Tag: sermon

Scripture:  1 Samuel 17:38-40, 48-49; Acts 9: 1-9

Some of you know that I recently got a new dog. His name is Archie, and is a beagle, with possibly a little bit of basset hound. 

We’re not sure because he’s a rescue, and in the 2 weeks we’ve had him, he’s captured our hearts. He’s five years old and just about the sweetest dog.  If you want to meet him, he’ll be with me on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays in the office.

I grew up with dogs in the household, but I was never the primary caretaker for them.  Now that I am, it’s gotten me thinking a bit about our fine four-legged friends. And specifically, what makes humans different from animals.

This reminded me of a classroom conversation that I had in seminary: What is the most basic thing that humans do that animals do not do? Because throughout at least some of the animal kingdom, we share many traits and activities, humans and animals eat, drink, breathe, fight each other, solve problems, and form partnerships.

Pack animals strategize, and can learn complex behaviors. Herding dogs, for example will group together and herd cattle, sheep, and small children.

Right now, by the way, we’re still working on getting Archie to sit and to come over on command.  He’s good for sitting about 80% of the time.  Getting him to come to us is much harder.

So as we were talking about it, having a very intense conversation on some things- can dogs love? (the answer by the way, is for some definitions of love, yes, others no), the professor made a contribution which has stuck with me.

She said the most uniquely human basic function is the ability to pause, listen, and reflect.  To listen, pause, and reflect. It’s not in the listening by itself; our dogs can listen to us, and they can stay, if not pause.

 It’s the combination of the three, along with the possibility of change in behavior and change in the heart, that makes it human. That makes us human. And everyone can do this.

The ability to do so in response to a crisis, and know which voices to listen to, both inside yourself, and in your community, is one of the core aspects of leadership.

It is also what we see the two leaders in our bible reading in our doing: In our first reading, David listens to his own body and stays true to himself by realizing that he could not wear King Saul’s armor into battle with Goliath, and instead must rely on his own strengths to defeat Goliath.

In our second reading, Saul (who we know better as Paul, author of a good chunk of our New Testament), is commanded by God to pause- literally knocking him off of his donkey. God then commands Paul to listen to those in the community he had hurt, and begin his ministry on the basis of what they would tell him to do.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, and turn back to the example of David. David, let’s remember, is at this time a young man- probably somewhere between 15 and 20.  Most likely about 16-17 years old.

 Not a young child by any means, but also not quite old enough to fight in the army- you had to be 20 to fight in the army back in those days. He’s described as being of tall and slender build, unlike King Saul, who wears mighty armor into battle.

Now, David, despite his youth, is no shirking violet: after all, he has killed a wolf and a bear while guarding his sheep. Anyone who has been hunting, or heck, even seen a bear in a zoo (or in your backyard), knows that these are not small accomplishments.

However, even though may have been unexpected in some ways, it’s not as though he were untrained or utterly incompetent. He didn’t fit the conventional image of the hyper masculine might and muscled warrior who could squat 600 pounds and bench press 280 while wearing heavy armor.

But he did have that sling.

If you need a refresher on the power of a sling, a sling is not a slingshot- a sling was a potent weapon of war in use for thousands of years, up until the 1200s in Europe, and in the Americas until the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1500s.

Armies had groups of them- a competent slinger could hurl a sizable stone almost 1500 feet, at a speed of about 100 miles per hour. And David seemed to be a competent warrior with one.

But when David volunteers to fight Goliath, and goes to talk to King Saul, Saul tries to dress David up in his armor. David, with his build, is incapable of even walking in it.

But David is not reckless.  David takes the opportunity to Pause, to Listen, and to Reflect. David does not charge into battle.  He stops, and listens to his body, to his own strengths and weaknesses. 

The other men in the army might be inspired to see another mighty warrior king wearing that impressive armor while he goes up against the giant Goliath.

But that’s not David.

David is not Goliath.  He is not going to out Goliath Goliath, nor is he going to out Saul King Saul. He thinks about how tiring it is to even walk with this armor on; will he be able to use his own gifts- his sling and staff? And he realizes that no, he will not.

