Category: Sermon

Scripture: Exodus 19:2-8, Mathew 28: 16-20

A Nation of Priests.

That’s a controversial title for a sermon in this church if there ever was one. If you’re not quite sure why, I’ll break it down a little bit for you. 

The first reason is the idea of conflating the church with the world of secular politics as the word nation tends to get us thinking about. I do try to avoid partisan politics here as much as I can.  However, as I’ve talked about with the deacons, we live in a uniquely partisan and tense political time, and almost everything can be taken as political.

For my part, I realize that this is a politically divided congregation, and I also believe that no political party on earth can truly match the teachings of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of heaven.  Church is now one of the few places where Republicans and Democrats still gather as part of the same organization.  If this makes us uncomfortable, well, my advice for us to get used to it: heaven is going to be the same way.

Then there’s the word priest.

Some of you who grew up in this church or another protestant church might be bristling at the word priest, while those of you who are coming from a Roman Catholic background might be wondering why I am not your priest, but instead your pastor, and why we don’t have priests at all.

To explain this, it will take a bit of understanding our history, not just of this local church, but of churches like ours. To start off, I hope as a baseline that we’re aware that this is a congregationalist church, (it is in our name after all).  Churches like ours developed from the reformed branch of the protestant reformation.

Our theological ancestor isn’t so much the famous Martin Luther, who nailed 95 theses to the church door some 500 years ago, but instead the less famous, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli.

Other churches that share in this heritage are reformed and Presbyterian churches. Although the way we run our churches is different, we have much in common in our teaching. Indeed, our denomination has a “Full Communion” agreement with the PCUSA, the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States. We recognize the ministry that happens at each other’s churches, even while being separate. (While of course thinking that we’re better.)

And in churches that come from the reformed tradition, we don’t call our ordained minister’s priests. That’s because we believe that all baptized Christians are part of the priesthood of all believers. That is to say, we believe that all Christians are capable of the priestly functions that were, traditionally only allotted to a special few ordained clergy.

It’s why, in our church and other churches like ours, someone like Janice Mcyswyny, or Linda Minervini can preside over the communion table, with the approval from the board of deacons, who represent the church’s leadership as a body in all things spiritual.

And yes, I am ordained, and authorized to be a minister by the United Church of Christ, but that did not represent, as it does in the Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox, some sort of indelible mark on my soul that sets me apart from other Christians.  Rather, it was a public affirmation and proclamation of my being set apart in the midst of a Christian community.

This difference in understanding is part of why I wear a black robe that looks more like a graduation gown then the vestments that Father Kevin at St. Pius or Mother Susan at All Saints Episcopal in town wear.

For this actually is academic dress.  It represents the education and training that I received in seminary. For ministers back in the old days, it was a way of proving your credentials to the congregation. They knew that anyone could preside at the communion table, but who had the education to be able to proclaim God’s Word through preaching on a regular basis?

Of course, sometimes this got taken a little too far: in Scotland, where many of our theological influences lie, it was a practice for if a minister was going to give a “liberal sermon”, that they would wear academic dress from one university, and if they were going to preach a “conservative sermon”, they’d preach from another.

Some of you might suspect which academic dress I’d have to wear most of the time.

A nation of priests.

But that phrase, or the meaning behind that phrase, is complicated and hard, but it also, in many ways, comprises the heart of the history and theology of this church, and others like it in our reformed theological tradition.

On one level, we read these passages as Israel as also being in some way about the church- the church is to be like Israel was, a light unto all the nations of the earth.  It’s how we make sense of and bring forward into our time the book of Isaiah, which on a strict reading, is about a specific historical and political time in the life of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah, as being about Jesus Christ.

The church as a whole, not just its ordained clergy, are called to follow God’s commandments as the priests did, and to make disciples of the nations, spreading the good news of Jesus Christ inside and outside our communities.

And that is well and good, and that’s the interpretation we live and hear most often in our churches. But our theological ancestors had another idea too. When God says to Israel that you shall become a “Nation of priests”, some of our reformed ancestors took the metaphor one step further.

What if the church as a nation didn’t just mean matters spiritual? What if the church was also supposed to order secular life like a nation does?

This is the dilemma that we see the early reformers like John Calvin attempting to solve in Geneva, working with civil authorities in that Swiss city to build a model of the heavenly city on earth.

Calvin, by the way, wanted weekly communion, preaching twice a week, and bible study on other days.  So please don’t complain too hard about this 45-minute church service, ok?

While this wasn’t a complete success (or necessarily a complete failure), because after all, they were something closer to Presbyterian rather than Congregationalist in governance, they did inspire another group of reformed Christians to think about the politics of God, what a nation of priests would look like.

This was a group of Christians in England who felt that each individual church could organize and govern themselves. They were especially interested in these ideas because of persecution within England, and the risk of cultural assimilation in the Netherlands. 

They would leave England in the 1620s and 30s and, having been blown off course from their intended target, settled instead in Massachusetts, founding the Plymouth colony, and later the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Dissidents, from that group, including Thomas Hooker, would later trek southward, and found the colony of Connecticut. This idea of the nation of priests was perhaps the principal organizing force throughout the history of English settlement in New England, until the early 1800s. It’s legacy still informs who we are today as New Englanders, and especially as their heirs, the Congregationalists.

Boston, for example, was often imagined of as a “City on a Hill”, a beacon of light to guide the whole world toward God. And although Boston isn’t as religious as it once was, Boston sports fans will be happy to tell you that it is still, indeed, the center of the universe.

Our congregationalist forebears were of course, not the only theocratic experiments in Christian history.  There were cities in Germany that were ruled by Roman Catholic Bishops until the 1800s.  The novel idea that our theological ancestors had that set these experiments in Godly living apart was that they would form, a nation of priests, not a nation for the priests.

Because if every baptized Christian was a priest, shouldn’t they also be responsible for governance and leadership, as the Israelite priests were? Of course, there would be leaders, but each man (at this point, only men, sorry ladies), would have a voice in decision making. This is the theological background for our annual meetings, open to all members of the congregation.  Each and every one of us is a priest.

This is the base for the town hall meeting, that staple of local New England democracy and our major contribution to the political culture of the United States, especially as settlers from New England brought our churches and values out to the Midwest, the Great Plains, and from Sea to Shining Sea in California.

And although the experiment in Democratic theocratic government would end with the establishment of the United States, our theological ancestors left a strong legacy of activists, and reformers, fighting against slavery and for reformed mental health, who believed that as a nation of priests, we have a duty to make our local communities, and the country as a whole a guiding light for the nations.

At 12: 30, our congregation will have its annual meeting.  This is an experiment in democracy that is still ongoing.

I hope our annual meeting reminds all of us that through our baptisms and membership in the church, we have the power and authority of the priests.  Even though I am your pastor, what I say does not necessarily go.  I advise, consent, and serve, but ultimately, this is not my church.  This is your church. It is governed by you at the annual meeting, and throughout the year by officers you elect.

Over the next year or two, no bishop or higher authority in the church will be deciding who your next pastor is. That power belongs to you, as delegated to your search committee.  In the next month, they will be beginning their prayerful work and discernment, but ultimately, you will be voting on whether or not to except the candidate they bring forward as the next pastor. 

I urge you to be grateful for this opportunity.  This opportunity to govern, to shape how faith is expressed in the church, a gift from generation to generation. What a gift that is.

Amen.

Scripture: Isaiah 55:1-5, Matthew 14:13-21

The story of the loaves and fishes, as we have usually told it in the Christian church, is a little bit…odd.

I don’t think the fact that it involves food is strange. Food was clearly pretty important to Jesus- lots of his debates and encounters with people involved food.  One of the charges against Jesus from the religious authorities with that he dines with sinners and tax collectors.

Nor do the miraculous parts of Jesus’s food ministry bother me. He broke the bread and blessed the bread in the same way at this story of the loaves and fishes as he did at the Last Supper, and which we recall and reenact at Communion every month.

And even if I didn’t believe in the miracle of the last supper, it certainly follows something like the potluck principle, where everyone brings a little and all of a sudden there’s enough for everyone.

