Do you ever have those moments when you see someone you know, but in a different setting than you expect, and so you hardly recognize them?

I feel like that happens to me a lot. I’m so used to seeing people in a church context that when I get out to the school pick up line, restaurant, or just around town, it takes a minute, more than a minute to recognize them. And the reverse is true. People are used to seeing me at church in a collar. Don’t recognize me at first at the soccer field, out in Ambler. It can be awkward, embarrassing, funny.

Same Faces, Different Places

I was thinking about this recently and then just the other day I had two experiences of it.

On Thursday morning I went for a run at Mondauk Park, which has a one-mile trail loop that goes around it. So, I’m out running going in one direction. In the other direction is someone that sort of looks like Kim Forst, whose daughter, Cecelia, we baptized last month. And this person that looks like Kim is jogging with a stroller. But I’m not convinced its her. Never seen her at the Park before. Anyway, as we run around the trail, we must have passed each other 10 times, and I couldn’t be sure it was her, so I didn’t say anything. But later that day I emailed her and said, “Did I see you and Cecilia at Mondauk Park today. I thought it was you but wasn’t sure. I was the runner in the day-glo yellow shirt.” She emailed back, “Oh my goodness, I thought maybe that was you. But wasn’t sure!” We had a good laugh.

Later that night I went to the Ambler YMCA to go swimming. It’s around 9:30pm. I’m just focused on getting a lane and getting some laps in before closing when I hear someone say, “Pastor Keith Anderson!” I looked up and the lifeguard was Will……. I hadn’t recognized him. I hadn’t even really “seen” him. He was in a different setting, “just the lifeguard”, part of the scenery in the pool deck, and I didn’t even really see him until he said my name.

Seeing someone you know in a different time and place—in a different way—makes it hard to recognize them.

• And this is part of the dynamic in our Gospel reading this morning. It’s one of several resurrection appearances of Jesus. This time the disciples are fishing on the Sea of Tiberius, when Jesus shows up. They don’t recognize him until he gives them some fishing advice and they bring in a catch of fish.

• Also, as we saw last week during our Holy Humor Sunday Blues Brothers skit, when the disciples were on the road to Emmaus, they didn’t recognize Jesus at first. It was only later when they sat down to eat.

• And there are other stories. When she first sees Jesus at the tomb, Mary Magdelene thinks Jesus is the gardener and asks him, “Where have they put my Lord?”

• When Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room, they thought it was a ghost. He ate a piece of fish to prove he was real. Thomas still didn’t believe it and had to put his hands in Jesus’ wounds to be assured.

So, this is a pattern across all the Gospels. People don’t recognize the resurrected Jesus at first.

I wonder why this is such a pattern, why it seem so important? I mean, this is the most awesome moment in the history of the world—the Son of God died and rose again. He could appear in the fullness of glory and majesty, bright as the Son, but he doesn’t. His closest friends barely recognize him.

But no. It’s sort of like seeing someone you know in a different place.

But let me ask you: why do you think Jesus shows up this way? Or why his friends and disciples don’t recognize him? Any thoughts?

Our Expectations

Here’s my hunch: the disciples simply didn’t expect the resurrection. Crucifixion and death happened all the time. It was a common story. Sad but not uncommon. But resurrection? Who expects that?

I’m reminded of that Monty Python skit where they say, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” with their tools of “ruthlessness, fear, and surprise” and dashing red robes.

But in fact, we do, we expect the Spanish Inquisition. We expect bad news and we are bombarded with it. We expect the drumbeats of war, polarized politics, and violence. When I turn on the news, that’s what I expect to hear.

It probably wasn’t that different in first century Palestine. The crucified weren’t just hung on a hill outside Jerusalem. They were hung along Roman roads to remind people of the power of the empire and to stay in line. There was plenty of bad news to go around. It was so common that Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan has said the “The death of Jesus would have been seen by most as just the death of another good Jew.” And nothing more.

People expect bad news. What no one expects (really expects) is the resurrection.—the triumph of hope, love, and light. Who turns on the TV or radio or picks up the newspaper expecting to find that?

My father-in-law is a journalism professor and remarked once that people interpret the news in terms of threats to themselves. The biggest most immediate threat? Weather. It reveals how we look at our world.

So, when Jesus shows up, even though he told them any number of times that he would die and rise again, they weren’t expecting it. They weren’t looking for him. The women at the tomb brought burial spices. The disciples in the upper room were there because they were afraid they’d be crucified next. The two on the road to Emmaus had given up. Today, they are fishing, getting back to life as usual, as before Jesus showed up three years earlier.

We don’t expect resurrection.

And so, when the resurrected Jesus does show up, we encounter him like—a familiar person but in an unfamiliar place—trying not to stare, wondering if and how it could possibly be him. And finally he calls our name. He breaks the bread. He shows us his wounds and we find him present in our woundedness.

Jesus shows up in the places we don’t expect him to because we think are too dark, sad, or forsaken…or because they are too mundane: at the park or the Y. Or to unlikely people: forgiving Peter three times after denying him three times, confronting Saul the persecutor on the road to Damascus, converting him to the greatest evangelist.

And so I wonder…where do we (and where don’t we) expect the resurrected Jesus to show up in our lives? 

He is there.

A familiar face in an unfamiliar place. There are some dramatic moments when when he appears to Paul, but mostly Jesus shows up in a way the disciples could handle. Jesus shows up in ways we can handle: just on the edge of our expectations, on the periphery, letting us have a moment to refocus and recognize him, and meets us with grace.

These are the “God moments” we talk about and share. These are moments of recognition! Aha, God is here. Or, as Jacob once said after wrestling with God all night: “Surely, God was in this place and I did not know it.”

I’m convinced that so much of the Christian life is just about showing up and keeping our eyes open. God is there. Grace is there. Love is there. We just have to be ready to see it.

And with our eyes and expectations opened, we point it out for others.

In a world accustomed to bad news, we have good news to share.

In a cynical world that has seen it all before, we have something unexpected and surprising to share.

In the midst of our own fears, doubts, grief or anxiety.

In the midst of our joys and celebrations.

Jesus is there, because…

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia. Amen.

photo credit: Angelo DeSantis

The election was quite a spectacle, with the cardinals meeting in the famed Sistine Chapel. The world watching for black or white smoke to know whether we have a new pope.

And when it happens, this person in an instant becomes one of the most powerful people in the world—with great resources, great influence, endowed with infallibility, and appointed for life. The pope is the last of Europe’s monarchs, wielding absolute power, over a small put powerful nation-state. And yet…this Francis (like his namesake, St. Francis) is a humble man with a heart for the poor.

The images and news coming out of Rome since he’s been elected are encouraging and hopeful.

He has only been Pope for 11 days and already he has inspired and given hope to many—even beyond the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.

• Just yesterday he was pictured sitting in the back row of a chapel, praying before celebrating his second mass in two days for Vatican gardeners and trash collectors, and the sisters who run the switchboard.
• He wears black shoes instead of the traditional red shoes the pope wears, which were traditional symbols of wealth and power.
• He pays his own bills, rides the bus with others instead of the private car.
• After he was elected, he called his local newsstand in Buenos Aires to cancel his newspaper subscription.
• He wears the simple white garb and a cross, nothing extra.
• In an interview with journalists the day after his election, he said, “Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.”

And just recently there was a news report that “for the first time in living memory, the afternoon mass on Holy Thursday – the day before Good Friday – would be held in neither St Peter’s basilica nor the basilica of St John in Lateran. Instead, it would be celebrated…in the chapel of the Casal del Marmo penal institute for minors and young adults on the outskirts of Rome. During the ceremony the 76-year-old pontiff will wash the feet of 12 inmates, a ritual designed to commemorate Jesus’s gesture to his disciples after the Last Supper.” That is, instead of 12 priests the last four years.

It is a remarkable moment in the church. Francis is trading opulence for simplicity, pomp for poverty, hubris for humility.

It is going to be fascinating to see how things develop.

The example of Pope Francis came to mind for me when rereading the Palm Sunday readings for today. It too has the contrast between the trappings of power and Empire, and the humble Kingdom of God.

Jesus the Messiah

The story of Palm Sunday paints the contrast between Jesus and his rag-tag band of disciples, with a colt, cloaks and palms, and simple people lining the way, and the religious and political powers of that time.