David cannot be Saul, and David cannot be Goliath.  What God calls David to be is not Goliath, or Saul, but David. So it is David, tall and slender, a young man at the cusp of adulthood, who walks out into that valley to meet Goliath.

It is David who wears no armor but his trust in his God and his knowledge of his own skills and strengths. It is David who wields not the weapons of a brawny well trained soldier that he would not have the strength or skill to use, but instead  his own weapons, those of a shepherd- the staff and the sling. That is what would defeat Goliath: David being David.

In our second reading from the book of Acts, Saul seems to have almost the exact opposite problem. He’s so busy listening to himself and his own desires that it literally takes God knocking him off of his donkey to get the message that he needs to stop and reflect.

The Romans, who were the ultimate power in the region, delegated some authority to local religious structures in order to keep the peace.  Saul, at this time, worked for the Jewish religious leadership body, the Sanhedrin, as a sort of inquisitor figure, keeping the peace.

Remember last week when I said that in the Roman Empire, most religions were left alone as long as they were able to proclaim the emperor “Lord” and “Son of God.”

You might recognize those titles as ones that we try to reserve exclusively for Jesus. There’s a reason for this: to follow Jesus in the years immediately following his death and resurrection were a politically dangerous thing. For those early followers of Jesus said that only Jesus Christ was deserving of the titles Lord and Son of God, not the Roman Emperor.

So clamping down on this new group of heretics, often violently was the task given to the Sanhedrin- keep your house in order. Saul is but one cog in this wheel, even participating in the stoning of Stephen in Acts chapter 7 for example.

So it’s on the way to Damascus to carry out some sort of action against the nascent group of Jesus followers that he has this namesake Road to Damascus conversion.

What I love about this text is that if we read it carefully, Saul isn’t given any deliberate instructions about who he is to become, the wrongs that he has done, or how to make them right.

Instead, Saul is given the task of stopping the persecution- interrupting the violent behavior he was exhibiting; listening to those who he had persecuted- God tells him to go down to the city and be told what to do- presumably by the people there, and then reflecting- he spends time with that group of Jesus followers before he realizes his calling to go out and preach.

Stop, Listen, Reflect: this same pattern of behavior for these two as they encounter pivotal moments in their lives. The primary difference is that David must listen to himself and stay true to himself and remain authentically him in a time and place and context that want him to look and be like someone who he is not, and Saul must stop and listen to those around him to figure out how to stop causing harm and what the community really needs from him.

So this is the part where normally I talk about how being able to listen to yourselves and your community will be vitally important skills for this church as we move through this interim process. But enough about that already. You know about that. The church is going to be fine.

What about you?

Has there been a time when you should have listened to your heart and soul and body and God instead of caving to what others expect from you? Have you been David trying to wear King Saul’s armor? Is that happening to you right now? If so, be like David and cast it off. You do not need to wear it. God needs you to be the best you, you can be. 

God does not need 10,000 instagram and facebook perfect mothers and grandmothers and teenagers who always have the perfect vacations, get perfect grades and are never unhappy, who never struggle.

If he did, God would have made all of us the same. No, God needs you. God needs each and every one of us to be the best we can be.

God needs us to listen, without agenda or assumption, to those around us, our families and communities and figure out what they so we can match who we are in here with what the world needs out there.

If this seems daunting, its because it is.  But take heart: we are not alone.  We are never alone, for Christ Jesus is with us always.

Amen.

Scripture: Deuteronomy 31:1-8, Acts 1:1-11

When I saw my niece Mckayla at Christmas, she was about 15 months old; she was a very happy toddler right in the middle of toddlerhood. She hadn’t quite got the handle of words yet, but she is quite precocious, and curious, as many children are at that age.

And being that this was Christmas, she got lots and lots of gifts: clothes, and books, toys, and even a little motorized jeep thing. But none of those things were her favorites.

See, because she’s at that age that, although she still explores things by attempting to put them into her mouth, if they don’t fit, she instead tries to figure them out by touch. 

Because of this, the favorite things she played with were toys that either fit one into the other, like the thing with the star and the circle and the square and you have to get the right peg into the right hole, or even better, those stacking cups.