No, what I always found most odd was the context of the story.  Or rather, the lack of context to the story. All of a sudden, Jesus tries to get away and a crowd just starts to…follow him?  Makes no sense to me.

After all, in Matthew Chapter 13, he just got run out of his home town of Nazareth.  When did he all of a sudden get popular again? So that’s why we’re going to have our Bible quiz now.  I said the question at the beginning of church, and the page number to find it on in the pew bible.  But I will say it again.

The question is, “According to the Gospel of Matthew, immediately before the loaves and fishes story, why does Jesus want to go away to be alone, and why did the crowd follow him?” I’m going to give folks about thirty seconds to figure it out.  After that, there will be a small prize for whoever can tell me the answer first.

And…Start!

So yes, our gospel story begins with Jesus having heard some earth shattering bad news; John the Baptist has just been executed on the orders of King Herod. We know this is the cause for why Jesus feels the need to go away, but as far as what Jesus was feeling, well, we will never know.

We can speculate, however: Maybe Jesus was struck by complicated grief.  Perhaps he was saddened by the death of the man who had baptized him, someone who recognized his gifts and recognized his authority when that was not popular.

Or maybe, as one Bible commenter put it, Jesus was struck by the cruelty of King Herod’s government, a regime that on the whim of a member of the royal family would execute a faithfully religious man who challenged religious authorities to do better.

This might have driven Jesus into a state of moral crisis, another sign of the terrible capacity of humanity toward cruelty. Perhaps this is what drove him, this great man of the people, to go and try to be alone for a while.

Maybe he needed to prepare himself for the moral struggle that was about to happen between the evil in this world that seeks to enact violence on others, and the forces of Good and Love that seeks to bind people together.

Could also be that maybe Jesus knew that John the Baptist’s followers were going to need comfort.  They were going to need a place and way to publicly grieve, and a leader to see them through it. And he knew that he needed his own opportunity to grieve and heal, at least partly, before he could assist others in doing so.

Because Jesus knew that his isolation wouldn’t last.  Other than his time in the wilderness, before his ministry began, although Jesus tried to spend periods of time alone in prayer and fasting, it often didn’t work out for long. And that’s because humans are not meant to live in isolation. We are the social animal, and we are meant to be together.

We should also note that we don’t know who exactly this crowd is who came to follow Jesus was- we can guess that it probably included a mixture of John the Baptist’s followers, and others from the community who admired John and possibly Jesus. 

For how else, when they heard about John the Baptist’s death, would they have found the one whom John the Baptist had praised so highly and gone to him.

We’ve talked in previous sermons about how Bible Stories are like cakes or onions or parfaits, with different layers of meaning and context that stack one on top of the other. The idea is that it’s a very modern thing for Bible stories to only have one meaning, one correct way of interpreting them.

Learning about the full context adds another layer of meaning to this story.  Normally, we’re taught that this story is about God’s abundance, or maybe we emphasize its parallels to communion that I mentioned before.

But in thinking about the story of the loaves and fishes in a different way, perhaps as a response to a moral crisis and to as an outpouring of communal grief, forces me to approach this story in a new way.

The extra layer is that this story is not about a random gathering of people already committed to Jesus’ ministry, but outreach to a grieving community and a moral stance against a violent and cruel government.

This story is not about insiders being rewarded, but about what the church is called to do in our communities with people who might not know Jesus. This story forces me to think about what the gospel looks like, in times of community trouble, and indeed, how we approach our mission as a church to our communities.

To really understand why the execution of John the Baptist was such a crisis- both in terms of grief for his community and as a moral crisis, we need to fully understand John the Baptist’s ministry.

John the Baptist was a prophet.

In our everyday language, prophets are most often associated with telling the future. The technical term for these predictions is an oracle, and although the prophets in the Bible do them, it’s not how they spend most of their time.

Prophets in the Jewish and Christian tradition are much more than fortune tellers.  Rather, prophets are the moral and spiritual centers of their communities calling people to return to God, while also pleading to God on behalf of the people.

They almost always (with some exceptions) operate outside of religious power structures, and often have a testy relationship with them, as their connections to God bypass the normal routes of established religion.

Prophets like Amos, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah call on the people to stop oppressing the poor, to turn away from evil, and to reengage with God with their hearts, not their gold and sacrifices. These are the same things that John the Baptist did.

And his execution raised painful and tough questions. If the government could kill this man of God, what else could the government do?  What was the power of God next to this government that could execute a prophet?Which leads us back to this story of the loaves and fishes. Jesus, after realizing that these folks needed something that he could give them.  Hope.

He could give them hope in God, and maybe even renew or spark faith in God through healing them. He knew that they needed signs of the power of God.  And this he did.

He healed and engaged with the crowd on their own terms.  He didn’t prepare a barn burner sermon. To be healed did not require a declaration of faith or a baptism. Nor did the people need to show their insurance cards.

But then the people needed something that the disciples weren’t used to. Let’s note hear that Jesus had been doing healing miracles for a while at this point. The disciples are pretty used to them.  They know how to form people into lines, handle ques, that sort of thing. 

But when the imminent need of feeding probably somewhere around 7-10,000 people (remember, the 5,000 people who are counted were the men), comes up… they panic.Not the panic of running around as though one’s hair is on fire, but the bureaucratic panic that all sensible adults who have been made responsible for things know about.

The offloading of responsibility and ensuring that whatever is wrong is someone else’s problem. We can’t blame them too much. After all, feeding that many people would prove difficult under most circumstances.

But not Jesus.  Jesus knows that the mission of the church is not to offload responsibility for people’s care onto someone else. The mission of the church is to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, as Jesus said in his very first sermon.

It’s easy for us as a church- and I definitely fall into this trap- to think of mission as doing the things we like to do and are good at. It’s easy to fall into that trap when we think about our individual spiritual gifts, like we did at Epiphany, or our spiritual callings, like we did last week.

But ultimately, if those aren’t meeting the needs of the community, both inside our walls, but especially outside of our walls, then what are we really doing but showing off how wonderful we are?

And we must be ready for this.  The world still does need us.  The prophet Isaiah reminds us that “See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.”

This is a hurting world and it needs us.  It needs the church, and if this seems daunting, its because it is.

But there is hope, thank God.

Meeting the needs of our community will require listening more than talking, going out beyond the walls of the church more than staying in where it is warm inside. It will require that we recognize that we cannot do this work alone. 

It will require that we work with partner organizations, such as GWIM, that we have close ties to, and for us to work sometimes with those we disagree with, either politically or theologically.

It will require us to recognize both our common mission and diverse set of gifts present in the people of this church and throughout our social networks, who even if they never attend a church service, might still help us meet the needs of the community.

But most of all it will require us to move from hoarding of resources to recognizing the abundance of God, who not only fed a multitude on a lake shore, with what seemed like a little but who also invites us into his limitless love in the book of Isaiah with these words: Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

Amen.

Scripture: Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17

I’m so happy that today we’re talking about the baptism of Jesus, because it gives me the opportunity to tell you one of my favorite baptism stories.

It comes by way of one of my pastor friends, who I will leave anonymous to protect the innocent.

To understand this story, you first need to know that the tradition in her church, as it is in many churches, including, possibly this one, for after an infant is baptized for the pastor to walk around the church while holding the baby to show the child to everyone.

Well, this story concerns young woman in my friend’s church, who was in middle school. She was a faithful attendee of the church, active in Youth Group, did bible readings during worship, and she was all set to begin confirmation the next year.

Both my friend and the young woman’s mom thought this would be an easy win. She was involved, loved the church, her friends, and helping out. At first, this seemed the way it would go. In their conversations, the young woman seemed ok with everything.

There was one small hurdle though, her mom explained to her.  She had never been baptized. I believe this was one of those families that believed that their children should wait to make their own religious choices. OK.

But at the mention of this, the young lady started to look a little bit nervous.

No problem, her mom explained.  She already talked to the pastor, and there would be no problem.  She could go through confirmation class with everyone else, and the day of the confirmation service in church, she could be baptized and then confirmed one after another.  Easy Peasy.

At this point, the young woman looked horrified. She starts getting anxious and biting her nails. She starts pacing up and down the living room floor. “What’s wrong?” her mother asked, worried and confused.

