Complete Order of Worship

John 2:13-22

Mark 8:31-38 | Order of Worship 

Mark 1:9-15

Mark 9:2-9 | Order of Worship

Mark 1:29-39 

Mark 1:14-20

“And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”

No matter how many times I read it, it still startles me: just how quickly Andrew and Simon, and then James and John, are swept up and off. How effortlessly it seems their hands release their familiar grasp. How instantly their mended nets fall to the shore of the lake and the deck of the boat. Mark leaves no doubt: it all happens immediately.

But it’s not just the nets that drop. It’s a way of being. It’s a life they’ve mended and tailored just so. It’s an engrained pattern. It’s a set of motions and actions practiced over time. It’s an entire network of muscle memory they had developed since the first time they stood on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and the first time Zebedee showed them the mechanics of casting.

Neuroscientists tell us that when a movement or a motor skill is repeated over time, a long-term procedural memory – or “muscle memory” – is created for that task. I think of my son riding his bike for the first time. He progressed steadily. There was plenty of time spent with me clumsily running by his side. We developed a little mantra we would say before each try: “Pedal fast. Look ahead. Trust yourself.” And as much as I hoped for the scripted moment when I would release him into the sunbeams breaking through the trees in Fisher Park and watch him ride off confidently, when it finally happened, it was almost by accident. There was little thought, and no help from me. He was just balancing in the driveway as I watched out of the side of my eye. He pedaled once, catching himself, then twice, catching himself, then going a little farther, when suddenly, he realized it was in him. He could do it himself. And he was off.

Riding a bicycle, typing on a keyboard or texting on a phone, playing a melody or phrase on a musical instrument, and yes, casting a net – over time, with practice, first one motion then another, and the task becomes smooth, effortless, unconscious. It’s in you somewhere. So well-rehearsed is the motion that it can be returned to after an absence, like when the disciples return to their nets in those moments between crucifixion and resurrection when they wonder if Jesus is coming back to them. They pick up the nets and it’s as if nothing has changed, because the motion was effortless, rehearsed, memorized: Bend at the waist, gather the net, extend the arm, bounce in the legs, the motion left to left, the release of the net at the peak of its arc, again and again and again.

And I think this passage startles me, because I recognize how many times I’m just casting my nets. Bending, extending, the familiar motions repeated over time, the muscle memory effortless and unconscious, on the shores we’ve always known, the boats that have been passed down to us, and the waters we’ve navigated again and again. That’s where Jesus found them. And that’s so often where he finds us.

Mark doesn’t tell us much about that first meeting. The shortest of our canonical gospels is the “Cliff’s Notes” version of the story. There’s little character development. Few narrative details. Everything is strung together with Mark’s favorite adverb – immediately. There’s no time to linger or sightsee. There’s something about Jesus that demands immediate attention. So Mark is constantly moving the reader along swiftly, writing with the urgency and rapid motion that leaves much to our imaginations all these years later.

If Mark took more time – if he wrote like a historian, for instance – he could have described much more about the setting. He could have written about how Jesus and this quartet of disciples he recruits lived in a tough world. Jewish aspirations for freedom confronted the reality of Roman imperial exploitation. Families lost their land. Children scattered in search of work and opportunity, many finding themselves in poverty. Traditional structures crumbled under cultural and economic stress. Many found themselves destitute. These were the waters they fished in. These were the realities that impinged on them as they mended their nets by the Sea. And this is the situation in which they look up to see the arrival of the wandering rabbi, walking down the shore and crying out his very first words in the gospel of Mark: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Jesus begins with two declarations: the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom is near. Then he moves to a command: repent and believe the good news. The command is tied to the declarations. Repent and believe, because the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand.

It’s quite a thing to say to these fishermen on their familiar shores with their all too familiar troubles and concerns. To them he says, “The Kingdom of God is near to you.” You don’t have to go someplace else to find God. You don’t have to clean up your life for God to dwell with you. God is among you. Right here where you are, God is with you.

It’s the good news of the gospel, especially for those of us who happen to feel like, for whatever reason, life is lived out on the edges. Perhaps someone has told you, or you have come to believe that whatever God is doing in this world that is true and meaningful, you’re not a part of it. You’re not in the middle of it. You’re somewhere out on the edges. The good news – maybe some of the best news – of the gospel is that in the Kingdom of God, there are no edges. It’s near to you.

So repent. Turn your life around. Repent not hoping that some day God might come near. Repent because in Jesus God has come near.

And believe. Believe in your wildest hopes. Believe not hoping that one day God might come among us. Believe because in Jesus God is among us.

It’s enough to make them drop their nets. But of course, it’s not just nets that they drop. It’s not just family and workers they leave in the boat. It’s also a whole network of assumptions about what would sustain them. It’s also a slew of predictions about what their lives would be. It’s also all of the things that had been passed down to them and ingrained in them. All of their plans and rehearsed actions. So many unconscious motions. Immediately they drop. They leave. They follow into a whole new way of understanding themselves and being in the world.

And here is what I believe is so core to the gospel of Mark, placed right up front so urgently and loudly so we can’t miss it: your life can be more than you knew it could be. It can become something you did not even imagine for yourself. And it can happen immediately.

“Follow me and I will make you fish for people,” our translation reads this morning. A former professor of mine, Ted Smith, has argued that this translation misses something about the call of Jesus. It understands fishing for people as a task, when in fact fishing for people is a new identity. Rather than “I will make you fish for people,” we should read, “I will make you become fishers for people.” Maybe it’s just a subtle change in language, but it’s a significant change in meaning, because “I will make you fish” gives us one more activity to make space for in our schedules. “I will make you fish” gives us something to work into our lives, but “I will make you become fishers” gives us a whole new life. “Follow me and you will become fishers. Follow me into a new way of being.” (1)

Which leaves us asking what those four must have asked: do we want that? Do we want that new life? Do we want that kind of transformation? We who can so often be startled by change? We who grasp the familiar in our lives? Do we want the Jesus who inserts himself right into the middle of these four ordinary lives and says follow me, immediately?

Will Campbell was an iconoclastic Baptist minister and activist, he called himself a bootleg preacher, and he prided himself on never working for an institution, which meant, in a sense, he could say whatever he wanted, or whatever he felt the Gospel wanted from him. Like when he preached famously at the Riverside Church in New York. Situated on the northern tip of Manhattan Island, on the Hudson River, Riverside was built on a hill by John D. Rockefeller in the early 20^th Century – a great cathedral of Protestantism, which still stands today as an important and vibrant witness. But Will Campbell just didn’t have much use for Rockefeller’s cathedral. He was invited to preach in the 1980s by his old Yale Divinity School classmate and Riverside pastor, William Sloane Coffin. And in his Tennessee drawl he said, “Bill tells me you want me to hear about how to follow Jesus…But you don’t want to hear about that… “ and he looked up at the ornate gothic nave, the stained glass, the fine mahogany pews, the sacred art and said, “You want to hear about how to follow Jesus, while keeping all of this.” (2)

And isn’t it true of me? Isn’t it true of so many of us? We’ve all got our nets that we’re gripping, mended and tailored just to our liking. We want to follow Jesus, but usually we want to maintain the state of things. We want to see a kingdom come to earth, but usually we assume it preserves all the things we value and doesn’t ask us to change.

How many of us stand by that lakeshore? Reticent. Still holding firm to the nets in the midst of passing time? No one learns a new set of motions at my age, we might think. New muscle memory can’t develop nearly as easily after age 21, we start to believe. No one develops a new way of being after what I’ve done, if only you knew. Or maybe we think, I’ve got too much invested in these nets, this business. I’m too indebted to my father, Zebedee. I’m too patterned in this habit, too ashamed from this mistake, too weighed down by these burdens, and so often we continue in the same boat, same shore, same water, same nets.

And so often we seek the Jesus who will enable that – polite, kind, reassuring, and waiting for us to get around to following eventually. But if that’s who we’re seeking, there’s really no point in reading the rest of the gospel, because there, instead of the mild-mannered one who doesn’t expect too much of us, we meet the transforming one who expects more from us than we ever could of ourselves.

Alexander Baumgarten is a missiologist and global health advocate, whose book, God’s Mission in the World, includes the story of a visit he made to the southern tip of the Sudan in Africa. The war had taken its toll on the city of Juba. Once a thriving river port and transportation hub for Africa, Juba in those days resembled a ghost town. Gone were the schools, hospitals, clinics and all but a few miles of paved road. Running water and electric generators existed only in a handful of places, and nearly every building still standing appeared on the verge of collapse.

In spite of all this, and in spite of Sunday afternoon temperatures well past 100 degrees Fahrenheit, that Sunday the Episcopal cathedral in Juba was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people in their Sunday best singing their praises and offering thanksgivings to God.

Baumgarten says that in a quiet moment, he remarked to his friend, a Sudanese priest, that he marveled at how the Church in the Sudan inspires such faith among people who have been through so much and seem to have so little from Baumgarten’s vantage point.

“That’s easy, my brother,” Father Joseph replied. “Faith comes easily to those who have so little because we know we need God, and we know that God needs us. God needs us because God intends to work through us to heal and reconcile our land, to see the Kingdom come near.”

But then he continued, “I might ask you, my brother, how is it that your church inspires faith among people who have so much? How do you convince them that they need God, and that God has put them here for a purpose, and to see the kingdom near?” (3)

That’s how Jesus finds them. And it’s so often how he finds us. Having everything just so. Bending, extending, casting, and listening as we do for that call that will so startle us that we have to drop our nets just to steady ourselves and walk forward.

Hear it this morning. “Follow me, I will make you to become fishers for people. All those motions you’ve learned and memorized, your bending and extending and casting and releasing, well now I will teach you how to extend your arms to bless. I will show you how to bend your back to stoop down and serve the most vulnerable in this world. Instead of the same waters and the same boats, I will show you how to cast yourself widely out on the world. And I will show you how you can gather people up and help them to know me, to see me, to hear me. So come and be with me, follow me, and rehearse new motions and skills. Sure they will be stiff and clumsy at times, but then, one day, first one motion, then another, and you’ll realize it’s happened. It’s in you – the work of God, the kingdom near. And you’re off into all that is ahead.”

“So follow me,” he says to us, “and you will never be the same. Follow me, and you will become more than you ever knew you could be.”

1. From a profile of Will Campbell, “The First Church of Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer,” in Rolling Stone (December 13-27, 1990)
2. “Mark 1:14-20” in Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 1
3. In the Introduction of Baumgarten’s book, God’s Mission in the World: An Ecumenical Study Guide on Global Poverty

John 1:43-51

For Nathaniel, the journey of discipleship begins in the shade. He approaches Jesus for the first time, but finds to his astonishment that Jesus already knows him. “How do you know me?” Nathaniel asks, to which Jesus says, “I saw you when you were sitting under the fig tree.”

Often mentioned in the Bible, fig trees were of medium height – 15-25 feet – with a canopy that spread out wide. They were valued in the ancient world for their thick foliage, even in harsh conditions. It was common to find someone sitting beneath the cool and dense shade of a fig tree to escape the heat of the day. We might imagine those 1^st century residents of Bethsaida and many other ancient towns coming out of their homes and sitting beneath the shade, the way some of us can remember sitting on porches, or resting on a stoop. Picture those residents of that small Galilean town playing checkers, or rocking, or enjoying a glass of sweet tea. That’s where Jesus finds Nathaniel. He had his life ordered. His routine was fairly straightforward. His view was framed the way he wanted it. Life must have been pretty good, because from his shady perch he could look down at those he deemed other than and less than himself, sneering, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” In other words, you could say Nathaniel had it made in the shade. That is, until Phillip shows up one day and says to him, “Come and see.”

Seeing is a key theme in the story of Jesus as told by John. In the Gospel of John, to “see” is to know Jesus, recognize him as Messiah, and follow in his Way.

And sometimes, we might assume that happens all at once for people – at least in the gospels.

We sometimes act as though everyone was out there on that night when the stars flashed and the multitude appeared and announced with such clarity precisely who the Messiah was. But, then, John’s gospel doesn’t have a birth scene with harmonious midnight choir of angels.

Of course, Mark also doesn’t have a birth story. As we remembered in our passage last week, the Gospel of Mark begins with Jesus’ baptism. So maybe we assume that everyone was out there at the Jordan – all of Jerusalem and the surrounding Judean countryside streaming out to stand on the shore, and looking up to see the heavens part and hearing a booming voice announce him as God’s son, the beloved one. But, then, John’s gospel doesn’t have that baptism scene, either.

After theological reflections on light in the darkness and word becoming flesh, John begins with an announcement from John the Baptist, and then these stories of Jesus calling disciples. And they don’t see and understand him all at once. As Albert Schweitzer once said so elegantly, “He comes as one unknown.” It’s not instant, but gradual. And more often that’s what an Epiphany is like. It’s not sudden or dramatic, but a process. It’s like Magi seeing something against the sky, just a glimmer against the gloom, and then the more they follow, the closer they come, the more they recognize and the more they come to see.

This same gradual recognition happens in this early portion of the Gospel of John, in our passage today and in the verses just before. Notice how the recognition of Jesus progresses. First two disciples of John encounter him and call him “Rabbi” or “teacher.” Then one of those two, Andrew, goes and tells his brother Simon, “We have found the Messiah” the Christ. Next, in our passage today, Phillip begins to follow and comes to Nathaniel to say, “We have found the one that Moses and the law and the prophets have told us about.” And when Nathaniel finally arrives and is known by Jesus, he calls him “Son of God.” From Rabbi, to Messiah, to the one to whom it’s all been pointing, to the Son of God. Jesus doesn’t change, but as we come closer and closer, we can see him for who he truly is. And as we gasp and confess our astonishment with Nathaniel, Jesus himself seems to say, “You’re only just beginning to see.” Notice the end of the passage this morning: “You will see even greater things than this. You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

An Epiphany is not always or even usually sudden or dramatic. And in the same way, our understanding of Jesus doesn’t happen all at once, but over time, as we come closer and closer. People have to see for themselves. That’s why it so often begins with an invitation: “Come and see.”

Gordon Targerson was a pastor in Massachusetts, who told the story of crossing the Atlantic by ship when he noticed a man wearing a clerical collar who would daily sit on the deck and read his Bible. One day, the pastor approached and said, “Forgive my curiosity, but I’d like to meet you. I’m a pastor, and I’ve noticed how every day you sit here and read your Bible religiously.” After introductions and some conversation, the other man began to describe his story of faith. He was from the Philippines, and had studied in the United States with the intention of becoming a lawyer. And during his first week of school, he met another student, who offered to be help in any way he could. In particular, he asked if this new student would like to go to church with him, and the new student agreed.

The following Sunday it was raining quite heavily, and the young man assumed plans had changed, but then there was a knock at the door, and there stood the new friend holding two umbrellas.

The man explained how he became a Christian, and how it started through that encounter. He gradually began to know more and more and feel God calling him into ordained ministry. “I went to Seminary and was then ordained a Methodist minister and I returned to the Phillipines to serve.” That’s when Targerson learned that the man on the deck in the clerical collar was Bishop Valencius, Bishop of the Methodist Church in the Philippines.

“I have been able to serve my church in the Philippines but I always pray for and give thanks for my friend who had two umbrellas.”

Because he was the one who said “Come and see.” We need this invitation because we all have our shady spots, where we have it made just to our liking.

Ancient literature suggests that the shade of the fig trees was so valued that homes were often built near the trees. Bruce Malina – who studies the social science of the first-century world – has even suggested that when a fig tree is referenced, it’s actually a symbol for home. (1)

So when Jesus says, “I saw you under the fig tree,” it’s as if he’s saying, “I saw you in your settled places. Your sheltered places. Your home.” From this place of safety, Nathaniel will follow and come to see. What about us? What are the shady spots where we build our homes? Where have we constructed our private worlds? What branches are framing or blocking our views? What shadows do we need to leave behind if we are going to see things yet greater than we have for our lives, for our world, and from our Messiah? We, too, have places where we sit comfortably and assume where the good people come from, and figure out how to keep ourselves separated from them. We have places where we rest and retain an image of who Jesus is, and a limited frame of what a Messiah looks like.

And Jesus sees us all under our fig trees and our places of shelter, before we ever see him. He knows that something in all of us wants to stay in the shade. Because something in all of us knows what seeing Jesus will mean. If we follow, we know it will lead out of the shade, as it did for Nathaniel and so many others. Nathaniel has confessed that Jesus as a blessed teacher, the Son of God, and the King of Israel, but Jesus is not going to behave as Nathaniel assumes those categories would suggest. He’s going to show him even greater things than that. If Nathaniel is going to continue to follow and confess that Jesus is the Son of God, he’ll lose his life as he knew it, and find a new abundant life beyond all his expectations. And eventually that will mean more than seeing things he didn’t expect about Jesus. It will mean seeing things he never expected to see about God. Because the closer we come, the more we see. And so something in all of us waits in the comfort of the shade.

I led a funeral service last Saturday, which is an essential part of the responsibility and honor of my work. But in this case it was for someone I did not know. In fact I did not know their family or friends. The daughter of the deceased was a friend of a friend of a friend. It was a complex scenario, where the young adult daughter was the one making arrangements, but uncles and aunts and a large extended family had their set of expectations. They expected the service to be held at the church where they had all grown up, in a farming community about 30 minutes outside of Greensboro. But that church would not host the service in their sanctuary, but in the fellowship hall, for two reasons: because there was an urn and not a body, and because the daughter wanted to offer a eulogy in that church where women do not speak from the pulpit.

Well the daughter of the deceased man was right in the middle of all of these dynamics and had told a friend, “I need someone who will be comfortable enough for my family and yet won’t say something that makes me want to run out of the room.” Well, what can I say, it turns out if that’s your low bar, I’m your pastor. One day I’ll figure how to put that on a business card: “Comfortable enough for your family, but won’t make your skin crawl.”

So last Saturday afternoon, we gathered in the church fellowship hall, complete with old furniture and sliding accordion doors, and we claimed it as a sacred space of remembrance. Friends of the daughter played beautiful music, the daughter gave as fine a eulogy as I have ever heard, celebrating who her father was, and yet also acknowledging who he did not become amidst some of the troubles of his life. I offered some general words of hope, themes of redemption, words from Scripture.

With service over as punch and cookies were being served, a gentleman sought me out. I knew he was coming for me by the way he nodded dramatically at every verse I read from the Bible during the service. He was well-dressed and well-coiffed, and one of those people who shakes your hand through the whole of an interaction, just so you know you’re not going anywhere. “Preacher, I want to thank you,” he said, introducing himself as a representative from the church. “It was good to hear a young man proclaim the gospel,” he said. “We don’t need any of these stories or memories, we need the gospel,” he said. He then went on to suggest that next time I offer an altar call, “Because I know there were people here today that needed to know Jesus. They needed to hear the gospel. And that’s what this church is all about, helping more people hear the gospel.”

Well, what I wanted to say was “Sir, you’re absolutely right. There are people here today that don’t know Jesus. But people don’t hear the gospel they see it.”

I couldn’t help but wonder how the shade and shelter under which that church sat, where they ordered things just so, and looked down from their perch or their pulpit and presumed who the good people are and where they come from and what they have to say, and where they held in tact all their assumptions of who Jesus is and what the gospel is about, had kept them from issuing that compelling invitation: “Come and see.”

But then, remember in this story, I’m the funeral chaplain who sips punch and can keep your family comfortable, so I didn’t say any of that to him. But as I got loose from the handshake, and as I drove away, I started asking those things of myself.

I wondered, how often does the shade of my assumptions, the shadows of my past, the obstructed view under which I sit keep me from seeing. Even more, I wondered, how often does it keep others from seeing the compelling, revealing, life-altering, assumption-shattering person of Jesus Christ, who will show us even greater things than we imagine. People don’t hear the gospel. They see it.

On the Lower Eastside of Manhattan sits one of the oldest and most impactful social service agencies in our nation’s largest city: The Bowery Mission. The director of that mission used to tell the story of a many named Joe, who had passed through the mission at various points, always struggling to stay sober, stay sheltered, stay safe. Then one day, Joe came to “see.” That is, through the ministry of that mission, he had a life-changing experience with Christ. And then as he followed in the way of Jesus, he began to see more and more, and eventually he began to work at the mission, doing whatever needed to be done. Described as the most caring person you would hope to encounter, Joe connected with everyone, because they knew that he saw them for who they were. So compelling was his faith and commitment that he could be found cleaning, and volunteering, feeding people, even helping people who were too out of it to undress and get into bed at night.

The director shares how one night at the mission the director was delivering a sermon after dinner, amidst the usual crowd of tired and still people. But before the sermon was over there was one man who came down the middle aisle and knelt to pray, crying out for God to make a change in his life. He kept shouting, “Oh God! Make me like Joe. Make me like Joe. Make me like Joe.” And the director stopped, and went to the man leaning down to pray. And as they prayed, he said, “My friend, I hear you, but I think your prayer should be, ‘Make me like Jesus.” To which the man looked up and with absolute sincerity said, “Is he like Joe?” (2)

People don’t hear the gospel. They see it. At least in the gospel of John. It starts with those early invitations to “come and see” and continues all the way through to Mary’s proclamation of an empty tomb and a risen Lord. And what does she say as she shouts the news? She says, “I have seen the Lord.” And so here we all sit today.

It happens so often through the compelling invitation of those who have seen – people with two umbrellas, or people who have seen so much more than they ever knew of who God is in Jesus Christ. People like Nathaniel, or Joe, or Phillip, or even you and me, who leave the shade of what they have known to see still greater things, and then to those around issue that call: come and see for yourself.

1. Bruce Malina & Richard Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary: The Gospel of John
2. As told by Tony Campolo in Everything You’ve Heard is Wrong

Mark 1:4-8

Matthew 2:1-12

Genesis 2:15-17, Genesis 3:1-7, Matthew 4:1-11

Wednesday evening we began the 40 days of Lent bearing a symbol on our foreheads – a cross of ash, marking all of us as those who have remembered we are dust.

A pastor friend of mine has an annual Ash Wednesday tradition. For some years now, when the Ash Wednesday service is over and the sanctuary is clear, he gathers his things from a busy day and carries them to his car, where he drives immediately to Target. Then, still bearing the smudge of ash, he walks throughout the aisles – no shopping list or specific errand, just a deliberate practice of walking around in public with the cross of ash upon his forehead. (1)

It reminds us that we pastors can be a little weird! But more, it’s his way of letting others know who he is, in the shampoo aisle, or amidst the home decor and particle board furniture, or in the checkout line or parking lot. The cross on his forehead interrupts the ordinary patterns to signals to others, and maybe to him once more, “I am the one for whom Christ died” and further more, “I am one seeking to take up this cross in my own life.”

What if long after our foreheads were clean and clear we lived in such a way that this was known about us? In our day to day settings, our places of influence, our places of work, our families, amidst our tasks and to do lists, what it was clear that we are the ones who have taken up this self-giving love, this way of vulnerability and trust in God, this way that challenges the patterns and powers of this world? We are the ones who have taken up the cross.

This is the call of Jesus throughout the gospels: “Take up your cross and follow me.” But it’s usually accompanied by another call, as we hear it in Matthew 16: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lost their life for my sake will find it.” Or in another translation, “If you want to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me” (NLT).

If we are going to take up the cross – this way of Jesus – then first we must give up all that the cross is not.

Just like disciples who drop their nets – and with them their plans and patterns – so their arms are open and their lives are unencumbered.

Or like those who are sent out by Jesus – no staff, no money, no bag or tunic – so they can learn what it is to walk free and vulnerable through this world

These are the same who will have to learn, finally, that they must give up all their notions of what a kingdom might be and all of their schemes for power or strength, in favor of a kingdom not of this world.

If any of us disciples are going to take up the cross of Jesus, we must first give up all that the cross is not.

This has led Christians for generations to a Lenten discipline of “giving up” comforts or habits throughout these 40 days. We make small sacrifices, meant to free up space in our lives, and remind us of the large offerings called for by a life of discipleship. The practice prompts the annual question, “What are you giving up for Lent?”

Among the common answers ar chocolate, swearing, the news, soda and sweet tea, or social media (Of course, not before you tell Facebook you’re giving up Facebook).

Our 7 yr old, Jack, had a couple buddies over for a sleepover Friday night, which has led us to give up sleepovers for Lent.

What are you giving up? There are many ways we answer that question, if we practice this discipline of denial. For some of us it functions as a second chance at a New Year’s resolution, or an opportunity to sanctify something self-serving we’ve been meaning to do anyway. I know I’ve been drinking too much sweet tea ever since I returned south of the Mason Dixon line a few years ago. But what if we gave up more than sweet tea? And what is God calling us to give up not merely for 40 days, but for all our days? What do we need to lay down so we might be known as those who have taken up the cross?

Jesus calls us to give up our own way because he himself did it first. Before he ever took up the cross or appeared at the lakeshore of our lives to call us to follow, he is led by the Spirit into the desert. It’s a place many of us have been before – a dry place of denial, where food and water are scarce, the sun bears down, and the way seems obscured and uncertain. That’s where we find Jesus in his first public appearance, baptized in the middle of the desert, with all those wanderers standing round, before he’s led even further into the desert for 40 days.

As Matthew tells it, Jesus is hungry – famished actually – at the end of his 40 days. He’s human after all, and doesn’t fare much better than you or I would. His baptism must have been a distant memory. There are no doves descending. The Jordan River is only a mirage at this point. There’s no voice from heaven. Those words, “You are my beloved Son,” no longer ring as loudly in his ears.

It’s in this moment of vulnerability that the tempter sees an opening. Three temptations: Turn stones into bread and satisfy your hunger, prove you are the son of God with a simple stunt, and say a word and take power over all the kingdoms of the world. All three are specific, concrete temptations, but in some ways, all three are the same, tempting Jesus to shift confidence away from God to a substitute that promises to offer security, satisfaction, status, strength. It’s always the temptation: to shift your confidence away from God and toward your own way, your own impulse, your own control.

The tempter has been at it from the beginning, always seeing this opening amidst the children of God. In many ways, the story of Adam and Eve is about this same control. It’s not set in a desert, but a paradise where all was provided, except for the fruit of a certain tree. So the tempter leads Adam and Eve up to a high place where they could see all that could be theirs if they would simply seize control of their own lives: “God just doesn’t want you to know what God knows and be as powerful as God is. God wants to control you! It doesn’t have to be that way. You can be in control yourself.”

It’s when Adam and Eve aspire for that control that they damage their relationship with God, they spoil the bond that exists between the two of them, and they even jeopardize how they live in and with God’s good creation. They don’t trust the Creator as much as they trust themselves. It might be common to all temptation. The tempter seems to know where we’re weak.

In one of his books, Henri Nouwen, a Jesuit scholar and spiritual writer, tells the story about some of his friends who were trapeze artists – the Flying Rodelas. One thing they told Henri Nouwen is that there’s a very special relationship between the flyer and the catcher on the trapeze. The flyer is the one who lets go, and the catcher is the one who catches. As you might imagine, this relationship is important – especially to the flyer.

When the flyer is swinging high above the crowd on the trapeze, the moment comes when he must let go. He arcs out into the air, and his job is to remain as still as possible and to wait for the strong hands of the catcher to pluck him from the air.

The trapeze artist told Nouwen that the secret is that the flyer must never try to catch the catcher. “The flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything.” The flyer must never try to catch the catcher. The flyer, suspended in the air in complete vulnerability must wait in absolute trust. The flyer must be still and know. The catcher will catch him; but he must wait. He must trust. “A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him.”

And Nouwen writes: “Remember that you are the beloved child of God. God will be there when you make your long jump. Don’t try to grab; God will catch you. Just stretch out your arms and hands and trust, trust, trust.” (2)

There’s so much that Jesus can rush to grab hold of in this temptation story. So much the tempter asks him to rush to catch and to control, abandoning his trust in his mission from God in favor of immediate fulfillment.

The first temptation is social and economic, for his ministry to become about turning stones to bread. Which would have been good news for all the hungry throughout the world. Jesus has the power to end human hunger in a split second. No one need ever suffer from it again. But Jesus waits. Jesus trusts.

Next is a religious temptation, to demonstrate a public display of supernatural power, throwing himself down and being caught by angels. It could have given definitive proof of the existence of God and the lordship of Jesus. There would be no more doubts. Just this proof. The world would fall at Jesus’ feet to worship him. He would never have had to take up a cross for it to be so. But Jesus seems to know this is not how the world is saved. So he opens his hands. He gives up his own way. Our own way.

Then the final desert temptation. A political one. Jesus need only submit to the ruler of this world in order to achieve good for the people of this world. Well, I admit, sometimes I almost wish Jesus had caved in here and brought more justice to the world and all its governments, and relief to all those oppressed or forgotten by power. Why didn’t he seize control? He must have been tempted to do just that. But even this is not what his ministry or purpose turns out to be.

Strength. Power. A plan to better this world. To take up the cross, Jesus had to give up all that the cross was not.

If these temptations were set before Jesus, surely they are before us, too.

I think of all that I try to control. All that I attempt to grab. My plans for my family. The quest for institutional health. My desire for our church to be a model of growth and stature in our community. My hope we will be a place of influence. The ambition that tells me my life isn’t big enough yet, and I need a few more tricks and a little more strength. The idealism that tells me I must do more all the time to prove to this world the love of God. The strategy that keeps me bound to the systems of this world, always seeking control and power and forgetting Jesus’ loyalty to a kingdom that is not of this world.

The tempter knows where we’re weak. So we are tempted to rise, not to fall. We are tempted to do what seems right and good and beneficial. The tempter does not approach us with rotten fruit, but with the very best tree in the garden: “Make a meal of these stones… swell the ranks of believers… administer power with justice and mercy.” This is not the voice of one with a pitchfork and horns seated on our shoulder. It’s one who often looks like a friend.

But when we give in, we are again taking up our belief that with enough goodwill, enough strategy, enough power, we can save ourselves, when the cross calls us to set down this need for control to take up another way.

Sara Miles is a writer and minister in San Francisco, who has modeled a ministry of openness to her city, working to help people encounter Jesus amidst their day-to-day lives. Including on Ash Wednesday with the practice of “ashes to go” or “mobile ashes.” In this practice, she walks throughout her neighborhood to bus stops, corner stores, park benches and the like with a sign that invites people to receive the mark of the cross on Ash Wednesday. People respond. Some chase her down before catching a bus. Strangers lift their babies out of cab windows at a stoplight. And Miles describes the relief and gratitude she experiences from people as they receive this smudged symbol of the death of Jesus. She suspects it’s because with this symbol, we are reminded that we are not ultimately in control. In hospitals, for instance, she has marked patients in the midst of difficult health circumstances and find some rest in this mark. She’s even seen the rest and assurance among the medical staff, observing, “It’s as if even the doctors are relieved at this cross that reminds them that they are not in control.” (3)

With the cross, maybe all of us who have heard the voice of the tempter start to hear again the promises of God:

What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?… Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?… No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (4)

Jesus goes out to the desert because he finds us all out there, just as tempted as we can be. And we know what happens as he leaves. He moves from that wilderness to the temple to the mountain, just as he does through these three temptations. He knows the path to redemption wasn’t through satisfying his own hunger, but he does go on to feed thousands on the shores of Galilee so that they could come to a deeper understanding of the mercy of God.  He declined the offer to throw himself from the heights of the temple to prove who he was, but he does overturn the tables of the moneychangers who had failed to make his Father’s house a place where all are welcome. He doesn’t take the offer of a throne. But he takes up a cross.

It’s there he faces his final temptation, echoing the words of the tempter in the desert: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”  But he remembers his commitment in the desert, so he prays from the cross, “Father into your hands I commend my Spirit,” and he stretches out his arms in trust, trust, trust.

We never would have known that what looked like an end turned out to be a beginning. If it’s true of Jesus, it might be true for us, too. But only if we give up our own way – give up control – and take up the cross.

1. Rev. Bill Slater, pastor of Wake Forest Baptist Church
2. Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift (1994)
3. In “You Are Dust,” a film by Work of the People
4. From Romans 8:31-39

Matthew 17:1-9

This summer my family took a wonderful trip out west to spend time adventuring together.  We visited the desert of Utah, the cool, calming forests of Yellowstone, and the snow-capped peaks of the Grand Teton mountain range.  We climbed and rafted and biked and swam our way through 5 states while reconnecting, unplugging and experiencing this great creation God has given us.

My favorite part of our trip was a hike the three of us took in the Tetons.  We started out early in the morning with backpacks full of snacks, water and the requisite bear spray to ward off any unfriendly grizzlies.  We happily made our way around the base of the mountain, ready to tackle a significant hike- considering we had a 6 year old’s legs to keep in mind.  As the elevation grew, our spirits soared.  All of the guide books told us that the view at the top of our hike would be worth every mile we stepped.  So, we sang and talked and made up games.  We paused to look at interesting trees, powerful waterfalls, and fascinating rock formations.

And then, the climb got steeper.  My child continued with the exuberance that you always see in him.  His blonde curls bounced as he ran up to some park rangers he saw ahead of us, and from behind, we could just barely hear him engage them in a one sided conversation that consisted of something like “Hi!I’mBerkley!I’majuniorranger&Ilovehiking&I’monalongtripwithmyparents&wearehavingagreattime&doyoulikeyourjob?Becauseitseemsreallyfun!MaybeI’llbearangeroneday!”  His excitement was palpable.  He thought nothing of the hike ahead.  My husband, Stephen just hiked.  He’s strong and in good health, and while the hike became a bit more challenging, he’d probably tell you it wasn’t that big of a deal.  But as we made our way out of the woods and closer to the jagged rocks; as our elevation changed quickly and drastically, I struggled a little.  My breathing was harder, my legs started to ache.  I’m just not in as good of shape as the two guys in my family.  I stopped looking around at the trees and rocks, and started looking ahead at each step that I took.  I concentrated more on not falling off the side of the mountain, than on looking out at the view around me.  I focused on breathing and climbing the mountain.

And all of a sudden, we were there- not at the top of the mountain- because the Tetons are HUGE!  But at the overlook we’d aimed for.  And finally, I could catch my breath; I could pause and look up.  Finally, I could see.  I could see the majesty of the mountain range, the clear lake just below, the sky reaching out as far as they eye could see.  The journey up the mountain was hard, but it was totally worth every step.  When we climb up mountains, we see the world better.  We are able to look at everything around us.  We are able to see and understand and worship more clearly.  Being at the top of a mountain can give us a vision for what should and could be.

There is a reason that, over and over, scripture shows us examples of folks going to the tops of mountains for inspiration, for perspective, and for encounters with God.  God clearly likes making God’s self known on mountains.  Moses met God on a mountain, Elijah met God on a mountain, and in our story today, we find Jesus and three of his disciples meeting God on a mountain. There is something about the journey up a mountain that often leads us to experience God more clearly.

In the last several years there has been a surge in literature about hiking up mountains- Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild narrates her experience on the Pacific Coast Trail.  The book Walk in the Woods is about two older men & their adventure trying out the Appalachian Trail.  Both of these books were made into movies and both of these trails are referenced throughout pop culture.  The popularity of these books has inspired even greater numbers of folks to hike both of these significant paths- so much that the Pacific Coast Trail now has to limit the number of hikers allowed to enter the trail each day.

When I read both of these books, all I could think of was how much I would love to go on one of these hikes.  I kept saying to friends, “Shouldn’t we do one of these trips one day?  Wouldn’t that be amazing?”  And their responses were typically, “I’ve read that book or I’ve seen that movie, and it looks amazing, but no.  I’m not doing that with you.”  And let’s be clear.  I enjoy hiking and I enjoy camping.  But I’ve never hiked with a full pack on my back, and I really prefer my tents to have air mattresses and down comforters.  And yet I still feel drawn to hiking these mountain trails.

We are a people fascinated with these mountain journeys.  We read or see these stories and we understand the necessity of these mountain trips, and we are inspired to hike the mountains ourselves.  We find ourselves and we find God in that journey to the top of the mountain.

In our scripture today, Peter, James and John journey up the mountain with Jesus.  Up to this point, we know that Jesus has been trying to make it clear to the disciples that he is indeed the son of God, without actually saying that he is the son of God.  He is giving them advice about how to carry on once he is gone.  But, being true to form, the disciples aren’t quite putting all of the pieces together.

So he leads them up a mountain, alone.  And there Jesus reveals himself to them.  His face shone and his clothes were a brilliant white.  Then, the figures of Moses & Elijah- pillars of the Jewish faith- appeared before them as well.  Jewish tradition believes that Elijah & Moses were carried to heaven before they suffered a mortal death.  So, the disciples could have easily believed this was the fate Jesus was about to experience- that he was about to be carried off to heaven.

Peter immediately decides that the three figures should make their home on that mountain- a physical place for them to remain.  I imagine Peter believed this was the culmination of Christ’s story- that he would shine alongside these older men, and remain there.  Peter was busy making plans while God interrupted and spoke out to claim Christ as God’s son.  Perhaps Peter, James & John would have been convinced by simply seeing the transfiguration alongside Moses & Elijah.  But God left nothing to chance.  The disciples had missed so many messages up until this point, that God made it abundantly clear, in no uncertain terms, that they were, in fact following God’s son.

God tells the disciples that Jesus is the Messiah, and that they are to listen to him- to follow his leading and his teachings.  In the transfiguration of Jesus, God gives the disciples the ability to see what others could not.  And, as followers of Christ, we are given that vision as well. God allows for us to see this world differently from others.  But with that vision comes great responsibility.  We must allow that understanding of who Christ is to change us.  We must be continually transformed by the transfiguration of Christ.

The view of Christ on that mountain is radical.  It is amazing and beautiful and life-changing for the disciples who witness it.  But so was Christ’s life down from the mountain.  Christ preached and lived radically.  The transfiguration was simply proof that Jesus was not acting alone.  But, in fact his radical life was in direct response to God’s leading.

At the base of the mountain, Jesus was walking and talking with the people that no one expected him to.  He was caring for the poor- regardless of what led them there.  He took care of the sick- those afflicted with disease or mental illness who were shunned by those around them.  Jesus walked and talked with women as equals- a bold move in a time when women were considered to be property.  He spoke about a radical love for the refugee, he talked about living simply so that resources could be shared with those in need.  Jesus preached that the first should become last and that we should look to the needs of others before our own.  Those were radical teachings for the first century, and quite frankly, they are still radical teachings today.

And while we don’t get to journey up a mountain with Jesus physically at our side, the story of the transfiguration gives us all the proof we need.  The proof that Jesus is the son of God- that his teachings and his life are the ultimate examples we are called to follow.  And proof that we must not sit idly by when we know this truth- but we must respond.

A close friend of mine was recently in a conversation with co-workers.  They were sharing stories about the morals and values they learned growing up.  My friend shared with everyone that he grew up in a home that was pretty racist- both in overt and hidden ways.  They were homophobic and xenophobic.  They cared more about how the world could benefit their own family, than how their family could benefit the world.  My friend’s co-workers asked, “Well, what changed for you?  How are you not a person who still subscribes to those beliefs?”  And my friend very simply answered, “Oh!  That’s easy.  I started reading the Bible more and began to really see and understand who Jesus was.”

You see, when we really seek to understand who Jesus was, how he lived, and how he desires for us to imitate him as his followers, we can’t help but be changed.  When our eyes are truly opened to the transfiguration of Jesus, we are transformed.  We begin to see the world through God’s eyes, and we are called to love and respond and give to the world accordingly.

In this scripture lesson, Peter really wanted to hang out on the top of the mountain with this heavenly Jesus instead of heading back down.  Because down the mountain is pain and suffering.  And don’t we sometimes want that too?  Don’t we want to rejoice in the happy parts of Jesus- in the glory, the grace, the love that we receive?  But, like the disciples, we are called to go back down the mountain to both experience the painful parts of life and to share the glory of God with others.

We must not tend only to ourselves, but we must seek out the pain in the world.  Jesus sends us back down the mountain to be the type of people he modeled for us.  To be followers of Christ who strive for equity, and not just equality for all…followers of Christ who look out for the needs of others over ourselves…followers of Christ who love and even embrace our enemies.

In spite of Peter’s plans for everyone to stay on the mountain, Christ could not stay.  This was not the pinnacle of his ministry like the disciples might have thought.  Calvary was still waiting.  He had to go back down the mountain to continue to fulfill his calling and even to suffer for it. There was another mountain for him to climb, but first, they all had to leave the safety and comfort of this holy place.  They had to go down the mountain.

Aside from this crazy warm February we’ve had, this is normally the time of year when I have snow on my brain.  I love snow.  I love sledding.  I love building snow men.  I thrive in a winter wonderland.  So, it makes sense that I would really enjoy skiing.  And I’m proud to say that I’m not a terrible skier.  I even have a title that describes to you the type of amazing skier I am.  I am confident that I am absolutely the. slowest. skier. In the world.