And if you’re wondering at this point why I’m talking about children’s toys right now instead of our Bible verses, it’s because in each of our Bible stories today, they too are looking at a metaphorical board find the shape board.  The only difference is that they have to first figure out the shape of the hole.

For each of these moments describes the people of God in a time leadership transitions. In our reading from Deuteronomy, the people have finished their 40 years of wandering in the desert.  A generation has indeed come to pass; As one of our readings last week noted, Moses is dying in sight of, but not ever reaching, the promised land of Israel.

For his time and what the people of God needed, Moses was a fantastic leader.  He was respected enough in Egyptian society to be taken seriously at the Egyptian court, and confident- which literally means- with enough faith- to argue with the Pharoah and his advisors and warn them of the wrath of God coming.

He provided a steady hand and moral leadership leading the people when it seemed that the whole world was against him. There are many moments in the Exodus story when a leader with less fortitude would have given up.

Moses also knew when to ask for help. He knew that he wasn’t a priest, so he recruited Aaron to work alongside him, sharing in leadership for the Israelites. But Moses also knew that he would not live forever.  He also knew that where the Israelites were going, to the promised land, they didn’t need another Moses. 

They were going to a rough and cruel world, where conflict was mostly solved by war, and atrocities that we consider cruel and possibly even genocidal were committed regularly. They needed someone who would lead them into war and could settle them into the land: the people needed Joshua. Joshua was not like Moses. 

Joshua was cunning, sending in spies to Jericho; Joshua built new traditions for a people who were no longer in the wilderness, but who were starting to settle down. Joshua was not like Moses.

But once again, the Israelites did not need another Moses.  God knew this, and Moses knew this too. That’s why Moses didn’t seek out someone exactly like him to be the next leader of the Israelites.

Instead, he saw, with God’s help, what Israel would need as they transitioned from wandering in the wilderness to settling down into the land.  They didn’t need a lawgiver, and they didn’t need a king- at least not yet. No, they needed Joshua.

So Moses laid his hands on him, blessed him, and became the leader of the Israelites, leading them into a new age. This change of leadership- not only in person, but in style, played out in an even more dramatic fashion in our second Bible reading, with consequences that we’re still living with.

Our second bible reading is from the book of Acts; Jesus has died and spoiler alert, resurrected, and after that, spent 40 days with his disciples. After the 40 days is up, it’s time for Jesus to go up to heaven. We commonly call this event the ascension. At this point, Jesus knows that things are going to change for his disciples.

Jesus isn’t going to be there in the flesh to guide them as he did before, to teach them in parables, to heal the sick and to correct them as they need it. Whereas having faith and trust in Jesus when Jesus was alive meant going to see a rabbi who healed people, faith and trust in this new era would be different.

He knew that to have this good news of God’s love spread, it should not come through the force of arms; but through the human bearing of witness, empowered by the holy spirit, of the power of God’s grace and love to overcome sin.

Jesus knew that for the faith to spread, they would need not just a different type of leader, but a different sort of leadership. Although they had a dry run of this sort of thing in the sending out of the disciples, they always had Jesus to provide them with direct leadership.

Now, on earth, the apostles and other disciples would have to be the leaders of this new community of faith. Well, not just community of faith.

This call to witness to Jesus Christ was not just a call to build new communities, isolated geographically from one another, composed of people who were all either related to each other or of a similar social or ethnic group.

No, this call to witness called for an entirely new way of life that would cross borders that typically were not crossed in those days. For religion back then was mostly an ethnic thing. If you were Egyptian, you followed the Egyptian Gods; Greek, the Greek Gods, and Israelite, the Jewish God.

There were exceptions to this, of course; Ruth, an ancestor of Jesus, was a convert to Judaism.  And everyone in the Roman Empire, no matter your religion, was forced to participate in the Roman Religion by calling the Roman Emperor “Lord” and “Son of God.”

So Jesus saying that this new way, this new thing, would involve folks not just from his own corner of the world was revolutionary.  No longer would the witness of God be limited to Jewish folks, but would be deliberately spread to non-Jews- Gentiles, the Nations.