Turns out the young woman is absolutely scandalized, in the way that only tweens can be scandalized, and not by the baptism.  She was quite ok with baptism. 

No, she was horrified because she thought that after being baptized, the pastor would have to pick her up, sling her over the pastor’s shoulder, and march her around the church, like they do for babies to show her off.

The moral of this story: for those of you who were baptized as babies: Remember your baptism and be grateful. All kidding aside, as we did our reaffirmation of baptism this morning, that phrase kept coming up.

It’s a call for us to remember the promises that we, or our parents or godparents, probably made during our own baptisms.  To reject sin, to profess faith in Christ Jesus, to confess the faith of the church, to be Christ’s disciple, to follow in the way of our Savior, to resist oppression and evil, to show love and justice, and to witness to the work and word of Jesus Christ as best we are able.

It’s a call for us to remember what baptism is, an outward sign, of the grace of God that we usually only feel on the inside. It’s a reminder that our baptisms are less about us choosing God, and much more about God choosing us, with the baptism as a visible and public sign of the sovereignty of God.

That is to say, God is not constrained by any rules other than God’s own sense of right and wrong, which we call righteousness.

We’ve emphasized the power of God to choose us, over our own choices for God.  This is what separates us from Baptists and Anabaptists, who emphasize the individual’s heart and places us with most of the rest of the Christian Church worldwide including the Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists, and reformed and congregational churches like ours.

But let’s back up just a minute. Baptism is one of those things that comes up that deserves our full attention.

The first person to baptize people was, as we heard in our Gospel reading, John, who we usually call John the Baptist or John the Baptizer, or as one of my textbooks called him, JBap.

Baptism, the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins through ritual bathing with water, comes from the Mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath used to cleanse people before they approached the Jewish temple for sacrifices.

So the people who John was baptizing down by the river Jordan were probably all Jewish. In reading the Gospels, we get the sense that John had his own religious sect within Judaism, probably similar to what Jesus would initially build. 

We also get the sense that many, but not necessarily all, of John’s followers would eventually become followers of Jesus too. John started his work earlier than Jesus, and was working quite successfully when Jesus bursts on the scene.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus and John are second cousins, as Elizabeth and Mary are cousins, but in our scripture reading today from the Gospel of Matthew, there’s not any sense that they actually know each other personally, at least in the flesh.

But Jesus’ does know of John’s work, for his journey to the river Jordan to be baptized is made with a purpose. And although John doesn’t seem to know Jesus as a person when he arrives, John clearly recognizes Jesus’ spiritual power and especially his authority immediately.

This is the one whose sandals he would be unworthy of tying, much less baptizing. So John is confused when Jesus asks him to perform the baptism. John thinks that Jesus should be baptizing *him*.

But baptism isn’t about the power and the authority of the person doing the baptism. It’s why, although we tend to have pastors do it whenever possible, in an emergency, all Christians is ecumenically recognized to be able to perform a baptism, and it is considered valid by most of the Christian churches as long as it’s done in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

While we don’t agree with many other churches on much of anything, we do agree with churches all across the diversity of Christianity on the formula for baptism, and we respect each other’s baptismal rites, not re-baptizing Christians when they change churches.

No, that’s because we believe that the primary actor in a baptism is not the person getting baptized, nor the person saying the words, but God.

In fact, Jesus’ baptism becomes something of a family reunion, as both the Holy Spirit, represented by a descending dove, and God the Father, as a voice from heaven, make appearances, telling the gathered crowd, “This is my Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen at every baptism that happens today. Although that would be really cool.

The second thing that we need to understand what God is choosing us for. I think that there’s a misconception about what being chosen by God in the context of baptism means.

Peter, in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, talks a bit about that. He talks about how those who witnessed the life of Christ, death, and resurrection of Christ were called to testify and preach to the people about his life.

I believe that our baptisms, especially after they have been reaffirmed through lives of faith in the context of a community, make us into witnesses of the life of Christ.

We in the church have been chosen by God, blessed by God with the opportunity to testify about his good works. Being chosen by God doesn’t mean that we are magically better than we were beforehand.

Even Jesus, with the dove and voice of God thing going on, didn’t magically change at his baptism- he was the Son of God beforehand and would continue to be so after he was baptized.

And neither are we.  Baptism will not make you smarter, stronger, wealthier, or necessarily more faithful.  It will not make you a better person than non-Christians.  It does make you someone who has seen God’s light and truth, however. Indeed, it will certainly, if you take your baptismal promises seriously, make your life much harder.

After all, Peter, the apostle who preached this little sermon in the book of Acts about being chosen by God to witness to the life of Christ did not end up retiring to Florida.  He did not see his investments multiply 7 fold through his faith.

No, Peter ended up being executed, crucified upside down in the city of Rome by the Roman Imperial authorities. The Apostle Paul, our most prolific author in the New Testament, and prolific church planter, died in prison.

This is a pattern that stretches back throughout the Bible.  Moses certainly didn’t want to be chosen by God to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt.  Moses died before ever reaching the promised land at all. Jeremiah struggled with being a prophet in the depths of his soul. But yet they still witnessed to the power of God against the odds.

They did so because as people who have the privilege of experiencing God, they had a duty and obligation to do so.  This is our same duty to preach the good news of Jesus Christ.

Our baptismal promises are reminders of that duty. They remind us that we have a duty to reject sin, to profess faith in Christ Jesus, to confess the faith of the church, to be Christ’s disciple, to follow in the way of our Savior, to resist oppression and evil, to show love and justice, and to witness to the work and word of Jesus Christ as best we are able.

To witness to the world about the word of Jesus Christ as best as we are able doesn’t mean remaking the world in our image.  It’s not about making sure that everyone is just like us.  It’s about reminding the world that we were made in God’s image. 

It’s about reminding folks about a God who is love who came to save the world, not to condemn it.  A god who is lovingkindness and mercy but who hates cruelty and the harm we do to one another.

If that isn’t worth being reminded about every once and a while, I don’t know what is.

Amen.

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; Matthew 2:1-12

Y’all may or may not be aware that I spent much of the last two weeks in Houston Texas, and Miami Florida.

Yes, it was warm, and yes, I did spend most of my time in shorts, with a drink in hand, reading a book and watching the water go by, under the thatched roof of the Tiki hut at my sister’s house, on occasion playing Frisbee with her wonderful poodle Gracie. It was as good as you might suspect.

But relaxing wasn’t the only thing that I did, although it was most of it. My oldest brother invited me to go to his church last weekend.

Although my brother in his teenage years went to a UCC church down in Miami, for about the past 15 years, he’s been Greek Orthodox. This is mostly because he married a second generation Greek immigrant, and thus, into her big Greek Family and into the religion.

You remember My Big Fat Greek Wedding?  That was his life, basically.

Has anyone here been to a Greek Orthodox or other Eastern Orthodox service? It’s very, very different from how we worship. I would say that our ways of worshiping are about as far apart as can possibly be while both still being recognizably Christian. At least in form.

In function, we still do many of the same things- prayers for the people, bible readings, sermons, communion, but they look and sound so vastly different that its easy be overwhelmed by the differences. It’s easy to consider them so foreign that there’s nothing to learn from them.

But that’s the wonderful thing about the different gifts we bring that there’s always something to learn. Especially when we give those gifts and realize that we’re actually following the same star.

We see this pretty clearly in our two Bible readings today. It’s very obvious in our first reading, from the book of Corinthians, describing the diversity of gifts that we bring to the body of Christ. 

Because we are one in Spirit- that is, the Holy Spirit, our advocate who binds us together, variety of gifts we manifest; wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, auto repair

Don’t laugh, to someone whose car is broke and they don’t have enough money to fix it, auto repair is a spiritual gift.

This is part of why a church like this takes all types.  It takes people old and young, rich and poor, white collar and blue collar, liberal and conservative, people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds and, as this church has sometimes struggled with, people of different genders and sexual orientations.

We all have something to give as a gift to the church, to the community, to God. This sometimes includes people who are very very different from us. The Magi that come to visit Jesus were probably, according to both the tradition of the church and best research by scholars, Persians, from modern day Iran, who had trained and learned in Babylon, in modern day Iraq.