I didn’t really learn to ski until I was an adult.  So, I learned to ski at the same time I was starting to better understand my own mortality.  I learned to ski when I was old enough to realize that barreling down a mountain as fast as possible could result in some really tragic physical consequences.  So, I ski down the easiest trails and I go down really. really. slowly.  I take my time cutting across the mountain with my skis pointing more toward the wood line far more than they point down the mountain.  I wish I were a less cautious skier, but I do have a really good time going down the mountain, and I very rarely fall!

And so God calls each of us to get to the top of the mountain, but to remember that we must return down.  Some of you are going to fly down the mountain, with passion and excitement- to tell others what you’ve experienced at the top of the mountain, and then you may go right back up the mountain again.  Some of you are a little more cautious returning from the top of the mountain.  You take your time; you process things a bit more slowly, but you have to get down the mountain. Some of you might even opt to take off your skis, carry them in your arms, and walk down the mountain- because the prospect of getting out of control is just too high.  But even you, must go down the mountain.

When we are given the gift of seeing and understanding who Christ really is, we are transformed.  And we can’t unsee it.  The goodness, the glory, the radical nature of who Christ is changes us and we have to do something with it.  We can’t keep it to ourselves.  In the story of the Transfiguration, Jesus tells the disciples they are prohibited from sharing what they’ve seen until much later.  Can you imagine how hard that must have been?  If we saw Jesus standing before us, radiating and glowing, and heard the voice of God above us, that would be hard to keep to ourselves.  And thankfully, we are not given the restriction that the disciples were.

But, how often do we see the truth of who God is, and we are reluctant to share it?  We are reluctant to allow God to transform us.  We are scared that we will be asked to be uncomfortable.  Afraid that we might have to love someone that we don’t want to love.  Nervous that we will have to give up lives that are easy and secure.  God reveals God’s self when we do the hard work of going up the mountain.  God gives tasks, words, and prophetic voices for us to use after we’ve been transformed.

And so sometimes we don’t seek out the mountains at all. We seek out the plains- the easy places.  The flat places that don’t require a hike up the mountain or a trip down.  They’re not too high and not too low.  We settle.  We feel comfortable.  We don’t look for the prophetic voice, because that might challenge our current understanding of who God is.  But Jesus sought out the mountains.  He knew the risks of experiencing the joy at the top, and then the suffering at the bottom.  And yet he showed us that there are always mountains to climb.  There are always ways we can meet God anew- that we can be refreshed in our faith- that we can be inspired by catching another glimpse of Christ’s face, and another hint of God’s voice.

Each time we walk up the mountain, we get a little bit stronger, we breathe a little easier, we become more confident, and we’re able to lift our eyes up to have more perspective of the world and the needs around us.

Are you willing to look for what God might want to show you that could transform you?  Perhaps you want to run up the mountain- learning all you can about who God is and who God wants you to be in the world…talking and sharing as you go up the mountain, and flying down the mountain to get to work in a life that reflects how you’re being transformed.  Maybe you are strong & steady- making your way up the mountain methodically and purposefully…asking questions, searching for answers, and then meandering back down the mountain with caution and intention.  Or you may need a little help getting started and your heart might be weary from the mountains you’ve hiked before, and when you come down you are thoughtful and deliberate.  Regardless of the way you meet the mountain or the way you return down, we are still called to rediscover the mountains- to willingly move ourselves into that transformative experience with God.

After Jesus was transfigured to show that he is clearly the son of God, the disciples were further convinced of who he was and that his life was to be a guide and inspiration for them going forward.  Jesus wants to reveal himself to each of us.  But our eyes must be open to who Christ really is.  Our ears must be open to hear God speaking.  And our hearts must be willing to live out that radical change in the world.

As we go from this place and seek to rediscover the mountains to which we are called, what does God long to reveal to you on the top of the mountain?

Matthew 5:17-37

Rev. Dr. Amy Butler is pastor of The Riverside Church in New York City – a large, historic, influential church, where my friend, Amy, preaches powerful sermons from an elevated pulpit in a grand gothic sanctuary. Except for just a week ago, when she decided that instead of preaching one of her own sermons, she would preach a sermon from Jesus. She climbed into the pulpit and “preached” the whole of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, reading all of Matthew 5-7, including our passage this morning.

After the service, Pastor Amy was gathered for coffeehour with members of the congregation, where a few people came up to her to talk about the sermon – three chapters, Matthew 5-7, no breaks, just the red letters, no words of Amy, just the words of Jesus. And one person said, “You know, I really didn’t like some of what you said today.” (1)

If we’re listening closely to Jesus, we’ll all say the same from time to time. If we take him seriously, we’ll find that his gospel imposes on every one of us. It’s uncomfortable. Demanding. It’s always out beyond us, giving us the freedom to move ahead and follow, or just keep our feet planted and stay where we are.

Pastor Amy joked that Jesus probably had plenty of people come up to him at coffeehour after his sermon that day. Picture Jesus standing there with a cup of tea and a mini muffin, when someone walks up: “I was with you for a while there when you were talking about salt and light, and earlier when you were telling me that I am blessed. But then you started in on this series of teachings about righteousness – anger and adultery, divorce and swearing. I checked out for a minute there. What was it you said?”

Clarence Jordan, the founder of the Koinonia Community and pioneering Christian leader used to say that Jesus seems to always be asking us whether we are going to be his followers, or just his admirers.

 That’s one way of understanding the choice before the crowd that day. They are gathered because they’ve heard about Jesus – his magnificent exploits, his compassionate healing, and the possibility that it might make a difference in their lives. There’s so much to admire about what he’s done. There’s so much reassuring about what he has to say – all this talk that they are the blessed of the Lord, empowering words about being salt and light and a city on the hill, a promise about the care of God and a call to make a bouquet of lilies of the field. But that’s not all he says. There’s also the charge to love your enemies; caution about what happens to hypocrites; warnings against religious leaders; and these teachings that deal with broken relationships and ratchet up the social ethic for the kingdom of heaven and the church that will form after him. All of it forces the crowd to decide what they will do with the hard parts. Will they just admire the view on the mount, or will they follow him from there?

It’s not a new choice. In Deuteronomy, God addresses God’s people and says: “I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity… choose life…” We have the freedom to choose. We always have. As much as we’d like to exchange such imposing freedom for fate – as though things will be what they will be; as though I have no responsibility for my life or for this world God so loves – this choice before the Israelites is the choice before the crowd that day and any crowd that gathers to listen to the message made urgent in the person of Jesus Christ before them: Will you choose life or death?

This choice undergirds God’s gift of the Law to Israel. To understand Jesus’ challenging, imposing teachings in Matthew 5:21 and following, we have to remember what he says in v. 17-20. “I have not come to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill.”

Jesus does not come to abolish the law or refute the law. He actually intensifies it. He’s not saying “You’ve heard this, but that’s wrong, do this instead…” More than that he’s saying, “You know the law, but that’s just the baseline. Now I want more.” It’s a call to follow him higher – to a higher righteousness than even the Pharisees. And it starts with how we love one another; how we live in community. This love cannot be overlooked or simply admired. As Eugene Peterson has translated Matthew 5:”Trivialize even the smallest item in God’s Law and you will only have trivialized yourself. But take it seriously, show the way for others, and you will find honor in the kingdom.”

Jesus did not come to abolish the Law, because the Law is about how we love our neighbor.

 One of the best explanations I ever heard of the function of God’s Law was shared by the professor and preacher, David Lose, who relayed a story about his friend Frank, who was about eight years old when he started arguing with his sister. Before long, arguing turned to pushing and shoving and, soon enough, Frank had his younger sister pinned to the ground with his fist raised in the air. At that moment, his mother came into the room and told him to stop it. In response, Frank – as he described – reared up as only an eight-year-old can and declared, “She’s my sister. I can do anything I want to her.” At this point, Frank’s mom swooped across the room, towered over him, and said, “She’s my daughter – no you can’t!” (2)

The Law is the gift of God to care for God’s children; to ensure our wholeness and well-being. And with the Law God says, “You can’t raise your hand against one another or put your boot on someone’s neck. You can’t hoard everything. You can’t discriminate and exclude. You can’t violate and exploit. You can’t cast aside and treat as less. She is my daughter and he is my son.”

As Dorothy Day use to say to colleagues in her Catholic Worker Movement, “If each of us could just remember that we are all created in the image of God then we would naturally want to love even more.” (3)

And Jesus does not come to abolish this. He comes to ensure that it can’t be trivialized or reduced to sentimentality or set apart from the reality of his Kingdom.

It would be easy, you see, to say, “I have not murdered, and therefore I have kept the Law.” So Jesus intensifies the expectation, to remind us we are responsible not only for not murdering, but for our working to ensure our neighbor’s wholeness and well-being, as promised by God.

You have heard it said, “Follow these laws and commandments” but I say to you, “It’s much more than that.”

You have heard it said, “Don’t murder anybody” but I say to you “Be reconciled with one another. It’s not enough simply to avoid killing another. Consider what you are doing to improve their life, and the life you share.”

You have heard it said, “Don’t divorce, and for heaven’s sake, don’t commit adultery” but I say to you, “Treat the women and men in your life as human beings, not as objects to exploit for pleasure or to put aside simply out of a matter of convenience or the latest temptation.”

You have heard it said, “Don’t swear falsely” but I say to you, “Come and embody a love that is unconditionally truthful and does not stutter in the face of challenges to that truth.”

Later in Matthew Jesus will remind us of the greatest commandments, on which all these laws hang: love the lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Anger, adultery, marriage, false oaths – these might seem to be secondary concerns to this overarching call to love our God and love our neighbors. Unless they aren’t secondary at all. Unless it’s in every level of relationship that we have the chance to reflect our love for one another and thereby our love for God and God’s love for the world. For it is in such daily, foundational acts that we decide if we will stay on the mount, or follow in this way of higher righteousness to which Jesus calls us.

In the late 1930s, when much of Europe was already beginning to fold before the Nazis Germany, there was a small French town full of Christians disturbed by what was happening. In the town of Le Chambon, a village of only about 5,000 people in rural France, a church decided to do something. André and Magda Trocmé, ministers at that local church, mobilized their small community to act as a rescue route for Jews fleeing the Holocaust. They used coded letters to one another to relay Jewish refugees from house to house. When they knew a raid was coming, they moved Jews out onto their outlying farms where the Nazis were less likely to go. They provided food, clothing, shelter, false identification, and even education and places for worship to the Jewish people. All of this, understand, was illegal. One of the Jews who survived the Holocaust with the aid of these villagers recalls that “Nobody asked who was Jewish and who was not. Nobody asked where you were from. Nobody asked who your father was or if you could pay. They just accepted each of us, taking us in with warmth, sheltering children, often without their parents…” And they did all of this at great cost and great risk to themselves, their friends, and their families.

When asked in the decades following the war why they did this, the people of Le Chambon were confused. They did not understand the question. “What choice did we have?” they said. Their faith compelled them and they saw no other choice. If they refused to harbor the Jews, they would no longer be Christians. To deny their neighbors was to deny the way of Jesus. (4)

You have heard it said, “Don’t break the law” but I say to you “The Law is broken any time you forget the image of God in a neighbor; any time you put yourself ahead of another.”

That’s why this choosing life ultimately means choosing risk, choosing cost, choosing sacrifice. If you’re looking for an easier spiritual path, they are out there. They will promise everything and demand nothing. They will seek your best life, with little thought to what is best for your neighbor. But if you want to change the world, if you want to embody the kingdom, if you want to choose the life of Christ, you have to follow Jesus to this higher ground.

It’s a path that leads from one mount to another – from the rolling landscape of this sermon, to Calvary’s mountain, where only the true followers are found, gathered by the words of Jesus later in the gospel story: “If you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross.”

Jesus surveys the crowd as he preaches this sermon, and that’s what he sees. I don’t think he sees admirers who will taper off to the side to smell the lilies of the field. He doesn’t imagine us as those who will fall short or never make it. He looks out and sees people who can follow him all the way to Calvary. He sees those able to receive the gift he wants to give to this world. He sees the kingdom, in us. He can see us taking it on in our lives with one another, living it out and watching it stretch to make room for all God’s people. He sees us liberated to choose life, recognizing that we find our lives when we are prepared to give them away.

Earlier I mentioned Clarence Jordan, who asks us if we are prepared to follow Jesus.

Jordan was the founder of the Koinonia Community, an interracial farm in Georgia that in many ways was on the cutting edge of the Civil Rights movement and still is. Jordan, his wife Florence, and another couple, started the farm in the early 1940s as what they called “a demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God,” based on the early church’s vision of sharing in each other’s lives and resources, valuing the image of God in all people. All of this in South Georgia in the 1940s.

The Baptist theologian James McLendon has relayed a story about Jordan, and how sometime in the early 1950s, Clarence was talking with his brother Robert, a lawyer who would go on to serve as a state senator in Georgia and a justice on the state supreme court. Clarence wanted his lawyer brother to represent Koinonia Farm legally. Robert replied,

 “Clarence, I can’t do that. You know my political aspirations. Why, if I represented you, I might lose my job or my house, everything I’ve got.”

“We might lose everything, too, Bob,” replied Clarence. Koinonia had been under the threat of violence, drive by shootings into the houses, a firebombing of their roadside vegetable stand.

“It’s different for you,” said his brother.

“Why is it different?” Clarence asked him. “I remember you and I walked down the aisle of the Baptist church on the same Sunday when we were boys, and the preacher asked me the same question he asked you, ‘Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?’ and I said, Yes. What did you say?”

“I follow Jesus. But up to a point,” Robert said.

“Could that point by any chance be—the cross?” said Clarence.

“That’s right. I follow him to the cross, bot not on the cross. I’m not getting myself crucified,” Robert told him.

“Then I don’t believe you’re a disciple,” Clarence said. “You’re an admirer of Jesus, but not a disciple of his. I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to, and tell them you’re an admirer not a disciple.”

“Well now,” his brother said, “if everyone who felt like I do did that, we wouldn’t have a church, would we?”

“The question,” Clarence said, “is, ‘Do you have a church?’” (5)

On that mount Jesus looks out at all those admiring him, and believes among them are the ones who will follow him as the path moves higher.

He looks out and thinks he has a church. Does he?

____________________

1. Amy Butler, “The Sermon on the Mount is Counter Cultural,” Baptist News Global
2. David Lose from a blog post on “In the Meantime” (Feb 6, 2017)
3. Dorothy Day qtd. by Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, 275.
4. Thanks to Wes Spears-Newsome whose recent sermon “Salt Life” (Greenwood Forrest Baptist Church) told me this story. More of the story of Le Chambon at the Holocaust Memorial Museum website:https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007518
5. As told by Stanley Hauerwas in his commentary on Matthew in the Brazos Theological series, p. 57

Matthew 5:13-20

You couldn’t see anything. When the sun went down in the ancient world, it was completely dark. It might be hard for us to imagine, with our nightlights, bedside lamps or the glow of a phone close at hand, but nightfall in Galilee brought total darkness. Candles and oil were premium items, not utilized in the day-to-day limited lives of the average Palestinian peasant. When it was dark, most people couldn’t see anything at all.

Some years ago my father and uncle were caught in the darkness. My father, Craig, is a man of many hobbies – from bird-watching to sail-boating to motorcycle-riding – he acquires new hobbies all the time, most of which have equipped me with a lifetime of stories to use against him.

Like when my aspiring outdoorsman father and his brother set out on a fly fishing trip in the mountains, hiking own the side of Grandfather Mountain to fish for wild trout in Wilson Creek. At the urging of the cashier at the fly shop, they planned to fish at dusk, when they were told to expect the best bite. They set up camp by late afternoon, organizing everything perfectly: tent pitched, sleeping bags rolled out, firewood stacked, and an expensive freeze-dried camping meal just waiting for some boiling water. With dusk approaching they hiked a hundred yards downstream, planning to casually fish their way back to camp. They had fished for an hour when – all of the sudden – it was dark. The darkness of the mountain creek gorge had snuck up on these two Florida flatlanders, who had somehow forgotten that after dusk comes dark – real mountain darkness. They couldn’t see anything. They were standing in the middle of Wilson Creek, unable to even see their hands in front of their faces, let alone their well-organized campsite.

So the two boy scouts slogged to the shore, where they combed their way through the woods, grasping about, trying to find camp. This went on for a few hours, until finally, exhausted, they knew nothing more to do but to give up. So they cut some pine branches to sleep on and under, laid down in their fly fishing waders, and cuddled up next to one another to stay as warm as they could on a chilly fall night, all the while cursing themselves for not leaving any landmark or light to help them get back to their sleeping bags, tent and gourmet fireside meal.

After a cold and miserable night, my father and uncle woke up at the first crack of light, rubbing their eyes to find that their campsite was about 20 yards away.

The prophet Isaiah was well acquainted with the darkness. “We wait for light,” he cries in chapter 59, “But lo, there is darkness. We wait for brightness, but we walk in gloom. We grope like the blind along a wall, groping and grasping like those who can’t see.”

The prophet’s words echoed in the lives of those described gathered on the mountain with Jesus in our passage this morning. They are leaning in to hear the words of Jesus, but deep inside they cried out like Isaiah, “Justice is far from us, righteousness does not reach us, we wait for the light…” They must have felt at times as though they were grasping about in the darkness, but somehow they had found their way to Jesus. Some had to be carried, Matthew tells us. Some were probably crawling or limping along. But all were there with a sense that their world was darker than they could have known, and as they listen the message reaches them, “You are the light of the world.”

They were much like those early readers of the gospel of Matthew, years after Jesus’ death. It was a time of social and theological tension following the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. The community gathered around Matthew’s gospel was in conflict about just what the future would hold, and just what the past had meant. The way forward was uncertain, without much clarity about how to find their way back to what they had seen and heard in Jesus. And the word comes to those early followers of the risen Christ: “You are the light of the world.”

Just as it reaches through the ages to us today, amidst the heavy-ness of winter clouds and winter sorrow. The greying grief we wade through together as a community of faith, each time we light a candle of remembrance. So much about our lives seems to hold more darkness than light. Sometimes it’s a bad day, or sometimes that bad day lasts for years and years. Struggles, failures, loss of a job, a friend, loss of faith, loss of love. We witness terrible things unfolding around our world, and feel helpless in the midst. Everything clouded in darkness, we look for the light but don’t know where to find it: “You are the light of the world.”

They knew the darkness those years ago, and we know it just as well. All of us grasping about, waiting for the light to crack the clouds and shine on us, and Jesus’ sermon reminds us that we are closer to the light than we ever could have known.

Light is one of three metaphors Jesus uses in this section of the Sermon on the Mount – salt, light, and a city on a hill. All three make it clear at the outset of this sermon that faith in Christ and following in his way is public. It is external. It cannot be contained or privatized. You are salt to flavor the earth, you are light on a stand, you are a witness high on a hill, seen from all around.

Jesus is saying this to the same unexpected band of people that he has just called “blessed” in the Beatitudes. The poor in spirit, meek and mourning, the justice-seekers, the peace-makers, the merciful and righteous, all who wait around in the overwhelming darkness are the ones Jesus views as light in the world.

He must know it’s counter-intuitive and hard to believe. His entire sermon will turn out to be that way. Jesus uses the language of antithesis in his sermon – that is, he takes what you have believed and assumed (your thesis) and refutes it or reverses it (antithesis). “You have assumed ‘hate your enemies,’ but I say to you, ‘love them, and pray for those who persecute you.’”

You can hear that inference here at the outset. It’s as if he’s saying, “You have assumed that this is a world of overwhelming darkness, and that you are left with nothing to do but grasp for a way.” That’s our thesis, but then Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.”

Light itself is antithetical. An Indian proverb says it this way: “A candle at midnight does not conform. It says to the darkness, ‘I beg to differ.’”

That’s who all those gathered on the hill are. That’s who all of us who claim the name of Christ and follow in the way of Jesus are. We are a refusal to conform. We are God’s way of facing the darkness and saying, over and over, ‘I beg to differ.”

So any time we come across the contention that our world is doomed for destruction, loss, and looming darkness, the light of Christ in us says, “I beg to differ.”

When violence and hatred seem to claim the loudest shouts, through the power of Jesus Christ our lives can say, “I beg to differ.”

When we think we must just accept the way things are as the way things will always be, there’s this light in each of us who follow in the way of Jesus that piercingly, persistently, defiantly says, “I beg to differ.”

It’s the light of the one who was born to shine not in spite of the darkness, but right in the middle of the darkness. It’s the light that could not be killed, crucified or entombed. This light defied all stones that tried to encase it and the structures that tried to smother it. It kept coming back and saying, “I beg to differ.”

This is the light that is in us, through the power of Jesus Christ and his invitation to us to follow. The light does not come from us. It does not originate in us, Christ is the alpha and the omega. We can no more create the light than salt can generate its own flavor. But because of who Jesus is, and because of his call to us, and because of our decision to follow in this way, we are a light that cannot be overwhelmed.

Of course, we decide what we will do with this light. Salt can lose its saltiness. A city can be raised to the ground. And the light of Christ can be hidden or smothered.

We can cower. We can throw up our hands and just lay down right where we are, overwhelmed by the darkness as though there’s nothing we can do amidst all that encroaches so quickly. That’s why no sooner has Jesus told us who we are, that he tells us what we are called to do. The mood of the verb shifts in verse sixteen to an imperative – a command. Jesus moves from describing what we are – “You are the light” – to telling us what we must do – “Now let your light shine.”

It’s a message many of us have sung since we were children, raising our fingers in unison, “I’m gonna let it shine.” Many of us saw our children sing this message at this past summer’s Vacation Bible School, raising their lanterns and singing of the light. Children become what they are called. That’s what psychologists suggest. Positive messages shape a child’s understanding, and hopefully help them to live into the names they hear spoken over them, and so we say, “You are the light.”

I don’t know about you, but that seemed easier to believe as a child. But then as a teenager, I’m trying to fit in or find my way, and I’m somewhere with someone who’s doing something that I want to join. I know it’s darkness, but my life is hard and friends are difficult to come by. It won’t hurt to dwell in the darkness for just a moment. Yet Jesus says, “You are the light.”

Or in college, striving for success amidst so much pressure to perform and keep a scholarship. Who’s going to know if I cheat? Everyone is doing it, and it’s slanting the odds against me. To which Jesus says, “Let your light shine.”

Maybe I’m in a job that asks me to set aside my commitments. Its practices are unjust. People are mistreated. So much darkness, to which Jesus says, “But you are the light of the world.”

Maybe I see legal, social, economic policies that relegate people to unseen places of hopelessness. There’s so much suffering beneath an overwhelming dark sky. What can I do? And Jesus says, “You can let your light shine.”

Our families face illness. Or death. Or the unimaginable. We are gripped by fears concerning marriage, children, and future. So much darkness, and yet we hear, “Be the light.”

“How do you think the darkness is pierced, if not by you? So become what I have called you: you are the light of the world. You bear my name. You carry my light.”

Brooks Andrews is a minister who has worked with Japanese Baptists on the West Coast, most recently as an Interim Pastor at the Japanese Baptist Church of Seattle.

Brooks’ father was the English pastor of that many church years ago, back in the mid 20^th century – back when Japanese internment camps were opened in the United States during World Ward II. It was a dark and devastating time in our history. Many of the parishioners the Andrews family knew were moved to the camps, uprooted from their homes and jobs, completely reorganizing the church community.

So the elder Rev. Andrews and his wife, decided very quickly that they would move, too. They moved the whole family – Brooks and his siblings – to live next to one of the internment camps so that they could support their Japanese colleagues, friends, and congregants, and thus continue the ministry to which God had called them.

Sometimes Brooks is asked why his parents did that. What caused them to act in such a radical, sacrificial way? His answer is immediate, matter-of-fact, without any hint of drama or show: “Well, they were Christians.” (1)

 We might say today, they recognized that amidst all that darkness that sought to define them, Jesus had called them by another name: “You are the light of the world.”

Father Greg Boyle has said that as powerful as that statement is, it’s even more powerful to realize what Jesus doesn’t say. He does not say, “One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.” He doesn’t say, “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No. He says, straight out, “You are light.”

It’s what he calls us. It’s the truth of who we are, waiting only for us to discover it, and to let it shine. (2)

The author Elizabeth Gilbert once described how one dreary day some years ago, she was stuck on a crosstown New York City bus during rush hour. Traffic barely moving. The bus filled with cold, tired people. Irritated people – irritated with one another, with the weather, with the inching bus. All stared blankly at the darkness out the windows. Two passengers shouted about an inadvertent shove. A pregnant woman got on, and no one offered a seat. It was not exactly a meek and merciful crowd.

But as the bus approached Seventh Avenue, the driver got on the intercom. “Folks,” he said, “I know you’ve had a rough day and you’re frustrated. I can’t do anything about the weather or traffic, but here’s what I can do. As each one of you gets off the bus, I will reach out my hand to you. As you walk by, drop your troubles into the palm of my hand, okay? Don’t take your problems home to your families tonight – just leave ’em with me. My route goes right by the Hudson River, and when I drive by there later, I’ll open the window and throw your troubles in the water. Sound good?”

Gilbert said it was like a haze had been lifted. Everyone burst out laughing. Faces gleamed with surprised delight. People who’d been pretending for the past hour not to notice each other’s existence were suddenly grinning at each other like, “Is this guy serious?”
And he was. He was serious.

At the next stop, just as promised, the driver reached out his hand, palm up, and waited. One by one, all the exiting commuters placed their hand just above his and mimed the gesture of dropping something into his palm. Some people laughed as they did it. Some even teared up. But everyone did it. The driver repeated the same lovely ritual at the next stop. And the next. And the next. All the way to the river. (3)

We live in a hard world. A dark world, where we so often grope about, looking for light and not always knowing where it is to be found.
But what if, through the power of Jesus Christ, the light is you? You are the light of the world. Once we believe it, there’s really only one thing to do: let it shine, let it shine… all the way from here to the river and back again.

1. Story of Rev. Andrews courtesy of Rev. LeDayne McLeese Polaski
2. Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
3. Elizabeth Gilbert, “This Little Light of Yours” in Oprah Magazine (May 2016)

Matthew 5:1-12

On Tuesday of this week, I remembered what’s most important.

I was getting ready to leave the church – rushing home to pick up Jack for basketball practice – when I heard that a woman had come to our front desk, asking if anyone had seen a little boy. A 2-yr-old had wandered off his porch right here in our Westerwood neighborhood, and his mother couldn’t find him anywhere, he wasn’t responding to his name, and no one knew what to do.

Now, take a breath, I won’t make this a dramatic story, I want you to know up front that the little boy was found. But at that moment, we just didn’t know, and it would be getting dark soon.

Well, what would you do? When you hear something like that, you don’t just go home and pick up your own child for basketball practice. The lost child becomes your child. So we emptied out of the church to help with the search. Police were everywhere, clearly prioritizing the situation. I began to circle the neighborhood as part of a large net along with nearly everyone else that had heard the news: the family on their way to the park, whose children had dropped their scooters and now ran throughout the neighborhood looking… the woman out walking her dog, who now walked furiously and frenzied through her neighbors’ backyards looking for any trace… the people down at the tavern, who set down their happy hour drinks – or most of them did, at least – to fan out and help… and the staff of First Baptist that had not yet gone home,  driving in circles, this small squadron of mid-sized SUVs… everyone looking, bending and stretching to see every angle, going to where they thought others might not have thought to look. Throughout the neighborhood, everyone cupping their hands and shouting his name.

After a while I remembered it was an Upward basketball practice night, so I pulled up to an officer and said, “Sir, I don’t know if it would help, but we have a whole gym full of people that would empty out and help, just say the word…” and that’s when the officer told me they thought he’d been found. So we waited around to confirm, finally able to celebrate that this little boy was now home.

And it struck me as I left how long it had been since I was a part of anything so large and important and clear. We all knew what we were supposed to do, regardless of other plans we had made, or priorities we might have had. Officers and community, people whose houses had different political yard signs, some from different faiths and some with no faith at all. All of us knew what we were supposed to do, because a child was lost.

When you discover what is most important – when you find what is of ultimate concern – you set all else aside and you give it your all.

That’s what Jesus invites us to do in this section of the gospel of Matthew. He is describing that which is of ultimate concern, and inviting us to order our lives – and the life of the community formed in his name – according to this most important teaching.

At this point in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus has issued his compelling call to the disciples to follow him and they have joined him in his work throughout Galilee, teaching in synagogues and proclaiming good news of the kingdom, healing those who come to him until his fame spreads and the crowds swell. With such a great audience, Jesus begins his extended teaching, telling them in unfolding detail just what it means to be a disciple. To make sure the message has its widest reach, Matthew says Jesus “went up the mountain.” We’ve seen this action before. It’s an echo of Moses, who ascended high and returned with the Law – a cue to us that what Jesus is about to say will be of ultimate concern.

There are several such mounts in Israel. In 1993, I visited one with my father and a tour group from my home church. It’s one of several traditional sites for this sermon, where a church building named the Church of the Beatitudes is built. Open countryside slopes down from the hill, wide open and expansive. I remember as I stood there struggling to listen to our tour guide in the wind and wondering, “How did people hear him?”

How did the sermon reach the audience? Was his voice that resonant? Was there some sort of ethereal amplification? How did all those poor in spirit, meek, and mourning gathered on that hillside come to know the word of Jesus to them?

We might have a contemporary corollary in what’s known as the human microphone – or the “people’s mic “– a method used for rallies, marches and protests where amplification is inadequate, or not permitted. I experienced this in New York, where amplification is not allowed, and you might have seen it in coverage of rallies, like the airport protests just this weekend. With a human microphone, persons gathered around the speaker repeat what the speaker says, thus “amplifying” the voice of the speaker without the need for amplification equipment. The speaker says a short phrase – something like, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” for instance. Those that can hear what the speaker has said repeat the phrase in unison, so those behind them can hear, with each section repeating it for the next until the speech is complete, the crowd cupping their hands and shouting it out, passing the words around. You can imagine these words just rolling through the crowd until all have heard the echo of “Blessed are you.”

It’s Jesus’ first word to them, “Blessed.” The Greek word is sometimes translated as “honored” or “favored.” Some translations use the word “Happy,” with Jesus seeming cheerful about his promises “Happy are those who mourn.” The French edition of the New Jerusalem Bible includes a favorite translation of the phrase, translating the word for blessed as “debonair” – as though Cary Grant is the model for what it means to be blessed.

My own understanding was enhanced when I saw the interpretation by the Jesuit priest and author, Father Greg Boyle. Boyle is known for his gang-intervention ministry in Los Angeles, and his ministries of compassion that have become models worldwide. He suggests that the Beatitudes not be rendered as “Blessed” – blessed at the peacemakers, the justice seekers, the merciful – but that a more precise translation would be “You’re in the right place.”

Imagine that. To all of those mourning and meek on the hillside – those who have come from far away, inspired by the possibility they have imagined in a life with Christ – the word rolls back to them “You’re in the right place.” Consider how that felt – “you’re in the tight place,” the way a child might feel upon finding their way home. “You’re where you need to be.”

Jesus is telling us where we should be. Where to stand. When we are poor in spirit, meek, merciful or seeking the righteousness of the Lord, we are in the right place.

It’s a vital message, since we hear so many competing messages about where we should be and what we should be about.

The crowd was surely full of people who felt they were in the wrong place – Matthew tells us in chapter 4 it’s full of the sick, those afflicted with diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileiptics, and paralytics seeking a cure. And to these Jesus pronounces blessing.

In his coming sermon, he will use the language of antithesis: “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye…’ but I say to you, ‘do not resist the evildoer…’ Or “You have heard it said, love you neighbor and hate your enemy,” but I say to you, “love your enemies…”

In this form of speech, the thesis is spoken then the antithesis. And the contrast starts right here. Jesus scans the crows and he knows, “You have heard it said that you are impoverished and broken…that God’s favor rests somewhere else…that you’re out on the edges of it all… that you’re in the wrong place to experience the blessing of God.”

But I say to you, “You are more than you imagined. You are more than the things that have oppressed you and choked out your life. God is near to you. You are where you need to be.”

It’s an alternative view of the world and of the blessing of God – inside out and upside down – as it often seems to appear by our standards.

I was reminded of this recently on the basketball court I mentioned earlier. My son, Jack, eventually made it to basketball practice the other night, and has been having a blast this season in our Upward program, where he plays for the mighty Comets with Coaches Cassie and Gracie.

After a recent game, the coaches were passing out the “stars,” as each player receives recognition for they’re contributions and character – a red star for “offense” a green star for “defense,” one for being a good teammate, until the star ceremony concluded with the white star – the “Christlike star.”

“This player looked out for others, always tried to pass, was selfless and encouraged his teammates all game,” Coach Cassie said, “So this week’s Christlike star goes to Jack.”

He collected his star to great applause and promptly walked over to me, and Christlike Jack asked, “Daddy, which star is the best?”

It’s our reflex. Always taking the things we’ve seen and heard in Jesus and attempting to reverse it, to twist it, to turn it to our standards. Jesus, surely you speak of meekness, but surely you meant the powerful will inherit the earth. Jesus you meant the strong, not the week, the first not the last, the power taking not the peace making.

But the blessing is not for the privileged or the elite. It’s not for the political authority of Rome, and not the religious establishment. The Beatitudes are spoken to those groups whom God deems blessed, not by virtue of their own achievements or status in society, but because God chooses to be with them – the weak, the forgotten, the despised, the justice seekers, the peacemakers, and those persecuted because of their beliefs.

How does God accomplish that? How will they know it? How will they hear it?

It will be because those who have heard it first will cup their hands and shout, and then model their lives and carry such a word of blessing broadly through the expanse of this earth.

Despite our reflex to individualize the blessing, out there on that hill, Jesus addresses these blessings not to individuals, but to an entire crowd and a developing community of believers. It becomes the responsibility of all those hearing to attend to the poor in spirit, the grieving, reviled, hungry and the forgotten. It’s a call for all within earshot to conform our lives more to the values of this kingdom, all of our voices, vision and capacities coming together in a community of blessing that stands close to the poor in spirit, meek, merciful, and thereby stands close to the heart of God.

The Beatitudes, then, are founded on an ethic of compassion. The late Henri Nouwen offers an insightful description: “Compassion grows with the inner recognition that your neighbor shares your humanity with you. This partnership cuts through all walls, which might have kept you separate. Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same standard, and destined for the same end.”

Jesus was just trying to show us where we need to be. With the downtrodden, the outcast, the hurting, the struggling. Go there, be with them, and you’ll find that your spirit will be filled and that you will know blessing. God promises to meet you there.

Maybe asking who we’re called to be as a church and as disciples starts with asking where we are we’re called to go and who we’re called to be with.

For this reason, Greg Boyle has said the Beatitudes and the pronouncement that “you’re in the right place” are ultimately less about spirituality and more about geography. Being where God would have us to be.

We are considering enormous questions today of geography and place, and what binds us together, particularly after our new President’s executive action on refugees, affecting many people we know and love, and many more known and loved by our God. The recent action only exacerbates an ongoing struggle through many administrations to answer the question of just who is blessed, and where the blessing of God extends, and to find our voices and actions echoing those of Jesus.

And yet I see a countryside just full of the meek and the sorrowful. The crowds were composed of all those sick – those who were “afflicted with various diseases and pains,” Matthew writes. “Demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics that he cured.” And did you notice Matthew tells us in chapter 4, that they came to him as his fame spread “throughout Syria.”

The mountain was just full of them.

Their presence today reminds me how little I’ve done to proclaim the blessing of the Lord to these. It reminds me that while we may have new levels of fear and anxiety stirred, even before Friday’s action, our country settled only 18,000 refugees from Syria last year, and has continued to function in our sense of blessing while how many 100s of thousands are forgotten outside of it.

I recalled my friend Jason Coker, and how inspired I am by his work in settling refugees. Jason is the head of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Mississippi. Before that he served for a decade as a pastor of Wilton Baptist Church in the town of Wilton, CT, close to Manhattan. When I was a pastor in New York we would get together from time to time and we built a good and trusting friendship.

Jason has shared how in his work he participated in a group of faith leaders that welcomed, supported, and helped to settle refugees in their small community of Wilton. They had already settled one family – a father, mother, and two children – and they were presented with the opportunity to help another family – a woman (widowed) and her five children.

The group of faith leaders debated, not whether or not they wanted to help, but if they could. Did they have the ability and resources to help this larger family – the woman and her children – when they were directing so much to the family already settled. They had all but decided that it wasn’t feasible; that they couldn’t do it, when one of the representatives of the group spoke up…

“I’m really struggling with this,” he began. “Because my faith tells me I should not only welcome the stranger, but that I have even more of a responsibility to care for widows and orphans, that they might know the blessing of God.”

Ultimately, on the strength of conviction from this man, the group made the decision to support and settle this family.

And it need not be remarkable, but it feels especially important for me to tell you today that this group of faith leaders working in Wilton to settle refugees was an interfaith group. And the man who spoke from his conviction on behalf of this woman and children was Muslim. And the faith he invoked to help him care for her in her need was Islam.

And because of his conviction – his words of blessing – that woman and her children are still living and thriving in Wilton today.

Maybe those places we’ve failed to go are the places where Jesus has been waiting for us all along. So let us take on the mercy, the peace, the justice-seeking that is compelled by our faith. In so doing may we come to know fully the blessing of our Lord, and announce to all so desperate to know it today, “You are in the right place.”

Matthew 4:12-23

“Immediately they left their nets and followed Jesus.”

It’s a jarring, almost fanciful moment – how quickly Andrew and Simon, then James and John – set down their nets. Because it’s not just the nets that drop, it’s a way of being and a whole set of motions rehearsed over time.

Neuroscientists tell us that when a movement or a motor skill is repeated regularly, a long-term procedural memory – or “muscle memory” – is created for that task. Riding a bicycle, typing on a keyboard, texting on a phone, playing a melody or phrase on a musical instrument, and yes, casting a net. When first learning a physical skill, movement is often slow, stiff and easily disrupted if you break your concentration, but then, with practice, the task becomes smooth, effortless, unconscious. So well-rehearsed is the motion that it can be returned to after an absence, like when the disciples return to their nets in those moments between crucifixion and resurrection. When they wonder if Jesus is coming back to them, they go back to what is engrained in them and pick up their nets again.

Many of you know that this week my family has celebrated the life of my grandfather, Charles Proctor, who among other things, taught me how to cast a net. It was a favorite boyhood pastime on summer nights when we’d visit my grandparents’ river home – catching shrimp off my grandfather’s dock – and finally getting old and strong enough to cast the net myself. Looping the rope around my wrist, holding the sliding ring and lifting the net, then placing the lead weight between my teeth and gathering the rest in my right arm before one smooth, quick motion extending my arm, twisting my body, unfurling the net and releasing it into the water… and hopefully remembering to let go with my teeth.

Then we’d pull the net in and open it to see what was caught, and if the catch was small or undesirable, Papa would say, “Look at that little wompus cat.” It’s one of many a witticism my grandfather would drop into conversation. We never knew where they came from, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what they meant.

For instance, when my social butterfly grandmother would take him to a church social or Sunday School party you’d ask him if he was looking forward to it and he’d say, “Well, I’d rather be shovelin’.”

Or there was his most memorable line, when he was hospitalized and frustrated with a young nurse who couldn’t find a vein, he motioned at the young man and said, “You put that boy’s brain in a bluejay, he’d fly backwards.”

I wonder if that’s how Zebedee feels about his sons in our passage today. After all the time he spent teaching James and John on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, they are willing to leave it all, swept off “immediately,” Matthew tells us, just as Simon and Andrew before them. All of them release the familiar grasp, setting down the nets, leaving the boat, and in the process leaving behind a whole network of motions and an entire way of being.

That’s backwards. It’s confounding, nonsensical and fantastic. Why would they do it?

“Blessing the Nets” by Jan Richardson

Fishing wasn’t a glamorous living, but it’s what the young men in Capernaum did. Casting their nets, loading their boats, finding what to keep and what to toss, bringing it to shore and cleaning it before selling to support the household. This is what it meant to grow up in Capernaum by the Sea.

That’s where we find Jesus. It’s right after John was arrested, and Jesus goes back to Galilee, but instead of his hometown of Nazareth, he settles in Capernaum. It would seem a shrewd move for someone at the outset of a movement. Capernaum was on the via marris – the way of the sea – the principle trade route between Asia and Africa. It was a perfect strategic location.

But Matthew doesn’t understand this as strategy, but as the fulfillment of prophecy – citing Isaiah, who spoke about Galilee and the Gentiles, the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, where the people who have walked in darkness might see a great light.

The hardworking fishermen and others in their community of Capernaum had known this darkness intimately, as had so many throughout the region. While Jesus’ own cousin and baptizer rots in a jail cell, others also knew hopelessness and fear. Jewish aspirations for freedom confronted the grim reality of Roman imperial exploitation. Families lost their land. Children scattered in search of work and opportunity, often finding themselves enslaved by poverty. Traditional family and village structures crumbled under enormous cultural and economic stress. A very few people amassed incredible levels of wealth in Jesus’ day, while countless others found themselves destitute.