As we heard in our Gospel out in the narthex, Jesus is hailed as a king when he enters Jerusalem—but a very different kind of king. He rides a colt, some say a donkey, this coterie are a bunch of fishermen, tax collectors, sinners. His followers are not wealthy. All that they have to lay before him are cloaks and palm branches. The only music they can make is with the sound of their voice. It is touching but almost farcical. What kind of king is this? And how is he supposed to overthrow the powers of Rome, which is what they expected the Messiah to do?

In the Gospel reading we just read, the confrontation between Jesus and the Powers, between the Kingdom of God and Empire is thrown in high relief. The religious leaders falsely accuse Jesus and take him before Pontius Pilate, the Prefect of the Roman Province of Judea, the representative of the great Roman Empire, who asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus says, “You say so.” Pilate realizes that being from Galilee, Jesus was under the jurisdiction of Herod, the ruler of that area. Herod with his soldiers “treated him with contempt” and mocked him. They put an elegant robe on him, this so-called king of the Jews. They send him back to Pilate.

And, at the urging of the chief priests, the leaders, the people, who themselves were occupied and oppressed and fearful of Rome—perhaps at once drawn to the trappings of Empire, but deeply fearful of it—Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified.

I love that Luke tells us “That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies.” It’s like, “High five! We just got rid off this rabblerouser. Come over to my palace sometime, we’ll hang out!”

Empire wins again!  And Jesus is crucified.

Even then at the cross people were saying, “If you are the Messiah, if you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.” His title hangs above him on the cross: The King of the Jews. He is only recognized and acclaimed by a fellow criminal, also being crucified that day.

This is a clash between Empire and the Kingdom of God. And Jesus and the Kingdom seem to lose.

• But the twist here is that the real king is Jesus and that he reigns from a cross.
• The crucified is king.
• The sentenced prisoner comes to set us free.
• His death is the beginning of something new. Resurrection.
• The Kingdom of God cannot be extinguished. It cannot be extinguished. And it is more powerful than all the earthly kingdoms.

Kingdom and Empire

I think we experience this tension between Empire and the Kingdom of God in our own lives as well.

Empire is a way of talking about earthly power and earthly values. In our lifetimes the world has been dominated by American Empire, but many say that is on the wane, and new Asian empires like China are emerging.

Empire craves wealth, conquest, domination, hegemony, often resorts to violence, injustice, and exclusion to achieve it. It can use people and the less powerful empires as pawns. It values the lives of some over the lives of others. This is what Rome did and it stands in contrast to the Kingdom that Jesus taught about, the Kingdom he embodied, the Kingdom the current Pope is beginning to point us toward.

God’s Kingdom does not have the trappings of power, it seeks the good of others before our own, it is collective, healing, open, insists on justice, and embraces strangers and enemies.

And we live in each of these worlds. We must know how to make our way amidst Empire, we must be wise to the ways of the world, the dynamics of power, control, and authority.  We have to navigate them everyday in our workplace, our home, our communities. At the same time, we seek to follow Jesus and live in and help bring about the Kingdom of God. In fact, as Jesus said, the Kingdom is breaking in all around us. We must be, as the Scriptures say, “Wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

And until God brings that Kingdom in all its fullness we live in both. And many of the ethical, moral questions we face come out of this tension of these two value systems.

Jesus confronted the powers directly in Jerusalem, and maybe that is what some of us are called to do, in advocacy and working for social justice. And he did it walking in the way of peace. But before that, he did it village by village, person by person, in his preaching and teaching and healing, bringing the Gospel promise, hope, kindness, mercy, and grace to the world one person, one family, one community at a time. His passion and resurrection were the culmination of that work.

Maybe the Pope in these days serves as an example for us. He is surrounded by and has been endowed with great power, wealth, and authority, (who wouldn’t want that, even if just for a day!) but he is still focused on the poor and the outcast. He keeps his focus on where Jesus was focused. And so may we.

He, it seems, is not caught up in the trappings of Empire and all that goes with it. And so may we not get caught up in the thirst for power, authority, and our individual good and salvation, but the salvation and redemption of all of God’s people and creation. May we pray for all the world’s leaders and ourselves that we may all choose the way of peace.

For, Jesus came to confront Empire. But he did so in order to save it from itself. He met it head on in peace, in order to redeem the people that condemned him, who turned on him, who abandoned him.

And this prayer of the Pope’s namesake St. Francis seemed to capture our calling just right:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

Where there is sadness, joy.

…may [I] not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

May God give us the courage to live into the Kingdom of God and may God bless our Holy Week journey.

Amen.

Christmas is a time for memories. Memories of special times, special people, and special gifts.

Tonight I want to tell you about one of my favorite memories…of the best Christmas gift I ever received. It’s the Atari 2600. Do you remember this? Did you ever have one? The Atari 2600 was one of the first ever video game consoles. It came out in the early 80’s and had “cutting edge” graphics, like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Pitfall. Pretty primitive stuff. The Atari was the great grand-daddy of today’s X-Box, PlayStation, Nintendo DS, and Wii—the things on many Christmas lists tonight.

Except that the Atari wasn’t on my Christmas list at all. In fact, I didn’t even know what it was. And that’s why its my favorite gift.

Here’s how it happened. I’m, like, seven years old. I wake up early on Christmas morning and fly down the two flights of stairs from my bedroom on the top floor of our townhouse to our family room in the basement—and the Christmas tree. Two flights of stairs and I barely touch a step.

When I get there, I’m surprised. I thought I was the only one up, but my father is already there, sitting by the tree. And he says to me, “Did you see it?” I look at him blankly. “Did you see your present? Upstairs…by the TV.” It finally registers what he’s saying.

So, I race back up the stairs to the living room…and sitting there next to the TV is what remains to this day my favorite Christmas present of all time: an Atari 2600.

At first I didn’t know what it was. I had never seen or heard of an “Atari” before. With its four toggle switches, faux wood veneer, joystick (with just one button!), and three video game cartridges the size of 8-track tapes, I thought it was a some kind of new music player.

My father, who had followed me up the stairs, explained, “You can play games with it…on the TV!” It was the perfect marriage my two favorite things in my seven year-old world: games and TV. We spent the rest of the day (and months) playing Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Pitfall, and more.

Over the last 30 years I have received gifts that were more expensive and more useful than that Atari 2600, but none as endearing to me, none with such a privileged place among my Christmas memories. The Atari itself was great, but it remains precious to me primarily for the way it came to me.

I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t even know what it was. It just showed up, not even under the tree or anywhere near the tree, but upstairs in the living room, so out of place for a Christmas present that I didn’t even notice on my way down.

It was an unexpected gift found in an unexpected place.

Christmas gifts can be like that. No matter our age, we all have a Christmas list in our mind, whether it about gifts or expectations or hopes about what the holidays will hold, how our time with family or friends will be. The expectations around the holidays are often impossibly high. But I found then and still find today that it is the unexpected gifts of time, people, or presents, that often bring me back to the true meaning of Christmas. And, for good reason.

Born in a Manger

Tonight we gather to celebrate the birth of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. He too was an unexpected gift found in an unexpected place.

Jesus was born around 2,000 years ago in the city of Bethlehem. His parents, Mary and Joseph, a young maiden and a carpenter, had travelled there from their home in Nazareth. When they arrived there was no vacancy at any of the local inns. The only place they could find to stay was a lowly stable, and this is where Jesus was born. They laid him in the only bed they could find—a manger. His bedding was the animal’s hay. His clothes were bands of cloth.

And here’s the thing: No one noticed. No one cared. The innkeeper sent this holy family out back to the stable. No townspeople came by. The angels had to appear as a heavenly multitude to get the shepherds’ attention. The star of Bethlehem had to shine bright to draw the magi to the manger. And so and still, only a handful people that night noticed, only a few came.

It is amazing that God’s own Son would be born in such a humble way, so unexpectedly, so tenderly, without a press release or marketing plan, and, you see, this is itself part of the gift.

For, the way Jesus came to us is just as important as the fact that he came at all.

What Child is This?

Because this was not how God was accustomed to showing up.

Prior to the birth of Jesus, the history of God and God’s people had not always been an easy one. God called his people to righteousness and holiness. They kept falling short. God issued more rules and harsher judgments. The people faltered. And God and the people grew further and further apart.

After this happened for, well, a few thousand years, God had a remarkable change of heart. Rather than continuing to call us to be more like God, God came down to be like us—as one of us. To be born as we are born. To live as we live. To die as we die. And to rise again in order to raise us up to abundant and everlasting life.