They were astrologers, the scientists and economists of their day who also functioned as court advisors.  They were probably followers of the Zoroastrian religion, a religion of the ancient world that is barely hanging on today.

The most famous Zorastrian, by the way, was a musician named Farrokh Bulsara, who moved from India to England, changed his name, and became the lead singer for a then obscure rock band named Queen.  You might know him better as Freddie Mercury.

But anyways, these Zoroastrian Magi were most certainly not Jewish.  Although the Israelites probably had better relations with them than the Romans and Greeks, because the Persian King Cyrus allowed the Israelites back into Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile, they were still very much not Jewish.

So when these three scholars, wealthy men who probably traveled with caravans of servants and scribes, show up to a humble town about 5 miles past the middle of nowhere, it’s a bit odd.

It’s a bit odd of God. For the traditions around these gifts throughout the history of the church are that they foretell the life of Christ. 

It’s those middle three verses in We Three Kings. Gold, tells us about Jesus Christ as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Prince of Peace.

Frankincense a type of, you guessed it, incense, tells us about Christ’s role as the new symbolic High Priest of the Temple, the new mediator between humanity and divinity, the bridge between Heaven and Earth.

We should also note that in other Christian Churches, incense, especially Frankincense is used to make a place holy.  In our tradition, we believe that Christ’s presence on earth made the entire earth holy, and thus there’s no need for us to do so now. 

Myrrh was the bitter perfume, used in burial rites.  This recalls Christ’s death of the cross, and his resurrection.

So once again, how odd of God to have these non-Jewish sages come to pay homage to Christ’s birth with gifts that would foretell his life. How odd of God that even though there was a star that everyone could see, only a few were able to follow it.

How odd of God when that happens not only in the Bible Stories, but in our own lives. When there’s something that seems to be hiding in plain sight, but we’re the only ones who see what it really means.

When we follow on a path toward what we know to be holy and we think it will be straightforward, but it ends up being really really weird. And then when we get there, we realize that not only is our presence expected, but so is a unique gift, the gift of our whole selves.

When we take stock of the gifts we have to bring, they seem really weird, like accounting or auto repair, the ability to make people laugh, or to make really tasty cookies.

Like gold, frankincense, and myrrh for a baby. Yet if that star is truly a sign that God’s love and community are present in a place, those gifts, as weird as they might seem at first, are accepted wholeheartedly.

Because God loves all the gifts we bring, no matter how weird they might seem to us. Like the weird gift of experiencing God in a new way while on vacation in Miami at a Greek Orthodox Worship service, which they call the Divine Liturgy.

A worship service where, we get the sense that worship would happen no matter how many or how few people showed up. Part of that is caused by the way they do communion there.

To start with, the layout of an Orthodox Church is a little different. The Chancel area, which in our church is this area up here where the lay reader and I sit, is a bit bigger, and is mostly hidden behind screens with pictures of saints on them except for the center aisle of the church. The communion altar- they have altars, not communion tables like us, is up on the chancel, peeking out from in between those screens down through the center aisle. And toward the back wall of the church there’s a cross, a crucifix really for it contains an image of Jesus in body painted on it, probably about 4ish feet tall.

And when the priest presides over communion, he doesn’t do it like we do, where I face the congregation, in what is called Ad Populum- toward the people.

But rather, toward the cross, which is on the east wall of the church, for Orthodox Churches are always built on an East-west line, unlike ours which is built north-south. It’s not something that I would ever do, celebrating communion with my back to the people of the church, facing the east, ad orientem as they call it.

It’s not in our traditions, and in such closed quarters, it feels a little weird, cutting off the clergy from the congregation. But there is something really special in acknowledging that all of us are pointed toward Christ.

That we are all following that same star that tells us where the Christ Child lays in a manger. That although my spiritual gifts have set me aside as your pastor,  we’re still on the same journey.

Trying to figure out what gifts that we can bring to the living God, Jesus Christ, alive in the manger, who died on the cross, who rose from the dead, and who lives in each and every one of our human hearts.

Amen.

There is nothing like reading the facebook posts of my friends who are parents to reaffirm my desire to not be a parent.

It’s not that I dislike being with children and youth. I enjoy hanging out with you all at church, I regularly compete in the sport of fencing with middle and high school aged fencers- they usually beat me. I used to work in early childhood literacy and assisted the children’s librarian with storytimes when I worked in the library.

So its not that, rather it’s more that I’m happy to share my influence with lots of children for short periods of time, and then send them home to their parents, where I don’t have to deal with temper tantrums or dirty diapers.

Because of that, I will never experience much of what Mary was feeling in her song of praise that was our second Bible reading this morning, otherwise known as the Magnificat.

Because part of Mary’s song of praise and love for God her savior is unique to her situation, I believe some of the underlying feelings that inspire the Magnificat are common to all who parent children, who realize the enormity of the task ahead of them and the miracle that is birth.

It’s a song of praise for God’s salvation. It’s a song of hope for her and her child.  It’s a song of peace, the yearning for a world where the mighty are toppled from their thrones. It’s a song of Joy, delighting in a God that fills the hungry with good things.  And last, it’s a song of Love, of the steadfast love of God toward his people, generation after generation.

Truly, this is one of the great scripture sections in the whole of the Bible, and deserves its full context. Let’s back up for a second. I believe that to understand the Magnificat and Mary’s song of praise, we must talk about what salvation means.

When we talk about salvation today, most of the time, we think of whether or not we’re going to heaven or hell when we die. “Do you profess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior”, is a question that we ask when we join the church.

And although this is one aspect, even an important aspect of the history of salvation as it appears throughout the Bible, it is not the only way that we can talk about salvation. After all, Mary sings about “God, my savior”, not Jesus Christ, my savior.

Nor when she sang, do I believe her intent was declare how nice it was that now she would be going to heaven when she died. That’s not what the rest of the song is about, nor is that how Mary, as a Jewish woman during what we call the second temple period, would have understood salvation.

Heck, around the time of Jesus’ life and ministry, there was a vibrant debate among Jews about whether or not the soul was an immortal thing. To this day, Jewish folks don’t believe in a heaven and hell like Christians do.

It’s why when Jewish folks die, the traditional phrases and honorifics involved in mourning have little to do with the state of the deceased’s soul, but instead are things like “May their memory be a blessing.”

This isn’t to imply at all to imply that what we believe as Christians is in any way wrong. If I did, I would be Jewish, but rather that salvation is a multi-faceted thing.

Let’s look at what Micah and Mary in the Gospel have to say about salvation. Micah was one of the Biblical prophets writing before the Babylonian Exile.

He was living in a time of national insecurity, with the tiny kingdom of Israel sandwiched between the giant empires of Egypt and the Assyria. Micah’s primary concern was not the state of his soul, but rather, the soul of the state.

Micah was concerned about if the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel would have effective leadership that ruled in concert with the will of God. Micah wants a land with security, where people live in tune with God’s justice and righteousness, in peace with their neighbors, where the poor are treated with dignity.

As Christians, its easy for us to almost put aside this understanding of Micah’s situation, bluntly superimposing a “THIS MEANS JESUS” sort of stamp on this Bible reading, while ignoring its context.

It’s also easy for us to get so focused on the context of Micah’s time that we forget that we believe that the whole of the Bible does point to Jesus Christ, speaking beyond the time it was written.

It’s a conceit of the modern mind that only one thing, only one reading, one interpretation can be correct of any particular Bible reading. Christians in generations past were comfortable with these readings stacking on top of each other like a… parfait, for everyone likes parfait.

If we look again at what Micah is saying, it’s a call for a new type of leadership. Micah is deliberately calling back not just to King David, but to the town of King David’s birth, and youth.  Micah is deliberately calling for a shepherd.

Micah is not pointing toward a warrior king, a bureaucrat, or a lawgiver, Micah is pointing toward a shepherd. It’s a fundamentally different view of what good leadership looks like.

And if there’s anything we know about shepherds, it’s that there is a good shepherd who leads us. Furthermore, one of my commentaries noted that the words that were used to describe this shepherd King were not the words usually associated with human Kings, but with God.