These were the waters they fished in. These were the realities that confronted them as they mended their nets. This is the darkness in which they walked.

And it’s on them – in that place – that light now shines. It’s the light of Jesus, who arrives on the scene and begins to proclaim a message of repentance, for the kingdom of heaven is coming near.

“The kingdom of heaven is near to you,” he says in their ports and in their squares. It’s near to you in Capernaum, where everyone grows up to fish. You don’t have to go someplace else to find God.  You don’t have to clean up your life for God to dwell with you.  God is among you.  Right here where you are, God is with you. It’s a backwards message, nonsensical to many, but good news to those in Capernaum.

And it’s good news for us, especially for those of you here today who happen to feel like, for whatever reason, life is lived out on the edges.  Perhaps someone has told you, or you have come to believe that you matter less, and that whatever God is doing in this world that is true and meaningful, you’re not a part of it, you’re not in the middle of it.  You’re somewhere out on the edges.  The good news – maybe the best news – of the gospel this day is that in the kingdom of God is near to you.

One by one all those people who had known darkness start to see the light. People out on the edges start to feel that God is near to them. We can imagine that they repent, they turn, until Jesus knows he needs some help, and down to the lakeshore he goes.

That’s where Peter and Andrew are washing out their nets, mending the holes for the next day’s work, resting from all the bending, extending, casting, only to hear a simple, direct call: “Come follow me and I will make you fish for people.”

And confounding as it is, they drop the nets, leave the boats. They follow.

Is he just so compelling? Provocative? Is the light just so blinding from the shore? Luke’s gospel tells a little story that explains why the disciples find Jesus compelling. After a night of unsuccessful fishing, Simon, James, and John allow Jesus to use their boat as a podium. Jesus tells the men to put out and fish again. Simon grumbles, but an overwhelming catch of fish that convinces him that Jesus is the real deal (Luke 5:1-11). No wonder Simon and his colleagues leave everything to follow Jesus!

That’s one explanation. But Matthew gives no such detail. I think it’s because this is as much a story about the disciples and their belief as it is about Jesus and his allure.

Before they follow, they first have to believe. Believe in the good news. That is they believe what God-in-Christ believes of all of us: That we can do and be things we have yet to imagine. That despite all we’ve learned and rehearsed over the years, we are the ones Jesus is calling. That we might see the kingdom come near in our time, and even through the work of Christ in our very lives.

The theologian and Emory University professor, Dr. Gregory Ellison, tells the story of when he was a little boy, and he was sitting on his grandmother’s porch, where all the best memories are made, and he asked his Aunt Dottie: “Aunt Dottie, what can I do to change the world?” And she said, “Baby, I don’t know how to change the world, but I can change the three feet around me.”

It sparked Dr. Ellison in his life and ministry to issue what he calls the “three foot challenge,” that is: How many people cross within your three feet? How many places can you go to, within three feet of those who might need to hear that the kingdom of heaven is near to them, that they are made in the image of God, that their lives have value? (1)

Three feet. About the radius of a cast. So to those who have fished the sea, Jesus says, learn another set of motions. All those motions you’ve learned and memorized, your bending and extending and casting and releasing, well now I will make you fish for people.

I will teach you how to extend your arms to bless others.

I will show you how to bend your back to stoop down and serve the most vulnerable in this world.

Instead of the same waters and the same boats, I will show you how to cast yourself widely out on the world.

I will show you how you can gather people up and help them to know me.

Come and be with me, follow me, and rehearse new motions and skills. Sure they will be stiff – and we who read will see throughout the gospel just how stiff and clumsy it can be to learn something new – but follow me.

It presents them with a call, but also with a crisis. Where are we going, Jesus? How long will we be gone? What are the benefits? The retirement? And this boat passed down to me, whose will it be? The father that taught me, what will he do? The people I love, who will care for them?

We all crave the security of the Lord. This is what we hear in the Psalmist this morning, in the 27^th Psalm we read earlier: “The Lord is the stronghold of my life.” The Psalmist wants to live in the house of the Lord, to be comforted by God’s beauty, hidden in God’s shelter, concealed in God’s tent, out of reach of enemies, placed on a rock away from risk. We all want such safety, with fear that dissipates amidst the overwhelming love of God.

But the gospel of Matthew doesn’t let us play it safe. It is a story of sacrifice, departure from what is known to follow into what is uncertain.

This evening we will gather for the ordination of Lesley-Ann Hix Tommey – daughter of Monica and Phil, sister of Reid – whom many of you knew as a teenager and college student. Lesley-Ann studied at McAfee School of Theology, and we affirm that she has been called by God into a life of ministry and service.

We gathered for her ordination council a couple weeks back – the sixth such council we’ve experienced in the last 3 years – and among the questions, we began to talk about vocation, hoping to uncover some sense of what God was calling forth in her. I remembered a couple years ago, when Lesley-Ann had the opportunity to serve a ministry in Charlotte, called “The Family Tree.” Located in an impoverished neighborhood in Charlotte, the Family Tree invites people to live in intentional community as they serve the beloved of God who live within their radius of influence. Lesley-Ann had other options. Some with better benefits and more upward mobility, but she always was drawn back to this opportunity in Charlotte, sharing a bedroom, living amongst those who were poor, sharing life together. In her ordination council, I asked her, “Why did you have to do that? How did you know God was calling you there?” To which she replied, immediately: “It was scary.”

Here we sit, mending our nets again, tired from all the bending, extending, the familiar motions repeated over time, the muscle memory effortless and unconscious. The shores we’ve always known, the boats that have been passed down to us, the waters we’ve navigated again and again.

That’s where Jesus finds us, just as he found them. And we listen for that call that will find us so inspired and trembling that we have to drop our nets just to catch our balance and move forward in following him.

I never encounter this story without thinking of the theologian Albert Schweitzer, in part because of his memorable prose about this moment of call, “He comes to us as one unknown, by the lakeshore, as of old he came to those who knew him not, and he issues the same call: Follow Thou Me.” But in addition to his beautiful writing, I think of him because Schweitzer heard the call of Jesus in his life.

An organist and celebrated theologian, at the age of 30, Schweitzer saw the call for medical missionaries in Gabon, in Africa, and amidst great protests from family and friends, he went back to school to become a doctor to serve out his ministry as a medical missionary.

Noted preacher and storyteller Fred Craddock was twenty when he read Albert Schweitzer’s seminal work, The Quest for the Historical Jesus. He says he found Schweitzer’s depiction of Jesus Christ lacking – it upset and frustrated him – so he marked in the book, wrote in the margins, and raised questions of all kinds.

One day, he read in the Knoxville News-Sentinel that Albert Schweitzer was going to be in Cleveland, Ohio, to play the dedicatory concert for an organ in a big church, and according to the article, Schweitzer would remain afterward in the fellowship hall for conversation and refreshment.

So Craddock bought a Greyhound bus ticket and went to Cleveland.  All the way up there he worked in his Quest for the Historical Jesus. He laid out his questions on a separate sheet of paper, making reference to the page numbers: “You said this on p. 32, but what about what the Bible says here?”

So he went there, heard the concert; rushed into fellowship hall, got a seat in the front row, and waited with his lap full of questions. After a while, says Craddock, Schweitzer came in, shaggy hair, big white mustache, stooped, and seventy-five years old.  A master organist, he had played a marvelous concert. He came in with a cup of tea and some refreshments and stood in front of the group.

Dr. Schweitzer thanked everybody: “You’ve been very warm, hospitable to me.  I thank you for it.” He continued, “I wish I could stay longer among you, but I must go back to Africa. I must go back to Africa because my people are poor and diseased and hungry and dying, and I have to go.  We have a medical station in Lambarene.  If there’s anyone here in this room who has the love of Jesus, and hears the call of Jesus, would you be prompted to go with me?”

Says Craddock, “I looked down at my questions; they were so absolutely stupid.  And I learned, again, what it means to be a Christian and I had hopes that I could be that too someday.” (2)

The voice still echoes, as of old, across the waters of our lives. And as it does, there will always be some Zebedee or another to whom it doesn’t make sense; it’s a way that is inexplicable, fantastic, regressive. It’s backwards.

But for those of us who hear it, we know that when things look backwards, well, that might mean that the kingdom of God is drawing near.

____________________

1. http://www.fearlessdialogues.com
2. Craddock Stories, pp. 125 – 126

Matthew 3:13-17

“Is he going to drown her?” I thought to myself.

I was in Romania a decade ago as part of a group of students from Wake Forest Divinity School on pilgrimage for a week, where we were attending a Sunday night baptism service. The large, zealous, imposing pastor was holding the newly baptized under the water a little longer than felt comfortable to me. I swore I was seeing bubbles, but finally up she came.

I looked down the line of those waiting for the water – a long line of all ages and different backgrounds, all standing uniform in their white robes, but reflecting various forms of anticipation. Some were excited and eager, others taking deep breaths, but I noticed one young woman down the line was visibly trembling beneath her robe, perhaps sensing the enormity of the moment or the significance of the statement she was about to make, but to me, she was just worried about being held under the water too long.

I nudged my neighbor – our trip leader, and Baptist historian, Dr. Bill Leonard, who has studied baptism in all its forms and iterations as much as anyone. “I think that young woman is about to cry,” I said, expecting for him to chuckle along with me, but when I looked, his eyes were joyful and misty, and he said with a knowing smile, “It’s still dangerous.”

It’s easy for us to forget the danger and the risk, for we have taken baptism inside and insulated it from its original setting out in the wilderness, where the signs along the Jordan River said “Caution” and “Enter at your own risk.”

Baptized and Beloved by Jan Richardson

These days most of our baptisms occur indoors, in tubs filled with water that is temperature controlled. On the Sundays we hold baptism at First Baptist, one of the first orders of the day is the early morning temperature report to ensure that the water’s warm, and if it’s not at least that we can modify the temperature somehow so it rises to a tolerable tepid lest we have to cancel the whole thing.

At my previous church, baptism occurred in a hot tub; well, maybe not literally, but it appeared that way. Our Baptist church was located in an old Polish Catholic sanctuary in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan – purchased in the mid-80s and modified for the use of this Baptist congregation. So a baptismal pool was added in the back left corner of the sanctuary: a circular tub, about 8ft in diameter. “Why is there a hot tub in the church?,” visitors always asked. There was actually only one heating jet, but that didn’t stop at least one Resident Staff member years ago from inviting friends over on Sunday nights after baptism services.

It was in that pool where I performed my first baptism as a pastor. Pedro was a 15 year old member of our Teen Center, who had returned from summer camp renewed in his faith and passionate about making a statement, so we made plans to wade into the water, this wiry, 6ft 2in teenager and me. We stood before the congregation as I shared my carefully memorized remarks, and I readied myself to lower him into the water. I held his back and his forearm and widened my stance, but when I prepared to take my lunge step I realized I hadn’t moved far enough into the pool, and my foot hit the steps that led inside. Not knowing what to do, rather than lower Pedro gently with my left arm, I had to violently plunge him into the water with my right, grasping the front of his robe and yanking him back up again. We both came up and I looked to see my wife with her head in her hands. But the silence was broken as that gracious and loving congregation broke into laughter and applause as Pedro smiled and we embraced in the middle of the pool, both of us dripping wet, for he had taken me right in along with him.

It’s still dangerous. It can still find us bubbling and catching our breath. Trembling, perhaps at the prospect of the moment. We who are part of this group that claims the word “Baptist” to describe our particular practice of Christianity know the significance of the moment particularly well. But we are very far from those early Baptists who knew it even better. In 1646, Anglican critic Daniel Eatley observed of the Baptists – or the “Dippers” as he called them, so widespread in England: “They preach and print and practice their heretical impieties openly… they flock in great multitudes to their Jordans where both sexes enter the River… where they defile our rivers with their impure washings and the waters groan under the load of their blasphemies…”

All these years later, with none of our lives or livelihoods or even reputations on the line for attending this church or participating in this ritual, we might forget that we still follow a practice that has been dangerous. And maybe it remains that way even for us, for in baptism we are “buried with Christ.” Or so Paul wrote in Romans.

We are creatures 100 percent dependent on breath – the oxygen that keeps us alive and has done so since when we imagine God giving humankind breath through the nostrils of Adam. But when you make the decision to be baptized, you agree to go – just for a moment – to a place where you can’t breathe. You go straight to the heart of mortality and loss. You are “buried,” as Paul wrote.

Now if you’re considering baptism, don’t worry; to be baptized is not actually to be in danger of drowning. But it might be to expose yourself to a different kind of risk: to be lifted into a life that is not the same. To be lifted into the life of Jesus Christ – who came from Galilee to the Jordan unto John to be baptized by him, as we learn in this foundational text from Matthew this morning.

It’s the first thing we learn about Jesus after his birth in the gospel of Matthew. It’s the first time we hear him speak in this story, after 30 years of relative obscurity in a carpenter’s home in Nazareth. It’s a significant moment to declare his priorities and announce his ministry, and of all places to make his appearance, Jesus chooses the wilderness, of all rivers, he chooses the Jordan, of all baptizers, he chooses John.

These initial moments were of vital importance to the early church who, in the early festivals of Epiphany, focused especially on these first things we learn about Jesus: his visit from the wise men, his baptism by John, and his first miracle at the wedding at Cana. The early church believed that in these initial moments, much about Jesus, his ministry, his call, and his direction was revealed. In this passage, the revelation comes with Jesus’ baptism in the wilderness, which presents a question with which we have wrestled for centuries: Why did Jesus need to be baptized? John shouted a message of repentance, but the spotless, blameless son of God is not in need of such redemptive action. Why should he be baptized?

In Matthew, John himself wonders aloud about the purpose: “I should be baptized by you,” John says, “and yet you come to me?” But Jesus is insistent, saying his baptism is a fulfillment of righteousness; it’s an act of obedience to God, so under he goes and up from the water raised into a life that follows the echo of the sky: “This is my beloved Son.” Everyone out there hears it. Every one of them sees it. And he goes from there and passes that word around to others who didn’t see or hear for themselves. He helps others see that the identity of God’s love that defines him is promised to them, too.

Jesus enters the waters of baptism as an invitation to all of us to do the same, showing that his ministry is our ministry, his identity can be ours as beloved of God, and that when we enter those waters we are as close to the grace and love of God as Jesus himself was in the Jordan. We can share in his baptism.

This was the subject of the very last sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom we commemorate this weekend. Preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, the famous sermon is entitled “The Drum Major Instinct,” where King encouraged his congregation to seek greatness through service, love, and the pursuit of justice for all people.

His scripture text came from Mark, where James and John ask to sit at the right and left hand of Jesus, and Jesus replies: “Do you know what you ask? To drink of the cup that I drink of… to share in the baptism that I am baptized with…”

Dr. King goes on to reflect on this baptism of Jesus, into which he invites all of us; it is a way that is costly, that asks so much, and that invites us to come and give our all, and it even leads King towards the end of his sermon to begin to envision his own death and funeral as an extension of what it means to share in the baptism of Jesus. Because it was dangerous for him to follow in that way.

We’d much rather stay indoors where the temperature is controlled and lifeguards keep watch.

We’d much rather move to the center of things, where there’s power and stability, not out in the wilderness where people survive on rainwater and locusts and call for the world to be more than it is.

Or maybe we’d rather stay out of the water altogether – stay on the shore, where all is safe and secure, and nothing more is expected of us.

We’d rather keep our head above the water, where there’s no risk of losing our breath.

Because we know what can happen if we share in this baptism of Jesus.

Dr. King said it this way: “And every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral. And I don’t think of it in a morbid sense. And every now and then I ask myself, “What is it that I would want said?” And I leave the word to you this morning. If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity… Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice… ”

He would be 88 years old today. But he was killed two months following that sermon.

It’s dangerous. But remember the promise: those who have been buried with Christ in baptism are raised to walk in the newness of life. And it’s all those baptized, wilderness followers of John who become the first to see Jesus and to join him in a dream of something new. It’s those who go all the way under the water with Jesus, who emerge from those waters called to share in all that is ahead for him, too.

That New York City hot tub was the site of a few more baptisms during my years as a pastor at Metro Baptist. There was Gerri, concerned so much about her hair getting wet, and Tom, who had found a new start in that church and wanted to reclaim the faith of his youth. I eventually got the spacing and the steps down, much smoother than the first round, including one of my final opportunities for baptism: the baptism of a woman named Janet.

Janet had been a part of that community of faith for years. She lived outside, homeless for years, and most recently making camp at a construction site. We assumed she struggled with addiction, but we tried to do what we could. She loved that community of faith. She would show up almost daily at certain times, asking to help with one of our programs. She found pastors and community there and she eventually came to a place where she wanted to be baptized. It had happened before in her life, but this time she really felt it, she meant it, she thought it could make a difference for her.

So we gathered in that lukewarm pool with the congregation around. “Come on, sinners, let’s go down” the congregation sang as they surrounded the water. My remarks were rehearsed, and the lunge step was smooth, and Janet came up to applause, and great laughter, and an embrace from her community.

This week I got a letter. The address label held Janet’s name. “Just a short note to say hello” it started, “and to speak with you on behalf of the new version of myself.” Janet shares how she’s been clean, how she’s changed, who she loves, where she lives, and what she does with her time, again and again saying how her faith and her church had made such a difference. “I was dying,” she said, “Now I’m alive. And now I’m bound for heaven.”

Jesus is baptized because out in the Jordan, when John puts him under, he takes us all under with him: the gangly teenager, the trembling young woman at the end of the line, the stirring prophet, the excited child, and the woman who wonders if she can actually change.

Out there everyone sees it. And everyone hears it. And through the power of the Spirit, up we come into the echo of God’s love, and a life that is not the same, buried with Christ in baptism and raised to walk in newness of life.

Matthew 2:1-12

It was only a matter of time, but it turned out to be this year’s holiday road trip when the timeless question started to come from the back of the minivan: “How much farther?”

This time last week we were getting packed to return from a week in Florida. Thanks again to Pastoral Resident Rev. Courtney Stamey who proclaimed last week in this pulpit, while we were packing up all the Christmas toys from the grandparents and trying to get everyone in the car. You hear a lot of things on a 9 hour drive to and from. You hear cries and demands, mixed in with the pacifying sounds of Disney and Pixar on the DVD player, and the occasional notification from Google Maps, letting us know that there’s traffic up ahead and we can save 7 minutes time and a whole lot more sanity by getting off the interstate and taking a state road.

You add it all up with a few stops and somehow the 9 hour trip becomes 12.

Jenny and I have learned to look at one another at the outset of the drive and say, “Good luck. See you when we get there.”

But through all the noise and commotion, the consistent question is one we know so well: How much farther?

We’ve all asked it, and our travelers in our gospel passage today are no different. They see the star, set their course, read all the right charts and maps, and venture out for who knows how long a journey: weeks, months, main highways, and local roads, until they arrive at the end of all their traveling, and find that they still have farther to go.

Matthew writes, “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem.”

They’d come to Jerusalem, but Jesus was born in Bethlehem. So arriving in Jerusalem, their question becomes, “How much farther?” It’s an old question, and we learn in our text that it has an old, enduring answer.

This morning we begin sermons about such enduring promises. In our secular calendar, we call these days the start of a New Year. On one hand there’s nothing theological about that, except for the way it reminds us of the fact that we serve a God who is making all things new.

A lot is new as we greet 2017, some hopeful and filled with possibility, other parts woeful and filled with fear and dread. Amidst it, we are taking some time to remember promises that are ancient, enduring, as old as these three wise ones. So we pause for a moment, with all we’ve packed for the journey, all the gifts we’ve been given, and we try to find the direction that guided these three.

“Three Wise Men,” Zephyri

Each Christmas season, many of us unwrap their likenesses from the cardboard homes where they reside for 11 months of the year. We’ve seen them depicted by painters, and imagined their backstories with the poets, but beyond our traditions, we don’t know all that much about them.

We don’t really know, for instance, if there were three, only that three gifts are listed.

We don’t know how they came to travel together. Had they know one another for years? Were they colleagues, part of some ancient club of meteorologists? Or did they set out on the road separately, coming from different places until their paths all intersected somewhere and they met one another along the way?

We don’t know where they came from, only that they were Gentiles – or non-Jews – traveling from somewhere East of the Star.

And we know that for all their proficiency for reading the skies and mapping the course, they didn’t just read stars and maps; we can surmise that they also read the Jewish scriptures. Because they arrive in Jerusalem on the winds of hope that are found in the prophet Isaiah.

The gospel of Matthew is abundantly clear that Jesus is born right in the middle of expectation and anticipation of a long-awaited Messiah. Time and again in these early portions of the gospel, Matthew reminds that the coming of Jesus is the fulfillment of what had long been prophesied and awaited. And these wise ones knew that, too, because it seems they had been reading the prophet Isaiah:

“Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawning… They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.” (Isa. 60:6b).

This was the journey that Matthew’s wise man took. They see the light; it lodges in their eyes, and they come to Jerusalem, searching for this prince of peace, this Lord spoken of in Isaiah, to whom all people would stream.

But they arrive at the seat of commerce and power and discover instead the murderous and clinically insane King Herod. And it must have been so disappointing. It must have been something like what those ancient Jews had felt in Isaiah. They might as well have found the city in shambles and ash. One glance and they must have known they had come to the wrong place. Because they read the wrong directions.

Herod’s priests put their heads together and realize their mistake before anyone else. It seems Isaiah 60 is the wrong map for this particular journey. Micah 5 is where the directions are found. “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days . . . And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.  And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.” (Micah 5:2-4).

These wise ones learned they have farther to go, from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and in learning this, they come to see what we can never discover too many times: This king for whom they search, this messiah whose promise started their journey, is not to be found in palaces of stone or in places of prosperity, but in places humble, out on the edges, like Bethlehem. Not sitting in the seat of influence and power, but lying in a feeding trough in a ramshackle stable.

The wise men looked in Jerusalem for what is ultimately found in Bethlehem. What’s always found there.

We’ve made the same mistake. We’ve followed the same guide. So maybe we know these wise ones after all.

We know what it is to be people of Epiphany, longing for the seemingly distant life of God to come near to our very lives.

We know what it is to dream that things might be new.

We know what it is to search for a king.

We know what it is to gaze through our scopes, looking out into the darkness hoping to see some new evidence of hope – a light different than all the other lights.

We know what it is to be called by something beyond us.

We know what it is to pack our bags, gather our food and water, step away from the things that are manageable and proven, and set out uncertain of what is ahead.

And we probably know what it is to take all those steps, walk all those miles, and at the end of the road find that we somehow still have farther to go.

If Christmas is the season where we celebrate the nearness of God in Jesus, it is also a time when we can so acutely feel the distance from God in our own lives. We feel it in those we miss and in those we’ve lost. We feel it in the isolation that all the pageantry and festivity can make us feel if we don’t catch the spirit as those around us seem to, or if we don’t have all the grand things those around us seem to have. We can feel that distance in the tension of relationships, or in the family and friends we encounter. We feel it when we see the ways they’ve changed that cause us to worry about them or pray for them with a new urgency. Or we feel it in the ways that another year can cause us to measure our own lives – our own journeys – to find we are not where we set out to be.

It might be that Christmas is not merely the time we encounter the one born to us, but also a season in which we discover that somehow – even with the best intentions and tools – we got lost along the way to him. We’ve ended up in the wrong place.

Well, even the wisest person is susceptible to that. In fact, maybe it’s especially the wise ones – with all of our preparation, our packing lists, our knowledge and skill – who are susceptible to arriving in the wrong place and finding we still have farther to go.

It’s in such moments that we remember what the wise men come to know. Even as they stand in the middle of Jerusalem – lost and bewildered – as they look upward and a little toward the south, the light still shines overhead, still beckons for those who would follow it.

It would have been easy for them to just throw up their hands in disgust or defeat, turning eastward for home and deciding it’s all been some sort of cosmic trick.

Then again, it must have been tempting to just stay where they were – to forget the great gifts they carried and the reason they set out in the first place. They could have sold their goods in the city center, taken in the sights, enjoyed themselves, and toasted to better luck next time.

Or they could have made a deal, becoming the henchman for a tyrant, who in all his fear-mongering surely would have set them up for life if they’d just deliver what he so desperately wanted.

But instead they turn southward. They reorient their expectations and their way of seeing the world.

They start to walk a way much more vulnerable and a path less clear. They release expectations of grandeur in favor of neighborliness, triumph in favor of generosity.

They travel that distance from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. It must have seemed a vast distance – as it might to us. But it’s only a day’s journey.

It’s a journey we can take even now. We just need to read along with the wise men, these words of the peasant prophet, Micah. The one who speaks of Bethlehem, but then goes on to speak of more, saying “He will teach us his ways so that we might walk in his path.” And later “Nations will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation nor will they train for war anymore.” And reading a little bit more “He will gather the lame and assemble the exiles and all those who grieve.” 

So maybe you’ve come to the wrong place. It can happen to anyone, even the wisest among us. Do you feel like you still have farther to go? Like the wise ones, you’ll find the directions in Micah: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Amen.

Ecclesiastes 3.1-13

Before we look into our scripture today I would like to take a moment to introduce myself if we have not met yet. My name is Courtney Stamey and I am the second pastoral resident at First Baptist Church. The pastoral residency program is a two-year transition into ministry for seminary graduates.  A pastoral residency, like ours, operates in a way that balances vocation and education. Residencies have the potential to solidify young minister’s theological and ministerial constructs, providing a foundation that will last for years to come. For my ministerial role I spend part of my time in the church and part of my time at Peacehaven community farm. Peacehaven’s mission is to “connect persons with special needs to the larger community through shared living and the work of a sustainable farm.” Day to day at the farm I operate in a non-profit chaplain role, as a support and resource. I don’t do much regarding caring for the goat or harvesting vegetables, but it does happen sometimes. The split is about three days here and two days at the farm. After four months I think I finally have my schedule figured out, and I don’t usually end up in the wrong location. For the First Baptist portion, I have spent my first few months in a shadowing process, working alongside ministerial and administrative staff. This meant learning about finances, practicing with the choir, and helping with a funeral, among other things. Now that shadowing is complete, I will begin to select a few “projects” to work on for my remaining twenty months. So, right now I have the opportunity to be creative in selecting what projects I will work on. And it seems like it is a good time to start thinking since it is New Year’s Day.

If the internet is any indication, there are lots of people who are ready to see 2016 gone. So much so that before the first came, before even Christmas, I saw something pop up on my Facebook news feed. It was the top 20 fitness trends for 2017. They include some lively topics like wearable fitness technology, high intensity interval training, matcha tea, and wellness retreats. All I was thinking was about how can you call something a “trend” that hasn’t happened yet. Then, on Thursday I was filling up at the BP by Friendly center, and when I finished and cranked up my car every, I mean EVERY, radio spot was about the new year, including an advertisement for how better mattress will help you achieve your New Year’s resolution for better sleep. Sometimes, the New Year frustrates me because we are so busy looking ahead that we do not know where we are. And so here we are in these pews on January 1st, with this poem in Ecclesiastes, made famous by the song Turn! Turn! Turn! By the Byrds in 1965. And I promise it was in Ecclesiastes before it was on Pete Seeger’s lips. For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…and maybe on this New Year’s Day, we are looking forward to this new season, maybe we are looking back, thankful the last season has come and gone. But what if we intentionally attended to where we are right now, fully present, fully awake, fully alive?

There is a show on History channel called American Pickers. It has been out for a few years and apparently has some staying power. The show’s premise is that two men, Mike and Frank, consider themselves pickers. And pickers are people who search for “rusty gold” in the broken down barns and junk heaps of America’s backroads.

So these two gents from Iowa travel around in a van searching for forgotten treasures that they can resell in their shop. They are collectors themselves, and the people they visit are collectors. Sometimes they go to random places, in an act they call “freestylin’ but for the most part they lean on their shopkeeper Danielle to find them locations, prearranged with the owners to “pick.” And goodness do they find places. I’m talking people who have bought out auction houses, and purchased manufactured buildings to store their goods. Out parcels so full that Mike and Frank must literally climb on top of rusted out Schwinn banana seats, and mute jukeboxes to reach the top. However, there are sometimes, when Mike and Frank roll up to a collector’s home, already pre-arranged, and the homeowner will sell nothing. I mean not a thing! The collector won’t even sell the things they forgot they owned. That’s the thing with some collectors, they cling tightly to the things they own, sometimes for so long, they forget the joy they had when they began. They forget why they started collecting in the first place and can see no other existence than grasping to their collections, devoid of curiosity.

The author of our passage today is sometimes known as a collector, His name is Qohelth, the namesake for the Hebrew title of the book we call Ecclesiastes. Some call him teacher, others, preacher, but I prefer collector and sceptic. He is not, however, a collector like in American Pickers. His collection is based on his own personal experience, he desires to not cling too tightly to the wisdom passed on to him, but to be curious to discover for himself, and critically test his beliefs.

He does not grasp onto to one season or the next, collecting them for his own pleasure, but instead chooses to live fully in his present and to share his wisdom with others.

There is no book in the Bible like Ecclesiastes. It departs from conventional wisdom, by a long shot, and it’s a wonder why we have a text like this at all. It is so different, verging on heretical. Concerned about the shape of the human condition, in places where God feels distant and unconcerned with the intricacies of anthropology. And so, Qoheleth asks the question, the question we all ask at some time or another, what does it profit? What is the point?

Another way of phrasing this is to ask, what time is it? The beautiful piece of poetry in verses  1-8, presents to us dichotomies that exist in the seasons of human life. The word “Seasons” here, points to a particular time, when a certain action is to take place. So we have a time to be born, and a time to die,  a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted…and so on.

And we could probably add more for our own time period and our own lives, a time to start kindergarten and a time to graduate, a time to pay taxes and a time to get a refund, a time to be married and a time to divorce, each dichotomy particular to the seasons of each of our lives. These seasons are sticking points in our lives, I would call them poles. They are the moments where we hang our hats, times that we can mark with a certain starting point and finishing point. Poles that are conjured up with our senses, in an instant that they feel like they just happened to us. The melody of a familiar lullaby, the smell of grandma’s cooking, the feel of sand between our toes, the sight of the gravestone where we stood weeping. And poles are important, they are the seasons of our lives, they are our fondest and most tenuous memories, and in some ways they remind us who we have been, who we are, and who we are becoming in life’s climaxes and monotonies.

But these poles do not answer the question what time is it? What is the point in this very moment? What is the point, in our present? My fear is that when we grasp onto these poles, much like the collectors from American Pickers we lose sight of the joys of life, we forget our freedom and our curiosity. When we are always looking back or we are always looking forward we are continuously unaware of the present. And when we grasp so tightly to those poles of life, like a medieval torture machine, we will surely be torn asunder.

The metaphor that comes to mind is a parent holding a child’s hand while crossing the street. In early years of formation, this is absolutely necessary for the child’s safety. But what if the parent and child never let go of each other, not through the child’s teenage years and into the child’s twenties, they kept holding hands through busy parking lots and crosswalks. I would venture to say that at the very least it would create a relationship of dependency and hinder the maturity of both the parent and the child. Like a child holding the hand of a parent, holding onto the poles of our lives is important, for a time. They provide stability, safety, and boundaries protecting the important parts of our lives. But if we hold on for too long, then we become dependent, and our growth is stunted.

So, Qoheleth lines out his poem with fourteen lines of antithesis. Which we have called poles. And he asks us in verse 9, “What gain do workers have from their toil?” In other words, what is the point? Our central question. And he answers it in verses 11-13. There it is, life between the poles. This is our human vocation. I translate verse 11 as, God has made everything, beautiful in its time, and has set eternity into the hearts of people. Everything God has made is beautiful and eternity is set in our hearts. This is incredible! Did you catch it? The question what is the point? What do we gain from work and toil? The response is not money nor property nor fame and recognition, in fact it seems like Qoheleth circumvents the question of work at all. Instead he goes big picture. God has made everything beautiful in its time, and has set eternity into the hearts of the people. The texts goes on to say that humans cannot fully grasp this. Furthermore, that the best humans can do is to be happy and enjoy themselves.

But maybe, just maybe, we could catch a shimmering glimpse of the beauty of eternity if we stopped, looked around, and looked inside of ourselves. This is difficult work, living in the present. It is exhausting trying to catch a glimpse of the beauty of eternity. Our senses betray us. Because even with the speed of light as fast as it is, we are always seeing things in the past. We cannot ever truly see the present. And when we ask what time is it, as soon as we respond the second hand ticks away, and our response becomes the past. It is a sticky place to be, what if there is no point to life, what if we cannot catch that shimmering glimpse of the beauty of eternity? What if, as Qohelet asks, life is meaningless?

Well, let’s take a step back for a moment.

Perhaps the key, as Qoheleth states is to enjoy the little things in life. To eat, and drink, enjoy our toil, to do good, and express things like gratitude. In reality they aren’t little things at all. They are the thousands of choices and attitudes that we have between those poles. They are the countless seconds passing by from solstice to equinox. Yes, there is a time to be born and a time to die, but the season is the time between, it is where life happens.

There is a scene in the Movie Men in Black, that I think describes this paradox. At the crux of the movie an important alien dies and the last word on his lips are “The galaxy is on Orion’s belt.” So, the Men in Black, defenders of order in the galaxy, must preserve the galaxy. And so they think of Orion’s belt, the constellation, that must be what the cryptic line means. What they discover is that Orion is a cat. A cat owned by the very alien who left the cryptic message. Upon closer examination, the Men in Black look at Orion’s collar and on it a charm. Looking even closer they see star spiraling. And suddenly it becomes clear, the galaxy they thought was so big and so vast, was actually tiny, and in front of them the whole time. An eternal beauty so vast, that it must be nearby.

And Christianity is a faith of similar paradoxes, God in the form of an infant, faith the size of a mustard seed, belief like that of a child, one must be born again, the idea that the kingdom of God is simultaneously already here but not yet fulfilled. And yet with all this paradox and mystery, the Psalmist, reminds us to be still to know God, and Jesus teaches us not to worry for if the Creator cares for grass and birds and flowers, how much more will we be provided for.

And here we stand on the edge of the unknowable, challenged to be and to believe, and to be fulfilled in those things. Our life is a season between the sacred and the secular. And we are called to live in the paradox between. And if I may be so bold. Let me remind us that God calls us as we are, presently, not for what we have done nor for who we will become. Just as we are. God holds up a mirror, beckons us to look in, to be reflective of our present situation, and God calls us beloved. The difficulty here, is do we call ourselves by the same name? Are we willing to, are we daring enough, to do some present self-examination and self-care? This task takes some practice, this is where tools like mindfulness and centering prayer can come in handy. These are spiritual practices that can help us learn to be fully present and to be attentive to eternal beauty.

So, our challenge on this first of the year, is not to be consumed with new year’s resolutions. Not with how much weight we will lose, how many books we will read, nor how much money we will save. Not with whether or not we will follow a 2017 fitness trend or buy a new mattress. No, not today, for we are already in a season. For some of us we are grieving, for others rejoicing, some of us our building up and some of us are tearing down, and many of us are somewhere between. The challenge today is to recognize what time it is.

In some way or another all of us are called, this day, to heed the word of Qoheleth. We can boldly proclaim that life is not meaningless, it is a gift from God. We can take satisfaction in what we eat, and drink, and the good works that we do. Not with resignation but in a way that celebrates the joy in the seconds and even the milliseconds between the poles of our lives. Today we can choose to grasp onto the poles that we think define us or we can live into the present freedom and curiosity that God has gifted us with.

Where are we in the seasons of our life? And what do we need to do or what attitude do we need to take to enjoy it? Take a breath, and deep one. What’s time is it for you?

Amen.

Luke 2:25-35

Last night – Christmas Eve – we gathered beneath the star. As I shared a homily, I held my 5 month old baby, Elizabeth Bea, because at first, that’s what the story is about: holding a baby.

My friend Ashley-Anne recalled this a few years back when she was standing in a grocery store check-out line and the customer in front of her asked the clerk if she had any Christmas stamps.

“Do you have Christmas stamps?” the customer asked.

The clerk replied, “No. We just have Liberty Bell and some lady holding a baby.”

Asking to see them, the customer said, “Oh, that’s Mary holding Jesus. I’ll take those.”

As the clerk scanned Ashley-Anne’s items she kept going back to “some lady holding a baby” and said she sold those stamps for weeks and never knew it was Mary and Jesus.

Such honesty. At base that’s what the story is about. It’s just that ordinary. It’s a story about teenagers in a barn, having journey to Bethlehem as merely two among a mass of people coming to be taxed. An innkeeper turns them away. Some first-century farmworkers come by having heard about the birth. The teenage girl gives birth to a healthy baby and holds him close as her fiancé names him “Jesus.” Word became Flesh and history hinged, but it was just as ordinary as a woman holding her infant son.

Mary with Jesus pressed against her chest. Joseph, in days and weeks to come, swaying in the night trying to lull him to sleep. And in today’s text, Simeon reaching out to hold the son of God.

“Simeon took the child Jesus in his arms and praised God…” – Luke 2:38

When we encounter Simeon it’s not Christmas Day, it’s forty days later. The shepherds, the angels and the heavenly hosts are all gone now. The music has stilled. And Joseph and Mary are just starting to sleep through the night. As devout Jews, they have already taken their infant for circumcision and naming and now, after the appropriate time has passed, they’ve come to the temple in Jerusalem for the baby to be consecrated to God.

That’s when Simeon comes into the temple, guided by the Spirit.

Startled at first, perhaps, even a bit frightened by the old man’s ecstatic face, Mary and Joseph can sense the Lord’s Spirit upon him.

They hear Simeon’s prophecy and it reminds them of the whirlwind events of the previous weeks and months when angels and shepherds had all come into their lives to foretell the greatness of their Son.

So they offer their son to this faithful servant. And Luke says that Simeon took him in his arms.

And the text is very clear about the posture here. Literally it says his elbows are bent. Arms relaxed, hands open, palms upward.

That’s how you receive a baby. But it’s more than that.

From ancient times, this posture that Luke describes in Simeon is a posture that signifies gratitude. It indicates a willingness to receive the gifts of God. Elbows bent, not extended as though to grab. Palms open, not trying to clutch too tightly or grasp too rigidly.

Simeon was an open-palms/elbows bent kind of person.

His life was open to the Spirit that is mentioned guiding him, moving him, revealing to him.

His eyes were open to the work of God around him in the world as he looked for the evidence of God’s salvation.

His heart was open to those who came his way.

So it makes sense that he would approach the infant Jesus this way… elbows bent, palms open.

Among those who practice contemplative prayer, this is known as a posture to receive…

In fact, throughout Christian history Simeon has been known by another title: “The God Receiver.”

St. Simeon the God Receiver

Most of our translations of Luke describe Simeon taking the baby. But that’s too strong. He doesn’t take the baby at all. He receives.

There’s a world of difference between taking and receiving… and that difference might just form the heart of the gospel itself.

It might be the core of the story.

The scholar Ray Brown has suggested that the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke – the stories of Jesus’ birth and all that proceeds his adult ministry – are the gospels in miniature…that we are drawn into them not because of their romance and imagery, but because we recognize what Brown calls “an essential core of the gospel message.”

If this is so, then part of what we recognize in Simeon is the choice before any of us as we approach this one born into our midst in these days of Christmas… will we be people who take or will we receive?

At our previous church in New York we had a nativity scene or creche is among our Advent decorations. Our tradition – which is shared by many other churches – is that the manger stays empty until Christmas Eve. So for some of our children, a core question each Advent is, “Where’s Jesus?”

Now, laying aside their deep theological sensibility for a moment…the answer is, this tiny pocket-sized Jesus is kept in a drawer somewhere until the grand Christmas Eve appearance… then put back into storage until next year.

The one we can take anywhere… set any place… display at certain times, and shelve at others…

Yet the baby grows up. The child grew and became strong, v. 40 is clear. He starts stretching his way into this world, enlarging the space around him…pushing at the boundaries or ignoring them altogether.

Grows from the one who fits in the palm of our hand, into the one beyond our grasp…from the one who sits in a nativity scene on our altar table, to the one who starts turning over furniture in the house of worship.

And many of us like the Christmas story the best, because that’s the Jesus we can always hold. The one we can take and form in our own image.

That’s what so many of us are looking for when we come to Jesus… as they were in Simeon’s day.

Simeon has been waiting his entire life… as we see with the Temple setting of the scene… the locale telling us not only where Simeon is standing physically, but also that he is theologically right in the middle of Jewish messianic expectations… expectations that so often began, as ours do, with extended arms, grasping hands and set plans…

Consider his mother in this scene. She has heard from the angels, and sensed her son’s greatness… she has said yes to her part within it all… but imagine her chill when Simeon turns his blessing from God to then address Mary. He seems to warn Mary. “Steal yourself. A sword will pierce your soul, Mary. Because of this child you hold. And you can never prepare for it, not fully.”