In Jesus, God joins us in our struggle for goodness and peace. God enters our world and our lives to transform them—to bring us hope, healing, forgiveness, and love. In the birth of Jesus, God collapses the great distance that once existed between us, so that we might be as close to God as a mother to her child—the human and divine, God and us, now wrapped in a tender embrace.

Jesus came to us in this unlikely and unexpected way to show us the depth of God’s love for us—to show us that God is so in love with us that God would go to any length for us, even to being born silently in a stable.

An unexpected gift. An unexpected place. A loving God.

And Jesus still shows up in the unexpected places in our world and in our lives. Jesus was not only born in relative obscurity, in a small corner of our planet, he was born into a place of conflict, occupation, and oppression–that’s why they were in Bethlehem—so the occupying Roman empire would know how much to tax their subjects.

And Jesus shows up in our time whenever there is struggle, strife, and injustice. Wherever violence threatens and seeks to destroy the innocent and the good, there Jesus is born—born to bring hope in the midst of our despair, born to bring light in the midst of darkness. Jesus does not fear the darkness in us or our world because that’s where he chose to be born. To humble people, in a humble place—the light and warmth from the manger radiating out into the dark, cold night.

The Manger of Our Lives

Jesus is given many names in the Bible, “Lord, Savior, Prince of Peace, Messiah,” but the one we use most around Christmas is “Emmanuel,” which means “God with us.” In Jesus, God entered into our reality and our lives. God knows what it is like to be human. God knows intimately what we go through. God knows what it is like to have hopes and dreams, fears and doubts, to belong and to be rejected, to succeed and fail.

I think sometimes the most unexpected place for us to think of God is in our own lives. We secretly think that God is too distant, too busy, too other. Tonight we are reminded that chooses to be with us, wherever we are. God is with us, tonight, tomorrow. Always.

Jesus is God’s love made visible. His humble birth puts that love on full display. It is a beautiful and unexpected gift in a humble and unexpected place.

And I pray…that your Christmas observances will be filled with many unexpected gifts, be they presents, relationships, or moments of grace. May they remind you of the original unexpected gift of Christmas—Jesus—and of God’s great love for you.

Merry Christmas. Amen.

This sermon begins the only place it can begin. In tragedy. In sorrow. In darkness. I have watched with you over these last two days the horror and heartbreak that has taken place in Newtown, Connecticut. I won’t go into details for the sake the little ones here among us—and we already know them too well. It is so unbelievably sad. Utterly incomprehensible. It has left us shaken.

And so, it is good to be here this morning. To find comfort in community, shelter under the shadow of God’s wings, to find reassurance that good is stronger than evil.

And it is somehow fitting that we find ourselves in this season of Advent.

Advent is a season in which the light of Christ shines in a dark world. A season in which we wait and hold vigil, a season that readies us to believe again that love is stronger than hate, that a child born in the dark night of violence in a manger in Bethlehem really can change the world. That our suffering can be redeemed.

Today we find ourselves in the full reality of what this season means.

The familiar Christmas Scriptures tells us: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. On them light has shined.” And another, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

It is this promise to which we cling in dark days, and on days when the promise seems so elusive, so far away, so impossible…these are the days when we hold tightest, with anything and everything we have—to any flickers of light, any moment of grace, any inklings of hope.

That is why we have gathered here today: to say that the light still shines and hope remains.

Our readings this morning all carry this promise. They hold the hope for us.

A fellow pastor who wrote yesterday in response to the tragedy at Newtown said,

“When we read these ancient texts…we stand in a long line of proclaimers who have spoken jarring words that bring hope in the midst of despair, rejoicing in the midst of sorrow, and life in the midst of death. We…have the audacity to proclaim what is at the center not only of these texts, but at the center of the Christian faith. That God’s love is not negated or overshadowed by tragedy, senseless violence, or the inexplicable horror that one human being might inflict on another. At the center of our faith is the truth that God is especially [present] in these times and these places. These are the times and places when the comfort and hope of God’s coming speaks so forcefully.”

The prophet Zephaniah himself wrote in a time of deep darkness, “a time of national humiliation. The people of God had been carried off into exile. Their homeland was gone and their Temple — the visible sign of God’s presence and blessing — had been destroyed…property plundered, homes and businesses burned, and people killed, including innocent children.”

Zephaniah tells a broken and distraught people:

“The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst;
you shall fear disaster no more.

On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Do not fear, O Zion;
do not let your hands grow weak.

The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival.

I will remove disaster from you…

I will deal with all your oppressors
at that time.
And I will save the lame
and gather the outcast,
and I will change their shame into praise…

At that time I will bring you home,
at the time when I gather you;
for I will make you renowned and praised
among all the peoples of the earth,
when I restore your fortunes
before your eyes, says the LORD.”

“When I restore your fortunes before your eyes,” says the Lord. And no, it certainly does not feel as if we have seen that yet in these last 48 hours, but we hold to the promise of its coming. It has come before and will come again, and it will come soon.

Hannukah

These last eight days, my family, an interfaith family, has been observing Hanukkah alongside of Advent, lighting candles each of the last eight nights. In case you don’t know, the story behind Hanukkah goes something like this: the Temple in Jerusalem had been desecrated by occupying powers and the Jews under the leadership of Judah Maccabee cleansed and rededicated the Temple, but there was only enough oil to keep the menorah lit for one night. But miraculously, the oil lasted eight full days until more could be obtained—and so we light the candles.

Today, hope is our oil and though, in moments, it seems in such short supply, it still it lights our way. Even a little hope is a powerful and potent thing.

As I worked on this sermon last night, I did so by the light of the menorah. I watched as all the candles burn down and, one-by-one, went out, but one candle hung on impossibly longer than all the others, just a small persistent flame in the small recess of that candle holder, and then when it finally went out, it let off a strand of smoke that ascended into the air like a prayer.

Whether Advent or Hanukkah, we light the candles to remind us of the persistence of light, of hope, of the good. We light candles because sometimes that’s all we can do.

The Baptist

John the Baptist, the preparer of the way, was well acquainted of the sin and brokenness of our world, even to the point of calling the crowd in our reading today “a brood of vipers.”

John said of Jesus, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” That image of Jesus usually seems terrifying, but when we are so powerless, grief-stricken, and outraged it is somehow reassuring: that there will be justice for the people of Newtown, but also the 3,000 children a year killed by gun violence, and the thousands more around the world for whom what happened on Friday in Connecticut is a daily reality.

But, in this season, Jesus comes to us as a baby. As we say in our call to worship, as a fragile, vulnerable child, a promise carried along battle-torn streets, and, even now, the streets of Newtown and anywhere violence strikes.

The child Jesus experienced this danger himself. If you remember part of the Christmas story that doesn’t often get told: after the Magi visited Jesus, King Herod feared that the birth of a king could rival and dethrone him, and so he ordered the slaughter of all the young boys in Bethlehem. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph had to flee to Egypt, so Jesus would survive. We commemorate this on December 28th, just three days after Christmas. We call it the Holy Innocents. Even in the midst of the magic of the Christmas story, we are confronted with the reality of sin and violence and hate.

Jesus lived with this reality, as a child, and as an adult. Eventually, it killed him, but it did not prevail.

As that same pastor wrote yesterday, “God did not offer God’s love from the distance of a heavenly throne, but came to dwell among us, born of a baby. God’s love was demonstrated most forcefully in the midst of the unspeakable violence and cruelty of a crucifixion. And God’s penchant for life was demonstrated most profoundly in Christ’s resurrection, reminding us that while death is real and often horrible, it is never the last word.”

Even now it the midst of deep darkness, we trust that death will not have the last word, for Newtown, for us, for the world.

What do we do?

Even in the midst of our sadness, many of us are wondering, “What do we do now?” It’s interesting that people asked John the Baptist the same thing. He counsels, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

In preparation for the dawn of a new day, the coming of Messiah, the rekindling of light and hope in the world, John calls them to simple acts of love, kindness, fairness, justice—each in their particular station in life. To love our children and hold them tight, to support teachers and educators, to act with justice and compassion toward our neighbor, whether they are in the apartment next door, the next cubicle or classroom over. It is such simple deeds that restrain the power of evil. It is through such simple deeds that God works in the world.

And we must pray. And hope. And believe: that light is stronger than darkness, that love is stronger than hate.