So yes, Micah was yearning for a salvation rooted in the present conditions of a need for physical, economic, and religious safety. Yet Micah was also yearning for a savior shepherd, who would rule with humanity and divinity. Micah was yearning for Jesus.

Which brings us to Mary, Mother of Jesus, and as the ancient believers confessed, Mother of God, for Jesus is God. Mary, who sings out a song of praise to God her savior. Mary, suffering alongside most of her people under the occupation of a hostile Empire, the Romans, near the height of its power.

Even so, Mary sings of Hope: she sings that all generations will call her blessed.  She understands that her blessings are not because of her own power, but gifts from God, freely given and readily accepted.

Mary sings of Peace, not the absence of conflict, but the presence of God’s justice and righteousness where the mighty are toppled from their thrones, and the lowly lifted up. 

Mary sings of Joy, a God who delights in the lowly, filling the hungry with good things.

And Mary sings of Love, the steadfast mercy and faithfulness of a God towards his people, generation after generation, even in the face of exile, betrayal, and conquest.

Mary foretells Christ’s ministry- his desire to feed the hungry, lift up the people, and cast down the powerful. Which, by the way, if you hear that lovely song Mary, Did you Know, the answer is yes, yes she knew.  She tells us about it in this song.

But when Mary sings the Magnificat, Jesus hasn’t been born yet.  She knows, but doesn’t know the fullness of what changes he will bring to the world.  But she does know of God’s Hope, Peace Joy and Love in anticipation.

Mary’s song of praise is the clearest expression that I know of of the spirit of Advent, this period of anticipation mixed with reflection.

A season of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love, a season where we look backwards and forwards at the same time, celebrating the Christ that Came, while looking toward Christ who is to come.

Tomorrow, or the day after, is Christmas Eve.  We will read the Christmas story from Luke, light candles and sing silent night in the dark.

But today is still advent.  So sit with this song of praise of Christ yet to be born yet who is foretold.  Sit with the hope, peace, joy, and love of God in your hearts, and may your days be glad.

Amen.

This sermon was preached at the Wolcott Congregational Church on December 9th, 2019. The Scriptures were Malachi 3:1-4, Luke 3:1-6.

I have a question for you, church.

When you think of a Holy Person, who do you think of? You know, one of those people that when you’re in their presence, you think, God is working through this person. 

What do they look like? How do they act?

Maybe you thought of someone like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, someone who suffered in solidarity with the poor. Maybe you thought about the Dalai Lama, who just seems to radiate calm in the midst of political turmoil and exile.

Maybe it’s someone closer to home, a beloved grandmother or grandfather, a true prayer warrior with an unshakable faith. I know for my part, that I do not to picture a thirty year old man roving around the wilderness, wearing shirts made of hair, eating insects, telling people to repent for the end is nigh.

Honestly, that’s the sort of person who if I saw them on the streets of Waterbury, I would probably cross the street to avoid. And my reaction to him says much more about my own spiritual deficiencies then it does about old John.

But that’s our John the Baptist.

John the Baptist is the one who shocks us so that we might be able to listen to Jesus, the one who shows us that peace isn’t a passive withdrawal from the world, but the end product of the transformative nature of God’s justice and righteousness.

John is an unlikely voice in the wilderness, a strange hero, like so many biblical heroes are. St. Augustine of Hippo, said this about John the Baptist, I paraphrase, “John the Baptist was the human voice who shouted that Jesus is the Word of God first to his fellows.”

Born to the elderly Elizabeth and Zechariah, his birth story has a lot of echoes of the old Prophets. The advanced age of John’s parents echo Sarah and Abraham, and by the angel, his destiny is compared to that of Elijah, one of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets.

He’s so filled with the Holy Spirit from his birth that he’s not allowed to drink wine or liquor. Wine, as I’ve mentioned before, was a mark of civilization and sophistication to Greeks, so we know that this man was going to be a bit…different. He’s not going to fit in with polite society, and he’s not one of the “civilized”

John’s distance from civilization and polite society is contrasted by the introduction to our Gospel reading today: In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

Notice, that it sets the scene by naming all of the rulers of the area in power ranking and prestige- The Roman Emperor, the Imperial Governor, King Herod, the local puppet ruler, and so on down, and then men who were the high priests of the temple, the leaders of the religious establishment. And yet the word God is not revealed through any of them.

Instead, God chooses a barbarian, someone outside of civilization who couldn’t drink wine, yet was filled with the Holy Spirit. I think it is telling that Jesus does not reveal his ministry first to people with political and religious power and authority.

John the Baptist, who eats insects and honey, tells the fancy folk that they need to repent, that they, as individuals and as a society, needed to get things right. What does this tell us about the nature of God?

What does it tell us about God that God does not have Jesus magically appear in the Temple in a blaze of glory and force immediate obedience through the existing church and state power structures?

What does it tell us that the person who God calls to pave the way for Jesus Christ is John, living outside of society, not captive to its power, not enraptured by its wealth?

I think it tells us a few things. I think it tells us that all the earthly power that people laud over each other means nothing to God. That God will work through those who don’t suspect it, out of the corners of the world and our communities we might never expect it.

I think it tells us that all of our sophistication, education, and wealth mean nothing to God next to God’s goodness and mercy. I think it tells us that if there’s going to be peace, it will not be imposed by the top down, it’s going to be something that rises up from the bottom.

And it probably won’t be easy.

Peace isn’t something that comes about because we choose to avoid conflict, but because we accept the power of God’s justice and righteousness. John’s mission of peace is, in hearkening back to the book of Isaiah, the flattening of the hills, the raising up of the valleys in order to build a road for God and the people to walk on together.

Here on the top of one of the largest hills in Connecticut, we might think about the enormity of such work. I don’t know if anyone here is involved with construction work involving earth moving but literally moving earth is a big and very, very disruptive job.

And if you haven’t, anyone who has heard of the trials and tribulations of the Big Dig in Boston, or heck, the endless construction project and jobs program that some people call I-84 knows what I’m talking about.

But the disruptive nature of the process is part of how we know it is working.

Our first reading is from the book of Malachi, who is a rare prophet that’s mostly anonymous. The name Malachi just means “Messenger” in Hebrew. In our passage, he talks about some of the work that the person who will prepare the way of the Lord will do.

As Christians, we believe that Malachi is referring to John the Baptist, preparing the way for Jesus Christ. And the work that Malachi describes John as doing is supposed to be like a refiner’s fire or a fuller’s soap.

These are two metaphors that don’t mean much today but when would have made a lot more sense back then. They refer to the processes of purification in making different goods; a refining fire would burn away impurities in gold and silver about to be molded into jewelry or ornamental objects.

Fuller’s soap is what we use to clean sheep’s wool to make it nice and white after it’s been sheared off of a sheep. As you might expect, wool while on a sheep can get a little bit dirty. But either way, these are processes that are difficult, hot, sweaty, and nasty work, especially in the ancient world.

But look at the results.

The Refiner’s fire can turn a metaphorical or physical misshapen rock into a prized possession through intense heat that burns away impurity, while the Fuller’s soap grinds out the dirt and dust of life so that God’s presence can enter us fully.

This is part of the work that Christians are called to, that we are able to do as a result of God’s grace that we receive through our faith. It’s work that was never thought of as an individual effort- in the last line of our Malachi reading, he refers to the whole nations of Judah and the city of Jerusalem as appearing collectively before God together.

It’s work that is going to involve all of us, working at our own pace, but constantly encouraging each other, holding each other accountable, and opening our hearts up to each other.

And it will be hard work. 

It’s like exercise with our bodies; we except that exercise is good for us, but in the middle of, its hard and sometimes it hurts a little bit. And we also know the difference between exercise that challenges us, and exercise that injures us.Aim for spiritual challenges that strengthen you, not that injure you, and be able to tell the difference.

I want you to think back to your holy person I asked you about at the beginning of this sermon. Did they have an easy life with no struggle? Or did they overcome challenges that helped to refine their souls? I’m willing to bet that most of them went through that refiner’s fire, underwent the scrubbing of the Fuller’s soap in some way.

So when we consider what the peace of God looks like this Advent and Christmas season, Embrace the challenge.  Embrace the hard work. Embrace the messiness and when things don’t go quite as planned, know that sometimes, they do end up going right.