A reminder that Jesus would suffer, but that Mary would suffer because she loved Jesus, too.

This proud mother holding her newborn son, is learning that he will grow even beyond what she can hold. In fact, in the very next scene in the gospel of Luke she loses him on the road – a sign that he is growing stronger and older and out beyond her reach and her expectations.

It’s what Jesus would to others throughout his life, constantly encountering arms stretching out to grasp him, to direct him, to mold him into the one they had been waiting for, even unto the end.

Notice, one of the last things he says, to Mary Magdalene outside his tomb, as he stands there resurrected in the fullness of his glory as the risen one who could not be held by the tomb, he has to say to her “Don’t hold on to me…”

And I imagine her grasping at him, reaching out to grab, or to take.

And he says to her again “Relax your arms. Open your hands.”

We don’t come to know Jesus by taking hold. We come to know Jesus by receiving. Arms open, limbs free, loosening the stress of what we expect him to be or need him to be and instead receiving him as he truly is, setting our lives by the rhythm of his breaths, and finding how he helps us to come to know ourselves and our world anew.

That’s what this baby makes known to Simeon, and to all of us who would receive him this Christmas: another way. A way of salvation and freedom that helps us to see what we have not seen before. And it was true from the very beginning, even for those first to hear the proclamation of the Gospel, as the angels tell them “Fear not…” and they bring themselves to loosen up and run with abandon to see this thing that they had heard about.

See, in order to receive, you have to loosen your grip on some of what you’re carrying already.

We can’t hold open our arms if fear is blanketing our shoulders. We are slowed down when our hands are clutching and grasping every measure of security. We can’t animate the story with our own lives as we are intended if we’re holding on to our set expectations. We can’t take on its motions and movements if we’re too fixed and unwilling to follow in the way of vulnerability and love.

That’s what the baby in the manger grows to tell us about and to make known to us: an elbows-bent, palms-open way of being.

In fact, much later in the story when he sends out his disciples to follow in his way, he tells them to free their hands. “Don’t take a staff. Set down the money in your purse. Don’t take a cloak or a blanket. Leave your shoes. Go out vulnerable, without the usual precautions.”

With your hands free, you can learn to welcome the stranger in your midst.

With no staff to protect yourself or ward off what approaches, you’re less likely to live with suspicion of what’s up ahead.

Without your sandals, you’ll remember what it is to walk free and uninhibited through this earth.

Leave the bag. Without it you’ll learn that while you can carry a lot of provisions and precautions, you can never carry enough.

And take no copper in your purse. Leave it. Without it jingling around you’re less likely to believe you’re self-made, and more likely to look around and remember that “I am you and you are me” in this web of mutuality.

See, with our bodies free, we can run with abandon. Unencumbered we can sense more readily the leading of the Spirit that leads us all to the place that we can receive this one who comes near to us.

Of course, not long after Simeon holds him in Luke 2, the world that receives Jesus will begin to change its posture.

We’ll become aggressive and anxious.

We will try to get our arms around him, so that he fits our hopes for him.

We’ll try to grasp him, so he’ll remain still instead of compelling us forward to places we wouldn’t choose to go.

We’ll try to clutch him near to us, so he loves what we love and hates what we hate.

We’ll want him to fit all our categories and expectations that we keep within arms length.

And when he doesn’t, we’ll corporately grab hold of him and take him to a hill outside Jerusalem.

It happens so quickly. So easily. Chances are, it’s happening to us even now. The one born into our midst is starting to grow. And as we feel the tension that brings and the demands it makes, it’s so much easier to try to take hold of him once again, forgetting that the way we are meant to receive Christ in our world is the posture with which we receive a baby. It’s only with our elbows bent and our palms open – it’s only by receiving – that we’ll be able to say with Simeon: “My eyes have seen your salvation.”

Let it be so this Christmas for us – God-receivers, all.

We know the Messiah of which Handel’s oratorio speaks. It’s Jesus. The Christ. Born to Mary, in Bethlehem.

Yet in the whole work – 53 movements, and roughly 3 hours in its entirety, we never hear Jesus’ voice. The text tells us of the promise of the Messiah and the coming of the Messiah. It goes on to tell about the ministry of the Messiah, the suffering, death and resurrection of the Messiah, and of the Messiah’s exaltation and eternal reign.

But it is all told by indirection – the words of prophets and angels and gospel writers. The infant Christ grows, but in Handel’s oratorio we don’t hear Messiah teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. We will not hear his seven last words from the cross. He doesn’t speak at the empty tomb.

We never hear the voice of Jesus himself. The whole of the story is told by the voices of others.

Some of the first voices I ever heard sing this piece came from my grandparents’ living room. My music minister uncle began a tradition, at some point, of bringing the Christmas portion of Handel’s Messiah to Christmas dinner. And sometime between dinner and pecan pie, he would gather my accompanist mother, my alto aunt, my dad – a fine bass who really shouldn’t try the tenor line – and my grandmother, the longtime soprano from the church choir of First Baptist Palatka. Together they would sing portions of the Messiah. Now you can imagine the reactions through my childhood and adolescence to this strange Sherouse quirk that interrupted whatever movie we were trying to watch in the next room. And I’m sure you can picture the annoyance and eye rolls as I listened to family try to sing a piece intended for a much larger choir. But at some point it all gave way to an appreciation and admiration of the tradition, and especially for what the annual Messiah sing meant to my grandfather, watching from the burnt orange couch. No matter how shaky a vocal run or how sharp a tenor note, Grandpa would be beaming the whole time.

Grandpa last heard the family Messiah sing in Christmas of 2000, as he passed away in December of 2001, with a funeral that occurred on the morning of Christmas Eve. I think it was that memory of what it meant to him that prompted us to gather and sing again, after his funeral that day. Because we recognized that this story and music was also evident in him – a career postal worker who never sang a note.

We might think the story should be told by those specially trained or gifted. Those who have rehearsed or studied to unite their voices in harmony. But the first voices to tell the story, don’t forget, were the voices of shepherds.

Their voices were hoarse from the night air, and tired from years of herding and shouting at sheep. Their voices knew weariness and suffering. They might have even begun to think it’s a story that was never meant for them. Yet these are the ones who depart with the message “Unto us a child is born… Unto us a son is given…”

The gospel of Luke says the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told to them.

I imagine their voices cracked, their breathing grew shallow at times. But we know they told the story. We know it because all these years later it reaches us. And all because the shepherds left the stable and went back to the fields changed by what they had encountered behind the Bethlehem barn. They were filled up with something that made them believe that it was in them to tell the story.

In Advent, we call it joy – the joy of Christ’s coming that sends us all away glorifying God.

Maybe you’ve heard of an excellent new book entitled The Book of Joy – an extended conversation between His Holiness the Dali Lama and the Archbishop Desmund Tutu. The book is about the meaning of joy and begins with a simple question: Why are people in our world not more joyful? They conclude it’s largely because we have confused happiness with joy.

In the words of Desmund Tutu: “It’s wonderful to discover that what we want is not actually happiness. It’s not actually what I would speak of, I would speak of joy. Joy subsumes happiness. Joy is the far greater thing. Think of a mother who is going to give birth… mothers know they are going to have pain, the great pain of giving birth… And even after the most painful labor, once the baby is here, you can’t measure the woman’s joy.”

The shepherds came into contact with that joy that night, they heard it sung by angels, and heard it from the joyous Mother Mary. And then they believed that the song they heard and the story they are told could be shared through their lives.

In a world where they must have felt very small, with little influence and low volume, they came to understand that the story of Christ, God-with-us, needed not only the voices of prophets and angels, but the voices of shepherds, too

In our world of suffering, with so many vulnerable people, and all the time a new Herod out there threatening the people God so loves, we are here encountering great joy.

Joy that a child is born, and that with this child is the possibility that everything can change.

Joy that sends us back to the places we live and work and move as people who have encountered a Savior.

Joy at the possibility that at any moment, on any night, something could flash against the sky again, and we could find ourselves caught up in the story of God’s love born on earth.

So don’t hesitate. Take a deep breath from way down in your diaphragm, and however shaky you feel, let that message ring out.

Most people never hear Jesus’ voice. But how many people can hear yours?

____________________

Thanks to Woody Garner for this clip of the closing “Hallelujah” Chorus from the presentation of Messiah

Isaiah 35:1-10 and Matthew 11:2-11

It was December 1943 and another Advent season had come for the Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer loved Advent. “ The joy of God goes through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross” he once wrote. “That is why it is invincible, irrefutable. It does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it, in fact precisely there.” (1)

These words had new meaning for Bonhoeffer in 1943, as he sat as one of 800 prisoners in Germany’s Tegel military prison, imprisoned in April of that year for his bold resistance to the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer still hoped he might be released, not knowing as we do now he would ultimately be executed for his association with a plot to assassinate Hitler. But that Advent, he took joy in simple gifts that came his way. He corresponded with family. He acted as a pastor to fellow prisoners. He wrote. “A prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that…the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.” So in his cell was an Advent wreath. He lit two candles in honor of his parents and fiance. He read the Christmas story in the gospel of Luke.

From time to time he must have wondered what might have been different. He could have escaped it all. He could have stayed in America in 1939, safe and sound, as friends had urged him to do. He could have kept his mouth shut, layed low, stayed quiet. But that Advent he sat in jail, reminded anew that “God turns toward the very places from which humans turn away; that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn—a prisoner grasps this better than others. And for them, this is truly good news.”

I wonder if John was able to grasp any good news – anything hopeful – from behind his bars. When last we saw him in the gospel story, he was standing in the middle of the river, his voice booming with a message of “The kingdom of God is near” that echoed in that open space to masses gathered around.

And now, he sits. A small space to pace around in. Dark and dank. A voice that echoes back only to him against the stone. Words confined mostly to his own mind. Occasionally footsteps heard down the hall – someone arriving with a crust of bread, a bowl of water. Otherwise, he’s alone.

He can already sense how things will end for him. There is no real possibility of freedom again, not when you’ve offended a ruler. The kingdom of God is near? I wonder if he struggles to believe it behind Herod’s bars.

It’s a strange choice our lectionary makes for a gospel reading in the middle of Advent – a Sunday of love and joy, just two weeks before Christmastime. It’s a time when so much is full of the light of the season, the noise of anticipation, ringing bells and flashing balls of color and light. And now we have to imagine John behind bars. Is this what we can expect from Advent?

Then again, to recall words from another prison cell, Bonhoeffer wrote: “We simply have to wait and wait. The celebration of Advent is possible only to those troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come.”

John had spent his life looking forward. He had even leapt in his mother’s womb at the promise of it, growing to proclaim it and giving his all to the vision of the future as redeemed by God. He could have escaped. He could have kept quiet and laid low. He didn’t have to speak truth to the powerful Herod. And he must have been asking all those “what ifs” when we encounter him today.

We know this because given the chance, he asks a question that reveals his disillusionment – his questions about what his own life and witness have meant, his wondering whether he had staked his life on the wrong message, the wrong person. One day in the midst of his pacing in his 6ft by 8ft space – waiting, waiting – he hears steps down the hall. Only this time there’s no bread, no bowl. It’s one of his followers, finally, one of his followers allowed to get through to see him. The time is short, the words are chosen carefully, and John sends this follower out with a message – a single question.

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

This is the question at the heart of our Advent waiting. It might be the question at the heart of the gospel itself.

John asks it in chains. In crisis. I suspect, as far as John can tell, this Messiah he proclaimed and pledged his life to make a way for has changed very little. In the gospel of Matthew, especially, Jesus is a Messiah who is different from the one that had been expected in the political climate of the time. Most expected someone closer to Judas Maccabeas – the leader of the Maccabean revolt that sparked the celebration of Hanukkah among Jews to this day. He was a militaristic leader, and some at the time even called him “Messiah.”

Jesus is different from such populist expectation. But he’s also different from John’s expectation. John had staked his life on a prophecy like what we hear in our reading from Isaiah this morning:

A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way… the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people… the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing… everlasting joy shall be on their heads… sorrow and sighing shall flee away…

But this joy is so far from where John finds himself. The Messiah was supposed to make the world new. He was supposed to bring justice to human institutions, so that a tyrant like Herod would not sit in power, and a righteous man like John would not pace in prison. Jesus was supposed to finish the work John started so boldly in the wilderness — to wield the axe, bring the fire, renew the world. But it seems he hasn’t taken an ax to any trees, and has not burned any “chaff” with “unquenchable fire.”  He has not led a revolt. And he certainly, John knows, has not caused any prison walls to fall.

“Ask him,” John says to his follower through the bars. “Ask him, just like that, Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Here we sit, open and free with our voices booming out in this space. But don’t we ask the same question?

This week our country commemorated 75 years since the date that shall live in infamy – the attack on Pearl Harbor that launched our involvement in World War II, and shaped the lives of a generation. Three of my grandparents served in the military through the war, including my last surviving grandparent, who enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor. I remember them telling me how the news bulletins from that day interrupted their lives, and in some ways set a trajectory for their futures. So in my own remembrance this week, I decided I’d listen to some of the original radio broadcasts as the news came known, when I learned something I had not known before. That Sunday was the start of a new tradition called “Bible Week” on NBC radio, with many tuning in as the Bible was read, so that the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor – the news that precipitated a war – came to many as an interruption to the reading of the Bible.

Which is always happening. We proclaim this message, we light these candles, we stake our lives on it, and then, another beeping news bulletin telling us that the world is not what we hope for it to be. Whether Bonhoeffer in his cell, or John behind his bars, or so many of us in our own Advent waiting, we ask “Are you the one we’ve been waiting for? Hoping for? Working for?”

Notice Jesus doesn’t give a simple yes or no. “Go and tell John what you hear and see,” Jesus tells the disciples who bring him John’s question.  Tell him that “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.  Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

Jesus says: go back to John and tell him your stories. Tell him what your eyes have seen and your ears have heard. Tell him I am not a pronouncement or a prophecy. I am living, moving. I am the incarnation of the presence of God with you in the midst of every prison cell and question. And the truth of who I am emerges in the lives of ordinary people all around you. But only if you’ll see and hear.

And then as the follower begins to walk away with this answer, he can hear Jesus continuing, turning to those around him and talking about John – how when John believed and proclaimed Messiah, the life and love and salvation born into this world through Christ Jesus was in John himself.”

“Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” Jesus says. Offense runs away.  Offense quits. Offense opts out. Offense slumps down in the cell and waits for the inevitable. Offense erects its own wall and hides behind it because reality is harsher than we expected it would be, even in a world to which God sent the Son. Hearts still break. People suffer unjustly. That’s part of a life of faith, too. But don’t take offense. Don’t hide. Don’t run away.

I wonder what I would hear and see if I took this call from Jesus seriously this Advent. What would I come to know of the Messiah that I have not seen or heard before?

This Advent and Christmas season we collect an Offering for Global Missions, which supports missionaries with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship seeking to live out the love of God among the most vulnerable people in the world, and to go and do the very things to which Jesus called the disciples.

Field Personnel like Tina and Jonathan Bailey, who have worked for the last two decades in Bali, where most recently Tina has heard the call to go and proclaim release to the captives, working within a prison in Bali teaching art to inmates, where she met Myoran Sukumaran a few years ago. “Myu,” as he was known, was one of the Bali 9 – a group of Australian men who had been arrested in a failed drug smuggling attempt and given a capital sentence in Indonesia. In the last years before the sentence was carried out, Tina was their art teacher and minister, worshipping with them, teaching them, and as a minister even serving communion to Myu and his family in some of their last moments together.

Tina says she never would have chosen that work, but that she knew she was right where she needed to be – that she was called to follow Jesus toward the places from which others turn away – and so her work in the prison continues to this day.

“The work is not always easy,” she says. “Sometimes it can break your heart. But it is the love that enables me to get through those hard times. And a lot of love is needed. So, I will continue to love when its hard. Because I know that Christ is known through love.”

Photo courtesy of CBF

As Tina shared her story recently at the annual meeting of CBF, she stood in front of a painting. It was a likeness of Jesus, painted by Myu. Tina described how on Myu’s last day, she was caring for his final paintings, which were still wet to the touch. As Myu died, the guards reported that he was singing. I expect it’s because he knew that through his very life, the Messiah would continue to be known.

And so John sits, 6ft by 8ft, wondering how it all might have been different if he’d just laid low, been quiet. There are many places in the Gospels where we want just a little more – just an extension of the plot to know what happened next. John’s prison is definitely one of those places. How did he respond to Jesus’s answer? Did it encourage him? Did it inspire hope? Did it foster love? We don’t know. But maybe our uncertainty is an invitation to us to finish the story in our lives.

So we imagine him, occasionally getting up to pace about, or etch something into the wall. Footsteps occasionally come – bread, water – and then one day, the footsteps are followed by the voice of his disciple. The one he had sent out has returned now with the answer to his question.

“John,” this disciple says, “Jesus told me to tell you that the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at him… Oh… and as I was leaving he said one more thing. He said to thank you for preparing the way.”

How did John respond? How will we?

_______________________

(1) Bonhoeffer quotes and anecdotes drawn from Timothy George, “Bonhoeffer at Advent”

Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44

In Greensboro, we give you a week, but then the endless rush of seasonal traditions begins. Just this weekend there was the Candle Tea, the Festival of Lights, Parades, Concerts, countless Breakfasts with the Big Guy, and the list continues.

On the list for some is a visit to one of those living nativity scenes that some churches stage this time of year. It was a few years back that we found ourselves at one. It was a small church, but very serious about this annual pageant. We parked and found ourselves in the middle of a church-lawn made to look like 1st-century Palestine. We wound our way through the marketplace of craft stands, food vendors, merchants and a synagogue, finally reaching an Inn where the sign said “No Room.” So we were led out behind the inn, through a live petting zoo and actors playing shepherds, an angel with a halo, Joseph, a kneeling Mother Mary, and baby Jesus at the center of it all.

Now it was very cold that night, so the baby Jesus was portrayed by a Fisher Price plastic baby doll. The whole scene was lit by a blueish light for effect and there was the plastic baby, just soaking up the light with his blinking baby doll eyes and tattered swaddling clothes. And I don’t know if I was feeling frisky in the cold, but I couldn’t help myself and said to my party, a little too loudly, “Goodness, the baby Jesus is frozen solid.”

Which caused a woman in front of me to shoosh me, “Do you mind, sir?” she said.

“Oh of course, ma’am,” I said, “I should know better. After all, I’m a minister.”

“You’re a minister?” she shot back. “Well I’d like to know what church!”

And I bowed my back and said, “Well, the name of that church is First Baptist Church of Greensboro, ma’am… And I’m the youth minister, Steve Cothran.”

All paths lead to the baby again this Advent. We wind our way through countless stops along the way, so much pageantry and so many potential detours. But at the end – at the center of it all – the baby is there once more.  And when we arrive, we want to know it’s the real thing. Not the plastic version. We want to find the one who can tell us about God, can inspire us to believe what we have not seen yet, can teach us once more to hope.

In her poem, “The Gates of Hope,” the Reverend Victoria Stafford says, “Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope, not the prudent gates of optimism.”

Hope is more than optimism. Optimism is perhaps more sensible. More practical. It’s certainly more attainable. But it’s ultimately a blue-lit, blinking baby doll version of the hope we come to know in Christ.

It’s a term – hope – sometimes reduced to slogans or marketing. Wishful thinking. Pie-eyed positive thinking. A Christmas wish list. A letter to the North Pole. Looking on the bright side. Clinging tenaciously to silver linings in dark clouds. Sometimes when we speak of “hope,” we are settling for optimism. For the theologian Reinhold Neihbuhr, this plastic version of “hope” for which we sometimes settle was a greater threat to faith than despair. Because our highest ideals, our most positive thinking, they have not saved us. They will not save us.

Instead of stories of optimism, we need narratives of hope. Optimism is about feeling good, denying suffering or the horrors of our history and sometimes looking past the effect on real lives – for it’s too disruptive to our idyllic understanding of the world. Deep Christian hope, however, is wide-eyed to the past, open to the present, but holds the promise that the realities we have known do not have to dictate the future. We are not captive to our past. Our present does not hold us.

This is what we hear in the prophet Isaiah. He is open-eyed to the real, lived suffering and loss of his people. The prophet is crying out amidst people living in Exile – those who have watched their city burn behind them, and now feel very far from home in a strange land of exile. Our prophet of Advent was a person who knew so intimately well both the light of God’s presence and the fiercesomeness of God’s absence. And Isaiah means so much to us in our own Advent because we know those things too.

Isaiah is trying to see what he has not seen yet. In chapter 1 Isaiah graphically laid out what he had seen: violence, bribery, unfaithfulness, desolation, trampling on the poor. There are brief interruptions as God calls for repentance and offers glimpses of hope, but they are drowned out by these pictures of violence and rebellion. You can hear the prophet’s mounting frustration: “Your country lies desolate, your cities are burned…Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them.”

And we have seen all of that before ourselves. But then Chapter 2 opens as though Isaiah is starting all over again – or maybe God is starting all over again. Isaiah is seeing something new – a new advent of hope as Isaiah sees not only what is taking place now or what has happened in his past, but also looks toward what will yet be “in the days to come” or “in the later days.” People of every nation will stream to Mt. Zion, including those who were enemies of Israel and Judah. God’s instruction will go forth from Jerusalem; God will judge between the nations. The people will be transformed.

The message of Isaiah sounds a lot like the message of Jesus, who comes into Galilee preaching and ultimately to Jerusalem giving his life to tell people not to take their experience lying down. Not to take what is lived and experienced as given or inevitable. Not to take the sword as the only way, but to look for something more. Not to accept what is in front of our face, but to dare to say, “What we see now and what we’ve seen before are not enough. Not good enough. Not true enough. What we want – what we hope for and pledge our lives to – is something that far exceeds this.”

Advent Hope teaches us that we can be aware of the reality around us, and still anticipate and receive the gift of God that is born into our midst.

To use the language of our gospel passage, we can be wakeful and watchful – the way a baby in a manger might find his eyes adjusting to the light, finally seeing what was once formless and just flashes of light, eyes darting until we can finally see it.

To use the language of the prophet, in verse 2, we can start walking, the way a child grows and finds balance, tentative at first, then steady, resolved. In verse 2, the prophet depicts all the nations streaming toward the holy mountain, all the nations and all the peoples of the earth walking together toward peace and justice and God’s vision of what we were all meant to be. Advent Hope is active. And we have to start walking in it. We have to start following the light of the Lord.

Advent Hope invites us to recognize the realities of our world, and yet become not discouraged but determined, not paralyzed but active, reminded that our world is not separated from God’s eternity.  What we do is already part of it. How we prepare matters. In our own individual lives we can turn swords into ploughshares. We can turn spears into pruning hooks. We can practice love where there is hate. We can foster faith amidst our fear. Instruments of warfare and division can be transformed into tools of peacemaking and growth, preparing the ground to become what we still long for it to be in the redemption of God, when what we have been working for and looking for and hoping for is finally born.

Our oldest child was here with his choir on the steps today – having been wrestled somehow into a cardigan sweater. Before he was born, we did a lot of work. We anticipated, we prepared the room, we bought the supplies, we labored over monumental decisions like what color car seat to buy.

Jack was born via a scheduled C-Section, so I had lots of time to prepare leading up to the date. I planned my first words to him. I planned what I would say to Jenny amidst the surgery. I practiced photography. I did all I could to be ready. Only when he finally came, in the surgery room there were two sneaky anesthesiologists making small talk. I thought they were being friendly but know now they were trying to distract me with talk of family and baby names. I kept waiting for the moment they would say “Okay, we’re ready to begin the surgery” so I could begin all my prepared moves and motions. “Are they ready to begin?” I finally asked. And then they said, “Oh, they’ve been at it the whole time. In fact, here he comes.” And then there he was.

It all leads to a baby. Our preparation and work matter. Our hope prepares the way. But in the end, we realize it’s been happening all along and then, there he is, born as a gift from our God.

New Testament scholar, Marcus Borg, tells of a family he knew who was welcoming a new baby home. It was a hopeful moment, especially for the baby’s 3-yr-old sister. She couldn’t wait to have a brother! Within a few hours of the parents bringing the new baby home from the hospital, the girl made a request: she wanted to be alone with her new brother in his room with the door shut. This request made her parents a bit uneasy, but then they remembered that they had installed an intercom system in anticipation of the baby’s arrival, so they realized they could let their daughter do this. They let her go into the baby’s room, shut the door, then raced to listen to the intercom. They heard their daughter’s steps moving across the baby’s room, imagined her standing over the baby’s crib, and then they heard her say to her three-day-old brother, “Tell me about God…I’ve almost forgotten.”

So much causes us to forget. We forget how to hope, how to believe. There’s so much that causes us to accept what is plastic and forget what is real. But at the center of it all, still, there he is. The path winds by. And we gather around the baby once more this year with the chance to say, “Tell us about God.”

Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12

Dr. Benjamin Wall is a professor at Greensboro College, an Anglican priest, and a new friend of mine.

As we sat one morning over coffee downtown, I learned that he is also our Westerwood neighbor, living only a block or so from our church. He loves what he sees and hears about First Baptist. He’s kept a close eye on the new community garden, loves seeing the parking lot full, and appreciates what he hears about us at the college and in the wider community.

Still, when I learned he was in such close proximity, I asked what has become a standard, tongue-in-cheek question I pose to our Westerwood neighbors: “So, how do you like the bells?”

Occasionally we get some unsolicited feedback about our church bells – too loud or too long, one or two people have remarked. So I just ask this question outright, so no one feels the need to leave a message or write a note.

Dr. Wall was surprised to hear that anyone could be annoyed. “We love the bells!” he said enthusiastically. In fact, he went on to tell me that each morning, their youngest child – a toddler – wakes up and walks to the edge of his crib where he looks out the window pointing to the First Baptist steeple a couple blocks away and says: “Bong, Bong, Bong.”

But not everyone appreciates the noise. Too loud. Too long. Too disruptive. The truth is, many of us prefer it to be still, quiet and undisturbed, especially where we live. We don’t want to be awakened or startled by the noise, regardless of its tone.

There’s enough noise everywhere we turn right now. We have just passed through the season of Thanksgiving – that annual tradition with such timeless holiday staples as a bountiful table, expressions of thanks, turkeys, football, parades, and of course, the loud uncle. If you’re thinking right now that your family doesn’t have a loud uncle, well, it might just be that you’re him.

But the volume has turned up around just about every table right now – loud uncles and aunts and loved ones of all kinds, who even if we tune out or ignore in person, now have their own Facebook pages to project ideas. And it’s all kinds of messages – conservative, liberal, capitalist, communist, atheist, true believer – it’s not the idea so much as the notion we get from some that they alone possess the truth.

We have plenty of voices ringing in our ears, and we now peal right into the amplified volume of the holiday season with its light, and spectacle, and amplification.

We have enough noise.

So this Advent it’s natural for us to say, “Can you turn that down?” For part of what we seek is quiet. Serenity. Tranquility. So that amidst all the noise around us we can hear from God.

This is how the award-winning author, Dennis Covington, alludes to Advent. Originally from Alabama, Covington’s work is full of the stories and idiosyncracies of life in the South. In one of his books he recalls that on long summer evenings when he and his buddies had been out fishing or playing ball, each boy’s mother would call them home in a different way. Many mothers would lean out the back door and yell for her child. “Frankie! Danny! Stanley! Come home!” Some mothers had big cowbells outside the back door, and they would ring the cowbell to call a child home.

But Dennis’ father was always the one to call him home. And Mr. Covington didn’t just stand on the porch and yell for Dennis. He wandered down to the lake and softly called “Dennis.” And father and son would walk home together.

Dennis lovingly said, “He always came to the place I was before he called my name.” (1)

Advent is that time when God comes to where we are, amidst so many shouts and so much noise, God comes near to us and whispers our name. It’s as soft as a baby crying in a manger. It is as still as a night sky against which we had only before seen stars. It is as is subtle as an interruption of our sheep herding or whatever our daily labor. It’s as nondescript as the back side of a Bethlehem barn. It’s as quiet as the rustling of livestock. So it makes sense that we seek a setting where we can sleep in heavenly peace.

But on this Sunday of Peace, we also hear the voices that tell us that the Peace of Advent is so much more than tranquility, serenity, quiet. More than a Silent Night, where all of us can sleep, the Peace of Advent – the peace that we long for in the coming of Christ – awakens us from our slumber, disrupts us when we try to relax, and makes noise right where we live.

Peace is not actually that quiet.

Just as prophets aren’t that quiet.

Isaiah is sometimes considered the prophet of Advent. He is writing to people who had known the noise – the violence – of invasion, struggle, politial crisis, long-suffering and exile. They had seen their city burn, and with it had heard the sounds of so much loss and destruction.

And, you can hear the frustration in the prophet’s voice crying out to God, “God, how we wish you would break open the heavens and come down…how we wish the mountains would tremble…how we wish you would make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to tremble.”

“Show us something God…” he’s saying. “Do something. Rend the heavens; break open the mountains; do something; make some noise.”

Somewhere an embarrassed or exasperated family was probably covering their ears or rolling their eyes at obnoxious Uncle Isaiah. But his message persists, and in this passage he envisions that when Messiah comes, it will be just as disruptive as this: wolf shall live with the lamb, leopards lying down with kids, calf, lion and fatling together, and from a dead, lifeless stump will sprout out a shoot from which such a vision will branch. Where we have only known death, Isaiah envisions new life. Where we have only known the way things will always be, the prophet imagines God in the form of this child striking the earth, reorienting relationships, bringing righteousness to the wicked and justice to those who have known so much suffering.

It’s a vision further amplified in the words of John the Baptist – the cousin of Jesus, the precursor to the Prince of Peace – who holds his megaphone and stands in the middle of our quiet Advent scenes once more this year with his message of “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” It is a dangerous, countercultural, disruptive message, especially when a Roman imperial governor sits within earshot.

And let’s not forget, it was voiced in a dangerous place. This was a voice crying in the wilderness. Where the Israelites had wandered and wondered aloud if God was with them. Where Hagar and Ishmael nearly died after Abraham sent them away. A desert place. No rolling hills or scenic backdrops. The wilderness was home to lonely, and frustrated people. People that had learned to survive on rainwater and locusts. People that had left the cities and centers to gather on the edge, and dare to dream of change.

Matthew reminds us that Jesus’s first appearance as an adult is out there to this man. It’s Jesus’ first public act and his best chance to declare publicly his priorities and agenda. And of all people, he comes out to John. Of all waters, he comes to the Jordan River. And of all places, he goes out to the wilderness. Because Advent is for people who live there.

And if John wasn’t so persistent in his call and if Isaiah wasn’t so insistent in his shouting, we might be tempted to settle for quiet instead of Peace this Advent. Rather than the radical, life-altering, redemptive Peace of Advent, we might accept tranquility or serenity alone.

Another prophet of another age once warned of such a temptation. Dr. King was writing in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, deep in a Birmingham jail cell, when he shared that he believed the greatest obstacle to the struggle for civil rights for African Americans in his time were not the people armed with water hoses, not the police dogs, and not the people draped in white sheets. The greatest obstacle was the passive people, the middle of the road people, the quiet people, who in King’s words preferred a “negative peace,” which he defined as the absence of conflict, rather than the presence of justice.

In every age, there are prophets in our ear, reminding us that the Peace we long for is not inevitable. We have to work for it. We have to make some noise for it.

You can’t have Peace without justice. And we will not fully welcome the Prince of Peace into our lives unless we’ve also heard from his cousin, the Baptizer in the wilderness, or his great uncle, the prophet who envisions wolves and lambs lying down together.

Because Peace – Heavenly Peace – always includes a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. And if we are ever to sleep in such peace, we must first be awake and watchful. If we are to ever know the silence of true peace, we must first work for it, shout for it, be a clear voice and witness for it. To arrive in that place of Peace, we follow the way of this Christ child, who did what the Welsh poet and minister, R.S. Thomas, once described: He looked at us, holding out our thin arms, waiting for a vanished April to return. And Jesus could have stayed amidst the peace and tranquility known at the side of God, but he looked at us just as broken and torn as we could be, and the son said, “Let me go there.” Let me go to that place. Send me there – right into the middle of that pain. Let me go to that suffering. (3)

It was in such a place that the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow found himself in 1863, right in the midst of the American Civil War. He hated the war. His son had returned home with severe wounds. He had lost his wife to a bizarre accident.  Some six months later, Longfellow wrote, “I can make no record of these days. Better leave them wrapped in silence. Perhaps someday God will give me peace.”

In the midst of this pain, on Christmas Day 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem called “Christmas Bells,”

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men!

Today we know these words from the carol that was inspired by Longfellow’s poem: “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” As the verses continue, Longfellow continues to wrestle with the reality of suffering in his life, and he pens what may be the saddest words I’ve seen in a Christmas verse or carol, reflecting the misery of a man who struggled to hope:

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, goodwill to all!”

But the carol does not end there. The bells kept ringing. And in that persistence that morning they reminded Longfellow of something deeper even than his own suffering:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, goodwill to all!”

For there are those who keep proclaiming that a kingdom can come on earth. And there are those who keep pealing bells that ring out for Peace – and not the peace that lets us sleep, but a peace in which we awaken to a new day. It’s the peace of one who left the quiet, serenity and order at the right hand of God, to come instead to us.

So let us in this season and on this day proclaim that peace. The peace of Christ. Let us proclaim it so it rings out loudly from our lives and from our church.

Or said another way: bong, bong, bong.

____________________

1. In Salvation on Sand Mountain
2. In King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
3. From Thomas’ poem “The Coming”

November is Commitment Season at First Baptist Church Greensboro, as we remember again who we are and pledge our gifts to the life and ministry we share as a community of faith. Our Commitment theme this year is “As We Go,” based on the benediction we share at the end of each service. This week’s sermon was the last of three sermons on this theme, remembering that the love of God is “loose in the world” through our lives and the life of First Baptist Church Greensboro.

Matthew 9:35-10:8

In her wonderful book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor includes a chapter entitled “Benediction.” It includes a story from some of the last days of her father’s life. Family was all gathered around, when Taylor’s husband, Ed, went to her father and leaned down. They shared some memories, and both chuckled, then Ed knelt down on the linoleum floor by his father-in-law’s bed, to fit his head underneath the older man’s bony hand. Taylor watched as Ed reached up and put one of his big hands on top of her father’s hand to make sure it did not slip off. Then he held still while her father’s lips moved. After he stood up, he leaned over to say something in the older man’s ear.

“What was that?” Barbara Brown Taylor asked when her husband came back to slump at her side. “I asked him to bless me,” Ed said. “I asked him to give me his blessing.”

Taylor writes, “This kind of blessing prayer is called a benediction. It comes at the end of something, to send people on their way. All I am saying is that anyone can do this. Anyone can ask and anyone can bless, whether anyone has authorized you to do it or not. All I am saying is that the world needs you to do this, because there is a real shortage of people willing to kneel wherever they are and recognize the holiness holding its sometimes bony, often tender, always life-giving hand above their heads.”

In these weeks of November, we have recalled the blessing we share through the life of First Baptist Church Greensboro – how it extends to us through all kinds of hands, in so many different moments, times, and places, and how we commit ourselves to be the ones extending our hands and our voices, our lives and our gifts, to bless one another and to bless this world that God so loves.

Each week at the close of our service, we share in just such a blessing – a benediction. It’s a wide, open-eyed moment. We look at one another and share with one another words of the memory, blessing, and hope that we know through the love of Creator, Christ, and Spirit one. Usually a minister speaks the words, but we all share in the blessing – repeating it in our souls, and in our very lives, as we live as those who believe: “As we go, remember who we are. We are sons and daughters of God. We are friends and followers of Jesus Christ. And through the power of the Spirit, the love of God is at loose in the world through our very lives.” This blessing has formed the theme of these sermons in November, as we’ve recalled who we are as beloved of God, followers of Christ, and this week those who are “loose in the world…”

And anyone can do it. Anyone can extend their arms and extend their lives. Anyone can bless.

At least that’s what Jesus believed. You’ll notice that our passage today – the sending out of these disciples – is at first a singular charge: “Go.” Eyes are open and hands are outstretched. He blesses them and sends them, but before the instructions to cure and cleanse, to cast out and call out, to preach and teach, the very first word is “Go.”

When I think of “going,” I remember an early morning in June that doesn’t seem like that long ago. Jenny and I joined our lives together over fourteen years ago. After our honeymoon, we returned to our childhood homes in Lakeland, FL, where we packed the things we loved and left the things we felt we’d outgrown, hugged our parents and siblings, and then came to the time to set out. Bound for Winston Salem, North Carolina, and then who knew where, we drove a 17-foot UHAUL, filled up with our clothes, our furniture, the new mattress we bought dutifully with some wedding cash, and the box my mom had packed full of my Christmas ornaments and a few old little league jerseys that my son now wears to sleep in. It struck me as we went: “Everything we own is loaded in this UHAUL Thrifty Mover!!” And, as if Mother Nature wanted to accent my sentimental mood, somewhere out beyond Interstate 4, the sun began to rise.

Of course, much of our “going” occurs without dramatic light cues. Most of it’s not so thick with romance. To be loose in the world is a vulnerable state, and journeys that start out with confidence and boldness, hugs and parting gifts can end with consequences, wounds, dejection. And we’ve heard these travel stories, too. That’s why this charge to “go” can clash with our better judgment.

We know too much. We’ve seen what this real world can do to the wandering and wildeyed – to people that fail to take the necessary precautions. It is a world that can be frightening and unforgiving. It’s a world that rolls stones in front of tombs, where broken people stay broken and dead people stay dead. And when you see enough of that story, you begin to internalize it and live your life by the cues of reticence and fear.

So how tempting it is for us hear Jesus’ call to “Go,” and instead hunker down as the people who “Stay” and spend our lives in safe and settled spaces. Such is the tendency of disciples in any age.

Imagine what must have been racing through the minds of Jesus’ early followers that day. This account of Jesus blessing and sending forth the disciples is one of the most challenging and demanding stories in all of the gospels.

Up to this point, things had been going just fine for this curious, recently compelled group of followers. They have witnessed some amazing and reassuring things. Just before this story, they’ve seen a demoniac freed from his demons. Earlier, they saw a man with leprosy made clean with a touch from Jesus. Sick people cured. Dead people raised. Nothing seems too much for Jesus and they get to see it all up close – a reclined, lazy-boy version of the gospel where they were able to sit back and cheer, swapping the stories of exploits past and present.

But then Jesus comes around one day with this abrupt announcement and a new look in his eye. “Go” he tells them at first. Go out from this place with the good news that you’ve seen so much evidence of.

But then he tells them even more. Not simply “Go.” Then he tells them to “Do.” Do the very things they’ve seen him do. Cure the sick. Raise the Dead. Cleanse the lepers. Cast out demons. Tasks that seem so far beyond their ability. Hard enough when a person is fully outfitted, and harder still with no sandals on your feet and no coins in your purse.

Which is how Jesus sent them out. In Matthew’s account, the disciples are not simply asked to go, and do, they are also asked to leave…to leave everything behind. “There are no Uhauls on this journey,” Jesus seems to say. Mark and Luke each make it a little easier on them. Mark lets them keep their shoes and Luke says, “Shed your possessions,” but only for the time being. But in Matthew, the charge is unabashedly “Leave. Take no copper in your purse. Take no bag to carry your provisions and precautions. Carry no staff to protect yourself from the things you encounter on the road.”

Go. Do. Leave.

Just think of what a journey like that would do to a person – traveling vulnerable, barefoot, wandering from town to town, depending on the kindness of others for a cup of water and a corner in which to sleep. When you travel like that – when you live like that – you can never return home the same person.

To be loose with the gospel in this world is jarring, demanding, abrupt. But we might recall that the love of Christ that we proclaim has never been safe. It’s never been a call to settle down. It calls us to set out, to move forward.

It’s love that says that just when we’re enjoying security and protection within the fencelines we’ve constructed, the Good Shepherd turns to all of us 99: “There’s this part of me that just can’t rest. I’m going out beyond the border to search for the 1 and bring him home, bring her home, again and again.”

It’s love that’s experienced by those who approach a tomb early one morning carrying spices, arriving for a funeral, wanting to make sure the tomb was sealed and the body of Jesus is contained, only to hear from the figure in white “He is not here. He’s not encased here. He’s not where you expect him to be. He is gone. He’s gone out ahead of you.”

It’s always been a call to go, as it has also been a call to leave – leaving the settled, familiar terrain. Leaving the trades we’ve practiced and the nets we’ve thrown into the same waters again and again. Leaving the stories we’ve rehearsed and internalized of this world that limits our imaginations, where our best hopes die and stay dead. Leaving to go and become more than we knew we could be.

In fact, that’s the incarnation itself. It’s about “going.” Maybe you’ve heard, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And when given the chance, the love of Christ did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but emptied himself. He left that safety so that we might know fully the love of God and learn to take it on in our own lives.