Final Word

I want to give the final word this morning to friend of mine, Paul Krampitz, who is a former Connecticut State Police Officer and now a Lutheran pastor in Connecticut. He spent Friday with state police officers, at their barracks, at Sandy Hook School, and the homes of victims. He beheld this tragedy up close. Yesterday he wrote:

“Tomorrow (that’s now today) we dare to rejoice even as we struggle to come to terms with the events that took place in Newtown. This is Advent and we are a people of hope who trust that Christ, the light of the world, is already breaking into our darkness. His is the light that no darkness shall overcome. In dying he has destroyed death and in rising he has opened the gates of heaven to all who trust in him. Let us hold fast to these promises, let us embrace one another in Christian love, and let us be confident that the risen Christ holds these slaughtered innocents in his own wounded hands.”

Amen.

Widows are special people. Yesterday, we had a memorial service for my grandmother. Ruth was her name. She died peacefully a few weeks ago at the age of 88. Yesterday, at the graveside service in Maryland we had a chance to reflect on her life. She was widowed in 1988 when my grandfather died. She was only 64. Rather than fading away, her world shrinking, as sometimes happens…she retired, moved from Maryland to Florida with my dad, lived with him, helped raise me for a time, then lived with her niece in Jacksonville, her sister in Huntsville, AL and finally back with my dad in Tallahassee. It was a 24 remarkable years.

Ruth never had a lot, but she was loving, compassionate, and had a gift for hospitality. We reminisced yesterday about how she cared for so many people, taking them in, making them family, throughout her long and good life. She was generous with whatever she had at any given moment.

This week, I could not help but think of my grandmother when I read our Gospel reading for today. I imagined my grandmother as the one putting those two coins in the treasury.

Widows are, by necessity, practical people. They are, by virtue of their own experience of loss, sensitive to the needs and losses of others. And if God or her neighbor had need of something, well…I could see my grandmother doing the same.

The Widow

Our readings this morning show God’s love for widows, and the special place they have in God’s heart. Scripture is filled with God’s care for the widow and calls to the rest of us to show love, respect, and justice to them as well.

In our Gospel, we find Jesus teaching his disciples by drawing a contrast. Jesus warns them against religious ostentation, against hypocrisy, describing how these so-called pious people treat widows poorly, “devouring their homes” he says, all the while treating themselves well.

To illustrate the point, he sits down across from the treasury at the Temple. Rich people are putting in large sums, drawing attention to themselves, but then “a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. He tells his disciples, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

The story is powerful for many reasons – the contrast between the haves and this have not, the fact that Jesus notices her (someone who was invisible to others) at all in the commotion of Temple commerce, and that she gave everything she had to God.

While everyone around her was drawing attention to themselves, she was quiet, unassuming, invisible. While people gave gifts out of their abundance, this is, giving out of their surplus wealth, she gave all she had. She gave sacrificially. She gave out of her poverty. What little she had, she gave away.

This widow (like my grandmother) had every reason not to give, to withhold, but she did not. She gave generously.

Be-Attitudes

This morning we continue with our Be-Attitudes of Stewardship. The past few weeks we’ve heard about Being Content and Being Thankful. Today is about Being Generous.

There is perhaps no better example of generosity and faithful giving than this poor widow – this widow, who would have been among the most vulnerable people in Jesus’ time (widows often are in our own) – not the religious leaders, the pietists – she becomes the model for generosity.

Two Moments of Giving

It reminded me of two recent moments of giving. One tiny, one big:

- On Wednesday nights, we’ve been having our Animate series. It kicks off with dinner with a free will offering. A couple weeks back, a little boy have 50 cents (two coins), all he had in his pocket. He was obviously too young for an allowance, so this was all he had. He was so proud of himself. He walked up to me and said, “I had two quarters in my pocket and I put them in.” He smiled and then went on to eat and play.

On a much larger scale, there was the recent news that George Lucas on selling the Star Wars  franchise to Disney for $4.5 billion…and he’s giving all of it to support education. No doubt, he has other billions, but Star Wars was the thing that made him. It was his life’s work, his identity, but he didn’t cling to it. He gave it all away. There was no big announcement, he’s just doing it.

It just goes to show that whether you have 50 cents in your pocket or billions of dollars, we can all give like the widow.

It’s a Wonderful Life

There are so many ways to think and talk about stewardship, giving to God. We try to touch on different aspects of it throughout these few weeks. I want to share one way I’ve been thinking about it. This is from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, which Jenny and I watch every year.

This is a scene where there is a run on the bank. Its the beginning of the Great Depression and people are pulling out money while they still can. People show up to get their money, but they don’t have enough to cover people’s accounts. The Bailey Building and and Loan might go under and fall into the hands of the evil Mr. Potter. George Bailey has to come out and talk the people down…

This speaks to me about stewardship because, while we talk about giving to the church, the needs of the church: light, heat, supplies, staffing. In actuality, when we give to the church, what we are doing is really supporting each other…supporting each other’s faith journey.

When we give, we are supporting our children’s learning, our gifts for music, our call to serve…

Our stewardship in church is an investment in one another. And that giving doesn’t end at the church, it flows out through the church, helping each other to grow in faith, supporting our gifts, making a difference in the world, helping those in need, and as we saw in our video, thousands of ministries here and around the world through the ELCA. It helps us to love our neighbor here, and beyond, supporting in one another’s callings to serve.

So, today, I am asking you to be generous. And when I ask you to be generous, I’m really asking you to be generous with one another, and with our neighbor, and with God, and to follow the widow’s example of faith and generosity – a giving that comes from a place close to the heart, not just out of what you have left over, but from the core of who you are and what you have.

The fact is: we can all be more generous. The widow shows us that. She had less than all of us – just one penny to her name. We can be generous with money, time, prayer, encouragement, love and compassion. She had next to nothing, and she gave, and she is forever honored in Scripture.

Surely, many of us could raise our giving and we wouldn’t really notice it. It might sting for a moment of filling that giving commitment, but in a couple months, we probably wouldn’t even notice it at all.

Many of us could give a bit more and it would be more of a sacrificial giving, we’d have to give something up. That’s not a bad thing – for, that kind of giving reminds us of God’s sacrificial love for us, reminds us that we are giving to God, which is a really beautiful way of giving and loving our neighbor.

And there are those who can’t do more, and may need to do less, not because they don’t want to more, but because life has changed for them, but we still celebrate that giving, and the rest of us can pick them up.

It takes all forms and manner of giving to help make the miracle of what we call church and the Body of Christ to happen. And I invite you to be generous when we come to our Commitment Sunday next week and in the coming year.

Defining Moment

I don’t think I would normally be so direct about this (it’s not really my style) but I can tell you that I have been in a church when giving was growing and I have been in a church when it declined. It was the same church.

The momentary inconvenience of talking about money basically once a year in church, the perceived and momentary pain of putting a larger number on that commitment form, is quickly replaced with the good feeling of being generous, and with joy – joy in giving and seeing what, together, we can do, create, and be – how God will use it to not only help us, but to spread God’s love and compassion and grace to a world that so desperately needs it.

Conversely, the momentary good feeling of not growing in your giving, keeping our gifts to ourselves, is replaced with a year-long struggle for how to do the same with less, or coming to terms with doing less, and puts pressure on volunteers and leadership.]

I hope as you prayerfully discern what your giving will be in the coming year, that you hold that in mind. Because nothing feels better than a congregation moving forward with the support of its members and their gifts.

The call to be generous, stewardship, is about a church shaking down its members, it is an invitation to joyful living, a tangible way we love and serve God and neighbor.

Finally, when I was considering coming to Upper Dublin and friend of mine said to me: Keith, this is a defining moment. She said that this decision would be one of those pivot points in my life, whether I embarked on this great new adventure or not. (And, you know, I am so glad I did. And cannot imagine it otherwise.)

And it is a defining moment, not just for me, but for all of us as a church. (I think we recognize that.)

And we’ve come to far to stop now. Let’s do this thing. Let’s step boldly into the future God has called us do together.

As God has been generous to you, be generous to God. Be generous with one another.

Amen.

photo credit: RachelEllen via photopin cc

Last weekend we travelled down to Asheville, North Carolina to attend the wedding of a very good friend of ours. She and her now husband were married at the North Carolina Arboretum on the edge of the Smokey Mountains. They made vows, received blessing, and united together surrounded by family and friends.

