Today’s sermon from North Presbyterian Church, Kalamazoo
Category: Sermon
This Little Light of Mine
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In the liturgical season between Epiphany and Lent, one of the major themes is Light. Christ is revealed as the Light of the World.
Now, here’s the funny thing about light: you can’t see it. You only know it’s there because it allows you to see everything else when it’s around. Even if you look at a light bulb, you’re not really seeing light; you’re seeing little strips of metal that have been heated up by electricity. The heating process causes the metal strips to emit light into the room. You can see the strips glowing, but that’s not light itself, just the effect.
Today’s readings introduce us to the idea of Christ as Light. Isaiah says it first and Matthew quotes him later:
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined.”
The psalmist takes up the theme as well:
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?”
What does it mean to follow Christ the Light when we cannot see light itself?
My working theory is that we can experience the presence of Christ in the effect Christ has on the lives of people around him.
In today’s gospel, Christ encounters several people who will become his first disciples. We could say that he ‘illumines’ or even ‘enlightens’ them with his presence.
Let’s look at the text:
Where does Jesus first encounter Simon, Andrew, James, and John? On a beach.
And what are they doing as he walks up? Simon and Andrew are “casting a net into the sea.” James and John are “mending their nets.”
This starts off as a rather boring scene. These four people are only going about their daily routine. Christ meets them in the midst of everyday life.
This is important because it gives us a hint about where, when, and how we can expect to encounter Christ in our lives as well: in the mundane, boring, everyday stuff.
If they were construction workers, he would have met them on a job site. If they were doctors, he would be sitting in the waiting room. If they were students, he would be sitting next to them in class. If they were dialysis patients, he would be hooked up to the machine next to them. Wherever we happen to find ourselves is the place where Christ meets us.
This runs counter to the idea that one can only have spiritual experiences in spiritual places, or that one can only meet God in godly places.
If they had been drug dealers, Christ would have met them on the corner where they sell their dope. If they had been strippers, Christ would have met them at the club.
Religious people tend to have a hard time with this reality. We think that Christ only shows up when someone has sufficiently prepared themselves for the encounter, but Scripture plainly and repeatedly shows us that Jesus is not interested in such distinctions. Christ is everywhere. The only thing spirituality does is prepare us to see him whenever and wherever he meets us. In this case, it was on a beach with a bunch of uneducated, working-class fishermen.
The next thing Jesus does is even more interesting: he approaches Simon and Andrew and says:
“Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”
He doesn’t say, “I will make you stop fishing.” Nor does he say, “What are you doing, wasting your time with this stuff?” He begins by affirming what they already know.
Just like light, Christ does not change the essential nature of the ones he shines upon. They don’t cease to be themselves. They are fishermen now, and so they will remain in God’s plan for their life.
Many people come to the Church because they want to be (or pretend to be) something other than what they are. But Christ doesn’t work that way. He doesn’t take fishermen and make them into saints; he makes them into saintly fishermen.
The light shines on us as we are, but it also helps us to see what we are more clearly. If I wake up before dawn, I can stumble around the room, looking for my clothes. Or I can turn on the light to look for them. Turning on the light doesn’t change the location of my clothes, it just lets me see where they already are.
When Christ the Light shines more brightly in our lives, we remain ourselves, but we come to see ourselves more clearly. Jesus saw something in Simon and Andrew that they had not yet seen in themselves. They were meant for bigger things than what they were already doing. Jesus helped them to see the deeper meaning of their lives and the calling that God had in store for them. They would remain fishermen, but they would be “fishing for people,” according to Jesus.
This is how Christ the Light shines in our lives today. We come to church, read the Bible, receive the sacraments, and discover that we are changing from the inside out. We do not cease to be who we have always been, but the deeper nature of our lives is revealed. We are like the elements of the Eucharist, which remain bread and wine in a physical sense, but are transformed spiritually into the Body and Blood of Christ.
I once heard a story about a woman who worked at a post office. When a new acquaintance asked her what she did for a living, she wisely responded, “I am a servant of the living God, cleverly disguised as a postal worker.”
When we look at ourselves in the mirror, or look at our lives, we see the disguise we have built for ourselves (or the disguise that was given to us by society). We see race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, education, employment, or criminal record. We come to falsely identify ourselves with these things because they are obvious and visible.
But the real truth of our lives lies beneath the surface of those accidental qualities. None of them fully captures the essence of who we really are. When Christ the Light shines upon us, our true selves are revealed. We, and others, begin to see more clearly the divine image we bear. Christ met fishermen and revealed the apostles in each of them.
Christ sees you and draws out the saint or mystic that lives just beneath the surface of your life. Maybe you just didn’t see it clearly before now. But that’s okay, because the lights have been turned on over you and the real you can now be seen and loved for who you really are.
So, go out into the world today as your true self, deepened and revealed by the light of Christ. With that light as your guide, see in yourself and others the beauty and dignity of Christ, whose image you bear. Be the hands and feet of Jesus in the world today, and “let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good works and praise your Father in heaven.”
A God’s-Eye View
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Introduction
Think about a time when you felt misjudged or misunderstood. How did it feel? Who was involved? What was it that you wanted them to realize about you? What do you wish you had said to make that person understand?
Most of us have memories like that. The pain of the memory can sometimes cause us to seethe with anger at the injustice, even years after the fact.
Less common and less visceral are memories of times when we have discovered ourselves to be the ones misjudging others. Psychologists have discovered a reason for this: they call it “the fundamental attribution error.” What it means is that people tend to name external circumstances as the cause of their own faults, while simultaneously blaming other peoples’ faults on defects of character.
Here’s an example: You are at a stoplight and cut across a lane of traffic to turn right in order to not be late for work, cutting another driver off in the process. You think to yourself, “Sorry about that, but I can’t be late for work!” Now, if you’re the driver in the other car, and you see this happen in front of you, and are forced to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident, you think, “What a jerk! They must not know how to drive!” That’s the fundamental attribution error in action. The first driver chalks the mistake up to circumstances, while the second driver chalks it up to the other person’s character.