So to follow in this way of Christ, is to learn these motions of the disciples, which turn out to be the motions of Christ himself: Go. Do. Leave.

It’s the motion of Christ’s church. Church is not so much a place to which we come as it is a place form which we go. Will we go, hearing this call of Jesus, accepting this challenge, hearing our names among all of those sent out, and believing that anyone can do it.

In September, as I shared with you previously, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting of The New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta. Started in 2007 by former President Jimmy Carter, New Baptist Covenant seeks to promote community and cooperation and shared ministry among Baptist churches across racial lines. I attended with my friend Rev. Dr. Darryl Aaron of Providence Baptist here in Greensboro, as we shared about what our friendship meant to us.

Among the other speakers at the event was Tony Campolo, a longtime professor at Eastern Seminary in Pennsylvania, who spoke about encounters he will sometimes have with his students’ families. It seems that every now and then one of Campolo’s students will not only recount the words of Jesus on a test or paper, but will actually try to live them out. So they will do things like go from seminary and live in communal houses where rooms are given to the vulnerable in society. They don’t worry about paychecks because they commit to giving everything away. They take the red letters of Jesus seriously and make the Sermon on the Mount their guide.

One of these student’s parents came in to Tony’s office with some opinions about this. A father began to talk about his son and how he was living in a shared space with a few others students and then a woman who was homeless and a man who was mentally ill, neither of whom were paying their share of rent on time. The father was not very happy about this. He was not happy that his son was giving so much away, and he began to rant about Tony’s interpretation of Christianity and his son’s understanding of the call of Jesus and it came to a head when the father brought his hands down on the desk and said, “I am all for living a Christian life… up to a point and then it’s enough.” (1)

And the truth is, I think I slam my hands down and pray that prayer every single day. I hear this call. I look at the way of Jesus. And I say, “Jesus I am all for following your way of life…. up to a point and then it’s enough.”

And I can see so many “up to a point” moments in my life. See I have other commitments. Other things to take care of. Jesus, I’ll follow you, just let me stop having all these kids first. Jesus, I’ll follow, just let me hold on to this valuable thing. Jesus, I know you want me to give you everything, but I’m going to need to reduce the amount I give to your kingdom this year, I mean, we’ve got to put in that extra bedroom at some point. Jesus, I hear you telling me to serve you among the least of these, but look at how much our church is growing as it is. Jesus, I know you call me not to insulate myself, but I’m tired of all the conflict and I just want to surround myself with people who think like me rather than sit across from those who are different.

Jesus, I will follow you, but up to a point and then it’s enough.

I guess when it comes to following Jesus, we all have our up to a point moment. But here’s the gospel truth. You reach your up to a point moment and you look out ahead and there he is. Jesus is still out ahead of you, calling you forward from where you feel so proud to be. You can give more of yourself to my kingdom, I know you can. You can live more simply and offer more readily. You can live your life sitting down at the table with those who think differently to offer love and care and common cause of the Kingdom. You can give more of yourself to this way I proclaim.

So leave the staff. Sure, it can come in handy, protecting you on the road. You can use it for warding off the suspicious things that approach and seem to threaten you, but leave it.

And leave the sandals. They insulate you from the road and make you forget what it is to walk free and uninhibited.

And leave the bag. You can carry a lot of provisions and precautions in it, but you can never carry enough.

And take no copper in your purse. Leave it. It jingles around and tells you that you can rely on yourself. Set it down, and with it the notion that you are self-made.

But when you set these things down, when you leave them, remember what you take with you. You still carry with you the things you have been given by God – the grace that redeems us, the love shared in the community of Christ, the power of resurrection and new life. And the really good news of the gospel is this: that’s still enough to go and do the things God is calling us to do.

To cure the sick, working together to create a world where all people receive the care that they need.

To raise the dead, finding those people who are asleep in their tombs – really really dying – and telling them what it is to be alive in Christ.

To go cleanse the lepers, finding those cast out and being a part of restoration to community.

To go cast out demons, refusing to accept the systems of the world as it is, and proclaiming the power of God to bring about something new.

Anyone can do it. And the work – the call – starts with one word. That’s why the question that really interests God is the question that we hear in that beautiful narrative of call that we find in the 6^th chapter of Isaiah. Do you remember it? “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high and lofty…” And the voice of the Lord comes to the prophet and asks a question. Not who will preach or who will teach? Not who will cast our or call out? Not who will cure or cleanse or spend?

No, the important question is the same one we might hear in our souls even now: “Who will go?”

____________________

1. Thanks to Griff Martin, who summarized this story in his sermon “The Ideal Candidate” at First Baptist Church of Austin, September 26, 2016.

November is Commitment Season at First Baptist Church Greensboro, as we remember again who we are and pledge our gifts to the life and ministry we share as a community of faith. Our Commitment theme this year is “As We Go,” based on the benediction we share at the end of each service. This week’s sermon is the second of three sermons on the theme, remembering who we are as “followers of Jesus Christ.” 

Matthew 4:18-22

“Follow me,” Jesus said, “And I will teach you how to fish for people.”

My grandfather taught me how to fish. My grandfather, Charles Proctor, and I don’t share everything in common. He’s a second-generation farmer in N. Florida and I’m now in my fourth autumn of trying to grow tall fescue in North Carolina. He once passed through New York City while serving in the Navy after the war, and all these years later can’t understand how his grandson ever could have lived there. It’s almost as baffling to him as how any of his grandkids could buy a car that wasn’t made in the USA. And I think it’s probably safe to assume that my grandfather and I have never voted quite the same way.

Still, I love him and he loves me. And he taught me how to fish, on the dock that stretches out behind the house he and my grandmother built on the St. John’s River in North Florida. I remember age 6 or 7, when the dock was being built, watching from the yard as Papa waded into the river to set the posts deep into the riverbed. Around that time, his neighbor was also having a dock built, hiring an outside expert – an Engineer in from Jacksonville sporting a Masters degree, a team of workers, and lots of unsolicited advice. My grandfather listened politely, but decided to do it his own way. “That young man knows about a lot of things,” Papa said, “but I’ll tell you what he doesn’t know the first thing about: how to build a dock.” Well wouldn’t you know the first big storm proved him right? The neighbor’s heavily engineered dock was left in ruins, while my grandfather’s dock remained.

It’s where we learned to fish – how to bait a hook, the muscle memory and motion of the cast overhead, the patience to watch and wait (“no one catches it right away, Alan”), and the quiet and stillness needed (“Shh, don’t scare em off.”). I spent countless days on the end of Papa’s dock. It was the first place we’d run any time we visited, out to the end, looking at familiar landmarks and still water.

It was such a foundational place – such a symbol of home and family – that when it was clear that Jenny and I wanted to join our lives as one, I asked her to marry me on the end of my grandfather’s dock, one cool evening with the sun setting and moon rising as I tried not to drop the ring between the boards.

Because it wasn’t just where I learned to fish. It was where I learned motions much deeper, more foundational, more enduring. And there is much in his life that I’ve wanted in my own.

That’s the sense of Jesus’ call to “follow” in our passage this morning. “Follow me,” Jesus calls out to these fishermen. It’s a verb, “follow,” that comes from the Greek word, mimos. You can hear in it the root of our words mime or mimic, the way a 6 year old might copy the movements of his grandfather who had fished the waters so many times before him. The call from the shore is an invitation for your life to mimic and take on the motions, reflexes, and qualities that defined the life of Jesus. To be a follower of Jesus is, then, to be what the book of Ephesians describes as an “imitator of Christ.”

“Follow me. Live as I am living. Go where I go. Touch who I touch. Mime your way through the motions I will show you, and you will never be the same. You will be like me.”

This is the grand, bold hope of the follower – the hope that in some way, some day, all of the mimicry will give way to something more and they will become someone like the person they are following.

But before these fishermen can take up the life of Jesus – before they can take on this new way of fishing that he will teach them – they have to set some other things down. They have to unlearn some motions and forget patterns they’d rehearsed for years. They have to leave the family business and all they’d inherited. They have to drop their nets in a tangled pile on the dock. They follow immediately, Matthew says, because they sense in this invitation a chance to become more than they could have imagined themselves being on their own. But first they have to leave some things behind.

It’s the first task for any of us who would follow this call, for there are motions we’ve rehearsed, and patterns we’ve inherited, and waters we’ve fished for years with no real satisfaction, so we, too, have to bring ourselves to set some things down.

Among the things we set down today, I suspect that we’re eager to drop the worn, tangled net of our political season. We carry it into this sanctuary today, after an election day result that surprised just about every pollster and has prompted such a range of response – bewilderment to elation, with protests at the prospect of the next four years including here in Greensboro last night, and even instances of violence in a few cases.

I’ve heard from many of you throughout this week. You know we make no assumption of political uniformity here. There’s shock, dismay, grief from those who believed in a vision of America as “Stronger Together.” There are others for whom our president-elect is a break from politics as usual, and who believe his more incendiary remarks and rhetoric will prove to be political theater that won’t define a presidency.

We feel these things deeply. We are a tangled web – a matted mess of the mixed emotions that we see in a divided country. There have always been differing opinions among those who worship together – no less than those who fish together. So we won’t assume how you voted or why you voted. But we will make this assumption: we are committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ, we have heard the call from the lakeshore, and we are willing to set down the motions we’ve rehearsed and the patterns we’ve inherited to take up the way of Jesus.

It’s absolutely vital right now for us to embody this way, in the climate after this campaign, which has intensified some of the grim and threatening realities of our country, amplified some of its most hateful voices, and reflected to us once again who we still are as a nation, as much as we’d like to just ignore it and move on.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hateful speech and incidents in the United States, reported yesterday a marked uptick in instances of reported hate speech, vandalism, threats, and intimidation since Tuesday’s election, saying it’s occurring at a rate that reminds them of the United States following September 11, 2001. The highest numbers of complaints are anti-black and anti-immigrant incidents, followed by anti-Muslim. Some of this we’ve heard about, like a planned December parade of lunatics of the KKK right here in North Carolina – an act widely criticized by many, including the North Carolina GOP. But some of this hatred is more personal. It’s not draped in a white sheet. And it’s not so far away.

Adriana is a member of our seminary church, First Baptist in Lexington, just down the road. An immigrant from Mexico, who lived through horrors on her path to citizenship, Adriana voted in her first U.S. election this week. The next morning she was dropping her daughter off at her elementary school when someone rolled down their car window. “Get ready to go home soon,” they said to Adriana, a US citizen.

My friend Scott’s mother teaches school in Charlotte, and described how taunting and anti-immigrant, racist language she’d never heard so much of before was occurring in her classroom on Wednesday of this week, in one of many schools across our nation that were provoked to take action.

Rev. Sara Beth Pannel, a daughter of this church and now a minister at the Lemon Springs Methodist Church in Eastern North Carolina, shared yesterday how her church had sent a group of teenagers to the annual youth conference of the North Carolina Methodist Churches this weekend. The conference includes the long-standing tradition of youth taking clothespins, writing encouraging messages on the wood, and “pinning” one another randomly throughout the weekend – mementos of the community shared. Only this year rather than simply Bible verses or kind words and wishes, some teenagers with brown skin were pinned by their peers with messages that told them to go back from where they came.

All right here in North Carolina. All in the last few days.

It’s ringing in our ears so loudly, that it can be hard to hear the call of Jesus and recall the belief that Jesus has for those of us out on the waters: “Follow me. You can become like me. Your life can look like my life.”

And when I read the gospels, I see a man who at every turn finds his way to the people that need him most. On every page he seems to make his life about the people that find their existence on the edges of his world. There’s no getting around this. He was building a kingdom, one scholar has said famously, of “nuisances and nobodies” (1) – those who frustrated the elite and powerful. Those Howard Thurman has described as “standing with their backs against a wall” with nowhere else to go. To these people Jesus said in a direct, targeted way, “The Kingdom of God – this place I dream about – it’s near to you.” You don’t have to go someplace else to find God. You don’t have to clean up your life for God to dwell with you. God is near you. Right here where you are, God is with you.

That’s good news for those in our world – and maybe some of you here today – who happen to feel like, for whatever reason, your life is lived out on the edges. Perhaps someone has told you, or you have come to believe that you matter less, and that whatever God is doing in this world that is true and meaningful, you’re not a part of it, you’re not in the middle of it, you’re somewhere out on the edges. The good news – maybe the best news of the gospel – is that in the kingdom of God, there are no edges. It’s near to you.

The clear and compelling call of the gospel this morning is for those of us who are strong and unafraid to speak this good news just as boldly as we can, particularly from a tall steeple and a brick façade, where people wonder if it’s true. It’s for us to say to those who are feeling on the edges of things or particularly vulnerable right now because of origin, or race, or ethnicity, or sexuality that this is a place where you are known, and welcome, and loved. It’s now for us to remember that Jesus measured his followers by what we offer to the least of these strangers, and hungry, and wandering and fearful. In a time when hate is dramatic and pointed, the call is for the church of Jesus Christ to be just as precise and just as targeted in proclaiming the welcome and embrace of our God. Cause I don’t know how we all feel today, but here’s what I do know about us: we are followers of Jesus Christ. And we will make our lives – and the life of this church – about the things for which Jesus laid down his.

That’s what Jesus knew about us, too. He believed that through all our following – all our mimicry – we could become like him. So later in the gospel he will turn to these same fishermen, and a handful of others, and send them out on their own to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons – the very things they had seen him do.

And still later, when he knows his time with them is short, he gathers them all together and says “Love one another as I have loved you. All you have experienced from me is within your ability to pass it around to others.”

And when he’s displaying his power on the water one day, and Peter says “Lord let me walk out to you” Jesus says “Come out of the boat.” He doesn’t say, “Peter you could never do it.” Jesus actually says, “If I can to it, Peter, then you can do it, too.”

Jesus doesn’t seem to see our limitations and our brokenness first. “If I can do it, by the power of God, you can do it, too. You can walk on this water. You can heal those sick. You can love with the love you have experienced in me. You can preach the gospel and baptize in the name of father, son, holy spirit. You can transform this world to look more and more like this kingdom I dream about. You can be like me.”

And that is good news. But it’s also demanding news. It’s challenging news. Because I have to ask myself, am I following it? Am I giving my life to it? Here’s the question: Am I becoming more like Jesus, or am I trying to make Jesus and the gospel look more like me?

Many years ago I was sitting in a formal dialogue session between Christians and Jews. A rabbi from the local temple sat on the panel, along with a Christian minister and two religious scholars. From the crowd, a question was posed to the rabbi – the question many curious Christians want to ask – “Rabbi, why don’t you believe that Jesus was the Messiah?” “Glad he asked it, and not me,” I thought. Still I watched the pensive rabbi and awaited the answer. The rabbi paused, and from where he sat he leaned back to peer out the window. And as he gazed, he said, “If Messiah had come, the world wouldn’t look like this.”

Much as we might want to leave it all up to God at a time like this, that’s not the call of Jesus. Jesus calls us to live like those who have seen the Messiah, who have mimicked his life. If we do believe the messiah has come, what are we doing in this world of ours with his good news? Have we mimicked his life? Have we acted out his Kingdom? Do we even believe we can do it? Or has our following been too cautious? Our limitations too apparent? Our brokenness too visible? Our hatred too loud? Our mimicry too hesitant?

There was no hesitation or inhibition from those called from the lakeshore. Immediately, on the spot, Matthew tells us they dropped their nets in a tangled mass. Why did they do it so decisively? I think that at some point in the midst of casting their nets and rowing their boats – somewhere in the midst of their labor – they began to ache for their lives to be something more. They imagined that their world could be something different. And they saw this man with all of his compelling grace and thought, “Maybe it can happen to us! Maybe we can become like that!”

Maybe that’s your desire, too. I know it’s mine. That in the midst of our labor, our lives might become something more. If that’s what you want, the challenge from the gospel is very clear for us today: mimic Jesus. Follow in his path. Mime your way through his motions.

But isn’t it too far-fetched? Aren’t we too feeble and flawed? Broken and divided? Isn’t it a bit disingenuous to presume we can become something we’re not? Something we have never been?

Maybe. But don’t forget, Jesus believes it about you. “If you’ll follow me, I will teach you how to fish like you’ve never fished before.”

It’s been a while since I fished on my grandfather’s dock. Actually, no one has recently. A couple months back, just weeks following his 90^th birthday, my grandfather suffered a stroke that has changed his life – many of you, church family, have been praying for him, and my family is grateful as we adjust to a new stage of life and love with Papa.

But I’m not sure I told you that just a few days after his stroke Creation itself seemed to groan, as Hurricane Matthew sped up the coast and the swell caused the water levels to rise, sending the river up and over Papa’s dock. When the water receded, the topside of the dock was in pieces, and many of the boards had washed away. But the posts were still there.

So we’re making plans to replace the boards. We’re not sure when Papa will be back to the house, but we know we want to be able to walk out there again. We want to be able to teach others how to bait a hook, cast a net, and take on some of the muscle memory. How to be patient and watchful. How to be sensitive to the rod in their hands. How to be quiet and still. Papa probably can’t teach as he once did, but actually, I could teach my kids myself. It’s second nature to me now. Because you see what’s happened: I’ve now become like my grandfather. I’ve now become, you see, like the one that I was once only imagining I could be.

And I don’t know precisely how it happened, or when it happened. But somehow, over time, through all the mimicry and motion it happened. And the good news of the gospel this morning, is that it can happen here. And it can happen now.

Maybe you’re here today, and you feel like your life is in pieces. You’re not sure where to step. Familiar sights are obscured. Let me encourage you that a foundation remains. And we will do what the church of Jesus exists to do: Call out to you, and invite you to join us as we seek to follow Jesus. We’ll walk the way he walked and move the way he moved, until we look out our windows one day and the world itself looks very different.

So hear the call to you this morning, cutting through all the other noise: “Follow me, and you will never be the same. Follow me, and you will become more than you ever imagined you could be.”

____________________

1. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus

Matthew 3:13-17

Church is not so much a place to which we come, as a place from which we go. The window above the sanctuary entry of First Baptist Church reminds us that just as we enter into this place, light shining in on us, we are sent back out by the same way – the entrance is also an exit – so when our service of worship is over, our service and our worship begin in the wide world.

And as we go, we share together in a benediction. Some Sundays it probably feels like simply a worshipful way of saying “Exit”; sometimes it’s our cue to gather our things like we’re anticipating the bell at the close of Algebra class, but other times it’s much more. From the Latin words bene (well or good) and dicere (to speak) – a benediction is an opportunity to speak good things, to vocalize and experience the blessing of God. It’s a wide, open-eyed moment. Looking at one another. And sharing with one another words of the memory, blessing, and hope that we know through the love of Creator, Christ, and Spirit one. Usually a minister speaks the words, but we all share in the blessing – repeating it in our souls, and in our very lives as we live as those who believe.

I once worked with a pastor who, as my supervisor, insisted that I practice a benediction. One day he asked me to follow him into the empty sanctuary and he sat on the front row and said, “Stand up and show me a benediction.” I felt ridiculous. What sort of silly stunt was this? But still I began, awkwardly, extending my forearms and holding my hands at shoulder height. Then like an instructor to a student he stopped me abruptly and said, “No, not like that. Not a hesitant benediction. Not with your elbows bent. Extend your arms. Open your hands. Project your voice. Don’t look down at notes, look people in the eyes. You’re sending them out. It’s as audacious and important as anything you’ll do.”

These years later, I think I understand – as a pastor – as a church – I’m not sure there’s anything we do that is any more bold and important than to speak a benediction. That is, I’m not sure there’s anything we do that is any more bold and important than to send people out into the world to live as those who know Jesus Christ.

At some point I began to repeat a similar benediction each week: “As we go, remember who we are. We are sons and daughters of God. We are friends and followers of Jesus Christ. And through the power of the Spirit, the love of God is at loose in the world through our very lives.” For the next three Sundays, we’re going to consider this blessing we share – what it says about who we are and who we’ve been and who we can yet be… beloved of God, followers of Christ, loose in the world…

If there is but one word that echoes in our souls, let it be this one: beloved.

It’s the word that tells us that the God who has been acting throughout history – the God who has delivered people from bondage, and helped people cross on dry land, and made tables in the wilderness of our world, and set about the broad work of redemption of ALL, is also the one who has acted in an intimate way in your life.

Jesus learned the word early in his life; the first time we see him as an adult, in fact, he’s standing up to his waist in the Jordan River with John the Baptist. John baptizes Jesus, then the wind blows, the skies part, and a voice comes: “This is my beloved son.”

It would become the source of all that was to follow. Or as Henri Nouwen has written the word Jesus heard at his baptism became like a golden string that Jesus followed for the rest of His life.¹

It became the echoing, anchoring word that carried him through all that was yet ahead, for just as soon as he comes up from the water – before his hair is even dry – the Spirit moves him out into the wilderness – a signal that his life would be made on the edges of the world.

And there he had to decide what it meant for him to be who he was called to be. And I think it was in the echo of that word – beloved – that he was able to press through the wilderness – with all of the voices in his head, the burdens he carried, the challenges he anticipated, he had this anchoring word, beloved…

And so the word appears again much later when Jesus stood in another hard place. The cross loomed before him. There would be misunderstanding and suffering and death. And on the Mount of Transfiguration Peter, James and John heard a voice — the voice that spoke to Jesus a second time, saying, “This is my beloved son…” In the light of that word, Jesus was able to leave the mountain for the valley and the hard days ahead and finally even death.

But more than an identity he claimed for himself, it became the great theme of his life and action in this world.

Standing in the Jordan, dripping wet, he looks out and can identify with a whole Judean countryside, as Kathleen Norris has written, this scene is not only the site of identity formation for Jesus, but it is, she writes, where we see what God intends for all of us to be.

All of us gathered out there in all our brokenness, all of us at times feeling out on the edges of God’s activity in this world, all of us hearing so many voices telling us who we are, and sometimes screaming those lies to one another.

And with that word in his ears, Jesus was able to say to all of us: you are daughters and sons of God… God is with you…you don’t have to go somewhere else…the kingdom is near to you.

And, of course, it doesn’t stop there. Long after his hair is dry, Jesus took that word he learned in the water and passed it around, giving it away to those he came in contact with:

disciples casting their nets, lepers whose hope for restoration had long faded, people who had believed all kinds of stories about themselves and their limitations, their sin, their brokenness.

And they loved him, because his word, became their word. His word, becomes our word.

You may have read Toni Morrison’s beautiful novel entitled, Beloved. Her story dates back to those awful slavery days in Ohio. A black slave-mother had lost her two-year-old child and is utterly devastated. The man who carved tombstones tells her that he will carve a tombstone for her, if she can come up with a name in ten minutes. But he says she can only use seven letters because the stone is so small. She wanted to use those beautiful words the preacher had used at the funeral: “Dearly Beloved,” he said over and over, but they were too long. And so she asked the man, “Could we use the word ‘beloved’?” And so the man thought, “B-E-L-O-V-E-D.” And he carved those letters on that tombstone.

What would it mean for us to carve those letters into our lives, to hear that word in the hovering spirit above the waters and the wilderness of our world?

That’s what these whom we have called saints must have heard, and All Saints Day is a way of recalling that the word echoes for them still… they exist, still, in the love of God… and we recall how we have heard this word and remembered this love more clearly because of them.

I heard this word whispered from those earliest moments in church – it’s one of the reasons I’m so grateful to have my family in church, because I know that my children are hearing it even now. And among the many who pronounced it for me, I’ve been thinking recently of one saints of my childhood church, Mrs. Jean Decker, who taught Sunday School, and did the snacks at VBS, and always asked me about my life when I was home. The summer before my senior year of college, my home church has made the decision to license me for ministry – a way of blessing me as I looked toward seminary – something, I confess, I was doing mostly because my pastor father felt it was a good idea.

So I arranged to be home one Sunday early that summer, and milling about the sanctuary I spotted Mrs. Decker in the back. I had heard about her recent health struggles, and noticed she now used a walker to aid her mobility. As we spoke she said, “I haven’t been here in 6 months, but I wasn’t going to miss the chance to pray for you today.”

And later in the service I was invited down front. As the congregation shared a prayer, members were invited to surround me in prayer… family, friends, youth ministers, choir leaders came… and from the back, Mrs. Decker came forward deliberately… with one hand she balanced and with the other she extended her arm and placed it on my shoulder… I don’t remember the prayer, but I know I heard the echo: “beloved.”

The word spoken to Jesus becomes our word, and so as the church of Christ continues after his death, this word “beloved” starts to be passed around in Christian writing to us, we who have heard and believed all kinds of words…

“You’re no good. You’re ugly. You’re worthless. You’ll never amount to anything. You’re lazy. You’re nobody. You’ve made too many mistakes. You’ve neglected too many responsibilities.” And some of us have fought against these words all our lives.

But somehow above the waters of our lives this word hovers.

The heavens open for us, this word spoken to Jesus of the love and pleasure and delight of God also echoes in God’s promises to us, that the God who called the name of Jesus speaks our name…beloved.

And maybe it might do for us the thing that it did for Jesus. It will become our beginning, that will not and can not be undone. It will send us out into the unknowns of these days ahead knowing that whatever comes, we will be anchored by a word: We are beloved.

And we can hear it now, and maybe we can even hear it here.

I mentioned Henri Nouwen earlier, who has written extensively about this theme: beloved. After a successful career as a seminary professor and best-selling author, Nouwen, a Roman Catholic priest, made a dramatic life change.  Leaving the academic world behind, he went to work as a chaplain at the L’Arche Daybreak community in Toronto – we have come to know the L’Arche communities more through our growing friendship with Peacehaven Farm – mentally and physically disabled people live in community with those of normal abilities.

Henri describes how, one day, a disabled community member named Janet came up and asked him for a blessing. Henri was distracted by other things, so he quickly traced the sign of the cross on her forehead.
“No,” protested Janet. “I want a real blessing!”
Henri understood, then, how he had been insensitive to her need.  He promised that, at the next communion service, he would have a special blessing for her.

At the end of the prayer service, about thirty people were sitting in a circle on the floor.  Henri announced, “Janet has asked me for a special blessing.”
He didn’t quite know what she was seeking from him, but her next move left no doubt.  She walked up to him and wrapped her arms around him.  As he embraced her in return, her slight form was almost covered by the folds of the white robe he wore while leading worship.

As they held each other, Henri said “Janet, I want you to know that you are God’s Beloved Daughter. You are precious in God’s eyes. Your beautiful smile, your kindness to the people in your house, and all the good things you do show what a beautiful human being you are. I know you feel a little low these days and that there is some sadness in your heart, but I want you to remember who you are: a very special person, deeply loved by God and all the people who are here with you.”

Janet raised her head and looked at him.  Her beaming smile told him that she had truly understood and received the blessing.

What happened next was unexpected.  As Janet returned to her place, another woman raised her hand.  She, too, wanted a blessing. She stood up and embraced Henri, too, laying her face against his chest.  After that, a great many more of the disabled members of the community took their turn, coming up for the same sort of blessing.
For Henri, the most touching moment was when one of the assistants, a twenty-four-year-old able-bodied college student, raised his hand and asked, “And what about me?” John was a big, burly young man, an athlete.  Henri did the same with him, wrapping his arms around him and saying, “John, it is so good that you are here. You are God’s Beloved Son…”

John looked back with tears in his eyes and simply said, “Thank you, thank you very much.”

All of us need to remember who we are, and our world is full of people who might have forgotten, or never heard it spoken before.

So as we go, let’s be the ones to tell them… not with weak arms or quiet voices… but as loudly and boldly as we can.

Mark 9.1-8

Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

 Holy mountains.  The Mount of the Transfiguration is among several holy mountains that are part of the landscape of today’s Middle East, in particular Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

But there are other mountains in other parts of the world that are reckoned by other peoples to be holy . . .

It rises 1,142 feet above the flat desert floor, with a circumference of nearly six miles.  It is the largest monolithic mountain in the world.  That means it is constituted of one single, undivided rock.  As with an iceberg, geologists calculate that nine-tenths of this monolith’s mass lie below the red desert sands.

I’m speaking of Ayers Rock, the iconic stone mountain that stands at the very center of the continent of Australia.  The colonizing British of the late 19^th Century named it for an early provincial official, but the current Australian government encourages people to honor the mountain’s Aboriginal name, which is Uluru.

The minority Aborigines are the native Australians.  Anthropologists suppose they have been present on the continent for 40 thousand years.  Their religion has been largely animistic, meaning they have looked for answers to life’s deepest questions in the plants, animals and even inanimate objects that form their environment.

Aboriginal tribes have identified forms and figures on the face of their holy mountain which remind them of various birds, reptiles and other creatures which have been thought to possess a spiritual essence and to relate a narrative of creation they call Dreamtime.  Even the gigantic rock itself is believed to have a soul.

That’s why the Aborigines have been unwilling to climb Uluru and to walk on its flat top.  They don’t want to risk transgressing or treading upon the holy.  In consideration of these peoples who are now respected as the “traditional owners” of the land, the Australian government officially discourages hikers and backpackers from going up the mountain.  Nobody is forbidden, but warning signs are everywhere.

I thought how different our Christian and Jewish understandings are, when it comes to mountains.  In our traditions, mountains are not holy in and of themselves.  They are made holy because of something that happened there.  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills—from whence cometh my help,” sang the Psalmist.  “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121.1-2).

Thus it was that that One you and I recognize to be the Lord did not place warning signs at the foot of the holy mountain in our text today.  Rather he called his closest disciples together and personally guided them aloft.

The apparent reason for the journey was to clarify the identity of the rabbi these men had been following for months.  We can look back several chapters preceding Mark 9 and readily observe the disciples’ increasing confusion about their master—who he was, why he shielded his true identity, what was the point of his seemingly selective and occasional miracle-working.

Many have supposed that the ultimate clarification appeared at the end of Chapter 8, where the teacher conducted his pupils to the far north of the country, to a place known as Caesarea-Philippi.  “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asked along the way.  The disciples offered several suggestions.  Then Jesus made it personal: “But who do you say that I am?” (vv. 27, 29).

We can imagine that the impulsive disciple Peter first hesitated, and then gulped, before finally proposing, “You are the Christ [the Messiah]!”  Peter got it right, of course, but quickly fell from favor when Jesus spoke of a personal future involving not messianic conquest, but rather suffering and death.  Mark records that the disciple “rebuked” his Lord, while Jesus’s response to him was harsher: “Get behind me, Satan!” (vv. 32, 33).

So what exactly was everybody to make of this teacher, whose parables, examples and figures of speech were so hard to get one’s head around?  This healer, who opened the eyes and ears of the blind and deaf, but didn’t want anybody to talk about it?  This worker of signs and wonders, who fed vast hordes, but who insisted that the take-away was something far deeper and longer-lasting than full stomachs?

Who was this mysterious, enigmatic person?  In the minds of the disciples, it must have been high time to clear the matter up.  They had not long to wait.  For in only a few days they came to the holy Mount of the Transfiguration.

Mark called it a high mountain apart.  The traditional site is Tabor, a perfectly bowl-shaped prominence standing a few miles west of the Sea of Galilee.  At fewer than 2,000 feet, it seems no one would have called it a “high mountain”—until we recall that the word “mountain” in the New Testament refers to any sort of elevation in the topography.

For a certainty Mt. Tabor is “a mountain apart.”  I will long remember my first ride up in an Arab taxi.  The driver wowed his nervous passengers by taking the dozen or more hairpin curves at excessive speed, shouting “Ooooo! . . . Ahhhh!” at every turn.  (Thankfully, we drew a different driver for the trip back down.)

Some of you have been there.  The crest of the mountain feels like a different world.  There’s room for an Orthodox basilica and a small monastery, linked by a pleasant, shady avenue.  The view from the top is stunning and evocative—the Valley of Jezreel to the south, the Sea of Galilee to the east, Nazareth to the north, and Mt. Carmel and the Mediterranean to the west.

Those are all busy places, but none of their hubbub reaches the top of the mountain.  None of the cacophony that Jesus would encounter when he descended into the valley later that day.  Only quiet serenity.  Truly “a mountain apart.”

What happened there was unique and extraordinary.  We read that Jesus went apart from Peter and James and John and “was transfigured before them.”  Transfiguration is the same as our word metamorphosis: it refers to a change in appearance.  The best description Mark could produce was the look of Jesus’s robes, which were “dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.”

The color white suggests high holiness.  (That is why we wear white stoles over our own robes to mark high, holy days in the church—Christmas, Easter, weddings and funerals.”)

These disciples already had some sense of their teacher’s holiness.  Early in Jesus’s ministry (Mark 1.24) they recalled at the Capernaum synagogue “a man with an unclean spirit.”  The demon-possessed man cried out, “I know who you are—the holy one of God!”  What the disciples lacked was a sense of their teacher’s absolute distinctiveness—the singularity which would set him apart from all other means and measures.

Presently there appeared alongside Jesus two others, whom the disciples somehow recognized as Moses and Elijah.  Moses the Lawgiver had descended another mountain—Mt. Sinai—some 1,300 years earlier, with the commandments of Yahweh in his hands.  These became the moral and ethical standards by which God’s people would henceforth be identified.

The Prophet Elijah, on the other hand, represented all of the Old Testament’s prophets, who stood against principality and power and insisted that a holy people must go forth in righteousness and make their nation a holy place.

The text describes these two figures as real, living persons, come from another place, translated from another dimension.  As such, they proceeded to converse with the living person of Jesus.  As to their subject matter, the gospel writer Luke—ever a stickler for details—reported that they spoke of Jesus’s “departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9.7).

Peter, no doubt smitten by the contrast between that and what he had always assumed, was left to stutter.  It was a very revealing stutter: “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here.  Let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

“Tabernacles” or “booths” is the word Peter chose.  Three identical booths to acknowledge the equal eminence of the three persons who would inhabit them.  The Lord (in Peter’s view) had risen to the level of the Law and the Prophets.  But was this a compliment?

Now enter the voice of God the Father, the great and final Clarifier of every man’s confusion, who was having none of this.  Speaking as he had once spoken to Moses, from the interior of a cloud, the Lord God declared, with solemnity and finality, “This is my Son, the Beloved.  Listen to him!”

We read from the Book of Romans (10.17 nkjv), “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”  But we see that not everybody gets it.  Not everybody listens to the voice of God.  Some have to be shown.

And so with Peter and James and John.  “Suddenly, when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.”  Only Jesus.

All through their lives, they had done as well as fishermen might—these three.  They had tried to keep the commandments, to pray in the synagogue, to study the Torah.  They had tried to mind their families, their vocation, their villages, making them safe, secure and livable places in a difficult world.  They had tried to live right, and make the right decisions, when confronted with difficult choices.

Yet doubtless one thing always haunted them and oppressed them.  Jesus himself said it as well as any Old Testament prophet.  When he had first delivered the memorable Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said this: “Unless your [right-living] exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Before long these disciples would once again be asking, where is there hope?  What can save us?  And Jesus would remind them, “With people it is impossible, but not with God.  For all things are possible with God” (Mark 10.26-27 nasb).

How vital to our purpose in the world it is to get that!  How vital to get that word out!  For that is the best news the human ear will ever hear.  With people salvation is impossible, but not with God.  With people solutions may seem non-existent.  But not with God.

There is much in life that we can get right, and much good that we can and should perform.  But we are called to remember that our faith and our future will never rest upon what we may accomplish, but instead upon what has already been accomplished in our behalf, and the world’s behalf.

Moses and Elijah will always matter.  Doing right, being good, and making the best choices will always be our human responsibility before the one human who fulfilled all righteousness.  But that can never be the core of our message and our mission to a humanity that will never make the grade.

“For I handed on to you,” Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, “. . . I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures . . .” (1 Cor. 15.3-4 nrsv).

First importance.  In our outreach to people—poor, needy, confused, sinful people—what remains of first importance?  At day’s end, we recognize that the problem isn’t that our world is askew—it always has been.  The problem isn’t that we can’t get our act together and get everything right—we never will.

The problem is that people are sinners.  “All have sinned and come short . . .” (Romans 3.23).  Time after time, we have chosen to go our own way and live out of harmony with the One who created us.  But there is a fix for that.  What remains for us now is to go forth courageously, and proclaim the fix: Jesus, and only Jesus.

Luke 18:9-14

They used to call me “winner.”

Now understand, this was not meant as a compliment. My college roommates and friends called me “winner” with a great deal of sarcasm, poking fun at me because they knew that whatever the contest – whether intramural flag football, ping pong in the house, setting the curve on a test, or even things that were actually no contest at all – I wanted to win. I think I’ve managed this compulsion over the years, but it’s a classic case of what Harvard Business Review has termed the “high need for achievement personality.” I can’t tell you how much I wanted to be a Cubs fan last night.

I remember when I realized that this competitive trait so present in me was not innate for my first-born son. Like a few years ago when we were at the train table building tracks for his favorite engines with imagination running wild when I grabbed two of the trains and said, “Okay buddy, let’s have these two race…” And he sort of cocked his head, puzzled, and took them from my hands, “No, they go down the track together.”

I admit, I felt defeated. Just as I did when trains gave way to superheroes and a 3-yr-old Jack was running around with his slightly older buddy, Hudson, soaring across the room when Jack said, “We’re playing superheroes. Hudson’s Batman and I’m Robin!” And Jenny held me back as internally I said, “Son, if anybody is Batman it’s you.”

But at some point something changed, as my now 6-yr-old seems to have caught up – or been caught up, rather, in our achievement-driven, image conscious, competitive virtue world. And he can’t stop asking me about the latest football scores. Who’s better? Who’s the best? “Daddy, who’s going to win?” he asks.

He now paces himself against classmate and friends – always aware of who’s the fastest and the strongest. And on the soccer field on Saturdays, he and the rest of the Under-7 boys almost laugh out loud at us when we coaches try to tell them, “Guys, we’re not keeping score.” Because nearly everything else we’ve told them and shown them says otherwise.

We all absorb it – this rehearsed, if not innate, competitive pattern of dividing our world sharply into poles and neat dichotomies. Either/Or. Winner/Loser. Right/wrong.

Just as we do in this parable. Once again, Jesus is using stock characters to tell us something about the kingdom of God, and in this case the two figures could not seem more divided. It’s a regular split screen. “Daddy, who’s going to win?” Who’s better? Who’s going to get it right? The Pharisee or the tax collector?

But at first they’re not divided at all. They’re in the same frame. The parable starts simply with two men going up to the temple to pray. This was a common scene and a familiar path that others had walked before them and with them and still others would follow after them. Two men going up to the temple. You always go up to the temple and down from it. Up is the direction you travel for praise and prayer and offering, and down is the road that returns you to life and labor. To hear that two men are going up, without any titles or markers of identity, you could almost imagine that they were traveling together – heading to the house of God in a show of unity.

But then Jesus tells us who the two men are: one a Pharisee and one a tax-collector. And now the screen splits. There’s a clear line down the middle. The matchup takes shape between two sharply delineated figures – people we know, or at least think we know. And as they speak, they begin to confirm our assumptions about them.

The Pharisee speaks first. We’d expect as much from him as someone who knows how to pray, and what to say. He is religiously devout. A leader among the Jews and a guide for those seeking to follow God’s law, he tries to lead a blameless, righteous life. He is careful in his observance, generous with his money – and as we hear him pray, we learn he’s not afraid to tell God all about it. His prayer is a soliloquy, outlining his works of goodness. “Whoever humbles himself will be exalted,” Jesus will say after the story, and if you asked this Pharisee could surely tell you that his best trait was his humility.

In contrast is a tax collector. Jesus describes him “standing far off.” Why? We’re not sure, but it might have something to do with how despised he was by most people. More than misunderstood, tax collectors were on the wrong side religiously, politically, and economically. It was his job to call in what was owed to the empire. He was an instrument of an ultimately oppressive system that gauged the poor and benefitted the wealthy, and filled his pockets along the way any time he wanted to collect over and above what was owed. When we hear him introduced, knowing Jesus as we do, we recognize him as one of those people that Jesus liked to eat with. He’s someone we might want to identify with, thinking that we, too, ought to be at those meals with Jesus and wanting Jesus to say to us, “I’m coming to your house today.” But we can only see that in hindsight. This was not some publican with a heart of gold. He was despised – so lowly he won’t even raise his head toward heaven.

“Thank God I’m not like that person,” the Pharisee says with the victorious tone that winners always assume. Thank God I’m better – on the right side of the temple, the correct side of the screen, exalted and justified unlike this other.

But as we observe these two, we begin to notice how smug and sanctimonious the Pharisee appears next to the insecure and timid tax collector. The saintly Pharisee parades to the temple as though he’s carrying God with him, while the sinful tax collector keeps a physical distance, as if feeling very far from the work of God in the world. The religiously devout man stands up and puffs out his chest, while the tax collector looks down and beats his breast. The Pharisee prays loudly about his own virtues, while the tax collector can barely get the words out.