At the reception, the bride’s sister, the maid of honor, gave a beautiful toast. She quoted from a book called The Robe of Love: Secret Instructions for the Heart
by storyteller Laura Simms. This book is a translations of oral stories from many different cultures: tales from Persia, Korean, Jewish and Celtic tales…. In her introduction to the book Simms explains: “Love is what is always waiting within us to ignite into the fire of longing for union, or to uncover the inherent well of unconditional awareness that opens into bliss.”

“Love is what is always waiting within us to ignite into the fire of longing for union.” In short, we were made for love, made for relationship.

That’s what this sermon is about – about being made for love and the ways we sometimes get tripped up on it because, well, we’re human – and how God keeps loving us anyway. These readings today from Genesis and Mark are hard texts. Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve is kicked around for justification (or not) for who can be married and to whom, the role of marriage in culture and, well, human civilization. (Adam and Eve – still causing trouble after all these years.) Jesus’ talk of divorce in Mark can be interpreted as harsh and judgmental.

These are complicated and charged texts, but I’m not afraid to take them on with you because these, like any texts, are interpreted in the light of the Gospel, the grace and mercy of God. We are going to hold them up the light of God’s grace and the resurrection. And, if necessary, we are going to squeeze every ounce of grace out of them.

Genesis

Our first reading is the second, shorter creation account in Genesis 2. God forms man from the dust of the earth. And then the rest of creation. Afterward God realizes, “It is not good that man should be alone.” Even with all the plants and animals and rivers, Adam was lonely. He was the only person on earth. God creates Eve and Adam says, “This at last is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”  Finally, somebody like me. Somebody to belong to. This is the look I saw in their eyes of our friends at the wedding, in the words they chose for the service. They found their home in each other, and in those gathered around them. For, Eve also represented the beginning of children, grandchildren, family, community, humanity. Adam and Eve were in perfect relationship with God and with each other. Whatever else the Garden of Eden looked like, it was the place of pure relationship, which, of course, ends with Adam and Eve wanted to be like gods themselves, eating the fruit from the tree.

Stories in the Book of Genesis seek to explain how things are the way they are, how we have come to know them. It doesn’t have be literally true to tell the truth about our existence, our experience, our nature and God’s. They tell a deeper truth. We were made for love and relationship with God and each other.

The great spiritual teachers talk about this longing for God. St. Augustine, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Pascal said there is a God shaped hole in each of our hearts – a place only the love of God can fill. And yet, we try to fill it with so many other things and our hearts remain restless.

We long for love. We long for union. And God has this longing. Why else humans at all? We are such messy and complicated creatures. Why not just stick with the plants and animals? No, God has a longing for relationship too.

Dealing with Divorce

In our reading from Mark, Jesus is asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He responds, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

Honestly, it’s one of those things I wish Jesus never said. It sounds harsh and has been used harshly. There are some interpretations that take the edge off of this reading. One ways that what Jesus is doing here is protecting women. When a woman was divorced she was left out on her own, essentially abandoned. Maintaining the marital relationship protected them. Another interpretation is that among early Christians, there was a sense that Jesus was coming back right away, and so you shouldn’t even bother with having a family – and if you did have a family maybe you should give it up and become an itinerant preacher and evangelist.  This reading encourage people to stay in family. However, the interpretation  we often hear, what we usually take away from this text, is judgment.

Around 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. We are well acquainted with divorce – in our families, among our friends, in our communities.

My parents divorced when I was 13 years old. It was incredibly painful. You’re world just blows up, the future you imagined is gone, your self-image is broken.

If God is against divorce, I think its because God doesn’t want us to suffer in this way, to experience such pain. Jesus doesn’t want that for us. Both my parents are remarried, to people who were also divorced. By one interpretation of this text my family is made up of a whole bunch of divorced adulterers. I refuse to condemn them because I don’t believe God does. (And it would make Thanksgiving dinner a bit awkward.)

Divorce has such a stigma in churches and our culture and, boy, I wish that would change. There are lifetimes worth of hurt and shame and grief already there without the church’s piling on. These are our parents, our children, our friends.

It’s got to be something we can talk about and not hide, so common to our human experience.

And sometimes divorce is the right thing to do. And sometimes it is the necessary thing that must be done. Under best circumstances, it is still painful – painful when relationships break, when the bone of my bone is broken and flesh of my flesh is torn. 

After my parents divorce I lived with one parent and then the other, but I could not find solace. I could not find healing. It is actually the thing that pushed me to go back to church as a teenager – and that’s where I really encountered Jesus beyond just what I learned in Sunday School, and that’s where I first felt called to become a pastor.

So that maybe – and I hadn’t thought of this until writing this sermon – so that maybe one day I could stand in front of a group of people who have experienced divorce, the breaking up of relationships and families, who carry hurt and don’t know where to go with it and say – you’re in the right place and God loves you more than anything and loves you completely and that pain you feel, the hurt you carry – God wants to take it from you, God is the one who can bring you healing and peace you seek.

I remember, I was so desperate to know what there was a place of pure unconditional love – that no matter what happened, the relationship would endure, that love would remain. I found that love in God. It won’t surprise by now to learn that I got choked up a lot. But I remember that I could not speak about the love of God, once I really encountered it, without crying – for weeks and weeks. Such was the relief, the release, and the revelation of divine unconditional love.

Though we humans divorce ourselves from each other in all kinds of ways – whether it be ending a marriage, cutting ourselves of emotionally, through resentment or prejudice, saying harmful or hurtful things, choosing ourselves over the other – God never does. God will not, will never divorce us.

And this same Jesus who says this hard, hard saying about divorce is the same person who sat to meals with the shunned, the outcast, those whom society divorced because of their disease, their ethnicity, their religious practice, their poverty. This is the same Jesus who defended an adulterous woman, saying that whoever was without sin was welcome to cast the first stone. Jesus, who preached to prostitutes.

This is the same Jesus who, in his refusal to have anything separate us from God, gave up his own life on the cross – so that nothing we can ever do, nothing that ever comes can separate us from the love of God. As we heard in the funeral here yesterday for Ellen Stranges’ mom, Dorothy Bogusz, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The cross is a symbol that tells us that God is present in the excruciating moments of life – and the pain of broken relationships of any kind is high on that list – and a sign, a promise that God will not let anything come between or separate. And we call this the Gospel.

As imperfect as our love for God and one another may be, God’s love for us in perfect and everlasting.

Let the Children Come

Finally, I find it interesting – and comforting – that once again we end our reading with Jesus and the children. The last time I preached the sayings with children followed a moment when the disciples were confounded by Jesus’ teaching and were arguing over who was the greatest. He held up a child of a model of discipleship. In this terse Gospel of Mark that is all about pushing the story, the action to the cross, these little vignettes with children keep popping up, like interludes along the way.

And here today the disciples were trying to prevent the children from interrupting him.

“whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. And he too them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.”

No matter our age, no matter our life experience, we remain God’s children. And when we approach Jesus won’t let anything stand in the way. He takes us in his arms, lays his hands upon us, and blesses us.” And we are safe, whole and well in the arms of God.

Amen.

– photo by woodleywonderworks

Image by tj scenes’

Have you ever been in a room and thought everyone there was smarter than you?

I sure have. I remember that when I started my ministry training at Harvard Divinity School I was soooo intimidated. I had gone to a small liberal arts college, maybe 2500 students. It was a great education, and I was pretty smart, but whoa. This was Harvard. There were people from Ivy League colleges, and people who, as we say in Boston, were just wickid smaht. And wickid wickid smaht. Talking about theologians and concepts I never heard of before.

I’ll never forget my first assignment: a three page paper on the advantages and disadvantages of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. One of the great figures in church history. Three pages, about the length of this sermon – no big deal, right? Not. I was a deer in the headlights. I was paralyzed with fear of looking completely ignorant. Thankfully, a friend walked me through it…all night, paragraph by tortured paragraph.

You know that saying, “Fake it ‘til you make it?” I think that’s how I spent my first semester in Div School. I would listen and then look things up later. I was careful with what I said and when I said it – what I asked and when I asked it – so as not to appear ignorant. And it took me a while to know what was going on and get up to speed.

Afraid to Ask

So, I have sympathy for the disciples in our Gospel today. Jesus is a great teacher. They were his students. This is how he taught them: he’d say things in the midst of the large crowds, like parables. And then when he was alone with the disciples, he’d explain what they meant. Or he would ask them what they thought about what had happened. It was an advanced seminar in discipleship, leadership, and faith.