People do this. In the story of our own lives, we tend to cast ourselves in the role of the hero or the victim, almost never as the bad guy. The role of villain is given to others. The funny thing is that the “bad guys” in each of our stories also think of themselves as the “good guys,” while we ourselves play the role of the villain in their stories.
The world loves to divide people into categories: us and them, good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. We pass judgment on one another and react, rather than respond, when circumstances turn inconvenient. In time, we learn how to impose those categories on whole groups of people: black and white, straight and gay, men and women, American and Russian, Republican and Democrat. It’s as though each of us is in the process of writing our own superhero comic book, fighting like mad to ensure that the good guys win in the end.
The problem is that, when we do this, we aren’t relating to each other as whole people, each with their own complex challenges of circumstance and character. Life is complicated. People are complicated. And at the end of the day, there are no good guys or bad guys, just people.
Exegesis
In today’s gospel, we get to see an example of a time when one person was able to look at another and see the truth beneath the surface of that person.
Last week, we looked at the relationship between Jesus and St. John the Baptist as a door that opens us up to the relational nature of reality in the Trinity. Today, we are going to look at that same relationship from the opposite direction: we are going to see how one’s relationship with the Triune God opens a door for us to see our relationships with our neighbors differently.
When St. John the Baptist looked at Jesus, he saw past the categories that other people used to put on him. John saw Jesus for who he truly is: the Son of God and the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
Jesus was no stranger to being categorized by other people. We read about this time and again in the gospels. His hometown neighbors listened to his first sermon and couldn’t get past the mental categories in which they had placed him, as the son of Joseph the carpenter. The clergy and theologians couldn’t get past the fact that Jesus sounded like a heretic to them, calling into question centuries of religious tradition. The political authorities had him pegged as a dangerous radical. Even his own family came to believe that Jesus had lost his mind. All of these made their judgments about Jesus and tucked him away in their mental categories as a way of dismissing him and his message. But John the Baptist doesn’t do that. John sees Jesus with a different set of eyes.
The gospel calls John a “prophet”, who was “sent from God” as “a witness to the light.” Whatever else this may mean, we can at least say that it means this: John the Baptist saw the world at large, and Jesus specifically, from a spiritually-centered point-of-view. He saw Jesus clearly, with spiritual eyes.
John was able to this, most basically, because of the gifts and calling that God had placed on his life. God wanted John to see Jesus in this way. But, along with that, I tend to believe that John was able to sharpen and hone this gift of God by his spiritual practices.
We know that John lived simply, out in the desert. He had few possessions and sustained himself, as the text of the Bible tells us, on “locusts and wild honey.” As far as we can tell, he was unmarried. He was given to prayer and the preaching spiritual renewal in baptism. In many ways, his life resembles that of an Old Testament Nazirite, a holy person dedicated to God and separated from the world. Traditionally, they refrained from alcohol, haircuts, and funerals. Other famous Nazirites from the Old Testament include the prophet Samuel and the hero Samson.
Although John is not specifically named as a Nazirite, his life resembles that of one, being wholly dedicated to the service of God. In modern terms, we might think of him like a hermit or monk.
John’s spiritual practices give him the ability to see the world differently from the way most people see it, and when Jesus arrives on the scene, John is ready to see him differently too. Where some saw just another crazy person or heretic, John saw Jesus as the Son of God, upon whom the Holy Spirit had descended, and the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. John saw Jesus’ true self, beyond the categories imposed on him by the world.
Application
I don’t think this ability is unique to St. John the Baptist himself.
First of all, I think we get a glimpse, in John’s vision, of the way God sees each and every one of us. When we are misunderstood or misjudged, there is another who sees and loves us as we truly are. God looks at us and sees past the shell of worldly categories to the treasure beneath the surface of our lives. That treasure is there in your life because God wants it to be there and placed it there himself. Even better, God wants us to see that treasure too, so that we can share it with others. Whenever our dignity is maligned by our neighbors (or even ourselves), God is working quietly behind the scenes to bring prophets like John into our lives who will see and draw out the divine treasure that is in us.
Second, I believe that John’s gift of spiritual insight is available to all of us, if we choose to make use of it. Like John, we can make use of spiritual practices to sharpen and focus the way we look at the world and people around us. Studying the Word and celebrating the Sacraments keep us connected to the core beliefs and values that tell us there is inherent dignity in every human life, no matter what categories people may try to impose on it. We read in the Bible that our neighbors are reflections of God’s image, members of the Body of Christ, and living stones in the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the Sacraments, we all pass through the waters of Baptism and partake of the bread and cup of the Eucharist as members of the one Body of Christ. We are part of each other, precisely because we are part of Christ. This is how St. Paul is able to say, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’” (1 Cor. 12:21)
In prayer and meditation, we connect the joys and concerns of daily living to our divine life in God. Even secular psychologists have come to admit in recent years that the practice of meditation is good for human relationships. When we meditate, we lower our stress levels and become better able to respond to crisis from a place of peace, rather than react out of anger. Meditation helps us develop empathy and detachment, so that we can see past the hard categories we impose on each other. Spiritually centered people don’t see “good guys” and “bad guys,” but instead just see “people.” They don’t think in terms of “us” and “them,” but think instead of “We.”
God sees each of us as beloved sons and daughters. People learning to see the world from God’s point-of-view begin to see their neighbors in that same way.
That’s how John saw Jesus. That’s how God sees us. My prayer this morning is that we too will learn, day by day, by Word and Sacrament, by prayer and meditation, how to see each other in this way. When we do, we will be seeing one another with the eyes of God.
God is a Relationship
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Whatever else we want to say about God, we can at least say this:
God is all about relationships.
We can see that in the natural universe:
The relationship between our planet and our star is so finely tuned. If the earth were just a little closer to or farther out from the sun, or if it was just tilted a little more on its axis, life as we know it would be impossible.
