at the pearly gates acting as heavenly bouncer. One thing I sometimes imagine is a great banquet, a feast, where the conversation is lovely, the food is delicious, the wine is fine, and it just goes on and on. Or I imagine a heaven of mountain meadows with cool breezes, snow-capped mountains, completely fresh air, and I am with my family. And when I am missing her, my mother is there with me. Perhaps your visions of heaven are similar. You are reunited with your dead, you are doing things you enjoy in places that are supernaturally beautiful. How radically different are these visions of heaven from those of the early and medieval Christians! In our modern heaven, where is God? Where is Jesus? Speaking for myself, I sometimes imagine Jesus as the host at the feast, or he is with me in the mountain meadow, or my mother introduces me to him. And God is little more than light or a feeling of well-being that permeates this heaven of mine. Despite this, I still like my heaven because it is so comforting to me now. Our modern visions of heaven encourage us, and console us in grief, and they remind us that things will get better when we are feeling down or scared or lonely or overwhelmed.

5. Of course, despite their ability to console, these visions of heaven, these modern visions that foreground reunions with loved ones and pleasant activities, run the danger of trivializing eternal life with God. They can problematically lessen our focus on resurrection to new life with Christ. Perhaps we have gone too far from Jesus’ own words about heaven wherein we will not be worried about to whom we are married but rather will be like angels and children of God. Perhaps we have lost our focus when, as author Lucy Bregman worries, our heaven resembles “a Florida retirement community, minus ill health and mortality.”
And then, of course, is the very real issue that in this modern scientific world, it has become utterly possible to be a faithful Christian who yet wonders if there even is a place called heaven. It can be hard to believe that Jesus will descend on a cloud and resurrect all the dead, bodies and all, from their resting places to move them to some kind of paradise in the sky. Never mind family reunions or beautiful sunsets over the ocean, can we really believe in the resurrection of the dead at all? Does it even help us to live with this kind of comforting vision of the afterlife, or does it just distract us from our real problems in the here and now? Are we merely drugging ourselves with “pie in the sky when we die by and by”?

6. A famous Baptist minister and preacher named Carlyle Marney once made some candid and self-revelatory remarks about heaven. “In some lectures at Southern Methodist University, Marney confessed there were days he didn’t know if he believed in the resurrection or not. Afterward his friend Albert Outler stopped him in the hall and said, ‘Marney, whoever told you that you had to believe in the resurrection every day?’ ‘Well, Albert,’ Marney responded, ‘if you know so much, when do I have to believe in the resurrection?’ Outler said, ‘On they day you die and the day you help someone else die; that’s when you believe in the resurrection.’” (Quote from The Christian Century, Nov. 2, 2010, Kyle Childress) I’m inclined to agree with Outler. We’ve heard Jesus speak on heaven, we’ve heard Augustine and Aquinas, and we’ve heard our own fantasies of heaven. But what we really need is an abiding belief in the resurrection that is there for us in our most delicate and important moments.

7. Ultimately, as Jesus teaches us, “Now [God] is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive.” You get that? For God, you will never be dead—you will always be alive. That is what counts. When this earthly life is over for you and me, we will know the resurrection made possible for us in Christ. Golden streets, harps, reunions with loved ones—these things are all wonderful consolations, but the resurrection is ultimately an act of God on behalf of life, our life. Let us conclude with another teaching of Jesus. He was talking to his friend Martha after Martha’s brother Lazarus died. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” [Martha replied,] “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” Brothers and sisters here today gathered, Do you believe this? Believe it. Because of Jesus the Christ, you will never die. Amen.