“Have mercy on me, a sinner” the tax collector says, while the Pharisee’s words are, “Thank God I’m not like that person.”

I admit, I think I know the Pharisees words the best. “Thank God I’m not like them.” Have you heard anything like that recently?

We find ourselves in a divided season of political campaigns. It visits us every two to four years – some of this division over issues of great importance, and differing ways of seeing the world, discordant ways of understanding solutions. Such a division is a natural, even laudable part of democracy. But this year seems to many of us to be as bitter as ever. Our self righteousness and moral superiority are on display. Our division and conflict are acted out on screens in living rooms and basements in ads and debates, where so many statements seem to amount to “Thank God I’m not like them.”

I guess most campaigns are built on such superiority and self-righteousness. Imagine a campaign whose slogan amounted to “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” No candidate would approve. So the speech grows more and more brash, and so do we along with it, becoming as callous, angry, divided, and unable to see as any candidate for office, and all the while never asking where it comes from or who benefits from it.

“Daddy, who’s going to win?” Well some people will. And so some of us will feel victorious, too. We’ll have the chance to justify and exalt – separating our world once more into winners and losers, either/or, sharp dichotomies and a clear line down the middle, even among some people who go up to the house of God together to pray.

It’s what we do with this parable. We read along with Jesus and ultimately find the fault in the flaunting Pharisee. We side with the virtuous tax collector, setting aside his injustice in order to be with the one exalted. We distance ourselves from the Pharisee – his self-righteousness, his self-serving campaign, his puffed up sense of self, and his assumption that he’s holding the high ground in the temple all on his own.

And somewhere as we’re walking away from him, well, it just slips out, “Thank God I’m not like him.” Which is the phrase that makes us exactly like him.

This is the parable where Jesus makes us Pharisees. “Thank God I’m not like the tax collector,” the Pharisee says, prompting all of us to say, “Thank God I’m not like the Pharisee.” It happens without us realizing it, but the moment we choose the tax collector’s side in the story is the moment we settle again into either/or, winner/loser, assuming that sharply divided way of seeing the world that characterized the self-righteous Pharisee. We create the same division and assume the same distance this Pharisee puts between himself and another child of God. We stand alone, seeing only the separation, which in the ancient world, is exactly what the empire would have wanted. If people separate themselves, they’re easier to persuade, and easier to control.

How often do we stand apart from others when we pray? How divided are we from the realization that we are all in need, all sinners, all belong to God? God, be merciful to us all, sinners.

My friend Roger is one of the dearest men of faith I’ve known. The word “saint” is one I use sparingly, but I will use it for this man who is a father figure to his nephew, a faithful and quiet servant of his church, a devoted Bible Study leader to the handful of men who show up to his apartment every Monday night, and a friend and encourager who always signed emails, “You are stuck with my love.”

In one such email, he once told me about his own sense of call. Part of “Saint Roger’s” devotion comes from a call to ministry he felt as a young man growing up in the Midwest. Ultimately he was discouraged from this path by his Christian college and religious community because it came to be known that he was a gay man. This was the 1980s, and Roger experienced painful reactions and some separation from his church. But amidst that he held on to his faith in a loving God and his deep sense of call to do the will of God. He began taking classes at a small seminary a few hours from his hometown, and began looking for ways he could serve people who might be trying to hang on to their faith in the midst of challenges. He kept coming closer to people from whom others stood at a distance, because he had been one of those people himself.

Roger ended up serving as a Chaplain at a small jail in Illinois, leading Bible Studies, providing pastoral counseling to inmates and families, and leading worship services each week. He told me he labored at first trying to think of topics and sermons that would be helpful to these inmates. What could he, a young man, share with these so hardened by life? Roger wrote, “It took me a long time to figure it out, but I ultimately realized that the inmates and I needed the same help. The same message.” The saint and the prisoner needed the same prayer. And in his note to me Roger summed that message up with the phrase, “Lord, have mercy on me.”

What if as we came up to the house of God, we shared together this prayer, and with it a sense of our common frailty, or ability to miss the mark? What if we prayed a prayer that helped us see that we’re all sinners who yet belong to God? What might happen when we go back down into our lives?

Well what happens when these two men – tax collector and Pharisee – go down from the house of God? The parable says, “The tax collector went down to his home justified rather than the other.” Those we have separated so sharply in the temple are seemingly separated as they leave it – winner/loser, either/or.

Then again, let’s look more closely at the phrase “rather than.” The parable says, “The tax collector went down to his home justified rather than the other…” “Rather than” is from a Greek phrase that can be translated “rather than” or “instead of” if we so choose. But in most cases throughout ancient literature, it’s translated “alongside of.” (1)

“The tax collector went down to his home justified alongside of the Pharisee.”

Why don’t we see that immediately? Why don’t we choose to translate the passage that way? Well, Luke says that Jesus is telling this parable to people who thought they were righteous. Which turns out to be me. It turns out to be us, gathered together with the other pharisees, always looking to divide things up. Meanwhile, Jesus is always forgiving, reconciling and uniting us until the kingdom comes and all are alongside.

I wonder how often we see either/or where Christ sees side by side.

If there’s any hope to be more like Christ, it might start here and now, by going up to a place of worship to gather together and pray. And if you wonder how to pray, take a cue from the tax collector this morning: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

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1. Thanks to Amy-Jill Levine for this insight in a lecture at Vanderbilt University, Spring 2006

Luke 18:1-8

I opened my mouth, and the words would not come.

Have you ever found yourself without words? A friend’s diagnosis, a loved one’s bad news, an accident or a loss. You open your mouth, but the words just won’t come. Or if they do come, they don’t reach very far. You’re left speechless; nothing to say.

I guess we all know this silence, in this world that confronts us all with our share of unspeakable moments.

How many sympathy notes have ended up in the recycling bin next to my desk? I start to write, and somewhere mid-sentence I trail off into platitudes or preacher talk and the words just drop off the page. I have to shake the pen as even the ink seems to resist being wasted on cliché.

When we do form words with our lips or bring them to the page, we fear saying or writing the wrong thing, failing to validate the pain and suffering or magnitude of a situation with something that feels simplistic or dismissive or trite.

I’ll never forget the pain expressed by an older gentleman in my church in Nashville. He was a big, burly, and proudly irreverent man who in his 70s could still remember the words of a hospital chaplain 40 years earlier, when his daughter was in critical condition. The chaplain came to the room and said something about heaven sometimes needing angels and a word about the will of God – words that felt so out of place that they caused this nervous young father to erupt and pin the chaplain to the wall in anger, daring him to say anything like that again.

Well, I don’t want to be pinned. I don’t want to say the wrong thing. The empty thing. It’s much easier – much safer, it turns out – to say nothing.

Maybe that’s why the phrase “No Words,” has so much contemporary usage, especially on social media. “No words” we write or hashtag in the midst of the latest news. No words in the face of injustice. No words when we’re appalled at violent action or violent speech. No words for the scope of suffering from our neighbors globally and here in our own state amidst disaster and flood. In times of crisis, our words might be the first things to go. No words.

The theologian John Pilch has pointed out that the Hebrew word for “widow,” like the widow in our parable this morning, means a person with no words. It literally means “silent one,” or “one unable to speak.” (1) The widow knew what it was to be without words, though for reasons different than many of us. In this ancient Mediterranean world, men played the public role, and without a man in her life, a widow stood pinned with her back against the wall. Just consider the injustices widows faced in the Hebrew Scriptures that Jesus read. Tamar was promised a husband but Judah refused by dragging his feet, leaving Tamar without the protection of marriage and children. The widow of Zeraphath faced starvation. Naomi, the mother-in-law of Ruth, was experiencing hunger and loneliness.

“The Widow and the Judge” by Nelly Bube

Being widowed could leave one without property, impoverished, and vulnerable to the whims of a male relative or an unjust system. Over and over again, the Old Testament implores the people of God to take care of the widows. The widow was an archetype for those marginalized and vulnerable. This was especially when up against a judge.

In ancient Israel, the duty of a judge was to maintain peace and order in the community. There were no juries, so a judge was trusted to mediate fairly and impartially. But the judge in the parable could care less about either of those criteria, just has he could care less for any external standard. “He neither feared God nor had respect for people,” Jesus says. This judge has no heart for the cause of justice. He arrogantly and arbitrarily decides the cases of the people who come before him.

“No words” the judge had said to this widow as the system and circumstances drowned her out. Maybe she was the victim of a payday lending scheme, or maybe unjustly tethered to her late husband’s debtors, maybe someone owed her promised wages; no matter, the judge keeps refusing, “there’s nothing you can say.”

But she keeps coming. She’s un-phased by the judge’s reputation, or the height of his desk or the strength of his door or all the things that seem to form a blockade to what is true and right. She keeps coming, despite all in this judge and in her society that seems bent on her defeat.

In JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the elves admit that they’re losing their forest lands. But they keep trying. Keep resisting. They describe their struggle as “fighting the long defeat.” Tolkien is probably the source of a comment made by Paul Farmer, who has fought a “losing battle” for health care for the poor, particularly in the impoverished nation of Haiti where even in recent weeks we see further evidence of the disasters of poverty and defeat once more. In Tracy Kidder’s biography of Farmer called Mountains Beyond Mountains, Farmer says, “I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. No… I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory… We want to be on the winning team, but even if we lose we will not turn our backs on the losers, it’s not worth it. So we fight the long defeat.” (2)

No matter the defeat, the widow keeps coming. No matter the efforts to silence her, she keeps speaking those words of truth. “Grant me justice,” this seemingly voiceless woman keeps saying. She persists, she continues, she beats on the door, she grabs the judge by the robe and shakes him into consciousness of her. There are all kinds of ways we might describe her words: resolved, determined, words of advocacy, strength, and justice, but at the very first, I believe they are words of hope.

In a crisis, our words are the first thing to go. But our hope is the last.

Without hope, there can be no words. Our sentences trail off. Our efforts tire. Without hope we can’t keep coming back to the judge day after day.

This is not simple optimism, which descends into the sentimental. Optimism tells us that the way things are is not so bad. But hope refuses to settle for the way things are, telling us that the way things are is not the way things must always be, or will always be. Hope tells us that the disaster of a flood for the most vulnerable is not the way it must be, that the crisis of racism and division is not all we can imagine for this world, that violence or abuse or loss does not have to be passed over or normalized, and that the suffering of the present is not all we can expect in the future of God’s kingdom.

Optimism would tell this widow to go home, listen to the judge, accept his ruling, and find the good that still exists in her life – sit down at her table, pour herself a glass half-full of tea and add plenty of saccharin.

Hope tells her that the unjust judge and the system he represents do not have the last word.

For hope is rooted in the God we know in Jesus Christ, who suffered and died to know our deepest sufferings, our greatest crises, and our ongoing vulnerability, but returned and in his resurrection shared the ultimate words of hope, that the worst thing is not the only thing. It’s not the last thing. Not for him, not for us, not for this widow. (3)

“She keeps coming,” the judge says. Hope is what makes her persistence possible. And finally the judge says, “I will grant her justice…”

If that’s true of this hyperbolic, disgraceful, unjust judge listening to a widow, how much more is it true of a loving God, who wants none of us rendered voiceless? In the gospel of Luke, this parable calls us to be persistent in our prayers, and even more, relentless in our hope. It calls us to be like this widow, who even in her desperation with so much overpowering her and causing her words to catch in her throat, continues to give voice to her deepest longing, believing she will be heard.

Prayer isn’t always so arduous. Sometimes it’s grace at a mealtime, or at the bedside of a child or grandchild recounting God’s gifts in your day. But sometimes those same hands you once learned to fold neatly and quietly in prayer are reaching, grasping for anything, or knocking at the door. Like at a community meeting before a march some years ago – as members of the black community organized against injustice in their society, and one older African American preacher read this parable from the pulpit and then said, “Until you have stood for years knocking at a locked door, with your knuckles bleeding, you do not really know what prayer is.” (4)

Sometimes we feel we knock so long that we just stop altogether.

Frederick Buechner is a Presbyterian minister and one of my favorite authors, whose memoir called, The Eyes of the Heart, includes many powerful stories, including a poignant description of his brother’s final days.

It was on July 11, 1988 the day Buechner turned seventy-two that his brother called him to say that he had been told he had incurable cancer of virtually everything and didn’t intend to be around for more than two weeks more if he could possibly help it. He then added, ‘By the way, Freddie, Happy Birthday’ Fred told him that he loved him as much as he had ever loved anybody in his whole life… Fred said he had a feeling they had not seen the last of each other, and his brother made a soft, descending ‘Ah-h-h’ sound as a way to thank him for saying it. Maybe to thank him for believing it.

Buechner said his brother never went to church except once in a while to hear him preach and he told Fred he didn’t want a funeral. But he did ask Fred to write a prayer for him that he could use in these final days. The prayer read, “Dear Lord, bring me through darkness into light. Bring me through pain into peace. Bring me through death into life. Be with me wherever I go, and with everyone I love. In Christ’s name I ask it. Amen.”

Buechner would learn later, from his brother’s son-in-law, that the prayer he wrote for his brother had been on the table beside him when he died.

Do you ever feel like a widow in your prayers? Which is to say, do you ever feel like one unable to speak? Like you need someone to form the words for you? You’ve knocked at the door, or you’ve grabbed God by both lapels, and your voice has just become hoarse from the shouting.

If you’ve ever been that person with no words, I hope you can remember this widow, who though so many would render her speechless and hopeless, she still found the words to speak. Which is to say, she found the hope that the worst thing she had known was not the last.

Can you form such words today? If not, can someone else form them for you?

I opened my mouth but the words would not come – the prayers would not come, I mean. And when I prayed, it was if the words weren’t reaching, weren’t rising any higher than the ceiling.

Some of you know that yesterday was a national day of awareness for pregnancy loss and infertility – and even as we place another rose on our altar celebrating a new baby born this week, we also make space for all those who have experienced such grief.

Jenny and I have, and it was the most voiceless, speechless time in my life of faith. No words, when your expectation that all will go smoothly doesn’t turn out; we had been married for 6 years, we wanted a baby so we’d have one, right? No words, when you experience the waiting and the wondering. And there were definitely no words the day when we lost a pregnancy at around 10 weeks. I remember everything about that day: where we parked at the clinic, what we were wearing, the ultrasound technician, and the catch in her throat as she shared the hard news.

Jenny and I gathered ourselves, and in our silence began to walk the institutional halls, trying to compose ourselves and not really knowing where to go from there. Then out of a side hall appeared the woman who had been our fertility specialist for the last 6 months. We didn’t know she was there that day, but it was the only familiar face we had seen. All she had to do was look at our faces and she whisked us into this side room. There was little to say, but she stayed with us, gave us some water and tissues, and at some point Jenny formed the words, almost like a prayer, “You know, I just always assumed we would have a lot of children.” And the specialist said, and I’ll never forget it, “Sweetheart, that can still happen.”

You know amidst the platitudes and prayers that wouldn’t seem to reach in those days, it was those words of a nurse practitioner that have remained with me. I don’t know everything about how God works in the world, or how God answers our prayers, but I do believe God is always working to inspire us to retain our hope in the midst of the unimaginable. And I know this much, that I stood there just as overwhelmed and silent as I had ever been in my life, and someone else’s words became words of hope for me, helped me to begin to form words of my own, and helped me believe that the worst was not the last.

Maybe you have no words like that today. That’s okay. They can’t be forced or contrived. And they come for us all at different times. But if you do have them, say them. Say them as persistently and boldly as a widow who found her voice before the bench of an unjust judge. Because I promise you someone needs to hear them, someone needs to believe them, and the Kingdom of God is made up of words and widows just such as these.

1. In The Cultural World of Jesus, Year C
2. Cited in “Keep Praying and Don’t Give Up,” Journey with Jesus (October 20, 2013)
3. Owing to Frederick Buechner’s description of resurrection: “The worst is not the last.”
4. Story told by Fred Craddock

Luke 9:1-6

This suitcase went with me to Nicaragua on my immersion trip while I as at Wake Forest Divinity School.  As you can see this seems in opposition of the scripture that Steve Cothran just read for us.  We were there for ten days, I mean what is a girl to do- not take one extra change of clothes???  So instead I took clothes for all ten days, then plus some, and I think I even packed bread.  When I showed up at the airport that morning at 5am and met up with my cohort, it did not take long to notice that I had the biggest suitcase.  I do want it on record that each person on our ministry team used something from my suitcase as well as asked to use my suitcase to bring home their souvenirs.

We were doing the things in Nicaragua that Jesus commissioned his twelve; we were there to proclaim the kingdom of God and to help with the healing of those in the community who were sick.  The hospitality and generosity of the community with whom we stayed with was overwhelming.  I fell in love with the people, their spirit, and for my time there, I felt a part of their close knit community.  But I have a feeling God already knew that was going to happen.

Our six verses remind us that our mission is simple and held in God’s providence. Jesus’ directive is empowering, but more than that, before he sent the disciples,  remember they were up close and personal, they observed him healing (before this passage are four healing stories) and they listened so many times to him describe the Kingdom of God.  Although this morning we are not standing in front of Jesus, hearing the words with our own ears, WE are reading the stories, studying the word, and feeling the sense of the Holy Spirits’ leading.

I cannot help but notice that each time I read the text; I turn it upside down in my mind.  I keep reading from the bottom up, kind of like the literary trick, chiasmus, taking the concept or in this case, the good news of the text and repeating it in reverse order. Luke writes it in the order of proclamation, healing and hospitality, but in this direct and simple text and drawing from experiences, I have reversed it in my mind to hospitality, healing and proclamation.

So I am going to start at the bottom and read verses 3 through 5, Jesus says to them, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money—not even an extra tunic. 4 Whatever house you enter, stay there, and leave from there. 5 Wherever they do not welcome you, as you are leaving that town shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

So while in Nicaragua, we were totally dependent on the hospitality and generosity of our host.  There were no hotels, no restaurants, no grocery stores; the community was comprised of about two dozen, 2/3 room homes, a school house, and a church.  Our meals were prepared by the women of the community; we attended the graduation of four children, played numerous games of soccer in the school yard, and assisted our new friends as they put into place a community healthcare system.  Their gracious spirit helps me to better understand why Jesus would tell the disciples to take nothing.

I do not think he had in mind for them to pack lightly so that they could travel faster; although I have firsthand knowledge that big suitcases can slow you down, but travel lightly to learn to depend on God’s provision. These instructions are echoed in Matthew 6:  “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”

Taking nothing encouraged the disciples to depend on the people they served, to rely on the kindness of strangers.  This is a crucial lesson when you serve others.  It is hard for any human being to be humble when serving others; it is easy to unconsciously pat ourselves on the back for doing such a noble thing.  Jesus is preventing those serving to fall into a state of subtle superiority.

And we can’t skip over the words of encouragement that Jesus departs on them, “Wherever they do not welcome you.”  Jesus has been there and done that and knows that everyone is not welcoming, not all understand the message about the coming kingdom.

Just this past week, the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for his “resolute efforts” to end a 52-year war with the nation’s largest rebel group, one of the longest civil conflicts in modern times.  Notice the word “efforts,” Colombians last Sunday voted down the peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.  The Nobel committee said in a statement that they hoped the prize would encourage the 65-year -old Santos and “give him strength” to get a peace deal done. We all need encouragement to finish the race- my hope is that he will shake of the dust and continue his work.[i]

So we go, we go because our God is a sending God- God sent Abraham and Sarah to start a nation, sent Moses to free a nation, sent Elijah and Prophets to warn a nation, sent Ezra and Nehemiah to rebuild a nation and sent Esther to protect a nation.  God then sent His son as a child of the Nation. And then Jesus sent them out- the twelve disciples, then seventy-two; their mission turns out to be an extension of his own ministry… and then there is us, called to also be an extension of healing and proclaiming the Kingdom of God.[ii]

And for some go means to travel to Eastern Europe and Thailand, and for some go means to volunteer at the neighborhood school. One summer my sons Brad and Ryan had the opportunity to do missions in Puerto Rico. Ryan was not as confident in his call to go as I was in his call to go, so as he is boarding the plan, he teaches me through a theological discussion that GO is not a quantitative measurement.

On our walls are the names of those who go far and those who go close.

For this is simply how our God works, the way God has always worked in the world.  And it becomes more personal when Jesus commissions us.

The ministry of Jesus was both for the body and soul, and we hear it in the instructions to his disciples, verse 2 “and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal.” The church learns it obligation to minister to human hunger and needs in all its forms. Some churches and their programs today only focus on healing the body, and others only care about healing the spirit.  Jesus did both. He lay upon the twelve, over and over again in this short passage, preaching and healing- concern for one’s bodies and one’s souls.[iii]

Hunger of the body- the aching kind- a feeling familiar to some in this place.  The stomach aches from malnourishment, at the same time other illnesses crowd the pew; cancer, diabetes, depression, and it brings fear and worry with them.  We live in a county that one in five family’s lives in poverty, 2800 school aged children experience homelessness, and we are number one in food insecurity.  We live in a community that has pockets of neighborhoods that cannot easily reach the healthcare system.   These are real hurts. Yet we know that Jesus cared about one’s body.

We are provided with many examples of him demonstrating legitimate concern for the body: Jesus’ feeding the 5000 on a hillside, restoring sight to the blind, curing the lepers, and healing the lame.

General William Booth, a British Methodist preacher who founded the Salvation Army, was once blamed for offering food and meals to poor people instead of the simple gospel.  The old warrior replied back “It is impossible to comfort men’s hearts with the love of God when their feet are perishing with cold.”

We join hands with our ministry partners to help provide for the basic needs of our neighbors.  We feed hungry stomachs, we build and repair homes, we volunteer in our schools, and we help to make healthcare available to all who are sick.

Hunger comes in all forms, not just of the body, we know there are souls that are tired, neglected, and abused— souls experiencing spiritual warfare.  And we are called to be part of the healing. [iv]

I want to ask you to take a moment and look at your hands, I mean really look at your hands and reflect- reflect on how they have proclaimed the Kingdom of God.

What I am about to say is not a slam or critique my colleagues, but the best proclaiming/the best preaching that we all do for the Kingdom of God happens every day, it happens through our ministry, through our hands.  As Baptist, we believe in the priesthood of all believers.

Although you do not get paid by the church… your sermons move people, and maybe you are thinking, well I don’t have my life in order to be preaching to others, then you have not given much thought about the first ones that Jesus called and sent out.

You have preached sermons of extraordinary compassion, some of you preach in the workplace, home and where you volunteer.  You preach a sermon of unrestricted grace to a co-worker, a sermon of unconditional love to a customer, a sermon of undeniable hope to a friend, to a neighbor, even to a stranger, a sermon of care to your family, a sermon of comfort to the ill, or even the simplest sermon to others- your presence.

You have led in sermons of worship.  As ministry leaders, we do not take for granted that you will show up each week.   Worship is a sermon of giving praise and thanks to God.  Our worship, confessing our beliefs, our offering of prayers, voicing our faith, singing our praise– all of this is a sermon of worship to a living God and you are an integral part.[v]

I was recently reminded of this call to daily preach our sermons when I heard our new Guilford County Superintendent, Dr. Sharon Contreras speak on Wednesday morning at a faith leaders gathering. She talked about her journey and her life’s work.  She then explained that the most asked question of her is “what is the greatest need in our school system” and how she responded to the question, surprised me, it was not with the authoritative call for additional funding, policy change, or more involvement- to my surprise- she simply said- “if everyone would just love one another, then everything else would fall into place.”  Her message sounds like a paraphrase of our scripture reading this morning, the ‘commission to teach love and offer healing’. Dr. Contreras told a room full of faith leaders that the biggest need for our schools is for folks to love for one another trusting the rest would take care of itself.

A sermon we can preach by the way we live and minister and share the Good News. For loving one another means we live out the call of proclaiming the Kingdom of God and healing.  It is not only a sermon to be dealt with in words, but also in deeds. It is a message which is not confined to news of eternity; but proposes to change conditions on earth.  It is the reverse of a “pie in the sky” religion.  It insists that health to people bodies is an integral part of God’s purpose as health to their souls.

We can’t forget that the going and proclaiming and healing are under the authority of Jesus. Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases. Is that kind of power and authority extended to us now? To cast out demons and cure diseases? I came across a reading in divinity school that I will never forget. With a single word, “authority” was brought to a level of clarity; the author described “Authority as followability.”  Followability.  A coined work that helps us to understand that true authority is what gives people the confidence to follow.

Many folks are packing to head south and east for Haiti, Jamaica, Bahamas and Florida, and we pray for them as they go. We know they will find neighbors whose lives need healing of body and spirit and need to be reminded of the nearness of the Kingdom of God. I imagine they are probably all are packing their suitcases with many tunics and bread, but the suitcase is for their comfort. Oh, they will take supplies needed for healing: water, bandages, food, blankets, etc.  But their hands will preach the sweet sermon of God’s love!

God’s way is simple- proclaim, heal and hospitality, or hospitality, heal, proclaim- it is simple; it is bold, because this is not the time to play it safe.  Remember when Jesus sends, He doesn’t stay behind.  In Matthew 28:20 he said “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”  And this is simply how we are called… And may it be so. Amen

[i] Huffington Post, October 7,2016

[ii] “Travel Light,” Rev. Hoglund

[iii] The Gospel of Luke, William Barclay

[iv] Layman’s Bible Commentary

[v] Downward, Upward, and Forward Behind Jesus Blog July 2015

Luke 17:11-19

Many of you know that my father, Craig Sherouse, is a pastor – at Second Baptist in Richmond, VA – and I grew up as a preacher’s kid, which was a great life, except when it wasn’t.

Like when the eccentric director of Adult Sunday School at my home church, hatched a scheme to add a little touch of theater to the gospel lesson one Sunday. The focal passage of the day was our gospel text – Jesus healing ten lepers – and Mrs. Howell thought it would be wonderfully dramatic to have live lepers walking the halls of the Education wing. So who do you call when you have a wild idea and you need a naïve volunteer?  Well, you try the pastor’s teenage son, of course!

Mrs. Howell pitched the idea, offered me a small bribe, and asked me to gather some friends to form a colony of lepers.  So I turned to my best friends – Nathan and Wes – they always had my back; let’s see if it extended to this. They helped me gather a few more and we reported to Mrs. Howell that Sunday, as she prepared to outfit us in our ancient attire.  You’ve probably seen the wardrobe before: it consisted of her husband’s old bathrobes and some ripped sheets turned into headdresses. Picture Rambo on his way to the shower.

Then she directed us to walk down the halls, looking as pathetic as we possibly could.  She asked us to contort our faces and moan like zombies, “unclean, unclean.”  And as a final touch, just for dramatic flare, she brought in a bowl full of pasty oatmeal and said, “Here boys, I want you to rub some of this on your skin.”

Well, that’s when the whole thing fell apart. Several of the guys left right away, and I turned to Nate and Wes – always there for me. Except that day. As Nate said, “sorry, dude, you’re the pastor’s kid…”

So it was that I wandered the halls of the Adult Education wing of Lakeside Baptist Church, embarrassed and alone and covered in maple brown sugar. A leper colony of one.

It might be that cold oatmeal and tattered bathrobes are as close as we will ever get to the characters in this story. We don’t know these lepers; the passage describes them “keeping a distance” from their ancient community, and we ourselves only get so close.

What we do know of leprosy is constructed based on a few Old Testament clues. In Numbers, lepers are required to “live outside the camp” (Num 5:2-3). The Levitical law asks lepers to cover their lips and cry out “unclean” to warn of their presence if anyone should come near (Leviticus 13). Their social role was set. They probably lived in colonies outside the settlements and kept the proper distance from those with unblemished skin. Some people probably felt bad about it, but it’s the way things were. Some were inside, some outside.

When we add it all up, it’s easy to understand why we picture these lepers as zombie-like figures, with Quaker Oat skin, wandering around crying out in pain. But Jesus sees something else.

As our text begins, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. Since chapter 9 of Luke, when Jesus first set his face to the city, he’s been on the road. He’s on his way to Jerusalem. You know what will happen there, and he knew what would happen there. His hope for the world would come center stage and ultimately ask for his life. He would humble himself on a hill far away. But for now, his focus is on the hill that’s in front of him, and the ten people that approach.

They come to Jesus speaking his name; they’ve heard about him. They’ve heard this is the man that’s made others clean. Luke 5 tells us that in one particular city, Jesus laid his hands on a man-covered-with-leprosy and made him clean. And Luke says the word spread abroad. At some point we can assume it reached these 10. So they cover up with their bathrobes and bed-sheets and venture out, approaching, but keeping their distance.

And that’s when Luke tells us Jesus saw them.

If you’ve paid any attention to Jesus, you’ve noticed that his eyes seem to work differently than the rest of ours’.  When he sees people, he really sees them.

He saw these lepers in the same way he saw the friends of the paralyzed man in Luke 5, as their faith helped a paralyzed friend walk away with his bed rolled under one arm.

It’s the same way Jesus saw Levi the tax collector in Luke 5:27; as Levi made eye contact and dropped everything to follow him.

It’s the same way he saw the woman in the synagogue (Luke 13), a woman with a spirit that had bent her spine for eighteen years until she came into Jesus’ view and began to stand up straight.

When Jesus sees a person, he really sees. In fact, he sees them while they were still at a distance, the way the father of the prodigal son sees his son coming from far off, cresting the hill as a silhouette against the horizon; it’s almost like Jesus has been watching for them.

But, then, you already know that. Because somewhere down the road, Jesus saw you. Saw you in your loneliness and offered you friendship. Saw you in a struggling relationship, and helped you find wholeness. Saw you weighed down by questions and uncertainty, and received your faith, incomplete though it was and imperfect though it is.

When the men approach, Jesus sees what anyone can see: ten outsiders, with strange clothes and broken skin. But he also sees what no one else sees: people in need of mercy.  He saw them; he really did.

                            Ten Lepers by Bill Hoover

His command to the men is straight to the point, “Go ahead now. Go show yourself to the priests.”  He sends them to the priest – the one who can sign off on their recovery and restore them to the community.  As they walk, somewhere down the road, one begins to notice the color returning to his right hand.  And another notices his strut change a bit as feeling returns to his left leg.  Suddenly their skin is new, and they take off, feeling what it is to run again with new skin against the wind. Nine of the men break into a sprint, heading toward the city and the priest that can make things right.

But a tenth man wheels around. One man turns back.

I guess the tenth leper doesn’t need to see the priest to know he’s been restored.  As the feeling returns and his skin looks new, he turns back, not only to thank his healer, but also Luke describes him praising God in a loud voice.

We come to find out that this man is not like the others, not like anyone else standing around – he’s a Samaritan, which means he’s two-times the outsider. And then the double outsider begins to make a scene. He falls on his face in the dust and begins to shout. Leper, foreigner, stammering fool…that’s three strikes, one would think.  But it all does something to Jesus.

Jesus is moved by it, and he offers this man validation that the others would never find from the priest: “Your faith has made you well.” Or, in the Greek, “Your faith has saved your life.”  Something in this man’s display of worship – moves Jesus.

Frederick Buechner has much to say about the way we worship God.  Buechner, the Presbyterian minister and author says that, “to worship God means to rejoice in God and to make a fool of yourself for God the way lovers have always made fools of themselves for the one they love…unless there is an element of joy and foolishness in our worship, the time might be better spent doing something else.” (1)

The tenth leper acts like a fool in love. And how could he act in any other way? (2)

This man has spent years ostracized and embarrassed, then Jesus saw him and now he has something that makes him turn back.  In the Greek language, the verb used to describe his “turning back” is the same verb used for the action of “going home.” So, we can say, this man who had wandered on the outskirts and made his bed in a colony, has now found a home. Sure there were ten who were made clean, but it seems that one was really saved. Ten are restored to the life of community, but one finds a new home.

“But where are the other nine?”  You can almost here a playful, prying tone in Jesus’ voice as he asks.  After all, he already knows the answer. The other nine are doing exactly what he asked them to do. They press forward toward the priest.  They want to know: clean or unclean?  In or out?

They keep going, maybe a little winded, probably stopping for a water break or two, but they continue forward. The other nine don’t really do anything wrong.  They follow instructions.  And I suspect that sounds familiar.

Pressing forward, continuing down the path with our goals and our checklists for validation, working with diligence to complete the task, staying faithful to the instructions and obedient to the commands.  That’s how many of us live.

In fact, it’s that obedience and hard work that built this sanctuary where we sit, and cares for all the structures and systems that make church possible. It’s that kind of faithfulness that brings families to church each week, even following a long week at work or a long day at the soccer field or a painful last second FG (let the church say “Amen”). It’s that kind of diligence that leads people to come to a Finance Committee meeting in the middle of a Panthers game. It’s that kind of dedication that allows us to work toward good things that through the power of the Spirit we envision for our community.

But a life of faith in Christ – and commitment to Christ’s community – is about so much more than devotion, diligence, and dedication to the tasks. It’s also about being in love.

Hear these words in the Revelation of John, spoken to the church of Ephesus: “I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance…. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love” (Revelation 2:1-4).

The other nine follow the instructions, while the tenth makes a scene. The other nine press forward to meet with the priest, as the tenth turns back to meet with Jesus. The other nine rush to the temple, but the tenth rushes to his home. The other nine act like good cleansed men, good Jews, good churchgoers. The tenth acts like a fool in love.

“Where are the other nine?”  Jesus already knows the answer.  And many of us do, too.  For this reason, Barbara Brown Taylor says we ought to ask a different question.  Not “where are the nine?” but “Where is the tenth?”  Where is the one that wheels around to worship? (3)

We are gathered here on a World Communion Sunday – a tradition that celebrates the diversity of God’s world, and the many expressions of worship and praise that unite to rise to God. It calls us again to celebrate and elevate such unity amidst diversity here and now in the world that God so loves.

It reminds me of times I’ve experienced such diversity, like once at a church I used to attend. A good church. I’d probably join it if I lived in that city, and many of you would to. It was a blessing to us when a new family joined one spring – a woman and her two young children. They had walked to the church. No one new why. As recent immigrants to the United States, they had come to know the church through an English for Speakers of Other Languages program.

We were glad they were there. But I guess some heightened awareness grew when this woman and her kids decided to sit on the left side of the fifth pew in the center section, you know, where someone else always sat. Then things grew a bit tense when the woman began to express herself differently in worship, raising her hands in praise and saying “Amen” at unprompted times. And then on Easter Sunday, with a packed sanctuary, as the choir sang us into the presence of the resurrected Christ and sent us out with a stunning benediction, our new member just couldn’t keep it inside and she shouted “Hallelujah” and broke into applause.

Well, it became a topic of conversation, in the many places where church people talk. And then the next month, we walked into a committee meeting to find a new matter up for discussion. Under Roman Numeral II, “New Business,” there was item B, “The applause issue.”

I don’t know exactly what happened next, except that we continued as best we knew how, singing with dedication, praying diligently, and saying “Amen” when called for in the litany. We kept gathering as sinners seeking to be cleansed. But we saw less and less of this family. And I’ve always assumed they found somewhere else to shout “Hallelujah.”

“Where are the other nine?” I guess we already know. I don’t need to look much further than my own restored body. We see them in our own new skin, our own diligent obedience. It’s much more than cold oatmeal that links us to these lepers.  We are closer than we might think.

But, what about Taylor’s question: where is the tenth?  Now, that’s the hard question. And it might be the gospel question today. When I ask it, I’m not asking us to break into a standing ovation, or shout “Hallelujah,” or fall on our faces weeping in the dust.  The story doesn’t ask us to express ourselves to God in any specific way.  The story asks us if we’ve ever been in love.

Don’t forget, somewhere down the road of your life, Jesus saw you; he really saw you, the same way he sees you still. He told you your faith had saved you. He gave you a new kind of home. So, where is the tenth leper found in you? Where is the part of me that is knocked off course and spins back in gratitude? Where is the part of us willing to wheel around on the road with joy that comes from really believing we’ve been made new?

We’re all gathered here, just where Jesus told us to be: obedient, faithful, clean.

But where is the one that turned back?

______________________

1. Wishful Thinking, 122.
2. The concept of the tenth leper as a “man in love” owes to Barbara Brown Taylor’s excellent sermon, “The Tenth Leper” in The Preaching Life.
3. Ibid

Luke 16:1-8

Some rules are made to be broken.

My friend, Rev. Courtney Allen, is the Pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Richmond. She was raised to love the church by her parents, both of whom are active, committed members of their local Baptist Church.

But it wasn’t always that way. Not for her father. Courtney’s father, David, attended church as a boy. He was there every week, in fact, for Sunday School, Worship, Wednesday Night prayer meeting, until he was 8 years old. That’s when David’s father passed away. His dad had a heart attack on a Friday night. But the next weekend, 9 days later, on Sunday morning young David went back to church. It happened to be Sunday School recognition Sunday. Children were being recognized for learning Bible verses, reciting the books of the Bible, committing hymns to memory, and then it was time for the children to receive their coveted attendance pins. 8 yr old David stood up with his class and walked to the stage, and the Sunday School director began to call all the names one by one. But she didn’t call his. “Ma’am, you forgot to call my name.” And she said, “Well, David, you missed a Sunday…”

And she was right. He had missed a Sunday – the weekend of his father’s funeral. So he was short of perfect attendance; it was right there in the rules. And David left church that day, and he decided he wouldn’t be back. And he didn’t attend a church again until years later.

Some rules are made to be broken.

I say that as we listen to what is universally considered Jesus’ most puzzling parable – a parable that is puzzling especially for those of us who are accustomed to following the rules.

Sometimes called the “Dishonest Steward” and sometimes the “Shrewd Manager,” even Luke seems confused by the story, using both adjectives in the tale. But whether we call him dishonest or shrewd, unjust or crafty, we can agree it’s confounding to see someone like him lifted up as an example; in fact, it’s just the sort of confounding, frustrating, disruptive surprise that Jesus would use to tell us something about the kingdom of God.

“There was a certain rich man,” the story begins, telling of a wealthy landowner who one day calls in his business manager – he’s heard rumors that the manager was being careless, maybe wasteful, perhaps even cheating his employer. Whatever the case, it’s just not working, and the employer is drawing up a severance arrangement.

Jesus tells this parable in chapter 16 right after three parables of lost things in chapter 15: a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son, and now we have what we might call the parable of the lost job. But the manager is not about to lose his prime office job and be stuck outside – in the words of David Buttrick, “he had no callouses on his fine Presbyterian hands.” (1) Physical labor had never been his skillset, and begging wasn’t an option. So quickly he devises a plan to gain favor with those who owe his master money. He calls in the biggest debtors and reduces what they owe.

“How much does my boss say you owe him? A hundred jugs of olive oil? It’s more like fifty.”

“What, a hundred bails of wheat? It’s more like eighty, trust me. Drop it off next week and consider us even.”

These forgiven debtors are now indebted to the manager, who has cut them a deal. He’s woven a safety net so that when he loses his job he will have a soft place to land. But when the landowner hears it, he doesn’t fire him; instead, he seems to congratulate him. He calls him “shrewd” and crafty – the kind of manager he wants running things. And by the time we leave the manager, he’s cleaned out his desk, not to go out to the parking lot but up to his new corner office, all with a wink and a smile as he waits for the elevator up.

Such is the kingdom of God… if the Kingdom of God were to celebrate tricksters and thieves. It shakes our sensibilities to see someone lauded and promoted for breaking the rules. But if that’s true, maybe it’s because the rules have usually worked for us.

To quote the Emmy-winning actor Peter Dinklage, “It’s easy to confuse the way things are with the way things ought to be… especially if the way things are has worked out in your favor.” (2) That’s just the gospel according to television, but it sounds a lot like the gospel proclaimed by Jesus, whose parables point beyond themselves to the kingdom of God, inspiring us to reimagine the world if this kingdom were to come to earth. And that can be a confounding message for those for whom “the way things are” has worked.

But what about those for whom it hasn’t? For whom the way things are – the current state of things – has been exhausting, frustrating, even unjust?

James Scott – a political scientist at Yale – has said such people throughout history have used any number of strategies to survive and challenge. Calling them “everyday forms of resistance,” he cites things like foot-dragging, false compliance, feigned ignorance, lies and half-truths as ways that people who feel overpowered by the economic and political structure around them will attempt to survive or bring about change. (3)

Maybe that’s one way to understand this shrewd manager – doing whatever he can with the methods available to him to keep his job.

In our own American history, we can look to the history of slavery and see the strategies of survival and resistance employed by those overpowered and overwhelmed, using the means available to them to survive or even creatively resist the economy of the household and beat the house at its own game. And in the instances when this courageously swelled to revolt – like in Nat Turner’s rebellion, memorialized in the acclaimed “Birth of a Nation” this fall – those slaves who took up arms were using what Audre Lorde has termed “The Master’s tools.” That is, since they didn’t have their own tools, they used the ones available to them.