The biosphere is so delicately balanced, the extinction of just a few species from the food chain can upset an entire ecosystem. A pastor friend tells me that, if bees continue to disappear (as they have been doing), we humans have only two years of life left.
We humans can share a special relationship with each other, when two people can come together in a special, intimate way that actually creates life.
We can see that God is all about relationships by looking at our Scriptures as well.
We can see it in today’s gospel: in the relationship between Christ and St. John the Baptist.
In the very first sentence of this reading, we see that Christ takes the initiative:
“Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan”
And then the text says that John, after a brief conversation, gives his consent. This is very important because real relationships can only exist where consent is freely offered between two parties.
After that, the baptism takes place and something amazing happens:
“just as [Jesus] came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him”
I take this to mean that Christ could see into eternity, into the heart of everything; he could see how it all hangs together. And in that vision, Jesus sees the Spirit descend upon him like a dove and hears a voice say, “This is my Son, the beloved”.
Note the three figures in this vision: First, there is Jesus, the Son of God. Then there is the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. Finally, there is the voice (presumably God the Father), saying, “This is my Son”. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This is the first place in Scripture where the Holy Trinity appears.
For Christians, the Trinity is our core concept of God. The word itself never appears in Scripture (that was worked out a few centuries later by the Church Fathers and Mothers), but here is where we see the three persons together for the first time. We believe in one God who is three Persons. Not three Gods, not one God known in three ways, but one God in three Persons. The relationship between John and Christ actually opens a window, through which we can see the relational, Triune nature of God.
I know this sounds rather abstract, but let me bring it down to earth: God is a relationship. As St. John the Beloved put it in his first epistle, “God is love”. Relationships matter to God because God is a relationship. God is love itself.
This is good news for us in this world, where our relationships are in such trouble. Our broken relationships, at the personal and political levels, are often characterized by exploitation, manipulation, oppression, poverty, and violence.
There is nothing new about this. We can see it plainly on the news and in many of our families. It didn’t begin with Twitter, or the internet, or television, or the 1960s, or the sexual revolution. It began all the way back at the beginning, when our relational God created us to be in relationship with God and each other. But we withheld our consent. We broke relationship with God, and soon our relationships with each other began to break down as well.
But God never broke relationship with us. God came among us in the person of Jesus Christ to redeem the world and restore us to right relationship with God and each other.
That is why the Church today, as Christ’s Body on earth, calls Christians to tend to our relationships with family, neighbors, strangers, and even enemies. We are called to live the truth that relationships matter because God is a relationship.
God is love. This is why Jesus sums up all the commandments of the Bible in a single word: Love. Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. Likewise, St. Paul writes, “love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10).
St. John again:
“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (1 John 4:16)
In other words, where there is love, there is God.
Whenever we swallow our pride and say “I’m sorry” to the spouse we’ve been fighting with, that is an act of worship to God. Whenever we are at a restaurant, and the waiter comes by with a refill, and we look up to meet that person’s eyes and say “thank you”, that is an act of worship. Whenever we march for justice and listen to the voices of the poor and oppressed, that is an act of worship.
Whenever we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, or visit the sick and incarcerated, we are not just serving our neighbors, but Christ himself. Christ was very explicit about this:
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40)
God is a relationship, therefore relationships matter. God is love, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. This is the truth that Christ and St. John the Baptist are driving home to us, through their relationship, in today’s gospel.
May we be the Christians who honor our relationship with God by honoring our relationships with each other in the world.
Outsmarted by Babies and Dreams
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I was leading a Bible study earlier this week where one of the participants asked why God doesn’t just part the heavens and come down, saying, “Hey everybody, I’m here! This is absolute proof, so you’d better believe in me!”
I thought this was a great question. Why doesn’t God do that? It would certainly make some things easier. We wouldn’t have to wrestle so much with our faith. When refuted, we could simply point back to the absolute proof and blow our opponents’ arguments out of the water. Everything would become totally clear.
But I also wonder: What would be the cost of such certainty? We already know we live in a world where the strong dominate the weak, where history is written by the winners, and where winners often win by violence and manipulation. We lament this sad state of affairs, but fail to imagine any viable alternative.
Could things ever be any different?
At least one person has imagined so.
The poet in our psalm this morning spends his/her time imagining a different kind of ruler from the ones who tend to seize power on the global scene. The psalmist dreams instead of a ruler who governs by the power of gentleness and divine justice, rooted in the natural ebb and flow of creation itself. This dream is voiced as a prayer for the king:
“May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.”
That is a very gentle, life-giving image. It makes me think of sitting on my back porch in the spring time, watching the rain fall and the flowers beginning to sprout up after a long winter. Could that be a model for sound government?
The psalmist thinks so:
“May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.
For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.
He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy.
From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.”
That might sound like a utopian pipe-dream, bound to end in disappointment, but the psalmist sees a different kind of outcome:
“May all kings fall down before him, all nations give him service.”
In a world governed by the power of violence, this dream might seem unattainable, but we Christians, who accept these words as sacred Scripture, are duty-bound to take them seriously as part of God’s Word. In God’s universe, it is right that makes might, not the other way around. If we really believed otherwise, why would we bother coming to church on Sunday?
This is no utopian pipe-dream or abstract principle for us Christians. We believe that this idea took on flesh and came to fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ. St. Paul refers to this as “the mystery of Christ” in today’s epistle:
“In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel… so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”
In Paul’s vision, God wins the victory, not by dominating or destroying Gentile enemies, but by including them as friends in the redemption that Christ won for the world. This, in Paul’s mind, subverts the dominant paradigm of the powers-that-be.
The way of God’s kingdom stands in stark contrast to the powers of the world, like King Herod, who we read about in today’s gospel.