And remember that it might not be calm or easy, but it will be good and holy.

Amen.

This sermon was preached on December 2, 2018. The Scriptures were Jeremiah 33:14-16, Luke 21:25-36

Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas…

Christmas music season is in full swing. Although it’s been building since Halloween, at this point, its unavoidable, which is part of why we’re going to ease into it here at church.

But as I was listening to my Spotify Christmas Classics playlist, I noticed something strange. Judy Garland’s version of Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas came on, and I realized that the lyrics were different.

There’s a line in that version that doesn’t appear in later, happier versions of the song, even though critics have noted, and I agree, it’s the most powerful line in the song.

The song climaxes emotionally at the end as Judy sings

Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

There’s something about muddling through somehow that speaks to what it means to be a Christian, heck, what it means to be human, in a world filled with separation, pain and sorrow.

Especially, It speaks to our Bible readings today, and what it means to have hope.  For hope is not the Pollyanna attitude of naïve optimism that things will be easy, or that there will no struggle

Hope knows that sometimes our best efforts will not make things all the way right. Hope reminds us that we presently and ultimately live in the palm of God’s hand. Hope means remembering that the present does not necessarily dictate the future.

Hope believes in redemption, in second chances, in forgiveness, that things can change. Hope means that even though we must keep our eyes on the difficult road we trod, we are also called to lift our heads up to the horizon, to remember that there is no force greater than God’s love.

Jeremiah, the author of our first bible reading, knew all about hope in the face of terror and tragedy. Jeremiah lived in Jerusalem, in the kingdom of Judah.  Jerusalem was the center of a tiny kingdom at the border of three of the great empires of the ancient world, the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian.

They’re the heroes of our story.

For years, Jerusalem had, through reforms, careful diplomacy, and a helpful plague that swept through a besieging army, avoided conquest by these large and terrible empires. In 586 BC, this all changed.

Jerusalem was conquered, the city sacked, the temple that Solomon built destroyed, and its people sent into exile.  If you’ve heard the phrase Babylonian exile, it comes from this event, where the population was sent en masse to live in and around the city of Babylon, in modern day Iraq.

Jeremiah saw the destruction of his city.  He saw the scattering of God’s people. Every structure, both spiritual and physical that had undergirded his and the life of his people was torn asunder.

He saw the culmination of the breaking of the covenant between God and his people, especially God’s promises to Abraham, to Moses, to David of a permanent homeland that would be without end.

The world as he knew it had ended, and everything had been turned upside down.

Yet Jeremiah kept going.

That, by itself, is worthy of praise.

Jeremiah’s spiritual strength, is not only to function as a leader in the face of this great tragedy, in his ability to not just put one foot in front of the other. Jeremiah’s great strength is to see clearly the trouble that they were in on the road that they trod, and

He kept encouraging his people to settle down when they were exiled, to be fruitful and multiply in the face of danger in a foreign land. He asked them to be model subjects, but to never forget who they were, and who’s they were. That they did not really belong to Babylon, but to God.

It is at the end of this reassurance to the people, the plotting out of what their lives would look like on the hard and painful journey of exile that our reading from Jeremiah appears.

It’s a reading that would have made Jeremiah’s people look up from the road they were traveling on. It forced them to look up from the road toward the horizon.

Toward a future that was peaceful, not just in the absence of conflict from their neighbors, but in the presence of justice and righteousness, as carried out by their king.

Listening to Jeremiah’s words, we might think that this work is really hard, and that’s because the work is indeed, really hard. Living with the tension that a real hope implies between the acknowledging the reality of world as it is and also seeing and imagining how it should be when no one else can is hard work.

It’s the work that Moses did when he insisted to the Israelites that yes, a promised land of milk and honey did exist even when it would have been easier to return and remain as the pharaoh’s slaves.

We just talked about how it was Jeremiah’s work, inspiring the exiles to prosper and remember and to see clearly in the face of total societal collapse.

It was Mary and Joseph’s work, knowing that even with no room at the inn, that even though they would have to flee their country in the face of danger, that God would be born in the world through them.

And that work is our work too, when we hear Jesus’ words in our Gospel reading. Jesus is reminding us that the road that we have to tread will be hard, not just as a single people, for the whole earth. Jesus tells us that there will be distress amongst the peoples, and signs in the skies.

An quick aside about the signs in the skies; astrology was an accepted Christian practice for a long time. It was thought that God wanted to us to know him through the study of nature, and so wrote the history and future of the world in the stars- It’s why Jesus’ birth is heralded by a star that guides the wise men from the east.

So learned people studied the skies back then just as educated people now study something like economics or history or political science- to learn why and how the world works.

We are supposed to, as Christians, keep appraised and engaged in the world around us. It doesn’t mean that we are to be defined by it, but we are called to live in it. And even as we do so, even more so, are we called to remember who we belong to, even as the exile we endure from the Kingdom of God and the eventual reign of Christ seems distant.

For its when the presence of God seems most distant from our day to day circumstances that we are called to look up. To look to the horizon and remember that no matter how hard the paths we journey on now are, it will not be that way forever, nor does it have to be.

That, my friends, is Hope.

Hope is what Judy Garland was singing to us about.  See, because Judy was singing to a nation in the depths of World War II, about to suffer through the Battle of the Bulge, with some of the heaviest combat losses for US troops in the war. 

It became popular with US troops in Europe not because it was cheery, but because it wasn’t.  It gave them an emotional space to express that life was tough, that they might not make it to next winter, and many did not.

But it also expressed hope. That the war would be over, that the journey they were walking on was one they could do, one day, one step at a time, and that on occasion, they would be able to look up at the horizon and know Hope, and Peace.

Soon we all will be together, if the fates allow, Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow, So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

Amen.

This sermon was preached November 18th 2018 at the Wolcott Congregational Church. The Scriptures are Psalm 145:13-21 and Colossians 3: 5-15

Pierre de Fermat was a French lawyer in the 1600s- a real renaissance man, if you will.  He spoke six languages fluently, and did pioneering work in many fields of mathematics.

But the most infuriating thing about this genius was that he often did not show his work. Indeed, his most famous theorem was written in the margin of a book, and underneath wrote out, “I have the proof, but not enough room here to write it.”

Noted in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s hardest math problem”, eventually the ideas it spawned in trying to work it out became greater than the theorem itself, this little piece of writing in the margin of a textbook.

The first time I read this morning’s scripture from the book of Colossians for the first time, one particular line in it had the same effect on me that Fermat’s little marginal theorem had on generations of mathematicians. 

“Greed” (Which is idolatry). That floored me.

It’s a short aside, delivered in our translation today in parentheses, which adds to its mystique and to its power.  There’s no explanation given, no long winded argument like what we heard some weeks ago in the book of Romans.

Just an assertion delivered almost as an aside, But one that, the more we consider it, the more it makes sense. Let’s break this down why this is the case.

Gratitude tells us that God is Good, and the provider of all that we need. Greed does the opposite. Greed lies to us, and tells us that we are the ones who are in ultimately in control.

That we have a right to dominate, to exploit, to render to our own advantage more, and more and more, not for any purpose but  to exalt the self. Greed exalts the one over the community. Greed, which is idolatry,says that God’s dominion is not unlimited, and that there are things worth worshiping that are not God.

Things like money, like sex, like power, even something like racism. Greed tells me that I am capable of meeting all of my needs on my own.

That other people are merely a means to an end, objects to be used rather than beloved children of God. It is in this context that our phrase appears in the text, as part of a list of behaviors and emotions that are counter to Christian living.

The first things that our author condemns are selfish sexual practices which tear communities apart, which I won’t go in to. For that we can all be grateful. But he moves beyond this to also condemning living in such a manner that exults the self over the needs of the community. 

This isn’t to say we should all live in poverty, but that lives of unmitigated luxury subconsciously (or consciously) encourage us to believe that we can meet our needs apart from our communities and our God.

But I believe it is telling that in this list, after two specific behaviors are condemned, it is three emotions or feelings that are condemned.For greed is one of those deeply planted seeds that causes bad behaviors to sprout up in ways and places we don’t expect.

Our author warns us of passion, which in this case does not mean any strong emotion, but rather those feelings that wrest control our hearts away from God and toward consumption with no purpose.