Just yesterday, the 99 yr old daughter of a former slave – Ruth Bonner – was helped to her feet to ring the bell that signaled the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C. It was an emotionally riveting moment. It signaled distance spanned. But it was also a living link reminding us that we are not so far away, and recalling how often throughout history the powerful have wanted “the way things are” to remain intact?

Will Campbell, spoke to this reality throughout his life. An iconoclastic Baptist minister and activist, he called himself a “bootleg preacher,” because he prided himself on never taking a salary from an institution. This meant he could say whatever he wanted, or whatever the gospel wanted from him, and those were very often the same thing.

Like when he preached famously at the Riverside Church in New York. Situated on the northern tip of Manhattan Island, on the Hudson River, Riverside was built on a hill by John D. Rockefeller in the early 20^th Century – a great cathedral of Protestantism, which still stands today as an important and vibrant witness. But Will Campbell just didn’t have much use for Rockefeller’s cathedral. He was invited to preach in the 1980s by his old Yale Divinity School classmate and Riverside pastor, William Sloane Coffin. “Bill tells me you want me to hear about how to follow Jesus…But you don’t want to hear about that…” and he looked up at the ornate gothic nave, the stained glass, the sacred art and said, “You want to hear about how to follow Jesus, while keeping all of this.” (4)

And isn’t it true of me? Isn’t it true of so many of us? We want to follow Jesus, but maintain the state of things. We want to see a kingdom come to earth, assuming it preserves all the things we value and doesn’t ask us to change. We want to believe that this is the world as it ought to be.

But I think this parable works because it assumes that the audience believes that the world of this rich man – the world that enabled his empire – is not the world as it ought to be. And we have a clue of this from the first line: “There was a certain rich man.” The gospel of Luke includes numerous characters whose resources are vast and used to bring about signs of the kingdom on earth – like a father of a prodigal son who throws a grand party, a Samaritan who takes a wounded man to an inn and pays whatever is owed, or a man who hosts a banquet and fills the seats with the poor, crippled, lame and blind. These are all wealthy characters who have great resources and use them to make known the kingdom on earth.

But I want to suggest that the rich man described here is not one of those kind of characters. “There was a certain man,” is Luke’s version of “once upon a time.” It’s used in many parables to introduce a character like. But three times the adjective “rich” is added to the phrase. And in the gospel of Luke, when that’s the first thing you hear of someone, it’s a clue you might already know the rest of the story. It shows up to describe a rich farmer in Luke 12, who builds barns to keep his grain and is later called a “fool.” It introduces a rich man directly following today’s parable in Luke 16 who feasted and enjoyed the finer things while a poor man, Lazarus, sat at his gate all along. With this adjective and introduction, the man in today’s parable is tied to them – their attempts to preserve, their self-centeredness that can’t see the world around them beyond their walls, their systems that excluded and exploited others on their way to the top. And this is especially true when you consider Jesus’ early audience and their experience of the world.

The rules didn’t really work for them. Most of the people who followed Jesus were not simply poor, some were even expendable. But Jesus made his life with such people. It was with them he imagined a kingdom of God, and he did so often speaking of things like the unfair relationships that could exist between employer and employee, inequitable wages, the excesses of some alongside the consequences of poverty for others. To such a crowd of people, the owner in this parable was probably viewed in collusion with the Roman rulers. With no evidence to the contrary, they probably would have assumed he was one who preserved for himself, exploiting others in the process, charging high interest on their debts, while in contrast, this manager is described as one who spread things around. The verb translated “squander” means to sow seed – to pass around, like a farmer scatters seed. That’s bad business. But isn’t that the kind of abundance that Jesus urges?

The parable describes a manager for whom the rules haven’t worked, to people for whom the rules haven’t worked, and then they watch as he is shrewd and bold enough to imagine and make possible another way.

We can imagine who those people are in our world. Maybe some of you even now have a sense that whatever is going on – wherever the power is and the important decisions are being made – you’re not a part of it.

I think that’s some of what we see in our world – most especially this week with the latest cries that Black Lives Matter. Clergy friends of mine in Charlotte have shared about the power of the protests they’ve witnessed and accompanied – a much different narrative than the warzone the media has depicted. Such protests are very often evidence that people have not felt heard or empowered. We lift up the family of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa. We lift up the loved ones of Keith Scott in Charlotte. And we know that they have experienced the world in such a way where the rules haven’t seemed to work. What did Terence Crutcher’s father say, but that when his son was shot he was doing what he had taught him to do his whole life? He was following the rules his father had taught him.

So before I ask anyone to control their rage I have to understand where it comes from.

Before I caution for patience and waiting for the facts, I might try to understand why such a high percentage of people of color don’t trust the “facts” I seem to value so much.

Before I ask for compliance with the rules, I better consider how well the rules are serving the vulnerable in our world today.

Because I think this manager was that kind of person. He was vulnerable. In the end it wasn’t that he was unjust or unrighteous. He was lost, like the prodigal son whose story preceded him, and the coin in the corner, and the sheep on the hillside. He was lost in a world that had rewards for the powerful, but a pink slip for him. That is, until he started to change the rules.

Which is what happens in the Kingdom of God – lost sons welcomed home, lost coins searched for urgently and recovered in the corner, lost sheep pursued by a reckless shepherd who leaves the rest behind in single-minded hysteria. And all the while the Pharisees and scribes, to whom Jesus is telling these stories, grumble at the notion; they are keeping careful account of who’s staying within the bounds, and acting with honesty and good sense. But they’re failing to see that they’re the rich man in this story, and that things are changing while they’re oblivious to it all. The proud are scattered, the powerful are brought down while the lowly are lifted, the hungry are filled and the people who have exploited or overpowered others are sent away empty (Luke 1).

And if that confuses us, if we find it confounding or disrupting, well, then it might say more about us than it does about Jesus. It might tell us that the rules have often worked for us, when Jesus came especially for those for whom the rules didn’t always work. Because, remember, the rules didn’t always work for him.

That’s why he calls us in our own times and places to be just as shrewd, to imagine this world if it was redeemed by the love of God and to use whatever means available to us to make it known. Just as God did in Christ.

What if God was only just? Which is to say, what if God only followed the rules? But instead, God in Christ came to this earth, moved about, crossing boundaries and defying conventions. And every time he came up against a standard of what was just and ordered, he seemed to respond with mercy, challenging convention and canon, acting graciously and lavishly, spreading love around in this world, provoking the rage of his peers by freely forgiving, healing those who came to him, giving the farm away, mismanaging the things that would be preserved, squandering generosity, and forgiving debts until such mercy was accessible to all, even you and me.

What if God had followed the rules? What if God had asked for all that is owed?  Well, the wages of sin is death. It’s right there in the rules.

Thank God, some rules are made to be broken.

___________________

1. From a lecture at Vanderbilt University, Spring 2006.
2. From Game of Thrones, “The Dance of Dragons.”
3. James C. Scott, “Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance.”
4. From Lawrence Wright’s profile of Will Campbell, “The First Church of Rednecks,” Rolling Stone (December 1990).

Luke 15:1-10

“Do we have a lost and found?” This was Gayle Adams’ question to me this week. Someone had left a scarf or a book or something, so together we rummaged around in the front office, looking in cabinets and drawers until we came upon the lost and found box, tucked underneath a table, where all the misfit items end up.

In this box you’ll find all the reading glasses you could want, a single red glove looking for its twin for who knows how long, plenty of umbrellas, and, I have to say, a number of unclaimed Bibles (God is watching you!).

It’s the place you’d go if you were missing a coffee mug, or a house-key, or your child’s hoodie sweatshirt; usually these things sit in the box for ages and seemingly reproduce themselves, but every now and then an item and its owner are reunited, and there’s relief and excitement and a little more room in the box for the next lost thing.

Do we have a lost and found? Well, we better, considering just how many things end up getting lost in church. Our church is full of people – many of us – who have lost things –  spare keys and coffee mugs – but much more, like some lost direction, or lost hope; surely someone in this church is experiencing a loss of perspective or a loss of purpose, and somewhere, maybe beneath the table or tucked in the quieter corners of this church, there are even those of us who have lost faith.

We know what it is to be lost. Maybe especially here, in church. Which is why this section of the gospel of Luke speaks so deeply and powerfully to us.

Chapter 15 is the heart of the gospel of Luke, with three parables of lost things: lost sheep, a lost coin, and two lost sons.

Jesus is where we left him last week. Having already moved toward Jerusalem, he is now telling those who follow him more and more about what it will cost, and what will characterize the lives of those who follow in this way, and now in Chapter 15, he stops to tell three stories about losing and finding, searching and sweeping, looking and discovering.

One lost sheep, so valuable to the shepherd that he would leave the ninety-nine to go and find the one who had gotten separated from the others.

This story is followed by the story of the woman who had ten coins, and who lost one, and who lit a lamp and swept the house, and wouldn’t give up until at last she had found the lost coin. She was so happy with its recovery that she gave a party for all her friends and neighbors, inviting them to come celebrate with her, probably spending more on the party than the worth of the coin.

These two stories give way to what is perhaps Jesus’ most important parable – a wayward son and a dutiful son – one lost to his squandering, and the other to his self-righteousness – and both found by the love of their father.

In each of these parables we hear the earnestness with which God seeks us out and welcomes us home. Like a sheep cowering on a hillside,or a coin collecting dust in the quiet corners of the house, or a child trudging up the road–this is the heart of the gospel, because it’s the heart of the story of Jesus, and the heart of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.

But as he proclaims it, maybe you can hear the noise that begins chapter 15 – the resistance of the Pharisees and the scribes. Jesus is telling these stories in response to them. For as Luke describes, they were saying to themselves, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

So as we listen to these powerful, joyous stories of lost things being found – and in every case, great rejoicing and celebration, by the angels themselves, but all of this is being described with the background noise of grumbling Pharisees and scribes.

As hard as we are on them, it’s important to remember that the Pharisees were simply a segment of first-century Judaism doing the best they knew to keep the law of Moses; they spent much of their time with scribes, because the scribes were the experts in this law: laws about what to eat, what to wear, or laws about just what exactly constituted work on the Sabbath day, or just who qualified as a sinner.  And the Pharisees wanted to know that, too; they wanted to stay close to the heart of God, within the bounds of the law, so much so, that they were said to build a fence around the Torah – or the law.

The motivation seems to date back to Deuteronomy 22:8, where the instruction is given that when you build a house, you must build a fence around it in order to avoid any guilt should someone fall from the roof, which in the tradition that followed became a charge to build a fence around the Torah, around the law.

This was the commandment in the Talmudic tract Pirque Avot – The Ethics of the Fathers. “Build a fence around the Torah,” the rabbis said; that is, this law is a gift from God, and it helps us to live together as God intends; it’s a gift to be preserved, insulated from anything that could compromise it, and so fences were built, some small and some big, as a means of ensuring that the people of God would stay as far from sin as possible, fences in the form of extra laws that if obeyed would ensure that the people would not ever come close to disobeying the Torah.

We can’t fault them too quickly; fence-builders aren’t evil. They are often motivated by a desire to preserve, define, make safe; it’s just that those have never been Jesus’ primary motives and concerns.

When Jesus came up against any boundary constructed by others in his Jewish tradition, he seemed to ask a clarifying question, something like what the mystic and prophet Howard Thurman once asked: What do our teachings “have to say to the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed, to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall, or with their backs against the fence, or those left standing on the outside of the safety of this fence altogether?”

And we know this from what the Pharisees are always saying about him. “He welcomes sinners and eats with them.” There were crowds of people coming near to Jesus that the Pharisees weren’t prepared to see so close to a man claiming what Jesus claimed. They had already labeled Jesus earlier (Luke 7:34), ‘a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’  And they had asked him once before, “Why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?” To which he replies, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”  The great New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger suggested this could be the theme of the whole of Luke’s Gospel.

And now we see it again. The crowd grows, and from the vantage point of the Pharisees, it’s loaded with these sinners that Jesus keeps welcoming.

The word Luke uses for sinner means literally “to miss the mark…”

And as it has from the beginning, sin separates. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they hid themselves.  God came looking for them in the Garden but he couldn’t find them anywhere.  And who knows how long that went on before Adam finally blurted out, “Here I am.”  And God said, “What were you doing?  Why were you hiding?”  And Adam said, “Well, I heard you walking in the Garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.”

But notice that God didn’t hide from them. God doesn’t hide. God searches. God looks. God seeks.

That’s what we see in Jesus as he continues to welcome; it’s a powerful word here in our Gospel lesson.  It means “seeks out.”  As in, Jesus “seeks out” – active, restless, like a good shepherd who will leave the ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness to seek the one lost sheep until he finds it, then lay it upon his shoulders and returns home, calling together his friends and neighbors to celebrate.

Like a woman who has ten coins and loses one of them.  So she lights a lamp and sweeps the whole house until she finds it.  And when she does, she calls her friends together and rejoices.  “Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

This is who Jesus was. It’s who God is. Love that tirelessly looks for whatever is lost, who sees in those far from home not a misfit, or a cast off, or a sinner beyond the reach, but simply someone who has gotten lost along the way.

And what if that was who we were, the ones who wouldn’t give up the search, or cut people off, who keep watching from the window, or searching in the night, or sweeping into the early morning hours, who leave the safety of the fence line, remembering that it’s out there beyond the boundary that we were found and carried home?  Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them, which is how he found you and me.

What if we could do the same?

Some of you know that this week I had the opportunity to take a quick there and back again trip to Atlanta to hear former President Jimmy Carter speak at the new Baptist Covenant meeting. Founded by President Carter in 2007, New Baptist Covenant seeks to encourage relationships and action for the common good among Baptist congregations across racial lines. Originally I planned to skip this meeting, not a great time in our family life for travel, but then this carrot was dangled out in front as my friend Darryl Aaron, pastor of Providence Baptist here in Greensboro, and I were invited to come and share about our friendship, what it means to us, and how we imagine such a relationship could impact our churches and our community. “We’d like you to give the invitation after President Carter speaks,” they said. Well, I imagined us shaking hands with the former President as he said, “Guys, I’ll set em up you knock em down.” It was nothing like that; instead it was listening to filler music for a while until President Carter arrived, spoke and was whisked away, on the opposite side of the stage from us, no handshake.

But I was up close with this 91 year old man, who here in the latter years of life, continues to build Habitat Houses, and stand for peace, and teach Sunday School at his local Baptist Church, and continues to inspire relationships across the boundaries and fences our world constructs, continues to be tireless about searching for those who feel lost, and who in this passing speech on his way to somewhere else, didn’t celebrate all that had been, but talked about all that was not yet, describing the crisis of abuse of women and girls in our world, lamenting the state of poverty and homelessness, and asking us how closely we are living to the things that defined the life of Jesus – who welcomed sinners and ate with them.

There will always be those who would rather stay within the fences and prefer the shepherd to stay right there, too, with the ones who haven’t wandered far and gotten themselves lost; we’d rather stay within the bounds of what we’ve neatly constructed, sometimes motivated by the best of intentions, like preservation, or piety, or distance from sin. These are not bad things; it’s just that those have never really been Jesus’ primary concerns.

It was the early 20^th century, after the devastation of WWI, when a group of Quakers brought relief to the impoverished people of Poland. They distributed food and clothing, along with other relief measures. In the course of their work, one of the Quaker relief workers contracted Typhus and died. There were only Roman Catholic cemeteries in this little Polish village, and church law forbade anyone not of that faith to be buried in that ground.

So the Quakers buried their friend in a grave just outside the Catholic cemetery.

The next morning, however, there was a surprise. During the night the villagers had moved the fence so that the cemetery now included the grave of the Quaker relief worker.

I don’t know much about those fence movers, but I know they understood the nature of the gospel, he love of the Christ who was not only a fence mover, but a fence-leaver, who saw no boundary so well-constructed that it could breached by the immediacy of love, urgency of justice, the desire for even one to find their way home.

So maybe they remembered this one who leaves the 99 to search for the one.

Maybe they even sent him out, knowing that none of them are safe until all of them are safe; none of them are found until all of them are found.

I once heard Fred Craddock preach on this theme of lost things found. Craddock, who taught preaching at Emory University, was a slight man with an unassuming demeanor and presence, and he used to say he thought being a preacher meant playing a tuba, but he realized he only had a piccolo, but how he could sneak up on you with the gospel, like as he told a story about playing hide-and-seek in the summertime with his sister as a boy.

And you all know how that goes. Somebody is “It”and whoever is “It” hides their eyes, counts to a hundred really fast, and shouts, “Ready or not here I come.” In the meantime everybody else has hidden themselves in a secret place. Then the person who’s “It,” comes looking and tries to beat the first one found to home base and touch the base three times saying, “You’re it.” Then the other person is “It.”

Craddock says he loved to play this game because when his sister was “It” she counted really fast; in fact she skipped all the numbers between ten and ninety eight, ninety nine, a hundred and started looking right away. But Craddock had ingenuity on his side. He was small, and there was a little crawl space under the front steps of the house where he could go right away and hide and she couldn’t see him. His sister would go looking all over the place. In the house, out of the house, in the weeds, in the trees, in the barn. But she couldn’t find him.

Craddock says sometimes she’d get close and she’d be standing right beside the steps and he could see her legs, and he could just barely hold in his snickering. He thought to himself, She’ll never find me here. She’ll never find me here. Then it occurred to him… she’ll never find me here.

So after awhile he’d stick out a toe. And when she came by, she’d see the toe and say, “Uh oh, I see you,” and she’d run back and touch base three times and say, “Ha ha, you’re it.” And Craddock says he would come out brushing himself off and saying, “Oh shoot, you found me.”

And then Fred Craddock looked out at all of us who were sitting there in that chapel and said, “But what did I want?  What did I really want?”

And I knew the answer.  Sitting there on the front pew it was all I could do to keep from shouting it out loud.  “To be found!” I thought.  “You wanted to be found!”  And then it seemed he looked right at me, pointed his finger and said, “The same thing you want!”

It’s what the kingdom wants: for all that is lost to be found.

And whenever that happens, there will still be some Pharisee or another who grumbles, but here among the people of God there will be joy; there will be great joy.

Luke 14:25-33

Jesus Teaching the Disciples by Rudolph Bostic

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, brother, and sister, even life itself,  cannot be my disciple.

Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me, cannot be my disciple.

Whoever does not give up all their possessions, cannot be my disciple!

And all God’s people said, “Wait… this is a metaphor, right? Jesus, you’re exaggerating, being hyperbolic; this is figurative, fanciful language.”

It’s just not the way we’re accustomed to thinking and talking about faith in Christ and following Jesus. More often, we speak of the assurance that can come through Christian faith. We speak about Jesus as the one who will solve all of our problems, and we present church as the place that will help us to find whatever might be missing.

So if you feel hopeless, we say come to a place where we believe the best is yet to come.

Are you lonely? Well then we invite you to come and connect in community.

Have you been isolated or left out? Then come to a place where everyone can belong.

Have you been burned by another religious institution? Come to us; we’re about relationships, not religion.

Have you ever felt like you were on the outs? We want you to know that this is a church where “All are welcome.”

These are all phrases taken from banners, signs, and websites of churches here in our community, including First Baptist. All of them hold great appeal. All of them are well-intentioned, and probably mostly true – at least in their aspirations. But none of these claims – optimism, welcome, friendliness, community – none of them form the full identity of the church.

The Church is the body of Jesus Christ. You can find “belonging” at the YMCA, community at your local coffee shop, friendliness and confidence in your scout troop or soccer team. The Church is the embodiment of Christ in the world – Christ’s actions, voice, and priorities. So it ought to be Christ’s words that we listen for. And Jesus didn’t come to merely say what we want to hear, but also what we need to hear. And it turns out, Jesus didn’t come only to solve our problems, but to create some of them, too.

“Hate your family; take up your cross; shed all your possessions.” Well, that might be a problem. Put that on the church sign and see what happens. It’s hard to sloganize the wholesale cost of following Jesus. And these words weren’t any more appealing or marketable to Jesus’ audience in the gospel of Luke. At the beginning of the passage, Luke is careful to say that large crowds were traveling with Jesus – large crowds drawn in by this man who passed through their towns with a kind of elegant grace that they wanted to follow. They listened as he told compelling stories that helped them see the world in a new way.  He broke social taboos; he ate and drank with the riff-raff; he confronted the elite and powerful; he proclaimed a renewed vision of the world as the reign of God, with a place for the vulnerable. And then he started enacting this by healing in the name of God and, wouldn’t you know, the numbers swelled to the “large crowds” in v. 25.

Understand, the people lost in these crowds had much to escape. It was a hostile world. Divided. Tense. Powerful people overlooked the vulnerable. Plenty were hungry and praying for their daily bread. Others were wrapped up in conflict and war on some of the same land where the world wars with itself today. And amidst such a setting, many were probably beginning to project onto Jesus their own hopes for a savior, their own visions for their lives and their world, maybe understanding him through the popular narrative of the one who would overthrow the empire and elevate Israel to the top.

But that’s when he tells them just how costly it is to follow him in this way. He has already predicted that he’s going to his cross in Jerusalem. But now those who follow so eagerly are beginning to understand that they are more than just observers. It will cost to follow. Not just a piecemeal cost, but a wholesale cost. Not just here and there but across the whole of your life. It could mean a break with those you love. It could mean a loss of what you’ve accumulated. It will mean a cross on your shoulders, too. How foolhardy it would be for a king to go to war without counting the cost of the battle; how baffling for a builder to begin a tower and not calculate how much stone is needed. So before you take another step, Jesus says, consider just what I am calling you to do.

Notice, Luke doesn’t say anything about the size of the crowds after Jesus is done speaking. You’d have to think that the numbers of those large crowds began to thin. The people peal off. Many of us are left locked in place as Jesus moves ahead, still wondering if we are bold enough, committed enough to follow in this way he is calling us to walk.

No, we don’t talk this way about our faith; we don’t walk this way in the steps of Jesus, because so often we don’t really believe we can do it. But Jesus does.

William Willimon was once leading a college dormitory Bible Study at Duke University where he was Chaplain. The text was a few chapters forward in the gospel of Luke, where a rich young ruler approaches Jesus and is told the cost of following: “Sell all your possessions,” Jesus says to the man. The man is heartbroken, because he doesn’t believe it’s a way he can go. Jesus offered him a cross, and he stands there clinging to his possessions.

Reflecting on such a heartbreaking scene, one of the students asked, “Had Jesus ever met this man before?”

Willimon was curious, “Why do you ask?”

“Because Jesus seems to have lots of faith in him.  He demands something risky, radical of him.  I wonder if Jesus knew this man had a gift for risky, radical response.  I wonder what there was about this man that made Jesus have so much faith he could really be a disciple.”

Another student said thoughtfully, “I wish Jesus would ask something like this of me. I am so tied to all this stuff I don’t think I could ever break free.  But maybe Jesus thinks otherwise.”

“Yeah, I wonder what it was that Jesus saw in this man that he didn’t see in himself.”

What is it that Jesus might see in me, in you, that we don’t see in ourselves? Does he see someone who could set aside all that hinders them in order to take up the cross?

This is the call from Jesus in this passage: to take up your cross. And to do so means to free your hands of the other things on which you have a white-knuckle grasp. Specifically, Jesus speaks of family and possessions.  “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father or mother, brother, sister, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

“Hate your family;” there’s no way to soften it.  Sure, in Matthew a gentler Jesus says that whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. But the word in Luke really does mean “hate.”  This is even more dramatic when we consider the role of the family in the ancient world. It was the primary means of dependence and security. Families provided resources, rights, and a livelihood. Just think of those across the scope of scripture without meaningful family connections, like orphans, and widows, and strangers in a foreign land. These were the most desperate and disenfranchised in the ancient world, in large part because they didn’t have a family. And here Jesus is asking his followers to assume that vulnerable place in the world – to sever ties with this system of dependence, to leave the family fishing boats and their father holding the net. They must be able to turn over tables in the family shop in order to follow him where he is going. In the same way, they must be able to set down possessions, which can be so heavy and cumbersome that they keep us from moving forward in the way of Jesus.

Family. Wealth. Possessions.  Set these things down. Your identity is not found in these, but in the cross that will replace them. In other words, when the way of the world is in conflict with the way of Christ, you have to make a choice.

Those followers are discovering something like what Lucy and Susan come to learn in C.S. Lewis’ Land of Narnia. They ask Mr. and Mrs. Beaver about the lion named Aslan, conceived in the imagination of C.S. Lewis as a representation of Jesus Christ. One of the children asks if Aslan is safe. Mr. Beaver then responds, “Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

He isn’t safe.  So as he moved on from that place, there are many who stay behind. The gospels are very realistic about this, describing that there are many who rejected Jesus’ invitation to this wholesale, cross-carrying life.  Many had heard him teach, and they calculated the costs, and they just stayed right where they were.  After a particularly scandalous teaching, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. People in a Samaritan village did not welcome him.  People in his hometown of Nazareth took offense at him and even tried to run him out of town. He experiences tension between his understanding of himself as son of God and his obedience to his earthly parents. The establishment eventually plots to kill him.  He was completely rejected throughout his life. So the large crowds surely grew smaller that day.

But notice that there were still those who considered the costs and yet they followed on. They knew he wasn’t safe, but they must have sensed that he was good; he was the king who could bring about a new reign.  Maybe they had heard enough of false promises and had enough pandering to their self-interest. They didn’t know everything about him, but they sensed that he was the way, the truth, and the life. And maybe somewhere in the midst of their lives they decided that they wanted a calling bigger than what they could conceive themselves. They wanted a purpose to call forth the best in them. And they knew that to live such a life is to lay some things down.  They must have understood that it would be hard, but beneath the jarring power of this wholesale cost of following, they heard the softer, more subtle message whispered into the center of our lives even today: that if you want to find your life, you have to be prepared to give it away.

And maybe once they knew that Jesus believed that they could do it, they started to believe it too.

This text in Luke was the lectionary text last week. The lectionary, which we are following this fall, groups texts in a three year cycle. The idea is that by the end of three years, we would have covered much of the Biblical text in worship and in preaching. Every three years, around the same time, we read the same texts in the lectionary, which means that five cycles ago, 15 years ago, on September 9, 2001, this was the gospel text.

And since then, we’ve come to know so much about this hostile world, and what it means and what is costs to be people who model another way, a way of Christ, where security is not the ultimate aim, where we are willing to set aside what is comfortable for what is true, and just, and transformative.

Jesus still believes we can do it. And sometimes we even see it done.

Five years ago, on the 10^th anniversary of September 11, we gathered with our church Metro Baptist in New York City. As someone relatively new to New York, one thing I observed is that New Yorkers didn’t talk about September 11, 2001.  I suspect it was because of the many ways it had been politicized in the intervening years, but on this, the 10^th anniversary, we felt that we needed to provide some space for people to tell the stories they had to tell, to say what it was on their hearts to say, so we held an open mic event for testimony and sharing, which turned into the better part of an hour. I’ll never forget the story my friend Ken shared on that day. Not a tragic story, but a glimpse of the world as it could be.

Ken owned an African music store located in the shadow of the towers, three blocks away, which he ran with his friend, Alberto Barbosa (or “Beto” as he was known). Beto was from the very small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. On Sept 11, 2001, Ken was heading into town when he was stopped in the traffic on the expressway, and he saw from the bus window the events unfold, and he worried as he did about his friend and one employee in his store: Beto.

Beto was on the last subway to arrive at the World Trade Center terminal, meaning as he came up from the tunnel he entered the madness, and he just wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could. But he noticed a woman who was very pregnant, and very frightened, struggling to breathe. He walked over to her, and her eyes opened, but she couldn’t really speak, so he lifted her up in his arms and carried her to the shelter of an archway to let her catch her breath. And they made plans to leave.

“I’m not in labor.” she said. “I’m just terrified.”

“Me too,” said Beto, “But we’ll help each other.”

He helped her to her feet, put his arm behind her waist, and they walked.

It took them 7 hours to walk 7 miles from the World Trade Center to Midtown Manhattan. People raced by them the whole time, but still they walked slowly, arm in arm, until they arrived at West 33^rd Street, where a ferry was transporting people across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Beto had her sit on a bench and after some searching he found someone of authority who said there was space for her on the next ferry.

As she went to leave, she said “I won’t go without this man.” And so they made space for him, and they crossed together. When they arrived in Hoboken, Beto flagged down a car, and they said they would take the woman wherever she wanted to go, but there was no room for Beto.

She wanted to wait for him, but he said you go on ahead of me. And 10 hours after they met, she went her way and he went his.

It wasn’t until 8 years later that Beto told anyone that story. See, he had been in a shopping mall, and he bumped into a woman.

“Alberto!” she shouted.

“I know you,” he said.

“September 11,” she continued, “You saved my life.”

“Ohh, you were strong… we helped each other,” he said.

“Beto,” the woman said, “when death surrounded me, I prayed to God that he would save me and my baby and when I opened my eyes you were there, and you lifted me up and you carried me away from danger. You saved me and my baby.”

And Beto said “How is your baby?”

The woman said, “Wait here.” And as she came back a man rushed ahead to Beto and embraced him, nearly knocking him over, and said, “Every night I thank God for you and pray that we would someday meet.”

Behind the man, of course, was a boy.

“Alberto…” the woman said, “I’d like you to meet our son. His name is Alberto.”

And Beto said, “Is that a name in your family?”

And the father said, ‘It is now.’”

What if it wasn’t a metaphor? What if it wasn’t figurative or far off? What if we came to believe it was possible within us?

That we can lay down our lives. That we can take up a cross. That we can become a new family.

Dear God, let it be.

Amen.

Luke 14

Throughout the Sundays of this summer, we have been listening again to the parables of Jesus, with an ear especially for the ways that Jesus takes the ordinary, everyday elements of our world and re-purposes them to tell us something about the extraordinary Kingdom of God – this realm where God’s love is known fully. And Jesus keeps telling us that we don’t have to leave our world to know it. We don’t to go someplace else. It is near to us any time we live our lives with that purpose of the kingdom – we can know it in baking bread, or planting seed… we can know it in our family relationships, or in the work of our hands… we can know it on familiar roads… we can know it sitting around a table.

It’s as powerful an image as we have of our life together as a church – and of the invitation into the life of God. The table. At every turn through the pages of Scripture you find it. The Passover meal in Egypt was eaten around a table. Many of Israel’s grand, dramatic stories occur around tables. The disciples of Jesus gather around the table on their last night with Jesus. And then, some days later, when they thought it was all over and wondered if he would keep his promise and make it back to them, two of his disciples have their eyes opened to a risen Christ while breaking bread with him at a table.

                   –The Best Supper by Jan Richardson

It is at the table that we meet Christ and find one another. And we know this as we gather at the table of our Lord for communion. But also we also know it at other tables, at the literal tables of our church, seated across from one another. Tables that are set up and reconfigured. Just today, we sat around tables in Sunday School; we gathered in the atrium as we came around a table set with coffee as we met our new Pastoral Resident. Tables are set up under the     trees for lunch after worship, and as we prepare  for the fall schedule, tables wait to be set for our weekly community meal, or youth snack supper, or community meetings, or handbell rehearsal, or a bereavement meal, as a grieving family are embraced by this congregation, or for a mission fair, as we remember the many ways we seek to love our neighbors, or for a monthly staff lunch, as our ministers and staff join together in the work to which we are called, or a committee meeting, as we dedicate ourselves to the care and growth of this congregation.

At these tables we come to know Christ and one another, and we can think of all those we see as we gather there, but this parable this morning is also about those we don’t see.

I had a college religion professor who would enter his classroom each day and, before taking the podium, carefully grab a chair and place it at his teaching table.  Each day the same routine: enter the room, grab the nearest chair, place it at the table, and proceed to the podium.  He was an active teacher, always pacing and scribbling on the dry erase board, never one to sit.  In fact, the semester continued without the teacher ever sitting down in the chair.

So one curious student – one of those students on the front row (you know the type) – finally raised her hand to ask a question that many students had thought to themselves: “Professor, we’ve seen your routine each day.  You always place a chair at the table but you’ve never sat down.  Why do you need the chair?”

The Professor answered, “I’m glad you noticed.  This chair stays empty as a reminder to us.  It reminds us of all those absent from this room.  We talk about scripture and theology, but there are so many that will never come through that door, so many perspectives we will never encounter, so many voices we will never hear.  This chair is here to remind us of all those absent from our table.”

The host in our parable today had arranged the chairs just so. He had been clearly schooled in the ways of hospitality that many of us know.

I’ve been to some of your homes, and I know how well you have perfected this art.

You’re the kind of hosts that wait expectantly and watch from the window so you can greet your guests before they even make it to the front door.  You know how to arrange the table with spectacle and grace and fine place settings.  This sanctuary is full of the kind of hosts that refuse to sit down until all guests are satisfied, and even then sit at that seat nearest the kitchen, ready to make a swift move if anyone runs out of sweet tea.

Maybe you’re the host in charge of planning the family gatherings.  You set the table with a centerpiece and cute little placecards – placecards decorated with a little turkey or an evergreen that matches your “motif.”  Everyone has their spot.  You put the rowdy child at a seat within his mother’s reach (that’s where I always sat), and the uncle that likes to talk politics is put down on the end next to the aunt that knows how to handle him.  The seats are arranged just so.

That’s hospitality.

Jesus is seated at  the table as he tells the story; it’s where he spent much of his own time.

 In Jesus’ day, the table was not only the setting for eating and drinking.  It was also a site for symbolic communication – what anthropologists call “the language of meals.”

And nowhere does Jesus speak it more clearly than in the gospel of Luke, which has more meal-time scenes, more tables set, than any other gospel.

It doesn’t matter whether the eating happens in Emmaus, an Upper Room, or the fields along the road (plucking the heads of grain); in the home of a despised tax collector (Levi, in chapter five) or even those of respectable religious leaders who invite Jesus to join them: like Simon the Pharisee, in chapter seven, and here, in chapter fourteen, another, unnamed leader of the Pharisees who offers Jesus hospitality for the Sabbath dinner.

The table was a symbol of social relationships.  The word for “banquet” that we find in our text literally means “an act of acceptance.”  So when Jesus sat down at table with someone, it was a way of saying to that person “I accept you” and a way of telling others, “I associate with this person…she’s one of my people…if you see him in the marketplace you can ask him about me.”

I found myself this week in a place I have not been since 1998 – the Principal’s office. I had a visit with Assistant Principal and First Baptist’s own Ryan Moody at Grimsley – it was much more pleasant than my last visit to the principal, and it was great to see some of our First Baptist students walking the halls between classes.

Our prayers have been with all of our students returning to school this week amidst the rigors and challenges of school – but between the classroom and the lockers there is that most difficult of schooltime challenges – the cafeteria tables.

One of the great existential crises of my life was at age 12, coming to the end of the line my first day of middle school: “Where will I sit?”

Lunchrooms can become mini societies, and they remind us how easily and naturally we huddle together with those who remind us of ourselves. Those like us, who share our level of privilege, or power, or possibility; we have a symbolic communication of our own.

Now a more strategic Messiah might have played things a little differently – might have teamed up with movers and shakers,schmoozed with the well-connected that could make things happen for him.  But Jesus seemed to find his way to tables filled with broken people.  The kind of people we hear about in Luke chapter 7, verse 22, when Jesus is summing up his ministry to the disciples of John – “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.”  Poor, crippled, lame, blind…these were some of the people with whom Jesus was inclined to gather, yet they’re the last the host invites in the parable today, but they’re always present at the table Jesus imagines, because they were with him throughout his life, seated across from him. He opened bottles of wine with these people and listened to their stories late into the night.

And so, when we find Jesus in Luke 14, you can almost picture him shifting uneasily in his seat.  Here he is, at a private party, in the home of a well-connected leader.  He seems to be enjoying the food, he’s on his second glass of grape juice, he seems happy.  Then he addresses his host.

“Good party, friend…great food, fine wine…but why am I seated here next to your rich neighbor and your favorite uncle?  And why all these empty seats?  Where are my people?  Were their invitations lost in the mail?  Don’t you know, when you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends and relatives or your rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return.  But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.”

If you invite Jesus to a banquet, he shows up with a guest list in his pocket.

Don’t be strategic. Don’t go for reciprocity. Be extravagantly, forgetfully generous. Invite the most unlikely, most unexpected of guests into your home and share that most necessary, most enjoyable experience of eating together.

And the message is this: why have we not organized ourselves like this? Why isn’t that what is natural for us?

“The poor, lame, crippled, blind…”

When we read the guest list, we’re almost tempted to change the venue.  I admit, I would be much more comfortable if Jesus had said, invite these people to your Soup Kitchen, your food drive, or your Christmas giveaway.  These are the things we do well–feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give water to the thirsty. But we should also hear Jesus say to us your mission is bigger than these things, more powerful than food and water, more demanding than a toy drive.  It also involves sitting down, looking across, lifting our eyes, at a table.

This is not the guest list for a benefit…it’s the guest list for a banquet.  An intimate, face-to-face gathering.  A meal of acceptance, where we declare something about ourselves and our associations.

Everywhere else we are separated by class, status, physical ability, but at the banquet, we are seated at the same table, side by side, face to face.

Our world is not set up for banquets. We’re too busy, too preoccupied; we have too many excuses.

We don’t see it in our lunchrooms, or in our churches, or in our places of work.

So often hospitality just becomes domesticated, confused with comfort, a kind of eco-system of inviting that keeps the welcome circulating among those we feel most comfortable around. Our relationship to the stranger often comes in the form of generosity offered from a distance, rather than relationship up close and personal.

But in fact the Greek word for hospitality means “love of the stranger”. Hospitality is ‘love of the stranger’, and at some point, when you sit down together, the stranger is no longer strange.  And maybe that is the Kingdom of God.

Because if we look closely, we will realize, we don’t make the seating chart; we don’t offer the invitation; this is not actually our table after all.

And the invitation has already been sent out: “come all you who are weary and heavy burdened…come all you who are thirsty…all you that hunger come.”

And that’s you…and that’s me!  See, we’re on the list. And at some point we experienced the invitation of Jesus, and have encountered that grace in our lives that said wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, you’re welcome here. You’re home; you’re safe; you can be new, and perhaps we’re even experiencing it here and now in a new way.

And one day we will arrive at a banquet, and before you even ring the doorbell, the door will swing wide and the arms of the host will welcome you.  You will be shown to a table spread full with food and drink and a seat saved for you.  And on one end sits your neighbor, and down on the other you see your favorite uncle.  But as you sit down, you notice the seats around you, to your right and left and across the table, are not yet filled…only placecards mark the spot.  So you stretch to read the names.  You’re curious to see who’s sitting next to you.  But I have a hunch you already know what these placecards say. They say, “poor, crippled, lame, and blind.”

Oh God, let this kingdom come on earth…on earth…

Amen.

Luke 11:5-8

People keep asking me how I’m sleeping these days. It’s one of those questions that people pose to parents of babies, often with a twisted smile as if to rub it in.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends that someone my age should get 7-9 hours of sleep each night… which is not really the norm right now… but I did hit the mark on Tuesday night.

Confession: this week I was in DC for a quick overnight trip – where I was by far the worst spouse among those in attendance for leaving Jenny at home with four children – but I was invited to be part of a conference on the role of faith in the public square. In this case I loved the topic, but many times when I travel I could care less the reason, I’m just trying to get to a hotel–waking up on a king-size pillow-top mattress, a TV on the wall that doesn’t have any kid’s channels. I woke up Wednesday morning, and I actually went for a long run through our nation’s capital; I paid homage to Honest Abe; I came back and grabbed a bottled water and towel from the lobby, “How was your run, sir?” someone asked. Back in the room I left laundry wherever I wanted, I turned the tv on full volume and took a long shower. I ironed my clothes while watching the news.  Now, don’t tell Jenny any of this… but as I read the paper while drinking a cup of coffee I thought to myself, “I really should do this every day.”

But then hotel life is not real life. And real life is not so pillow-top and plush. We have responsibilities, family, maybe an early morning cry from the other room, or the stress of waking children up for school, or the grog that comes from a late night of studying, or the reality that many of us who work outside of the home are taking that work back into the home at night. We have racing minds as we think about our families, or a shoulder pain that wakes us up when we roll over on it in the night.

There are any number of things in real life that are keeping us awake, so when you do fall asleep and find some rest, the last thing you want to hear is a knock at the door.

That’s what happens in this parable of Jesus. A man has settled in with the evening. His children are in bed. His work is complete. The door is locked, when someone arrives with a knock on the door, and a request: “Give me three loaves of bread, for a friend has arrived – an unexpected guest – and I have nothing to give them.”

Jesus invites us to imagine a world where this happens. It seems strange and unfamiliar to those of us used to doing our own grocery shopping, and having guests announce their visits well in advance.  The world of this parable seems a far-off place to us, even as much as we value and prioritize hospitality, we’re still not accustomed to this level where travelers feel comfortable dropping by at midnight uninvited, a desperate host goes door to door, and even the most reluctant, sleepy-eyed villager is compelled to give up three loaves of bread. It can seem like a distant ideal.