Herod vies for power, using all the means at his disposal. When he perceives a threat to his power, he gathers the scholars and clergy as part of his military and political intelligence program. He manipulates people with lies and fake displays of piety. When, at last, he is outsmarted by babies and dreams, he unleashes the full force of the military in a campaign deliberately designed to destroy innocent lives in the interest of maintaining his position.
The good news is that his plan fails miserably. God intervenes through unorthodox means, using pagan philosophers to subvert the diabolical schemes of this tyrant. Jesus, the one child Herod sought to kill, escapes unharmed and grows up to become the greatest personality in human history, not to mention the central figure in God’s plan to redeem the world.
The good news for us in this is that the ancient dreams of poets and prophets are coming true. There is a deeper justice in the universe that trumps the demonic schemes of powerful people. “Survival of the fittest” and “might makes right” do not have the last word in the order of life. By contrast, God seems to be saying to us in these texts that history is written by the losers, the weak ones, and the vulnerable, because history’s last word is written by the God who chose to become vulnerable in the infant Christ.
Sure, God could have parted the heavens and come down with irrefutable evidence to demand faith and obedience from the human race, but this would have been at odds with God’s actual plan for the world. In point of fact, God did come to earth, not as a ruler, but as a baby. God does not force the divine will upon us from without, like any other human tyrant, but influences us from within, respecting our freedom and inviting us to cooperate with the way of gentleness and vulnerability.
St. Teresa of Calcutta famously taught us that “Not everyone can do great things, but everyone can do small things with great love.” This is the way of God’s will in the world. It is the way that Christ invites us to follow.
The power of Jesus resides, not in inflicting pain, but in offering healing; not in pronouncing judgment, but in forgiveness; not in threatening deprivation, but in feeding hungry people with abundance; not in dealing death, but by rising to new life from the grave.
King Herod was not the last ruler who felt his power being threatened by Jesus. At the end of his life, Jesus stood before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who seemed to succeed where Herod had failed. He handed Jesus over to be tortured and crucified for crimes he did not commit.
They thought Jesus was a terrorist, plotting to overthrow the Roman government. Little did they know, Jesus’ real goal was far more dangerous: he was (and still is) plotting the overthrow of the entire world system of power based on endless cycles of violence.
Jesus brought those cycles to an end in himself by absorbing the violence of this world without retaliating. He allowed himself to bear the weight of our sin and be dragged into hell. But then, on the third day, he demonstrated the gentle power of God by tearing open the gates of hell and emerging victorious from the tomb. He undid the power of violence by showing it to be futile in the end.
We Christians are invited to share in this victory by walking in this world as Jesus walked. St. Paul tells us, “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11). We are the members of Christ’s body, his hands and feet on earth today.
In times such as these, the greatest temptation is for Christians to give in to the demonic spirits of despair and cynicism. We think that violence of word or sword is the only way to guarantee peace and justice in life. We “study war” in our political and personal lives. We mistakenly come to believe that the only way to get ahead is by stepping on the backs of our neighbors and enemies.
Friends, I would humbly suggest to you today that there is another way. It is the way of gentleness and forgiveness, the way Jesus and the cross. While it is true that this way is likely to lead to crucifixion and death, it is also true that it leads even further into resurrection and the eternal life abundant that Christ promises for all who trust in him and walk in his ways.
Christmas Victor
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As we gather here this morning to celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation in Word and Sacrament, we are also nearing the end of 2016. And there are many among who say, “Good riddance!”
It is only too easy for those of us who follow current events to hang our heads in despair at the state of things in the world. We hear of “wars and rumors of wars” at home and abroad. Our hearts break at the plight of refugees crossing our borders, break again as members of the powerful elite use these families as scapegoats for their politics of fear, and then break yet again as an act of terrorism in Berlin seems to lend momentary credibility to the argument that compassion is foolish.
Looking at the world on this Christmas morning, it appears that the cosmic forces of darkness and chaos are winning. We few who gather in church to tell stories, sing songs, and break bread appear to be the most pitiful of fools. Given the facts at hand, it is only understandable if we find ourselves asking the questions: Are just “whistling in the dark” after all? Are we really alone in a universe that came about as a random accident? Is the faith we proclaim nothing more than a charming tale we tell ourselves in order to sleep easier at night?
The modern world would answer “Yes” to all of the above. It would add: “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there; you’ve got to look out for number one; money talks; might makes right.” The world says that the only truth is facts, and the facts say that we are on our own. I say the world is lying.
The Church tells a very different story in today’s gospel. We say:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
What we mean by this is that the world belongs to God, who made it.
Christians believe in one God as Trinity: Three persons in relationship (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). For us, God is a relationship. Based on this, we understand the universe to be a network of relationships (galaxies, solar systems, ecosystems, nations, and families) existing within the larger relationship of the Trinity, as a baby grows in her mother’s womb.
But here’s the thing about relationships between persons: they have to be freely chosen. And we humans chose to break relationship with God our creator.
John’s gospel says it like this:
“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”
Once we had broken relationship with God, our relationships with each other began to deteriorate as well. In seeking to become masters of the universe, we became slaves in bondage to each other, to corrupt systems, our own desires, and the powers of darkness and chaos beyond our control.
The good news is that our Creator was not content to leave us in this sad state of affairs. Even though we had broken relationship with God, God never broke relationship with us. God came to live among us in the person of Jesus Christ. John says:
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
As the only-begotten Son of God the Father, Jesus is the fullest expression of the divine image in a human face. Living among us, Jesus loved us: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, forgiving sinners, welcoming strangers, and raising the dead.
But we sinful humans could not stand to look at such holiness. Through the powers of religion and politics, we betrayed, denied, mocked, rejected, tortured, and killed the Son of God by crucifixion: anything just to shut him up and make him go away.
But God wasn’t having any of that nonsense. Like the tired mother of a toddler throwing a temper-tantrum, God rejected our rejection, raising Jesus from the dead and proving, once and for all, that God’s love is stronger than the power of death itself.