Our author warns us of evil desire, which does not tell us to become like Buddhist monks and eliminate all desire, but rather to beware the seeds of evil that lurk in our hearts and attempt to root them out.

And last, our author warns us about greed, which is idolatry. Idolatry, of course, is the replacement of God as our object of worship, devotion, or trust, with anything else.  Greed, tells us that some small part of creation, belongs not to God, but to me. This, is counter to the word of God.

One of the primary lessons of the Bible is that the Earth and the whole of creation belongs ultimately not to any person, corporation, or government, but to God, who is Lord of all peoples, places, and nations.

We explore this today in our psalm. Our psalm today is psalm 145, a psalm attributed to King David, the epitome of earthly sovereign authority and power.

David is the King who the prophet Samuel warned would take the people’s wealth in taxes and send sons off to war. Yet David in this psalm acknowledges that his ruling over his piece of territory is nothing compared to the sovereignty of God.

This psalm recognizes that David’s power is not absolute, for the only power that is absolute in this world is the Lord’s.  This psalm is a psalm of gratitude for the dominion of the Lord. It is a psalm of gratitude that God is a better King than David could ever be.

Gratitude that recognizes the dominion of God brings people together and makes us equal before God.  Gratitude places our hearts in a place to acknowledge the power and righteousness of a god who lifts those who are failing and bowing.

It is our shared gratitude, which allows us to acknowledge the universal lordship of God and equality of humanity in Christ, as we see throughout both the Old and New Testaments, that God is the God of all the Nations. 

In Colossians, we find the declaration that “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! This included people at the center of the Roman world- Greeks, and those beyond its far edges, the barbarians and Scythians, who inhabited the far away and wild lands.

Gratitude makes kin of the people of God. It erases the borders of nation and race and class.  It brings people together. This is one of the most important aspects of gratitude for Paul.  When Paul names the good behaviors that Christians are supposed to exhibit, they are all things that bring people together. 

We are called to clothe ourselves in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Note that these qualities all deal with drawing people more closely into relationships, drawing together the ties of community.

What greed tears apart, gratitude binds together. And if this sounds a little bit like feel good hippy nonsense, think about what might be the most peaceful moment of thanksgiving dinner.

It’s that moment before the political discussions start, before we take the first bite of turkey and stuffing and sweet potato casserole. That moment before that one Uncle has had a little too much to drink. When we either hold hands or silently bow our heads.

When someone begins to pray, naming the things that the gathered are grateful for. When we remember that the bounty in front of us, whether it be in friends, family, food, is a gift from God, and not ours alone.

And especially in that silent moment just after the prayer. When we Christ’s final commandment for us to love each other has he loved us seems just a little more achievable.

That, friends, is the power of gratitude.

Amen.

This sermon was preached on November 4th, 2018, at the Wolcott Congregational Church. The Scriptures are Genesis 50:15-21 and Matthew 18:21-35

Today, we’re going to talk about debts we can never repay… And no, I’m not talking about my current student loan bill.

Debts are a funny thing.

We all know that biblical proverb, “neither a borrower nor lender be.” 

Oh wait, I’m getting word; that’s not actually from the Bible.  It’s from Act 3 Scene 1 of Hamlet.

Well, that’s the rest of my sermon down the drain.

Just kidding.

But seriously, the Bible has a lot to say about debt.

Debts feature prominently in the most famous Christian prayer- The Lord’s Prayer- Although we use the word sin at this church when praying it every week, the word in the original Greek- opheiló- O-fy-lo- is really much closer to debt.  We’re asking God to forgive our debts, just as much as we are called to forgive those debts that people owe us.

This is a big deal.

It seems weird to us now- after all, many of us have credit card debt, auto debt, a mortgage, not to mention student loans.

We live in a world of debts.

It’s not all bad- it’s allowed for a great deal of material prosperity, at the cost of even more tangled and complex webs of relationships between creditors and debtors. Here’s a statistic that astounds me.

The value of all the goods and services produced on earth is about $80 trillion dollars.  It’s an absolutely phenomenal and mind boggling figure.  I literally have trouble comprehending it. 

Global debt- the amount of money that humans, governments, and corporations owe each other, is $240 trillion dollars- three times that number.

So this notion of a duty to forgive debts that are owed to us is an extremely counter cultural one. It requires us to remember the depth of the goodness of God in forgiving our own debts to him.

It echoes Jesus’s commandment in the Gospel of John, to love each other just as God loves us. So as we have been forgiven of debts we can never repay, so too should we forgive those debts that can never be repaid.

This is an extension of the Golden Rule, something that is passed down to us from Jewish wisdom in an unbroken line.

Indeed, in commenting so vociferously on the need for canceling debts, both in this story and in other places, Jesus is expanding on a strain of thought that runs through the Bible, and is a cornerstone of the Bible’s economic philosophy.

Yes, the Bible has an economic philosophy.

Many of the laws that were handed down to the Hebrew people at Mount Sinai were actually about debt, yes, even private debts between two parties. In Deuteronomy, we can read about the practice of canceling debts every seven years.

And no, this isn’t because of an ancient Communist plot. But because God cares about the equality and fully realized humanity of his people.

And being in debt in the ancient world, was, even more so then today, a dehumanizing thing. Back then, if you got into debt, and you couldn’t pay, you, or your child, or your spouse, might be forced to work as a servant for your creditor to pay it off.

This, as you can guess, wrecked families, communities, and social network.

Farming then, even more so then now, was labor intensive work.

That’s why, in the ten commandments, it places coveting “your neighbors wife” alongside “your neighbors donkey”.  Coveting thy neighbor’s wife is not about adultery, as that’s covered in an earlier commandment. It’s about labor, and specifically, getting your neighbor into debt so that his wife would have to work for you.

So losing a wife or child was not only emotionally and spiritually devastating, but also meant the possibility of falling into an economic spiral which could be hard or even impossible to break out of.

They became debtors, bound to debts they could never repay. Landowners become reduced to hired hands, and wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of a few, who eventually start to see themselves as more human than those that work for them.

Family structures begin to break down as people don’t have the wealth or resources to marry and feed children. This is not the vision of what God wants for us.

We see this in our reading today, the parable that Jesus tells us.  We should note that in the story Jesus tells, the first servant is most likely a official of the kingdom, some sort of treasurer.

And through whatever means, he has managed to misplace or misuse a level of funds that’s the equivalent of millions, probably billions of dollars. So when the King forgives him of his debts, which he would never have been able to repay, this is not a private matter. This is a kingdom shaking event.

This official-servant though, as he’s of higher social status than the other servant that comes up to him, who asks for a release on his debt, thinks that its in his power to refuse to forgiveness.

After all, this money was probably the official’s own money, and a sizable sum in its own right. But the official made a tragic error. He forgot that the treasure he had was not entirely his own. 

He forgot that the benefice of his King was the source of his wealth, his comfort, and his status.  The debt, it turns out, was not really his to forgive. This is the same attitude that Joseph has toward his brothers.

Our scene in Genesis happens at the end of the saga of Joseph, who was now in a position of power and prestige in the wealthiest kingdom in the world, after having been a slave and prisoner due to the actions of his brothers.

Remember that Joseph’s brothers were absolutely awful, abusive, and even murderous toward him. Joseph notes that the forgiveness they need to seek is not from him, but from God.

I think it’s quite important that this forgiveness only happens only when they no longer can fall back into old patterns. At that point, in the story, the brothers do not have power over Joseph.

Forgiveness does not excuse their behavior, nor, more importantly, is this license for them to abuse him again. Once again, forgiveness does not mean a return to abusive conditions.

I believe that this was one of the reasons that Joseph cried.  They could no longer hurt him. He could let go of the anger, the pain, the sadness that they had caused him so many years ago.

The good that the brothers did was to acknowledge that the debt that they owed him was not one that could be bought off, but him is one that they could never repay.

They offer to become his slaves. Their only hope was the goodness and mercy of the God they shared. And maybe it’s our only hope too.

After all, how many of us have complicated family relationships? Ones that are maybe closer to Joseph and his brothers than we like to think? In our divided and angry world, how many debts are we holding on to like burning coals?