Now, he’s giving them their hardest lesson. He says, I’m going to be betrayed, handed over to the authorities. I’m going to be killed. And then rise again.

In fact, this is the third time Jesus had predicted his death and resurrection – and the disciples still don’t comprehend it.

Mark says, “But they did not understand what he was saying and [they] were afraid to ask him.”

They didn’t understand. (And who could blame them.)

They were going about healing and teaching, learning some good theology and Biblical interpretation – all well and good.

But death and resurrection? That’s mind-blowing stuff. It flips the script on a what a Messiah should be – supposed to conquer, not be killed. And then rise again? From the dead? And he was only 33 years old. His work had just begun. It just didn’t compute.

And they were afraid to ask. Why? Maybe they didn’t want to accept it. Was there some denial there. Or, perhaps, they didn’t want to reveal that they didn’t understand. They didn’t want to appear as uninformed, confused, and clueless as they felt.

So they didn’t say anything – and they wind up talking amongst themselves, arguing about who is the greatest, which only reinforces that they don’t get it at all, because while Jesus is divesting himself of all his divine power to go to the cross, they are arguing who is and will be the greatest and most powerful disciple.

Questions

Questions. Questions (as we can see from the disciples, as we might know in our own lives) are problematic for us because they make us vulnerable, by admitting we don’t know, revealing something personal about us. When I was in seminary I had a professor, who, when you would pose a question – often carefully formulated in such a way as not to reveal too much about yourself, as if you were asking for a friend, would say, “Why do you ask that question?” In those moments, you could see that there is a very short distance from the questions we ask and the things most on our hearts.

Often like the disciples, to avoid this, we just don’t ask at all. We keep our questions to ourselves.

Church

Church, unfortunately, has had a way of reinforcing that.

For a long time church has treated faith was a matter of having the right answers, assimilating the right information. Remember when we had to memorize the catechism. First Commandment, “We are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.” The whole idea was that right answers will lead to right living will lead to right Christian society.

My friend Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber at House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver has joked that Lutherans really believe they are saved, not by grace alone, but by theological precision. That is, by right thinking. Which winds up creating lots of debate about who’s right and who’s greatest.

But when the strength of one’s faith is calculated on the amount of information and the accumulated number answers, we tend to hide what we don’t know. Things like the catechism explanations are, no doubt, good to know, but in an age of Google we can pull things up nearly instantaneously (as I did this morning to make sure I had that explanation right). The question is: what does that mean for my life, as I experience it? And life as we experience it together?

No longer are churches places that distribute answers, as if they were a way to salvation, but places where we can ask questions that matter.

And so, the question I posed on Facebook this week. The question I have asked you this morning to text. “What are the questions we are too afraid – or too polite – to ask in church? What are the questions we keep to ourselves?”

This is why I’m looking forward to our new Animate series on Wednesday nights. A new twist on educational programming. Rather than a talking head giving you an answer about who God is, why you should read the Bible, and what it should mean to you, it suggests and ask for your questions. It revolves around the questions of really smart, faithful, curious and questioning people, people like Nadia. Questions like,

• Why do we have to read these Bible stories over and over and over again?
• How do we, like the disciples, make sense of the cross?
• What is God like? How do we know?
• Why can church be such a complicated, sometimes disappointing, place?
• Do I have to live like Jesus lived? And how would I go about it?

It raises other questions, like,

• Does anybody else have doubts? (By the way, everybody’s got doubts.)
• How do I make sense of suffering?
• Why do bad things happen to good people?

Question as Prayer

Answers are fine, but when we reach the edge of reason, the limits of our knowing, well, that’s when things really start to get interesting. When we discover faith, trust in others, and trust in God.

Jesus tell the disciples, “Whoever want to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” He picks up a child and says, “whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me.” And in another scene of welcoming children, he says, “You must be like a child to enter the Kingdom of God.” We often think that the qualities Jesus is talking about here are child-like innocence, acceptance, and trust.

But…they also have great questions and they are not afraid to ask them!

And God welcomes our questions – loves them. Questions open things up, invite conversation, whereas answers can sometimes close them down. Our questions are a form of prayer.

Through questions, as James writes, we can “draw near to God and God will draw near to us.”

Finally, I wonder what would have happened in our story if the disciples had asked, “Jesus, tell us, what do you mean?”

Amen.

Note: I asked those in worship to share the questions they carry via text message. We displayed them in the sanctuary as I preached using a service called Poll Everywhere. These were some of the responses.

Selected 7:45 Service Responses

God loves all people, even people who are gay, right?

Why do Christians kill others in the name of God?

Is the Bible to be taken literally?

How do dinosaurs fit into the Biblical story of Creation? Before or after Adam and Eve?

Can Christians be demon possessed?

What gives God power?

Do plants and animals go to heaven

Why does God let good things happen to bad people?

Selected 9:00 Service Responses

How do you stay in faith when so many intelligent well educated people say there is nothing beyond this life?

Is is OK to openly disagree with what the church wants us to believe?

Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart and then punish him for having a hardened heart?

Selected 10:30 Service Responses

How do we know we as Lutherans are correct?

Does the devil really exist?

Would Jesus be able to get a message out today in a world with so many distractions?

How would we recognize a miracle if we saw one?

Is there really a heaven and a hell we will go to when we die?

Would Jesus see Facebook as a good tool or a platform for hurt and pain?

Am I a bad Christian if I don’t want to give everything I have to others? I like new cars clothes and stuff.

Does God love everyone, even those with alternative lifestyles and values?

Photo by Ron Reiring

Readings: Mark 7:24-37 and Isaiah 35:4-7a

Last week Jenny and I took the kids out for a nice dinner to celebrate being here altogether, the start of school, and, well, we didn’t have that much food in the house yet. It was a feast served with huge portions. At the end we were sitting at the table with three boxes of leftovers.

As we sat there with all this food piled up on the table, our server asked if we wanted to donate $2 for the No Kid Hungry campaign by Share our Strength, that gets meals to needy kids with the ultimate goal of eradicating childhood hunger.

Jenny and I looked at each other, and Jenny said, “After a meal like that, how can you say, ‘No?’” She was exactly right. Our consumption suddenly felt so conspicuous, sitting there, stomachs full – over full – with all those leftovers, while so many go hungry.

Of course we said yes, but it didn’t feel like a noble thing. It was quite literally the least we could do and It felt like letting people eat from the crumbs of our table – the crumbs of the table we hear about in our Gospel reading from Mark.

Syrophoenician Woman

In our Gospel, Jesus has travelled from Galilee (his home) to the Gentile region of Tyre. He has come, Mark says, not to teach and heal, but to try to escape the crowds in Galilee, where his fame had grown with every miracle and healing. Jesus was going on retreat.

But even in Tyre, among the Gentiles, Jesus could not escape notice.

A mother whose daughter is possessed by a demon finds him and pleads with him to heal her. And Jesus says this terribly insulting thing to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” It is a startling moment. The woman begs him for help and he calls her a dog. This was a derisive and not uncommon way for Jews to speak of Gentiles and vice versa. There was plenty of animosity between these two groups, but to hear Jesus say it is just troubling.

His point, poorly made, is that his mission is to bring salvation to the Jews first and only then to the Gentiles. Basically, he says, you’ll have to wait.

Now, have you ever seen what happens when you tell a mother that is trying to get her child help to wait? Have you every been one of those mothers, aunts, grandmothers? They go into what I call “mama bear mode.” They are going to protect their kid take down whatever stands in the way of getting the help they need. (And in this story, that is Jesus.)

And so, in his encounter with the Syrophoenician woman Jesus meets a mother who is desperate to help her sick daughter and will not take “no” for an answer. A mother is always going to win that battle, even if its with the Son of God. As soon as she appeared, Jesus did not stand a chance.

She says, “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs. Even Gentiles like me and my daughter can get a little grace you are serving over there in Galilee.”

She is right and Jesus knows it. And his heart is changed. “For saying that,” he says, “you may go – the demon has left your daughter.”

The Mission

A lot of commentators and preachers get hung up on this insult, the drama, the emotional content of this encounter – (or they avoid the text altogether) – but never quite get to the crux of the matter.

The heart of the issue is really about Jesus’ mission – how he envisioned it and what it became. To hear it in this text, Jesus believed his mission was to bring salvation to the Jews and that it would eventually wind its way to the Gentiles.