“What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the door has been opened for us to freely re-enter a harmonious relationship with the Triune God and each other. John says it like this:
“to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the exclamation point at the end of a sentence that began with the incarnation. Christmas marks the beginning of a revolution that will never end until the entire universe is restored to right relationship with God.
The Church, far from an institution of civil religion that upholds the societal status quo, is an underground movement that preaches the Gospel of Jesus Christ as an alternative orthodoxy to the lies of this world system.
We are unashamed to speak the truth that the emperor wears no clothes. We are unafraid to expose the dark powers:
- of tyranny, oppression, injustice, stigma, exploitation, violence;
- of racism, sexism, ableism, classism;
- of xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia;
- and every other -phobia and –ism that plagues the human heart.
We are not afraid to name these lies and exorcise these demons from our midst.
The Church of Jesus Christ is a revolutionary movement:
- The Bible is our manifesto, the Sacraments are our weapons of peace, and the Cross is our only flag.
- Our only aim is the final reconciliation of the entire universe with the justice and mercy of God.
- The resurrection is our decisive victory, and the incarnation is our beachhead.
For this reason, let the dark powers of this broken world tremble with fear when they hear us utter the words, “Merry Christmas!”
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Carpenter, Interrupted
Click here to read the bulletin, including the biblical text.
Introduction
They say, “If you want to give God a good laugh, tell him your plans.”
I’ve been looking around this week for the original source of that quote. I can’t find a definitive answer. Some say it was from a comedian like Woody Allen or Lily Tomlin. Others chalk it up to an old Yiddish proverb: “We plan; God laughs.”
Personally, I like to imagine that it comes from St. Joseph the Worker, husband to the Blessed Virgin Mary and guardian of the child Jesus. Even if he did not utter these exact words himself, I think he would certainly smile and nod his head at their meaning. He knows, better than most, what it means to have one’s plans interrupted by God.
Exegesis
Today’s gospel is all about being interrupted.
It opens with Mary and Joe, a nice Jewish couple about to begin their life together as husband and wife. Then, all of a sudden, their plans are interrupted with the news that Mary was going to have a baby.
This was a big deal. Not only is having a first child a huge moment for any couple, but this situation was complicated by the fact that Mary and Joe were not yet officially married. Even worse, Joe was certain that he was not the father.
This was heartbreaking news. All of his plans for the future were suddenly thrown up into the air. In most cultures, a scenario like this would almost certainly be the subject of town gossip, but in first century Palestine, it was also a death sentence. Joseph could legally have Mary tried and executed, but he opts for a more gentle approach instead. He decides to resolve the matter quietly by breaking off the engagement and moving on with his life. All in all, it was the honorable thing to do for a man both fair and kind in the midst of a crisis.
That’s when God interrupts Joe’s story.
As Matthew tells it, an angel visited him in a dream, telling him not to be afraid because everything was happening as part of God’s plan. Joe, remarkably, listens to this dream and the wedding is still on, despite the public ridicule he would doubtless receive from friends and relations.
It takes a special kind of faith to be that open to God’s interruption in one’s life. We humans are creatures of routine and ritual. We like things done the same way every time. When things don’t go according to plan, we have a tendency to get frustrated. We don’t like being interrupted.
This tendency of ours is especially apparent when it comes to matters of faith and morality. We want to believe that God is unchanging. We like the comfort of knowing that what’s right is right and what’s true is true, for all time and forever. We depend on our religious institutions to always stay the same, meeting in the same place, singing the same songs, and telling the same stories, from cradle to grave, and continuing long after we are gone.
So, what are we to do then with stories like this one, when God interrupts, not only one family’s personal expectations, but also their foundational sense of right and wrong? Why would God, in bringing Christ the Son into the world, expose the Holy Family to danger and disgrace, and even violate the boundaries established by divine law in the Torah?
In that sense, our familiar Christmas story is profoundly disturbing. But in another sense, it is deeply comforting for all of us whose lives rarely go according to plan and often fail to live up to our most deeply held values.
The first thing this story tells us is that God is able to work with people whose lives are less than perfect.
The second (and more important) lesson this story tells us is that sometimes those imperfections and interruptions are the very things that God can use to bring good into the world. Sometimes, the interruption is the main point with God.
Whether it’s an unexpected pregnancy, a medical diagnosis, a lost job, a broken relationship, a personal failure, a missed opportunity, or any other unfortunate event, all of it is material that God is using to bring forth new life and freedom into the world.
Conclusion
That was the story for Mary and Joe and their unexpected pregnancy. The miracle born of their less-than-perfect circumstance was no less than Jesus Christ himself.
In the same way, I believe that Christ is being born into the world through each and every one of us, each day.
You might be tempted to look at your life, with all its imperfections and interruptions, as wasted time and space. But I would invite you, challenge you, dare you even, as we move from Advent into the Christmas season, to look at your life with the eyes of faith. God is doing something wonderful with your life. Christ is being born into the world again today, even through you.
God’s will for your life is for you to see the image of Christ in yourself and those around you. No person or situation is so bad that God can’t work with it. And God, as St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, causes “all things [to] work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”
This is the good news of Christmas: that God enters into this broken world, as it is, through us, as one of us, and brings good out of it for God’s own glory and praise.
St. Matthew writes in his gospel, “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.” Not some other way that might have seemed more ideal, but “in this way.”
This is how God worked through Mary and Joe in their less-than-perfect situation and it is how God is working in you and through you, no matter how bad your life might seem today.
The Unquenchable Fire
Click here to read the service bulletin, including the biblical text
Introduction
There is a story of a young novice in a monastery who goes to his abbot and says, “Father, what can I do to attain Salvation?”
The wise old abbot responds, “As little as you can do to make the sun to rise in the morning.”
So the novice replies, “What then is the purpose of meditation and all our spiritual exercises?”
And the abbot says, “To make sure that you are awake when the sun begins to rise.”
I love this story because it does such a good job of getting right to the reason why we, as people of faith, put ourselves through the hard work of prayer and the rigorous demands of the Christian life.