But it’s important to remember that for Jesus’ early listeners, this was entirely plausible. One of the greatest strengths of the parables of Jesus is the way they engaged people where they live, using elements of the everyday. In imagining the kingdom, Jesus said, “it can happen right here where you live, among your homes, your relationships, your villages…”

In this parable, God’s kingdom looks a lot like a village. And in this village – the economy – the standards are different than those we recognize. A guest has traveled at night, likely to avoid the heat of day. He has arrived late, and when the host has nothing to offer, he scurries to the neighbors. “Everything is put away…my children are sleeping…” The sleepy neighbor’s protest sounds reasonable to most of us… after all, when’s the last time we answered the door at midnight?

We’re a long way from such a village, and yet, we know that our streets, our society – our web of mutuality – includes so many people who are awake in the night.

How are we sleeping these days?

The Bible is full of the promise of rest. Pastoral images of the God in whose shadow we can rest, who covers us with the wings of a mother bird, who leads us beside still waters where our souls can be restored, who in the person of Jesus invites all of us who labor and are heavy-burdened to come and find rest for our souls.

It is the promise of God to all who come, and I believe that it might be the most powerful image of what the Kingdom of God means. Sometimes it seems abstract or distant, but I think it means a place where all God’s people have what they need to find rest.

But if we look around our world – take the long view that arcs out from our places of rest and renewal, like this very church – we catch sight of so many who are sleepless, who are rest-less, living very far from the recommended 7 to 9, and we can think of the reasons.

Hunger has a way of disturbing sweet dreams.  Violence and fear of it disrupts “peace and quiet.”  Stress and sickness keep minds active and awake and bodies tossing and turning.

We might remember the single mother; it’s all she can do to catch a nap in between shifts of her 2^nd or 3^rd job.

Or the man who sleeps outside, constantly aware of his surroundings and never really falling asleep.

Or maybe the nervous parent pacing frantically through the early morning hours praying for a sick child and wondering how she’ll find the care she needs.

Or the couple who’s up late at the kitchen table, trying to figure out how they’re going to stretch the funds to pay for college and offer the care they want to an aging parent who’s ill.

Or the family working round the clock to put their home back together after a flood, or what about the child who sleeps in a zone where he can hear the sounds of conflict and the rattle of war?

Many of us were rattled from our sleep to a greater awareness of the crisis in Syria a couple of weeks back through the image of a toddler who was pulled from the rubble of his home after it was hit in an airstrike – the boy and his family survived – but there was something about the image of him in the ambulance that disturbed, rattled, provoked a swell of international reaction. What comes because of that is yet to be seen. Will I just forget and slumber once more, or be moved to greater awareness?  But I think the most jarring part for me was to learn that moments before his home caved in, he was sleeping.

It’s what we do at our most vulnerable, and if he can’t sleep safely, where can any of us sleep?

That’s the message of this parable at its core: if someone can’t sleep on their side of the village, then I can’t simply sleep peacefully on mine.

Jay Hogewood is pastor of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Baton Rouge – and for the last two weeks amidst the crisis of the flood and the response, Jay and his church have found many people coming to their doors. They have found themselves a center for the first phase of response: making meals, housing families in a makeshift shelter, helping evacuees find more stable housing, coordinating volunteer teams, and meanwhile planning worship, and sermons, and Bible Studies. Jay is exhausted and there is little rest for him in sight. One day last week he was heading out when he remembered he needed to drop a family off at a hotel, so he packed his Ford Escape, ran inside to grab water and his phone, and behind him was a 17 year old boy named Wendell who said, “Excuse me…”

“Hey, man, Can I help you?” Jay asked, of course not really meaning it at the moment.

The 17 year old boy had a blank stare on his face and was drenched in sweat.

“Um, hey, I’m Jay. Is there anything we can help ya with?”

“Oh, okay then, well, I’m Wendell,” the 17 year old says. He was sweating from the walk he’s taken up Gardere Lane – a sidewalk-less street. A mile or 2 Wendell has walked to get to the church.

Jay braced himself for what Wendell would ask him.

“Mr. Jay, I just wanted to see if I could help with these…” Wendell put his little mesh backpack on the ground and carefully, he took out a stack of seven shirts and two pairs of slacks and put them in Jay’s still unwelcoming arms.  “They’re clean,” he said, surely seeing the suspicion in Jay’s face. “Oh and one more thing,” He pulled out a hand sized teddy bear (with a 2007 LSU National Championship little shirt on it). “I want one of the children to have this,” he offered. “And here’s something else for y’all.” Into his pocket, he reached and placed two $1 bills in Jay’s hand.

“I think y’all are showing the love of Jesus here. Hope you have a good day.”

He turned to go. On foot. Down a scary street. In the stifling heat of the day.

And Jay got in his air-conditioned car, and he wept.

See, the standard of the village – which is the standard of the kingdom, itself – reminds us that sometimes this person that comes do the door will have something that might just save us, that just as they come with a need, they also come with gifts that we will need.

I think that’s ultimately why the man rises from his sleep and answers the door.

It’s the persistent knocking of the neighbor that awakens the man, yes, but then look again at these two words: “his persistence.”

The word for persistence – in virtually every other instance it appears throughout ancient literature – is translated, instead, “shamelessness.” Instead of the persistence of the knocker, what if it’s really the shamelessness of the sleeper at work here?

“Because of his shamelessness – because he is ashamed to stay in bed – the man will get up and give him what he needs.”

In Jesus’ world, such shame was not simple guilt; it was a standard of life together. People gave, because they knew at some point they would find themselves on the road, or maybe they had found themselves there before. Surely, they would be annoyed by a knock at the door – but at some level, they would see themselves through the keyhole; they would see their own circumstances in the man knocking. And when you see yourself standing there, how can you not awaken?

“I cannot give you anything!” the man says.  The reluctant villager yawns and cries from within, “The door is already locked…My children are asleep.”  But from the outside, there is another voice. It’s inaudible and unrecorded, but it is clear: it’s the voice and demands of the village shouting back, “You can’t simply sleep if your house is secure, if your children are safe, if your loved ones are well-fed…if others aren’t.” Their restlessness is your restlessness. And if someone can’t sleep on their side of the village, then how can I simply sleep on mine?

That’s why I wonder if our faith is meant to be as pillow-top and plush as we sometime make it.

I wonder if sometimes we mistake faithfulness for contentment or for ease.

For all the talk of rest and peace and comfort, the Bible calls us to be wakeful, too.

And in addition to the peace God provides for the weary, God also sparks a restlessness that might in itself be a virtue of faith in Christ. More and more I think to follow Jesus is to be in a wakeful, restless state in the midst of this world that God so loves.

The restlessness that reminds us we are unfinished people, in an incomplete world that still is still in need of the saving grace of God and Christ.

That’s what this parable is asking of us, I think.

The parable is not asking us to do it all, but it is asking us to stay awake, stay alert to those who yet knock.

When I was a pastor in New York, at Metro Baptist, our church got a lot of knocks at the door.

The church was just across the street from the bus depot where people were arriving to New York City, often without a plan or clear prospects. They’d ring the bell, they’d knock on the door, and they’d try to get all the way in to the office area. There were many times when someone asked for something the church was not prepared to give, and we had to shut the door.

One of our summer interns experienced this one evening when a man came to the door wanting a place to stay. He was sick, coughing, no place to go, and she did what she could, gave him a sandwich bag and some socks, but was clear that we weren’t equipped for him to stay there. And she was right.  We had groups staying upstairs; we had children coming the next morning; we had staff we were accountable to; there was no way we could let him stay there. So she shut the door.  And it was the right decision. Even as she made the right decision, the plausible decision, she didn’t confuse that with the gospel. She noticed when she shut the door, the man slid down and leaned against it, and she was so heartbroken by it, that she did the same. And she could hear the man coughing on the other side, so she just sat there, tears in her eyes, and prayed as she listened to his coughs. She sat up half the night mourning his circumstances, grieving all that divided them, and praying that the gospel, the kingdom, might be made known.

There is a lot that’s happened in that building, but I’m not sure there is anything that has ever happened in that building that’s any closer to the kingdom of God than that grief, that restlessness that said, “there must be more; there must be more that God can make possible here in our midst.”

The parable is not asking us to do it all, but it is asking us not to sleep too heavily, not to shut the door too easily, not to slumber too readily.

In the next chapter of Luke, Jesus tells us a story about a man who has it all, and he goes asleep taking it easy, before God calls him a fool. His grave mistake is that he falls asleep too quickly.

And later in the gospels, when Jesus needs his disciples most – and he is awake in agony and self-doubt in the garden – they fall asleep: “Could you have not have stayed awake?”

Such is the Kingdom of God. The kingdom of the one, whom we learn in scripture, neither slumbers nor sleeps–a God who is awake to you and to me in all of our grief and brokenness.

For Luke, this parable is about prayer and the ways we seek this wakeful God, “Ask and it shall be give to you… seek and you shall find… knock and the door shall be opened.”

In other words, God is no sleepy villager, but the one who is wakeful, alert to our needs, constantly working for our good, and again and again opening the door to us, no matter how many times we wander out into the night and struggle to find our way back home.

And that God is seeking followers who would wake from their slumber, who would hear the slightest knock, who would stay restless enough to dream of a new world, even as they lie awake.

So let me ask you: How are we sleeping?

Matthew 13:44-46

The Sower by Vincent Van Gogh

Today I’m going to do something you don’t always see a Baptist pastor do…

Now, I’m not sure how many things are on that list for you, and I don’t want your imaginations to go too far, so I’ll just tell you. In one of the great honors of my life, our friends John and Kim Martin recently asked me to be the godfather to their daughter, Liza. So just before the end of our service today at First Baptist, I’ll slip out and over to St. Pius X to stand with family and friends at the baptism of Liza, all with apologies to John Smyth, our 17^th century Baptist forerunner, who so rejected the Church’s practice of baptism that he baptized himself so he could then baptize others.

But I have great hopes for this service. For one, my son, Jack, this morning was putting up a bit of a fight about attending church, and I’m hoping that after attending mass today – as I hope any time he attends another church – his conclusion will be that it could be worse.

But mainly I’m looking forward to standing near – to witness to a baptism in a way that I don’t practice, yet a way I can appreciate and admire – promises made to a child, pledges made for our hopes for her faith in Jesus Christ, and hopes that she will remember in some mystical way throughout her life that these promises were made.

Theodore Wardlaw has expressed the same hope for his children. Wardlaw, who is President of Austin Presbyterian Seminary and previously a pastor in Atlanta, is also the father of two daughters.  And when his daughters were younger, one of his habits was to periodically put his hand on their foreheads and make the sign of the cross, as he had at their baptism years before.  “Remember your baptism,” he would say, which strikes me as just the sort of annoying thing that children of pastors have to endure, but it became a ritual in the home.  When they were getting ready for school in the morning: shoes on, hair combed, backpack ready, sign of the cross, “Remember your baptism.” Tucking them into bed: teeth brushed, book read, sign of the cross: “Remember your baptism!”

You can imagine how his daughters responded as they got older. It happened less, but he still said it from time to time. When one of his daughters was a teenager she was heading out the door with friends, “Do you have your license?” he said. “Yes.” “Do you have money for the movies?” “Yes.”  “Do you…” and she cuts him off, “Dad, I’ve got my license, I’ve got money, I know what time to be home, I’ve done my homework, I’ve walked the dog, and I’m remembering my baptism… okay?!”[1]

But he wanted to instill it… to rehearse it… because Wardlaw knew, as Liza will come to know, as all of us beloved children of God know from time to time, that sometimes our faith, our hope, the kingdom that Jesus inspires us to imagine,  sometimes it’s a small thing. It’s not sweeping and overwhelming, not dramatic and all-encompassing; it can be as concealed as a single treasure in a vast field.

It’s a small thing, which means it’s hard to find, hard to see. It can be difficult to remember. It can be so easy to hide.

In this stretch of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is teaching us about the kingdom of heaven that is composed of such small things.  He does so with a string of parables about the small things: seeds and leaven and treasure and pearls.

As the teaching starts, first he is teaching a large crowd. He is saying that the kingdom is as miniscule as a mustard seed, as tiny as a spoonful of leaven. The kingdom will surprise you; you won’t see it or touch it or possess it, but it will still move about you.

But notice as Jesus moves to the next two parables, he is meeting privately with his closest disciples, and to them he says the kingdom is like treasure in a field that someone stumbles upon, or a pearl of great price that a merchant searches for and finds.

The kingdom is that one thing in your life that holds such value that it makes all other things seem unimportant, and unlike the mustard seed and the leaven that he tells the large crowd about, when it comes to the treasure, Jesus speaks as though he expects those of us who follow him to discover it, to encounter it.  Only he doesn’t tell us what it is. Jesus doesn’t tell us what it is, only that it’s something of such incalculable value that all else becomes dispensable.

Jim Collins, the leadership theorist, cites in his work an ancient story of the fox and the hedgehog. A fox who is cunning, brilliant, fully grasping the complexities of his surroundings, sets his mind on making a meal of a hedgehog. He plots the perfect attack. Meanwhile, the hedgehog, who is described as simplistic, goes about his business unaware. The fox attacks and the hedgehog rolls into a tiny, spiny, impenetrable ball. The fox is undeterred and keeps strategizing, but again when he attacks the hedgehog rolls into a ball. And the pattern repeats over and over, with new and innovative attacks that can’t get past the prickly ball of defense.  The story famously concludes, “The fox knew many things… but the hedgehog knew one big thing…”[2]

The kingdom is like treasure hidden in the field; it’s one big thing. When someone found it, they knew it, and they said this is it; this is worth all that I have to give.

Jesus doesn’t tell us what it is, but he does give us some idea of where to find it.

That peaks our interest, because we all have a bit of treasure hunter in us. You know this if you’ve been in the mountains at all this summer, and followed the signs and the winding roads that lead to one of North Carolina’s great cottage industries: the gem-mining business. Cut out of the side of a mountain are these stops where you can pan for gold, or rubies, or sapphires, which is what caught my dad’s eye years ago when we were stopped at one such place and a local man hanging out in the parking lot flashed a sapphire the size of his fist that “came right out of that mountain.” Next thing I knew, my dad was back behind this man’s beat up car, and the man was showing him rings in a suitcase. “Alan do you think mom would like this?” my dad asked me.  And that was the time my father bought birthday jewelry for my mother out of the back of a Crown Victoria on the side of a mountain. She doesn’t really wear that ring much anymore.

But so often isn’t that how we approach the good things of God? As though you have to climb a mountain, up some winding road, dig for it. You have to possess some sort of secret knowledge, or at least know an insider who can tell you the way.

But that’s not where Jesus says this treasure is found. It’s not up a hill; it’s at ground level.

In our parable, it’s in a field when someone seems to stumbles upon it. There’s nothing about this person’s efforts that are particularly notable.  They’re probably literally just plowing along, like always, hands gripping the tools, teeth gritted, and they strike something.

And it can happen like that.

Part of the wonder of Jesus’ parables is how mundane they are – dealing in the everyday elements that are buried in the earth.

We might want to travel to some extraordinary, holy place to search for it. We might think we have to climb a mountain or into a cave.

But it turns out that the kingdom and all its possibility is hidden in plain view, not in any of the places the slick treasure hunters would be sure to check, but maybe in the last place we look, on the ground that we walk, or beneath the surface of our everyday, ordinary lives.

See, in describing the kingdom of God, Jesus never asks people to leave their world; it need not be some distant dream.

You don’t have to go somewhere else for God to dwell with you. The parables of Jesus tell us that it happens as you are doing the everyday things, as you are drawing water from wells, preparing food, tending sheep. It happens as you’re baking bread, sowing seed, walking a familiar road, or plowing a field.

You can stumble upon it, which is underscored when you compare this parable of treasure to the parable of the pearl that comes next.  Unlike the merchant hunting the pearls, the person who finds the treasure in the field doesn’t seem to be looking for it.  But when he finds it, he doesn’t wait; he buries it again.  He runs to the bank, sells everything he’s accumulated on his laborer’s salary, and then goes back to the owner of the field, “So, how much would you take for this plot of land?”

Jesus says that the kingdom belongs to people like that. See Jesus doesn’t tell us what the treasure is, not precisely. He doesn’t tell us what the kingdom looks like, not exactly. He doesn’t tell us how to find it, at least not specifically, but I think he tells us how we will know when we do.

How is it in the middle of a field or the middle of a life you decide this is it? This is worth my all?

The one who found the treasure seems to know what is worth more than anything else, and he clears all else away in favor of this one big thing.

Jesus seems to be saying this is the way we are to live, finding treasure in the earth of our world and pursuing it no matter the cost or the consequence.

How do we know which is real and which is fake? How do we know treasure when it doesn’t look like treasure? How do you know that you’re ready to give up everything else, when you’ve stumbled upon something of such great value? We’ll know it’s real – we’ll know we’ve found it – because of this quality that describes the man in our parable, “In his joy.”

Right in between when the treasure was found and the field was bought, Jesus uses this phrase. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone found and hid again, and then in his joy he goes to sell all and buy that field.

When we find it, there will be joy, all-encompassing joy.

And when we find it, Jesus tells us how to respond.

When you find something of great value that makes other things you own seem dispensable, something that gives you that all-encompassing joy, don’t think twice.  If you’ve found the kingdom, stake your life on it.

It can be a tiny and overshadowed reality at times, but once you’ve found it, once you’ve experienced it, give your life to it. Buy the whole field, for it’s the kind of thing that can start to make us different people and this world a different place.

It is worth our wholesale efforts. For it does not come through piecemeal approaches; it won’t come about through all the best proven practices, the safe and secure strategies.

Sell all and give your money to the poor, Jesus says to the rich young man.

Drop your nets, and follow me into a whole new way of being, he says to the disciples, come along and you will become more than you knew you could be.

Jesus tells people, if they follow him, they could be rejected by their own family. Everybody could turn against them. There might be jail time, beatings, worse. He tells them there’s no way to follow him without a cross.

And wouldn’t you know that some dropped everything they were doing, deserted their homes, let the fishing business go, flipped over the tables at the family shop, and followed him.

That’s what you do when you stumble upon the Kingdom of God.

It’s there just below the surface of our lives, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be claimed.

Just imagine there was the thing of greatest value, that made all other things seem trivial, that gift offered to this world, the one thing you could be or do or give or have—you’d want nothing to encase that, nothing to stand in its way or obscure it.  You’d want nothing to bury it. And yet we know there’s so much that obscures it, hides it from our view.  There is so much in our world that keeps us from seeing it, from discovering it, from knowing it. I wonder sometimes where it is found and how, and if I’d recognize it when I do. I wonder sometimes if I will remember it’s there.

In a few moments I’ll stand with Liza and her family, and I will see that sign of the cross, and I will know so much will obscure and hide that from her view, and I’m wondering will she be able to remember, will they all be able to remember, will we be able to remember that it’s there?

That’s what Ted Wardlaw and his wife wanted so badly for his daughters, which is why, annoying as it was, he made that sign all of their lives.

The day came when Ted Wardlaw and his wife dropped their oldest daughter off at college. They were standing there saying goodbye, wondering had they done enough, been enough? Their daughter gave them one last hug and then left with other first year students. And she rounded the corner, all grown up, and they stood there, not knowing exactly where to put their feet or which way to turn, and then just before they left the daughter turned back, and she’s 30 yards away, and she looked at her parents and she offers them the sign of the cross.

And in the middle of that field, they realized they had helped her to find one thing of great value.

Maybe you’ve been forgetful, or preoccupied, or cautious with this treasure.

That’s okay. It’s easy to do that with small things. It’s easy to miss something when it’s hidden in plain sight, when it’s as small and concealed as a single piece of treasure buried in the earth.

But, don’t wait any longer. Go out today and buy the field whatever the cost, remembering as you do, the one that when he found it, gave his very life so that we might find it, too.

Thanks be to God.

[1]Related in a sermon by Benjamin Dorr, Northridge Presbyterian Church, Dallas (August 4, 2013)

[2]Jim Collins, Good to Great

 

Luke 15:11-32

As most of you know, this is my first sermon since Jenny and I welcomed a new baby. That’s one way to say it. Another way of saying it is, “We just had our fourth baby.” Still another way you might say it is, “We just had our fourth baby in six and a half years!”

Jim Gaffigan is a wildly popular comedian, whom some of us saw just last night right here in Greensboro. He and his wife have five children, and Gaffigan has made his name in part on his fun-loving, self-deprecating, honest look at fatherhood in his standup, his TV series, and in books such as his bestselling “Dad is Fat” – the title coming from the first full sentence Gaffigan’s oldest child ever wrote: “Dad-is-fat.” Before Gaffigan and his wife had their fifth child, he said that people would ask him what it’s like to have four kids. He would say, “Well, just imagine you’re drowning… and someone hands you a baby.”

Jenny and I can relate somewhat, treading water and finding new muscles all along in these recent weeks, and I’ve found myself coming up with some new strategies – rules really – of how to be a parent, and a father in particular, at this time in my life. So let me give you five. Perhaps these will be helpful for some of you, but mainly they’re a way to answer the question, “How’s it going?”

Number 1: Don’t disturb the status quo. Don’t ever do that. If everyone’s happy and no one’s life is in danger, just don’t mess with them, because it’s a thin line between balance and crisis.

Rule number 2: Try to find productive reasons to get out of the house, preferably by yourself for a reason that your spouse or partner can bless. Just invent errands that need to be done. You’ve been meaning to go to Lowe’s or Home Depot to pick up that obscure piece of hardware, or to the auto parts store to change your wiper blades. Get out of the house. So for example, don’t ever order delivery. Always order takeout and then volunteer to go get it, and if it’s not quite ready and you have to sit down at the bar to wait for it, that’s just the price you pay. “Boy were they behind tonight, honey.”

Rule number 3:  Along with everything you have to buy for a baby, buy a few extra sleeping bags and maybe even some camping mats, and put one set in every child’s bedroom just to be ready in the likely event that one of them needs you to sleep on the floor. Our baby, Bea, has been great, it’s siblings that have been waking up. Save yourself the extra step of fumbling around in the dark looking for a blanket. You might even want to set the sleeping bag up before you go to sleep, just to make it as smooth as possible at 3am.

With that in mind, rule number 4: Make sure you have some help. Any form of help. For us, this meant finding a trampoline, which is essentially a large, elastic playpen for older kids. Don’t try to have multiple children unless you have some help – a trampoline, or grandparents in town, or at least a couple large dogs that can pitch in with the kids.

On that theme of help is rule number 5: Pick one of your middle children and make sure they’re ready to raise themselves. It doesn’t mean they’re less important to you, but somebody has to pull their weight around the house besides the adults. Thankfully, so far 19-month-old Warner has seemed up to the task.

In all of this, of course, is the overwhelming rule to hold the child as tightly as you can. Don’t miss a moment to let her sleep on your chest and breathe in your ear. Because, as some of you know so well, in a couple weeks she’ll be going to college, or at least picking out new school shoes for kindergarten, and I will be realizing that no matter the rules I try to impose, I can only control so much.

Still, there are rules. Rules for fatherhood, for parenthood, for any relationship. Norms. Conventions. Expectations. They govern our life together. Rules in any relationship in any era, and this morning in the parables we meet a father who breaks every single one.

Return of the Prodigal, Jean Louis Forain

“A certain man had two sons,” Jesus says to all of us listening in. And with that, we basically know the rest of the story. We know how this goes. We can already hear the noise of the welcome home party. We can smell the fatted calf. The wayward boy will make it home from the distant land once again. Some of us have even walked that road ourselves. We know it.

So familiar is the tale, we might mistake it for a reassuring fable rather than a parable filled with the shock and surprise of this Kingdom Jesus is trying to tell us about where heroes appear dressed up like Samaritans,  savvy barn-building businessmen turn out to be fools, slackers find the same mercy as hardworking over-achievers, and squanderers find their way home to loving arms. We know the story all too well. I guess it doesn’t surprise us any more.

But Jesus’ first listeners probably felt they knew the whole story, too. “A certain man had two sons,” and immediately they could think of the conventions and the patterns they knew from their own experience.  It’s a story as timeless as Cane and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and his brother Esau. This is a sibling rivalry tale. Two brothers and between them a father’s inheritance. Every culture has these stories. It’s so archetypal it fits neatly into two acts. Act One: the younger son. Act Two: the elder son.

They knew the story. As they knew the conventions. The norms. They knew the rules.

Rule number 1: Fathers don’t divide the inheritance.

The ancient Jewish writing Sirach – a work of ethical teachings from some 200 years before Jesus – is clear enough: don’t give up the inheritance! Don’t do it. “To son or wife, to brother or friend,” Sirach says, “do not give power over yourself, as long as you live; and do not give your property to another…nay only in the hour of your death distribute your inheritance.” (1)

“Give me my share of the inheritance” the younger son says. Just like that. Phrased as an order. And the father actually does it! The younger son is essentially saying to his father, “Dad, you are better off to me dead.” And the father responds in turn, dividing among his sons his bios the text says. “Bios” from which we take “biology.” The son says, “drop dead.” And the father divides his bios – his very life.

An ancient rabbinical saying gives a list of individuals who should expect no sympathy when they cry out in need. Among those listed is “he who divides his property to his children during his lifetime.” (2)

It’s just not what fathers do.

As with Rule number 2: Fathers don’t release their sons to their own devices. A first century father was responsible – accountable – for all the actions of the household and for the entire economy built around it. Fathers couldn’t afford for irresponsible heirs to squander all that had been passed down and all that had been laid out for them.

This is dramatically underscored in this parable when we see the total failure of the son. He wasn’t prepared for such responsibility, wasting his inheritance on anything that caught his eye; he wasn’t prepared to deal with the sudden famine in the land, and when he finally comes to himself he’s wallowing with pigs. He heads home, motivated mostly by the meal ticket he will find there, rehearsing a speech under his breath as he trudges up the road.

The father never should have let him out.

But if you’re going to let him out, Dad, at least remember rule number 3: Life goes on. The child made his choice. He’s no longer under the concern or protection of the household. So move on. There are fields to cultivate, accounting to do, projects to supervise, others who rely on your sound decision-making.

But as the lost son makes his way home, the story is so utterly clear – his father sees him, “while he was still far off.” Bookkeeping, farming, advanced planning… he hasn’t been doing any of it. This father has been watching for his son.

I was about 7 or 8 years old and riding my bike through the neighborhood, and I was enjoying the newfound freedom that comes when training wheels are left in the garage. I was way down the road from my house feeling so independent and rounding the cul de sac when a screen door slammed, and I heard a woman shout “No!” and next thing I knew a playful but huge German Shepherd had bounded out the door, pounced and knocked me down on the sidewalk. It was the scariest moment of my young life, and I closed my eyes, screamed, covered my face… and it seemed like almost instantly I was up in the air; two hands had just yanked me up. My father had been following me. He seemed like a giant to me. He had some not so churchy things to say to that woman down the street, then we left my bike on the sidewalk and he carried me back home.

Some fathers follow you down the road. They walk behind you to catch you or clean up your mess or snatch you from a situation you can’t manage on your own. But this father in the parable waited. He watched. He sees his son. He recognizes what others might not. When the boy is but a silhouette against the sky, the father sees him. He sees his slowed but still familiar gait before he came into full clarity of view; while he was still far off, his father sees.

But for all that is right and respectable, just don’t break rule number 4, that is, fathers don’t go out to their sons. That’s not what fathers do. Sons come to them, and they better have a well-rehearsed apology speech if they do. Yet this father takes off, hiking up his skirts to run down the path as the screen door slams behind him. Then a rapid staccato of action in the text: moved with compassion, he falls on his neck, and kisses him again and again.

No testing of the son. No questions asked. The father cuts him off mid-speech with a robe, a ring, and a homecoming dance. Lost is found. Dead is alive.

And as the story continues in Act 2, he does the same for his elder son – the son filled with anger and self-righteousness and extracting himself from the family out in the field. But the father, again, pursues one of his sons. This is a father that goes out to both of his children, the parable tells us. He pleads with the elder. He even entreats him with a term of such endearment: “my dear child.”

Understand, that in the ancient world of this parable, by many accounts, that’s just not what fathers do. Fathers were detached, authoritative, conscious of hierarchy, and defensive of honor. This father so defies convention that the parables scholar Bernard Brandon Scott has said by first-century standards he might have been more like a mother than a father. (3)

Fathers don’t give away the inheritance, as though they are dead. Fathers don’t wait at the kitchen window for days at a time. Fathers don’t hike up their skirts. Fathers don’t pursue. Fathers don’t fall down in a mess of emotion.

But this father does.

And Jesus is telling us something about a kingdom such as this – the kind of realm he envisions and seeks to bring about where his followers defy convention and limit, where they discard the weights of expectations they’ve carried for years, and lift their noses from the rulebooks they’ve read and rehearsed over and over in favor of a bold new story of unrestricted love, complete with all its compassionate pursuit, and persistent waiting, and extravagant giving.

As a father to my children I may hope nothing more than for my love to stretch beyond limit, beyond conventions and expectation, that I might be for them a gazer, and a giver, and a runner, and a kisser.

But it’s not really a story about fathers and children. Not only that, at least. This is a story, ultimately, of the kind of love that, if we can receive it and understand it, can make us different people and this world a different place.

For we’ve been following our own rules, too. We have rehearsed and performed them. We have lived our lives with the cues of convention and the limits of our inherited knowledge.

We’ve believed the inheritance is limited and finite. We’ve retreated to the fields when we see the abundance of God enjoyed by another we deem less-deserving. We have missed the music and the joy, and we have evaluated our world and our own lives only by the rules of what is just and fair.

So often we’ve forgotten the one who has been watching for us all along – the one who sees us, really sees us as no one else can. The one who according to every rule we know could have said: you’ve earned this broken life, you deserve to be wallowing and limping, these are the wages of what you’ve done, you’ve brought this on yourself.

And yet God in Christ chooses mercy again and again, defies the expectations in favor of a wide, opening embrace, standing at the center of our lives with a message that “Everything I have is yours. All that I am is still for you.”

How will we respond when that kind of love finds us?

I’ve wondered the same about these two sons of the father. How did they respond? What happened?  Did the older brother accept the father’s invitation to come in to the party or remain in the fields feeling as though he’s holding up the honor of the family all by himself? Did the younger brother simply enjoy his father’s gifts, or live beneath the weight of shame, or did the place set for him serve as the start of a renewed life and an awareness that he is so much more than his failures?

We don’t know. Jesus leaves an open ending so that we must finish the story for ourselves. Act One: younger son. Act Two: older son. But we can easily imagine a third act.

Jesus’ early listeners probably would have seen it, too – an inevitable conflict on the horizon. For, one day, the father will be gone. And it will just be two brothers – one proven reckless and one fairly sanctimonious – and between them an inheritance is there to be claimed. You can imagine the rest of that story. You’ve heard the tale before. As old as Cane and Abel. And it has its own rules.

Rule number one: Sons can’t be expected to divide equally between them that which the father leaves behind.

Rule number two: Children wouldn’t believe there was enough of their father’s great resources to go around.

Rule number three: There’s only one way to settle this – collision and conflict are inevitable.

Rule number four: The last one standing claims the prize – in the ancient world, one or both of these children would probably end up dead.

Unless, of course, they throw out the rules – which they might just be able to do if they can remember the one who did the same for them. If only at some point they could remember the compassion of their father, how his love defied all the limits they had known, how willing he was to shed the weight of those expectations to demonstrate his affection for them. Maybe they pause in that moment and remember the one that pursued them. The one that did what most fathers don’t do. Maybe they remember his kiss. His gaze. His bare legs and awkward run as he hiked up his skirts and pursued them.

What would happen if they remembered it? What would happen if we remembered it? The watching, the running, the wide embrace, the unrestricted compassion of the one who pursues us still? It might invite us into a new kind of life. It might even help us imagine and embody a kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

See love like that, it changes the rules.

And thanks be to God.

1. Sirach 33:19-23.

2. Babylonian Talmud, Baba Mezia 75B.

3. Hear Then the Parable, pp. 99-126

Luke 16:19-31

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple.  At his GATE was laid a beggar named Lazarus.”

The parable of the Rich man and Lazarus–we know its meaning.  We should give to the poor; we should be sympathetic to those who have less than we do.  And if we do that we shall have a seat at Abraham’s table in the here-after.  This parable teaches that lesson well.

However, I would like to push against the current and seek to understand this parable as a tale not so much about what the rich man didn’t give, but more about what he failed to receive.  So let’s gather around this GATE and ponder the meaning of this fascinating story.  Let’s pray:  Lord, open our eyes and ears, open our hearts and our minds as we gather around this closed gate.  Amen

The theme of the summer sermon series concerns the way in which Jesus takes an object and repurposes it into a parable.  Well, here we are at the gate of the rich man’s house.  But, many suspect that Jesus might have been repurposing more than a gate; perhaps walking by this house reminded Jesus of a real episode in the life of the community that he could repurpose to get across a most important truth.

It is unusual for Jesus to give people names in parables.  “A sower went out,” not a sower named Zeb; “a Samaritan came by,” not Sam the Samaritan.  It seems odd that the poor man should be named, not the rich one, but perhaps Lazarus is named because he was well known, a common fixture at this gate.  Perhaps he was known because he was particularly ghastly to see; giving Jesus the reason for adding the specific observation of dogs licking his open sores.  When such a figure died, perhaps it was the stuff of talk, of speculation as to what he had done to deserve such awful treatment from God.  And perhaps the death of this poor soul coincided with the death of a famously rich man.  A community would have seen back to back the difference between the mere disposal of a body, and a funeral of a pillar of the community.  Walking by the gate, what Jesus really repurposed, perhaps, was the town buzz.

This takes us to Part I of the parable: The Introductions

We know the rich man is really rich because he wears purple, he lives in luxury, and he has enough scraps that fall from his table to feed the poor.  That’s what we know.  But, Jesus doesn’t cast this rich man as a particularly bad person.  We don’t read that he abused Lazarus.  He was a man simply playing out the usual scenario of a rich man; enjoying the wealth he had acquired, allowing those less fortunate to “feast” off the scraps of his table.  A terrible person might watch with some glee as table scraps were thrown to the animals while hungry people watched.  No such thing is presented here.  No doubt, most of the people who observed this rich man, based on the predominate theology of the day, assumed him to be a good person.  Why else would God so richly bless him?  The rich man in all likelihood believed the same thing; what a good person I must be to be so richly blessed.  And looking down upon the likes of Lazarus, using the same misguided theology, perhaps speculated as to what sin of his or his father would require such punishment as this.  I suspect he slept well at night knowing that his scraps kept poor Lazarus alive.

But, there’s that gate.  Certainly Jesus uses this gate as a clear divide between the haves and have nots.  And because he was addressing the Pharisees, he was setting up the divide between the clean, and the unclean.  Jesus knew that all those listening to him were making mistaken assumptions as to which side of this gate dwelt the love and the grace of God; and we are not immune to these assumptions.

We have a saying I hear quite often.   I think it reflects well the attitude of the rich man, and therefore, helps us understand how very much like him we are.  The saying, “There, but by the grace of God go I.”

Have you ever said that–I have.  But, have you ever been on the other side of the gate when someone said that about you?

When I was in college I cut my foot requiring many stitches the day before spring break began.  I had to keep my foot elevated and so I stayed alone in my dorm room while everyone else went home or to the beach.  A couple of my friends came by to see me before they left for break–a nice visit–I really appreciated it.  But, I heard one say to other as they were leaving…there but by the grace of God sit I…chuckle….chuckle.

There is nothing like being on the other side of any gate, to really know that there is even a gate there at all.  The operative word in this saying is, “there.”  There is a person, a situation–there is beyond this divide a place where God’s grace doesn’t dwell like it does on my side.

This parable is designed to clear up the distortion caused by the gate.  This parable brings to light the fact that all the measures we use to judge people: wealth, appearance, health, ethnicity, where they live.  All the methods we use to gage how much of God’s grace is being allotted has nothing to do with God’s grace at all, and everything to do with how we separate ourselves from the people we are called to love.

But let me remind all of us that this is a gate in the story–it’s not just a fence, and it can open.  With the gate wide open the phrase ceases to be, “There, but by the grace of God go I,” and it becomes, “Here, in exactly the same need of grace are all of us.”

But, the rich man didn’t get that.  You see, that gate didn’t just keep Lazarus out, it didn’t just make the boundary of the haves and the have not’s–no, that gate produced a gilded cage; a place in which the rich man believed the delusion that he was in need of nothing beyond his protected world.  It led him to believe that he possessed that God-like capacity to know who was blessed and who was not.  Such are the distortions of reality behind a locked gate.

And so we move to the Part II of the story; they both die and move on
to the here-after.

This is another unique aspect of this parable.  It is the only parable in which the
participants die and we get a glimpse into what lies in wait for us in the here-after.  It is a sketch of the here-after, not a blueprint.  As a friend of mine described it this way, “this parable is not intended to give us the furniture arrangements of heaven, or the weather report of hell.”

But, it does point us to the most significant feature of the geography of hea
ven and hell; the vast chasm separating the two.  And in this scene from the parable we get a glimpse into just why the rich man is on the hades side of the chasm.  It’s not because he’s rich–it is the condition of his heart; a condition that persists even in hell.  Did you catch what he did?  He asked Abraham to send Lazarus over with some water.  It’s not that he is rich; it’s that he still feels that his money, his position, his purple clothes makes him better than someone else, even a person feasting at the table with Abraham.  He still did not get it.  And hear this clearly; that hardness of his heart is the source of the chasm between him and heaven.  This is not a God imposed canyon; the rich man has dug this deep dark place himself.

But, herein lays the good news for us.  What was at one time only a gate that separated the rich man from Lazarus after death becomes an unbridgeable chasm.  But, for us—now–nothing more than self-imposed gates separate us from those God desires that we love.  And if our gates, (those measures we use to separate ourselves) are built from our own construction, then we can choose to unlock them and swing them wide open.

But, how do we do this?

Part III:  The moral of the story.  This brings us to the cross current of the story–that it is more about what rich man failed to receive, than it is about what he failed to share

Remember, in the sight of God, Lazarus is just fine, it is the rich man who is in peril.  If the rich man had had the compassion to open the gate, to open his arms to embrace Lazarus, he would have also been open to receive the wealth of this poor man.  That’s right–the poor man’s wealth; his vast store of humility, patience, gratitude.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.”  The rich man did not get this because his gate kept Lazarus out.  Sure Lazarus would have benefited greatly if the rich man had shared more.  But, we see played out in this parable the devastating effect of a gate that kept the true riches of Lazarus from the rich man.

And that is the bittersweet ending to the story.  The rich man never received what Lazarus had in abundance.  He would always be blind to what really mattered; and finally he had to admit this defeat to Abraham.  It’s too late for him, but maybe, just maybe, Lazarus can go back to earth and tell his brothers that this is the way things are.  But Abraham does not go for that idea.  They won’t listen.  They have had a life time of hearing the words of Moses and the prophets–you think they would listen to this poor unclean man?

On top of everything else these gates are sound proof, and they are truth proof–they keep us isolated from the many different ways we might hear the voice of God.

As in most of these parables it is good to put ourselves into the story.  I would like to end this with what I hope shall be a wonderfully positive note.  We are the siblings; we still have a chance to change the ending of this story.

Listen carefully to how Abraham explains the problem with these rich folks.  Sure they should have been more giving, more sympathetic, and more open with the great wealth they had amassed.  But, those problems are way down-stream of the more essential issue.

They are not listening—they are not heeding the words of Moses and the prophets.  They have the scriptures, but they are not hearing what the scriptures have to teach them about themselves and the world in which they live, and all the people with whom they share this world.

The problem was not their wealth; it was their poverty; the scarcity of their understanding of the meaning of the word of God.  They knew, as we know, the stories of scripture.  But there is a big difference between being acquainted with scripture and having an encounter with it.

And we can have such an encounter by developing a deep abiding love for scripture–by allowing the stories of our faith to speak to us each day, and to begin to see ourselves in the long arc of God’s redemptive story.

But, Jesus didn’t say we should study our Bible, he said, “I was hungry and you fed, and naked and you clothed me.”  Yes, and this parable tells us how to do that, how important it is to hear and to heed the voices of our forbearers. I have two heroes of the faith whose lives illustrate how an encounter with scripture can transform lives.  Clarence Jordon told us why he farmed those peanut fields in South Georgia with the poorest of poor.  Albert Schweitzer told us why he labored in the jungles of Africa with the poorest of the poor; because they both first hungered to know and endeavored to discover all that scripture had to tell them. They were first students of God’s word, allowing the wonderful narrative of love and redemption to touch them with new vision.

We all must open the pages of scripture….and listen.  We must open our arms to those in need…. and listen.  We must open our minds and open our hearts… and listen.  And as we listen, perhaps hear the voice of God in the squeaking sound of a rusty old gate opening the way of grace for everyone.