Trickle Down Grace

It was a mission, to borrow a term in the news lately, of “trickle down grace.” Trickle down grace. The Gospel would come to the Jews and then trickle down to everyone else in time. Jesus’ full revelation would be to the children of Israel and maybe a few rays of reflected light might shine onto other lands and peoples.

The woman, with her motherly compassion, corrects Jesus’ thinking, calls him to a larger vision of his mission, and more expansive view of God’s love. That God’s love and grace do not trickle, they flow.

And Jesus changes his mind. But, wait, can Jesus change his mind?

Jesus was fully divine but also fully human, and this, I think, is one of his most human moments – which is I like this text. He’s exhausted. He wants to go where no one knows him. And this woman shows up. (It’s like a pastor trying to go vacation, someone discovers your clergy and asks you to pray or counsel or preach or debate some theological point.) He is short with her and insults her. Isn’t enough that I go to the Jews? Isn’t that a big enough mission? Don’t you know where this is all going? What I have to do? Do I have to help you too?

And she says, “Yes. Yes, you do.” And immediately Jesus knows she is right. She calls to him in the midst of his exhaustion and reminds him what the love of God is all about, by showing what lengths she herself will go to in order to help her daughter.

The woman here is showing Jesus God’s love. Shows him that it is sufficient and more than sufficient, that there is more than enough for everyone. And that his plan, his mission is more than even he imagined.

It reminds me of another story, at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, when another woman, his mother, pushed him to compassion. Maybe you know this one. They are at a wedding reception in Cana and the wine is just about to run out. It would be a source of great shame for the host families. And so, Mary pulls Jesus aside and says, “You better do something. Now.” And he turns the water into wine. He didn’t do it on his own. She had to push him.

And here again, Jesus has to be reminded that everybody needs some grace and there is more than enough to go around. (We all need to be reminded of that.)

And if Jesus can go to that place, that place of scarcity rather than abundance, how much easier is it for us to go there?

We live in a Trickle Down World of our own making, no matter our political persuasion. It seems part of our human condition. That donation we gave at dinner the other night was a trickle down donation. We had our fill and then gave a little at the end. Less than our leftovers. The crumbs.

In our world, money, power, authority, opportunity – they trickle down…if they ever do at all. Maybe its a myth we tell ourselves to justify putting ourselves first. Squeezing some kind of virtue out of focusing on ourselves rather than our neighbor. Like fulfilling our own desires will somehow make the world a better place. We are told the crumbs of our individualism is enough.

But the Syrophoenician woman holds out a different vision – the same vision that Jesus talked about, then, as the Kingdom of God, where the last are first, where everyone has a place at the table.

And yet, like most everything else, we still fall into the trap of treating God’s grace like a scarce commodity. But it isn’t. God’s grace does not trickle down. It was washes down over all of us. We may try to contain and control it. We build levies, canals, and damns and try to direct its flow, make it go where we want. But, as Jesus learned, it will never work.

Because grace is infinite. (That’s why its grace.) And grace always finds a way because God always finds a way.

Our neighbor needs more than our crumbs. The good news is that love and grace are renewable resources. The more they are given away, the more they expand. The more we grow.

This amazing woman reminds us, too, that God’s grace has a way of spilling out in all kinds of ways we don’t expect. We go about making all kinds of plans, and maybe God has something else in mind. Something better. Something more.

Ephphatha

Isaiah tell us to get ready. It is coming. It’s happening.

The eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf unstoppped, the lame will leap, the speechless shall sing…waters shall break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.” God’s mission to save the world cannot be contained. It doesn’t trickle down, it flows down like an ever rolling stream. Like rivers in the desert. I cannot be controlled. It cannot be dammed up. It will have its way.

At the healing of the blindman, Jesus says to him, “Ephphatha…be opened.”

Commentators points out Jesus is not just talking to his stopped up ears. He’s speaking to his heart. Perhaps in the same way the Syrophoenician woman spoke to his.

When the man was healed, Mark tells us the crowd was “astounded beyond measure.”

And so may we be – astounded at what God is and will do in us, through us, for the excluded and outcast, for the sake of the world.

May we, like Jesus, be opened to the new thing God is doing.

May we be opened. Ephaphatha. Amen.

Reading: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

This morning, I want to talk about hands, because hands are at the center of the controversy in our Gospel lesson today. 

The story goes that some of the religious leaders, the Pharisees and the scribes, were gathering around Jesus, when they happened to notice that some of the disciples were eating without washing their hands. They ask Jesus, “Why do your disciples…eat with defiled hands?” Now, you can understand their concern. My own mother would have disapproved of that, and she too would have probably given the disciples a little talk about the importance of proper hygiene. But this was more than a matter of just good hygiene, and that requires a little background:

One of the core values of 1st century Judaism was purity. The Jewish quest for purity directly resulted from a conviction that God is absolutely holy, or pure. If God is holy, then anyone who wants to approach God must also be holy. Thus, the quest for personal and corporate purity.

Purity was deeply ingrained in Jewish culture, stretching all the way back to Leviticus. Impurity was easy to catch. Among other things, eating the wrong kind of food, or combination of foods, or associating with the wrong kind of person (like prostitutes, lepers, or tax collectors) automatically made one impure. (From this perspective, Jesus and his followers were probably perceived as habitually impure.)

In order to make someone or something pure, you had to remove the “dirt,” which in turn required some sort of “detergent.” The two main detergents for removing moral and ritual impurity were blood – by far the most powerful of the two, and water, the one used most often. Blood, for example, purified an altar or a person’s relationship with God; while water purified everyday objects like hands or utensils.

The Pharisees advocated that people practice purity in all areas of their lives, including their daily meals.People were to wash their food, wash whatever they were eating with, and to wash their hands. From their perspective, that was the best way to live a religious life. So, they were surprised and dismayed that Jesus, as a religious teacher, would allow his disciples to eat without becoming ritually pure.

You know, hands can tell you a lot about someone. Take my hands, for example.My hands are short and fat – an unfortunate inherited trait from my father’s side of the family. I bite my finger nails and crack my knuckles, a result of my tendency to worry by over thinking things. My right thumb is crooked from the time I broke it playing lacrosse in high school, and that same thumb has a scar from where I cut it in college and needed stitches. I have a couple calluses from some work around the house yesterday, but mostly my hands are soft. Compared to other professions, my job is easy on the hands. The only piece of jewelry is my wedding ring, which symbolizes the vows I’ve made to Jenny and the commitment I have made to our family.

Hands can tell you a lot. Just by my hands you know some things about me, from all the way back to my family tree, to what I did yesterday. And you know a couple of the most important things about who I am.

I wonder, if we were to look at your hands now, this morning, what they would tell us about you. What stories do they tell? What memories do they evoke, both good and bad? Maybe your hands are strong and tough, maybe nimble, perhaps arthritic from years of good use.

When I read our Gospel lesson this morning, I imagine the disciples’ hands as they eat.

I think of Peter, Andrew, James and John, who were all fishermen and must have had fishermen hands. Manning the boat, raising and lowering the nets, and getting the fish ready for market must have made their hands rugged, strong, tough, scarred, and tanned by the sun. Jesus nicknamed James and John “the sons of thunder” because they were so zealous. I imagine that their hands were clenched much of the time, always ready to defend their cause. Matthew was a tax collector. Tax collectors at that time were notoriously greedy, and often gouged people, taking more money than what was required.As it was a common practice, Matthew probably did the same thing. His hands would have been much softer than the others, for he used them to count his ill-gotten gains. Then, of course, there was Judas, whose defiled hand met Jesus’ hand in the same bowl at the Last Supper.It was his hand that revealed him as Jesus’ betrayer.

What do their hands and our hands tell us about ourselves? My hands are the hands with which I hold my children, and hold the hands of the sick and dying. They are the hands that typed up this sermon. However, these are also the hands that have hurt and have remained still and complacent in the face of war and injustice.If our hands are windows into our hearts and lives, I think that what we find is that we are both sinners and saints – capable of such good and such sin, and that we are all defiled.

Holy Communion
It is with these kinds of hands that the disciples ate that day. It is with those hands that they healed in Jesus’ name. It is also with those hands that they ate with Jesus at his Last Supper. And it is with those kinds of hands that we share together in that same Supper today and every Sunday. At this meal, Holy Communion, we too eat with defiled hands. The hyper-religious and non-religious people alike wonder how we can dare to receive. How can we call ourselves Christians? They labor under the impression – often given by religious people – that religion is a matter of purity rather than a movement of grace.