Saved by Grace
As Christians in the Reformed tradition, we are fond of insisting that salvation comes to us by grace, as a free gift apart from our good works, ritual observance, and correct theology. We receive this gift by faith, but even that receiving faith, St. Paul says, is a gift from God, “so that none may boast.”
We sainted sinners and sinful saints are utterly incapable, either by works or by faith, of doing anything to make the light of Christ appear in our hearts or world. Like the young monk in the story, we can do as little to attain salvation as we can to make the sun rise in the morning.
Like the shepherds of Bethlehem in the Christmas story, we do not bring Christ to birth, we simply bear witness as the Word of God “takes on flesh and dwells among us.”
Exegesis
In today’s gospel, we encounter a man who understands intimately what it means to bear witness to the presence and activity of Christ in the world.
Radical Prophet
St. John the Baptist was a dangerous radical and progressive prophet whose task was to “prepare the way” for Christ’s first coming to earth. I call him a “radical” because of the Latin term radix, which means “root.” John was a powerful mystic. As the last prophet from the Old Testament era, his ministry was inspired, not by a particular school or tradition of rabbinic interpretation, but directly by God.
Religious traditions need prophetic renewal from time to time. Without direct experience of the divine, religions begin to calcify and get “stuck in their ways.” The Buddha played a similar role in the Hindu faith. We Protestants might point to Martin Luther and John Calvin as prophetic voices in 16th century Europe. In Judaism, there were many prophets who arose throughout the history of Israel. Prophets, as radicals, reconnect the faithful to the “root” of their faith in God. They are always “dangerous” to established authorities because they call into question “the way we’ve always done it” and remind us of our core commitments to God and neighbor.
This is exactly what St. John the Baptist is doing in today’s gospel. He calls the people to a renewal of their spiritual and political lives by announcing:
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Bearing Fruit
He has particularly harsh words for the Pharisees and Sadducees, the two major parties of established religious authorities in first century Judea. To them, John says:
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”
By “fruit,” John means the kind of changed life that a person leads when they have come into a deep relationship with God.
The religious leaders would have been understandably offended by such comments. They might point to their seminary degrees on their office walls. Or they might make reference to their traditional ancestry, which they trace back through the prophet Abraham in the biblical book of Genesis.
But John anticipates this defensive response. He says:
“Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”
In other words, John recognizes this ruse for what it is: a distraction from living the kind of life that God envisions for the covenant community. After liberating the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, God said to them, in effect, “I want you to be a different kind of community from the nations you see around you. Old patterns of exclusion and oppression must not be present among you. I want the nations of the world to look at you, my people, and see what kind of God I am.”
But the people of Israel, like all peoples, were consistently unable to live up to this high standard. We read in the Old Testament just how often God’s people “missed the mark” and began to take on characteristics of Egypt, Canaan, and Babylon. They worshiped humanly constructed images and ideologies in place of God, exploiting the earth and their neighbors. This is why God continually sent prophets like John. They called the people back to what it means to be God’s covenant community on earth.
Facing the Consequences
When the people refuse to listen (which is most of the time), God warns them that this way of life (“Every man/woman for him/herself”) leads only to death and destruction. This is why John says:
“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
Notice how John does not name God as the source of this destruction. We might be tempted to think of God as the primary actor in this event, but I think it would be just as legitimate to think of it as a natural consequence of our tendency toward selfishness and the violent ways of the world. God’s intention, in sending us the prophets, is to save us from this path of self-imposed destruction. If we refuse to heed this warning, God respects our decision by allowing us to face the consequences of our actions.
Wheat and Chaff
The good news is that there is another way. Even in the midst of our rebellion against God’s ways of peace, God is present and active. In first century Judea, God sent St. John the Baptist to prepare the way for Christ.
John says:
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
At first glance, this image might seem like another warning of wrath and judgment. But it might help if we look more closely at John’s image of the Messiah as a farmer winnowing a harvest of wheat.
Wheat grains grow inside of a husk on a stalk, much like corn. In order to salvage the nutritious wheat, the husk must be removed. This is done by a process called “winnowing.” In the ancient world, farmers did this by setting the pods over a fire. The heat would crack the husks open and the wheat would fall out. Then the farmer would toss the pile in the air with a large fork. The wheat would fall through while the husks (called “chaff”) would be blown away by the wind.
Here’s the interesting thing: the wheat and the chaff are parts of the same plant. I take them, not as symbols of two different kinds of people (“good” and “bad”), but as two realities that exist within myself. I am, at the same time, both sinner and saint. There are good parts of me and bad, wheat and chaff.
Chaff is an essential part of wheat. It protects the precious grain while it grows on the stalk. Without it, the grain would be vulnerable to predators and the elements. But there comes a time when the chaff must be removed, or else the grain will never fulfill its destiny to make new plants or be ground and baked into bread. In the same way, we who live in this complicated world are a mixture of more useful and less useful parts. These parts of us must grow together for a time, so that we can become fully-formed, well-rounded people. We wrestle with these complexities and long for the simplicity of a life where only good remains forever.
When I imagine my destiny at the end of life, I imagine God taking those less useful parts of me and separating them from the goodness in me that reflects the divine image. I see divine judgment as the “winnowing” process, by which goodness is preserved and evil eliminated. Whatever is left at the end of this process is that which will live forever in God.
Unquenchable Fire
How will God accomplish this division of good and evil with us? John tells us quite clearly:
“He [Christ] will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
This is directly related to the winnowing process. The Holy Spirit, the presence of God within us, is the winnower’s fire that liberates the good wheat from the chaff we no longer need in our lives. God is at work within us, transfiguring us day by day into the divine image and likeness.
And John reassures us with the good news that this inner fire of God is “unquenchable.” That is, all the chaff and sin within us is unable to snuff out the presence and power of the Spirit.