Not debts that set us up in the position to be hurt again, but debts where the hurt is a burning coal that we alone cling tightly to, that we refuse to throw away.

How many of these debts can we lay at the feet of our living God and say, this debt is between them and you, oh Lord?

We are allowed, as people of God, to feel anger and feel pain, to protect ourselves and our families. We are allowed to collect debts owed to us when terms are reasonable and for mutual benefit.

But we are also allowed to let them go.  To forgive them.  To forgive ourselves. To allow for God’s forgiveness to dwell in us. And that, people of God, is a gift that we can never repay.

Amen.

This sermon was preached on October 28, 2018, at the Wolcott Congregational Church. The Scriptures were Galatians 3:21-29, Luke 7:36-7:50

Last week, I went to my seminary reunion for the first time at Andover Newton at Yale Divinity School. Andover Newton, my alma mater, merged with Yale last year, and many of us were upset about it.  In the merger there would be a loss of autonomy, and identity.

So, I registered for it somewhat grudgingly, thinking I wouldn’t have a good time there, I would see a couple of folks I hadn’t seen in a while, but I had kind of written the day off from the start.

It doesn’t help that I am a millennial, part of the most institutionally distrustful generation in recent history. Therefore, I was a perfect storm of resentment. By all indicators, I should not have enjoyed the day.

But I did.

Part of the reason why I enjoyed it, beyond the fabulous bookstore on campus, was that the Dean of Andover Newton at Yale, and UCC Minister Rev. Dr. Sarah Drummond, gave a talk that explained a lot of why the world seems so scary and weird now, and, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

Thankfully for us, and especially me, this ties into our Bible readings quite nicely. The main thrust of Dr. Drummond’s lecture was that we are moving beyond the extreme individualism of the past thirty or forty years, towards more collective- her word was “tribal” thinking. 

Gone are the days of “everything goes”.

Anyone who goes on social media or watches the news can see this now.  Depending on your social circles, your opinion on certain issues might get you dogpiled from the left or the right. There are correct ways to speak, to think, to believe now, and they’re enforced with a greater rigidity by social circles then even 5 years ago, much less 15 years ago.

Dr. Drummond called this phenomenon the “new Tribalism.” Basically, as a society, we got tired of total independence and individualism, and started becoming more group oriented. These groups are called tribes partly in reference to how Native Americans have organized themselves socially.

And these tribes, once we attach ourselves to them, then begin to shape our behavior too. Research is finding that, for example, Republicans and Trump supporters, even if they were secular, unreligious, or even atheists, are now increasingly likely to go to church.

Likewise, even religious Democrats are now becoming less likely to attend church regularly. And this isn’t to put down Republicans or Democrats, but to point out that how and who we identify with shapes our behavior, just as much as our behavior shapes our identities.

The apostle Paul was intimately familiar with idea. 

Paul knew that inside churches like his, and indeed, in churches like ours, that there were often multiple competing identities going on in each person which shaped their behaviors.

Just as our church is made up of men and women, blue collar and white-collar workers, and conservatives and liberals, so too were the churches in Paul’s time. Paul dealt extensively in his letters with issues of ethnicity, gender, and economic class, not only in this letter, to a church in Galatia, but also in the letters to churches in Romans and Corinth.

So issues surrounding identity are not new to the church. We know that the biggest controversy in this time period for the church was if gentile- Non-Jewish- Christians had to follow Jewish dietary laws and rules about circumcision. 

This was the big difference between the churches based near Jerusalem, and the churches that Paul founded in what is today Greece and Turkey.

The church in Jerusalem said that to follow Christ, one had to identify and behave as a Jewish person, following the restrictions on diet and clothing which are still held by religiously observant Jews today, in order to enter into life with Jesus Christ. Paul disagrees.  Paul says that Jesus Christ is big enough, that God is big enough, to hold both Jews and Gentiles who followed Jesus in his embrace.

Paul believes that the most important legacy of the Jewish people isn’t their ancestry, and It is not how to avoid pork or shellfish, but how to trust and abide completely and absolutely in God. That behavior, that absolute trust, which we call faith, is the cornerstone that shapes the identity of a Christian.

This is the identity shaping behavior that we see in the woman in our gospel story today.

Jesus is eating at the home of a religious scholar and lawyers when a “notorious” woman- almost certainly a prostitute of some sort, comes and anoints him with an alabaster ointment. This is an incredibly intimate scene, as she cries, her tears drop onto his feet, and she wipes them away with her hair.

This was incredibly courageous of her, both as a sign of emotional vulnerability, but also for her physical safety. The man who’s house they were at snidely remarks about her and her behavior and identity- as a sinful woman, she should have had no place near Jesus Christ.

In his eyes, she’s so bad that her presence alone invalidates his behavior and identity- his claim to being a prophet. Jesus, being Jesus, turns this around on him. Jesus asks him about debt and gratitude; who is more grateful? Someone who has $500,000 worth of debt forgiven? Or someone who has $5,000 worth of debt forgiven?

Jesus then points out her devotion, in contrast to his own behavior. Her total and utter dependence on God, her faith and faithfulness, are the cornerstone on which her new identity as a follower of Jesus is to be built on. It is faith and faithfulness, that complete trust that a child has for a parent, which is the cornerstone on which the faith rests.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Were the devotional acts of applying the ointment onto Jesus and crying tears on his feet what made God forgive her? Was it the behavior of weeping at Jesus’s feet what convinced him to forgive her of her sins? Are signs of piety needed for the forgiveness of sins? Should we expect the weeping and oil to appear at our next church service?

I don’t think so.

If we read closely the metaphor that Jesus uses, we hear that gratitude comes after the forgiveness of the debts.  Jesus’ proclamation of the forgiveness of her sins was a teaching tool for those present; her sins had already been forgiven.

So what then, had she done in order to deserve to have her sins forgiven? Was it anointing Jesus with oil? Could be.

Mary, in the story of Mary and Martha at Bethany, was commended by Jesus for doing so. But I think that the real moment of forgiveness didn’t happen with a physical behavior, but a change in her heart.

She became vulnerable with God, so utterly so that she allowed God to dwell in her and forge a new identity in and through her. This identity was didn’t forget that she was a woman, it didn’t degender her, but it accepted her as one who was close to God.

Remember that this was a society in a culture that very tightly governed women’s social relationships and status, and how close they could be to God. It was easy for men to be close to God- they made up the priesthood.  They could enter the holy of holies in the temple. But women? Not so much.

But Jesus says something different.  Jesus proclaims that her faith made her just as equal in the eyes of God as any man who followed Christ, something that we as a religion are still struggling with the implications of today.

Yes, we are still struggling with the same questions of behaviors and identity that our theological ancestors were struggling with 500 years ago, and 2000 years ago. 

The church’s identity is one of the big questions that will come up during the search process. What does it mean to be a member of this church? What does it mean to be, as it says on your website, a little slice of heaven on the Town Green?  What does it mean to be Christian?

These are big questions; ones that I can help facilitate your answering, but cannot answer for you, especially with about 2 minutes left to go in this sermon. What I will leave you with is a piece of advice for how we might live out the calling of Christ, in this era of “tribal identity”

For many of us, our Christian faith is another aspect of our “tribal” identities. This makes sense. We all want to know a Jesus Christ who is like us. Maybe this is a Jesus who, if on earth today, would drive a pick-up truck and listen to country music, or a Jesus who would drive a Prius and listen to NPR.

And I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that by itself. As long as we also remember that Jesus is not just the savior of the Republican or the Democratic party.

As long as we remember that the precondition for God’s love in Christ is not a particular form of worship or denominational membership, it is not having the right political or social views, it is not about who you vote for.

The precondition for God’s love in Christ to become known to us is not the size of your paycheck or your whose posts you like or don’t on Instagram or facebook.

It’s the simple and total dependence on God which we call faith. It’s the giving up on the idea that we can do this alone, that realization that I am a person, and that all of us are a people equally in need of a saving.

For there is no longer Democrat or Republican, White or African American, Union Laborer or CEO, and still, as the events of this weekend have needed to remind us, Jew or Greek, for all are one in Christ Jesus.

Thank God for that.