We may not have blood on our hands, but there’s plenty of dirt. At times, we may wonder the same thing. It is so easy for us to make Communion an issue of worthiness rather than grace. We may struggle with feelings of unworthiness as come to church and come to this Table. The good news for you is that you, we, will never be worthy (at least, on our own), but Jesus still invites us to his Table. Jesus makes us worthy. And he places himself in our hands.

Perhaps worthiness comes out most when we think about who can plan Communion, and who can serve it.

I fear that this robe and this stole, and my certificate of ordination, give the wrong impression that I am somehow worthy to stand at the altar and celebrate Communion.I am not worthy to celebrate. Our Communion assistants are not worthy to serve.And none of us is worthy to receive. Worthiness has nothing to do with it. One of my favorite descriptions of Communion, we are like beggars telling other beggars where to get food. We all stand in utter and complete need at this meal. We are one. That is why, for all the name
s for this meal, I prefer Holy Communion.It is about our true and full Communion with God, and with one another. Our human constructions of power and standing whether they are based on age, status, education, wealth, piety, or something else altogether (like the “traditions of the elders” in our Gospel lesson) mean nothing the foot of the cross, at this Font, and around this Table. Here, we are all equal, and I believe most truly the Body of Christ. We all come with open hands – rich hands and poor hands, young hands and old hands, gay hands and straight hands, male hands and female hands, hands of all different colors, and sizes, and stories. We are all welcome, and we all serve and eat with defiled hands.

It is into these defiled hands, our hands, that Jesus places himself – just as he came into this defiled world to save us.I invite you, when you come forward this morning, to take a take a moment and look at that wafer, Jesus’ body, in your hands. See your scars, your sins, your stories, the good and the bad. And know that that is exactly where Jesus chooses to be with you. Jesus puts himself in our real lives, into our worn hands and in our broken hearts.That is why He was born into this life and why he died: to join us in this life and to redeem it from the inside out.

And I want to conclude with an image from a mission trip I once took to Slovakia. In the capital, Bratislava, behind the President’s residence is a public park. And on one side of the park, there is a beautiful mosaic, about maybe four feet high and seven feet wide. It’s called “Hand of Abundance.” Reaching across the mosaic are two hands – reaching out from left to right.The arms and the hands are made up of thousands of black and gray tiles.These black and grey hands are reaching out holding what looks like bread. The bread is mainly made up of beautiful red and yellow tiles.I’m not sure what the artist intended, but the first thing I thought about when I saw it was Communion. The broken black and grey tiles are a symbol of our defiled hands. It is symbolic of the limitations, the brokenness, and the death that we experience in this life.In contrast to the arms and hands, the red and yellow tiles of the bread are brilliant. They look as if they are giving of light and warmth. This is the life of Jesus. What I didn’t notice until I looked at my picture again was that moving back down the hands and the wrists were many tiny red and yellow tiles, as if the warmth from that bread is warming the hands and arms of the person holding it.

We come to communion with broken hands and broken hearts. But when we take the bread from the paten, and lift it up and say, “The Body of Christ, given for you,” and when you open your hands to receive it, the very life of Jesus – the grace, the mercy, his healing power move – like those red tiles – up our arms and into our lives, transforming our hands, our wrists, our arms. Transforming us body, mind, and soul.

Amen.

Photo by adactio

Readings: 1 Kings 19:4-8 , John 6:35, 41-51

Snacks

One of the things you learn as the parent of young children is the importance of snacks. Yes, snacks.

Little kids snack all the time. We have snack bags in the house, in the car. When we are at our family cottage in the summer, we always bring a snack bag with us when we go down to the lake. If I had to tally it up, I think the whole lake experience is about 40% swimming and 60% snacking. Pretzels, granola bars, fruit snacks, apples, peaches. You name it.

God forbid you get caught out somewhere with kids without food. It quickly leads to cranky kids and awful meltdowns. And I have to say, that can just as easily go for the adults too. When we go too long without nourishment, we all get tired, cranky, and run short on patience.

It’s like these recent Snickers candy bar ads. Maybe you’ve seen them. They open with some celebrity complaining. A friend hands them a Snickers, they take a bite, and they become a regular person again. The slogan goes, “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry.” So true.

The same goes for the spiritual life too. If we go too long without spiritual nourishment, we are just not ourselves, the people God made us to be.

Elijah

This morning in our first reading from 1 Kings, the great prophet Elijah finds himself in the wilderness in dire need of something to eat.

Just before this passage, he defeated the prophets of Baal in a contest to determine who’s God was greater. The God on Canaan, Baal, or the God of the Israelites. Each set up a big sacrifice, and they called on their God to send fire from heaven to consume it. Elijah poured water over the sacrifice and it still burned. The prophets of Baal called and called but nothing came. It was a watershed moment, for the people of God as they laid claim to the Promised Land. It was a great victory for Elijah, the Israelites, and God. But the queen Jezebel, a follower of Baal, was not so ready to admit defeat. She calls for Elijah’s head. And so, he runs into the wilderness to get as far from Jezebel as he could. There was no time for packing a snack bag. He just has to go.

He reaches the point of exhaustion and hunger. He collapses under a little shade. He is ready to give up. To die. He falls asleep.

Then, an angel taps him on the shoulder, wakes him up and says, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” He eats and, again, falls asleep. A second time the angel wakes him, feeds him, saying, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”

Like Elijah, we need to hear these words. Get up. Eat. These are the words spoken by the Holy Spirit in our hearts that have brought us here together – to feast on the Word of God and at the Communion Table. These are the words that nudge us to pick up a Bible, or devotionals, or to prayer. Because, God knows, we too need bread for the journey, nourishment and refreshment along the way.

You know, I’ve been here at Upper Dublin for a grand total of 19 days. There are all kinds of things happening, so many great ideas in the air, so much to absorb. We are going 100 miles an hour and we want to 200. It’s hold onto your hat. Pedal to the metal. (And I am ready.) But I am so aware, so conscious of the need (for myself, but for all of us) to stay nourished, balanced, and grounded in God. The angels words ring true: “Get up and eat or the journey will be too much.”

We need many moments of spiritual refreshment along this way we walk together – and each of us individually as people of faith. The good news is that God provides. When the Israelites were hungry, God sent manna. When Elijah was starving, God sent the angel. When the people following Jesus were stranded at the end of the day on a hillside, he fed 5,000. When we were spiritually starved, Jesus gave us himself.

God gives. God provides. The challenge for us, sometimes, is to stop, or at least slow down enough, to eat.

Good old Elijah does survive the wilderness. He finally makes it to the shelter of Mt. Horeb. There, he has one of the most celebrated encounters with God in the Bible. After a series dramatic storms and earthquakes, God comes to him in the sound of sheer silence.

And so, this little moment in the wilderness, that is our reading for today, is sandwiched between Elijah’s great victory over Baal and a mountaintop experience of God.

It is a great reminder that we just don’t feast at those rare mountaintop experience and store up for the next leg of our journey. We need sustenance all along the way.

I remember a friend of mine, a personal trainer, used said to me, if you want to be healthy, eat something every three hours. Not three big meals, but five smaller ones, to keep the body going. And so it is with our faith. Like Elijah, we need smaller spiritual snacks to keep us going until the next mountaintop feast.

Prayer. Worship. The Word. Love and fellowship. Sabbath moments of rest. Feeding and being fed. Big things, little things, planned, and spontaneous.

The Bread of Life

But its not just when we eat, but what we eat that makes the difference. That’s the point Jesus is making in our Gospel today.

This reading comes right on the heals of Jesus feeding 5,000 people with just some a few loaves and a couple fishes. The people are astonished. They want more. People saying, “Hey, Jesus! That was awesome! Do it again! Do it again!”

Jesus says that they are missing the point. That the true miracle isn’t all that bread. After all, as great a miracle as it was, they would all be hungry again – just like the Israelites with their manna, just like Elijah under the shade tree. Instead, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

When we look to Jesus for nourishment, our hearts, our souls will be full and well.

Jesus is the food that truly satisfies and sustains us. Along our life’s journeys, we look for all kinds of other things to fill us up, to fill our longings – even the good things of God – but only Jesus sets our hearts and souls at peace, at rest.

For, “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.”

As we begin this long journey together, let us take Elijah’s example to be nourished regularly, Jesus’ admonition to seek and consume what truly satisfies, and his invitation to receive what gives life and life abundantly: Jesus himself.

Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you. Amen.