Kindled by Water
This fire was kindled in us, ironically, by water in our baptism. In that moment, when the benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection were applied to us, the Holy Spirit came to dwell in us in a way that cannot be undone. Baptism is not so much something that we do for God so much as something that God does in us. Baptism is the sign and seal of God’s pledge to save us and never leave nor forsake us.
Baptized Christians are part of Christ’s Body, and Christ loves us as dearly as we love the parts of our own bodies. He could not abandon us any more than one of us could cut off a hand or a foot. This is why John calls the fire “unquenchable.” We can resist the Spirit, but we cannot snuff her out entirely.
Application
The prophet invites us, in this Advent season, to “prepare the way” for Christ’s coming by cooperating with the energy of the Holy Spirit, who is already at work in us, separating the good wheat from the chaff we no longer need. We are invited to return to the roots of our faith and consider again what it means to be a member of Christ’s Body, the covenant community of God’s Church in the world.
This work is not something we do for God, but what God is doing in us. We cannot make Christ appear in our hearts any more than we can make the sun to rise in the morning. The good news is that Christ is already here, working God’s will in us through the power of the Holy Spirit. Our only choice is whether we will resist or cooperate with the work of the Spirit in our lives.
St. Paul writes, in his first letter to the Thessalonians:
“May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.” (1 Thess. 5:23-24)
This Advent, may we open our hearts to allow the fire of the Spirit to crack open our hard shells, and the wind of the Spirit to blow away that which we no longer need. May the water, wind, and fire of baptismal grace gather us once again into the barn of the Church, where we will dwell together in peace at Christ’s coming.
Telling Stories
This week’s sermon from North Presbyterian, Kalamazoo.
Click here to read the biblical text
Sermon text
One of the funnest (and funniest) parts of Thanksgiving dinner is when family and friends start sharing stories around the table. They often start with something like, “Remember that time Uncle Harvey…”
In our family, my wife and I have one that we never get tired of telling the kids. It’s the classic story of “How I met your mother… twice.”
I first met Sarah at a student conference in western North Carolina in the summer of 1999. We had a nice chat on a group hike, established that we had a mutual friend, shook hands, and parted ways. Four years later, I was getting onto a bus in Vancouver, Canada, having just moved there to begin seminary. The woman across the row from me struck up a conversation. We had a nice chat, established a mutual friend, and… suddenly both of us had a major case of déjà vu.
As it turns out, she was the very same person I had talked to four years prior. When life gives you a second chance like that, you take it. We began dating less than a month later and married before the end of graduate school.
People love to tell family stories like this, especially during the holidays, because they help to give our lives a sense of meaning and purpose. In a world that often seems so random and out-of-control, these stories give us a hunch that there is some other Will working itself out through our existence. They remind us that we are not alone in this universe and that life itself is meaningful and good. We never get tired of telling or hearing them.
Of course, these stories don’t just exist in our families. They are a major reason why we come to church. The Bible itself, even though it is a collection of many different stories, tells one Big Story that continues to shape and change our lives today.
The biblical story is that the infinitely loving God of the universe created the world and called it Good. When we humans, in our selfishness, turned away from God and each other and fell into slavery to sin, God did not abandon us. After centuries of reaching out to us through prophets and sages, God took on flesh and came to dwell among us in the person Jesus Christ. When we refused to listen to Jesus and tried to silence him by the violence of crucifixion and death, God summarily rejected our rejection by raising Jesus from the grave. Now, we who are baptized into Christ share the healing power of his resurrection and function with the world as his Body, his hands and feet, on earth until he comes again in glory. On that day, the dead will rise and the whole creation will be made new, as God originally intended, and governed with divine justice and mercy.
This is the story we Christians tell ourselves each Sunday in church. We hear it in the Scriptures and see it in the Sacraments. We leave the liturgy each week, fed with the Body and Blood of Christ, and are sent out into the world to be the Body of Christ. It cannot be understated just how important that mission is in this world, where life often seems so empty and meaningless.
Jesus talks about this Christian story in today’s gospel reading. Like any good story, this one has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Today, Jesus is talking to us about the ending.
He starts by undermining two thousand years of Christian speculation about the end of the world. Look in the Religion section of any bookstore, and you will find multiple books claiming to have figured out the scoop on when and how the end times will take place. But Jesus says in this passage, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
St. John Chrysostom, a bishop in the early Church, agrees with Jesus on this. He wrote that human beings “should not seek to learn what angels do not know.” Jesus does not give his followers any “insider information” on the end of the world. What he asks of them is far more difficult.
What Jesus asks of Christians is that we “stay awake” and “be ready” for history to reach its conclusion. This is important. Life on this planet often feels chaotic, empty, and meaningless. To the eyes of a person without faith, it seems like a random series of events that are just happening. Without a sense of purpose in life, we are wont to slip into a mindless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of fear.
In Jesus’ mind, this state of existence is not unlike the condition of the world immediately before the great flood of Noah. He says, “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.”
Another way of saying this is that it was “business as usual” for everyone until the moment when the rain began to fall. They were so caught up in their little plans and schemes, they didn’t realize that God’s great story was in the process of unfolding all around them. When the moment of truth came, they were not ready.
Jesus reminds us that the world does not revolve around us. The universe will not stop its ordinary operation to accommodate our plans, however great we think they may be.
The good news is that God has an even greater plan, and we are invited to play a part in it. Jesus invites us today to reorient our lives around God’s vision for the world. God’s dream is to renew the face of the earth so that it reflects the harmonious beauty that God intended for it to have at the beginning. God dreams of a world where the hungry are fed, the sick are healed, strangers are welcome, and sinners are forgiven. Jesus often referred to God’s dream as “the kingdom of heaven”. It is the one thing around which he oriented his entire life and ministry.
The work of the kingdom of heaven has been going on since the dawn of time. It began in earnest with the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It continues today through Christ’s Body on earth, the Church, and will draw to a conclusion at some unknown point in the future. It is God’s dream and Jesus is inviting us to be a part of it. We come to church each week and tell each other these stories in order to be reminded that this universe is no accident, and our lives are no random series of events.
This week, we begin the liturgical season of Advent, as we prepare to celebrate that beloved moment in God’s story when Jesus Christ, the Word of God, “took on flesh and dwelled among us.” But it is also a time when we look forward to Christ’s second coming at the conclusion of history. It is a time when we are invited to reorient our lives around the divine vision of a renewed creation, the vision for which Jesus lived, died, and lives again in us.
In this coming holiday season, let us not get caught up in our cultural patterns of materialism and greed. Let us also avoid the backward-looking nostalgia for the “good old days” of Christmases past. Let us instead look within and around us for the work that Christ is giving us to do in this world today. Finally, let us look forward to the day when God’s story finishes with a happy ending and all of creation joins in the song of unending praise to its Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.
Let us pray.
“O Come, Desire of Nations, bind all peoples in one heart and mind; bid envy, strife, and discord cease; fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.” Amen.
Sermon on Christ the King
Sermon Outline
- Feast of Christ the King
- End of our liturgical year
- Luke’s point is fairly obvious
- Christ is King
- Different kind of king
- Reigns from the cross
- But what does this mean?
- What does it have to do with us?
- What it does NOT mean
- Everything that happens is Christ’s will
- “God’s plan”, “Everything happens for a reason”
- Disease, accident, natural disaster?
- Everything that happens is Christ’s will
- Christ’s crucifixion itself?
- Christ endorses the agenda of the powers-that-be
- What it means
- Everything that exists/happens is material that Christ can work with (including the crucifixion)
- God’s vision – “the kingdom of heaven”
- Less to do with what happens
- More to do with who we are
- Christ is establishing a new order, over and against the powers-that-be
- God’s vision – “the kingdom of heaven”
- Was the cross God’s plan for Jesus?
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- To say Yes is to accept the unacceptable (“cosmic child abuse”)
- Crucifixion was the powers’ plan for Jesus
- Prophets expose the sins of the powerful
- Injustice, hypocrisy, idolatry
- Jesus does this consistently
- Shallowness of religious elite
- Futility of a political system based on violence
- Threatens the power-base with truth
- God didn’t need Jesus to die, the powers did
- Jesus accepted crucifixion as the consequence of his ministry
- Continued to minister anyway
- Borg: “The cross is the world’s No to Jesus”
- Ironic injustice
- He is made to suffer and die because for doing the right thing
- They call him “king” ironically, to mock him
- But he really is
- Jesus “bears their sins” by absorbing their violent hatred without retaliation
- “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
- They taunt Jesus to come down from the cross
- Leaders, soldiers, criminal
- They can only conceive of a Messiah that is like them: violent and powerful
- Leaders: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!”
- Soldiers: “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”
- Prophets expose the sins of the powerful
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- Everything that exists/happens is material that Christ can work with (including the crucifixion)
- Criminal: “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”
- The real irony: these opposing powers are really saying the same thing
- But one person gets the irony: the other criminal
- “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.”
- Nearing death, giving up hope for survival, he sees clearly the futility of this world’s violent system
- Unironically addresses Jesus as king:
- “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
- The hopeless loser gets it
- In the world today, the “hopeless losers” still get it
- They see clearly the futility of the violent world system
- But the powerful are blinded by their interests in the system
- We don’t want to see the truth because we still hold out hope that the system will work in our favor
- Poor and oppressed people see the futility more clearly
- Black Lives Matter, I Believe Women
- Powerful interests try to silence these movements
- Jesus stands in solidarity with them
- If we want to stand with Jesus as our King, we must stand with them
- Black lives, women’s lives, queer lives, trans lives, Muslim lives, refugee lives, Mexican lives, immigrant lives, disabled lives, mentally ill lives matter… and these lives are being ended by crucifixion today
- Church: “Preferential option for the poor”
- Like Jesus, we must be prepared to be crucified with them as a consequence of our solidarity
- We must be ready to listen to their experiences and suffer with them, especially where we have been complicit in their suffering
- This is repentance
- Jesus, the most powerful King, stands in solidarity with those who are the least powerful
- And he does it without returning violence for violence
- This is what it looks like for Jesus to reign as King from the cross
- His Church must do the same
- Our basis for hope is that crucifixion is not the end of the story
- King Jesus ascends the throne on Mount Calvary, but reigns from the empty tomb
- In his resurrection, Jesus has conquered death and hell
- St. Paul (Ephesians 1:17-23): “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”
- Filled with the hope born of this faith (this pledge of allegiance), the Church stands at the forefront of countless movements for peace, justice, and mercy
- We do not grow tired, even when the entire world is against us and others give up, because our hope is born of something greater than this world
- St. John (1 John 4:4): “Little children, you are from God, and have conquered them; for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.”
- We have even learned to take pride in the cross, the instrument of Christ’s mocking and torture:
- St. Paul (1 Cor 1:18-25): “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
- Our response
- “Therefore,” (Hebrews 12:1-2), “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”
- St. Paul again (Romans 12:1-2): “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
- We do not grow tired, even when the entire world is against us and others give up, because our hope is born of something greater than this world
- We must be ready to listen to their experiences and suffer with them, especially where we have been complicit in their suffering
- If we want to stand with Jesus as our King, we must stand with them
- Finally (Philippians 2:5-11): “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
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This is not liberal idealism; it is Christian hope
- Grounded in the mystery of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead
- We come to church, week after week, to fed by Word and Sacrament, then sent back out into the world to keep doing this work of standing, with Christ our King, in solidarity with the crucified peoples of the earth.
- We need to be reminded of these truths because the world will try to choke that faith out of us
- St. John (1 John 4:4): “Little children, you are from God, and have conquered them; for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.”
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The cross was this world’s No to Jesus, but the empty tomb is God’s Yes.
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And God’s Yes trumps the world’s No every time.
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Hopping Hadrian's Wall 