And, at least at first, this witness to God would happen not through battle, but through testimony, persuasion, and compassion. This was a new way of leading.  Might would, or should, at least, necessarily make right. The real battlefield would be in the human heart.

To do so would not require a victorious general like Joshua.  It might not, especially given communication technology at the time, require a single organizer to inspire every aspect of life, like Moses. Those weren’t what the people of God needed at the time.

What God and the people of God needed was not even one leader necessarily, but a network of churches and leaders that would be able to witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ on their own terms and in their own cultures and contexts.

This is the power of the Holy Spirit, which allows the Gospel to be heard across cultures and throughout the ages, even keeping a common core.

What else but the power of God could make ordinary people like Peter, Thomas, to go out to the ends of the earth; Peter to Rome, Thomas to India, and empower women such as Lydia and Phoebe to be leaders in a Greek society that thought women equal to dogs?

Hold that thought though. We’ll be talking more about what that particular transition looked like, and what it means for us, in a few weeks. Back to the bigger picture: what do these transitions tell us about the nature of leadership in our faith, and in particular, for our church right now in this time of transition?

I believe they tell us that different times and circumstances require different forms and functions for leaders. This church has been blessed with strong pastoral leadership for the past 40 years.

That’s a whole generation.  That’s as long as the Israelites spent wandering in the desert. What the church needs now in pastoral leadership might not be the same as it was 10 years ago, and almost certainly is different from what it was 40 years ago.

Discerning the pastoral leadership needs in this church, through conversation, study, and prayer, is part of the work that the search committee will be doing over the next several months.

I urge you to be honest and forthright in answering their questions.  Although by necessity it is a smaller group that will be doing the writing of the profile and interviewing of the candidates, how they formulate the needs of the congregation will be driven in part by the answers each and every one of you give to their surveys.

My advice for you is to pray faithfully and answer deeply these questions when they are asked of you: who are we right now? What is God calling us to do? What pastoral leadership needs to we have now, not ten or forty years ago?

This discernment is hard work, and will require an extra measure of love and grace on the part of the church. But isn’t everything that’s worth doing?

Amen.

Scripture: Psalm 90: 1-6, Hebrews 11:29-12:2

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Faith is at the root of hope, which tells us that there are other forces at work than those that are immediately visible. Although all the visible evidence suggests one outcome as the only way forward, faith and hope suggest another.

Faith and hope are at the heart of leadership, although they don’t always come from the expected sources. This is especially true in times of transition, like this church is in, like this church might have been that first read or heard this sermon that we call the Book of Hebrews.

As I mentioned before the readings, the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews is a total misnomer.  A more correct name for the book might be “A really good sermon of Apollos to Jewish Christians who were generally faithful but spiritually stagnant”

They were Christians of the second generation; although their church may have been founded by an apostle, that apostle may have already died.  They probably didn’t have many firsthand accounts of Jesus’ life, and those who had seen him were probably dying out quickly.  This is the era of the writing of the gospels.

So in that context of a people in transition, what are we to make of this list of heroes of the faith, a unbroken line of courageous heroes who saw beyond what as apparent.

But if we take a look at this list, a real look at this list, some things start to pop up.

Moses was a murderer, had a stutter, and was often a very reluctant leader, and died without ever reaching the promised land. Gideon demanded three miracles from God before he would be faithful. Barak, despite great military victories, in his time was thought of as weak, because he recognized the authority of Deborah as judge and would not go into battle without her.

It takes Samson betrayal by his lover Delilah, and his subsequent capture and blinding to realize that his strength came not from his hair, but from God alone. Jephthah was a rash man, who, made a rash vow which, depending on your interpretation of the story, either offered his own daughter up to the temple for her life as something like a nun, or as a human sacrifice.

As for David, well, his moral failing can be summed up in three words: Bathsheba and Uriah. These are not perfect people. Heck, sometimes, these aren’t even good people.

If I were picking out folks for my spiritual leaders all pro team, some of those folks would not be first round picks. More than that, most of these folks end off worse after serving God than before they started! Faithfulness in serving God was not, for most of them, a gateway to prosperity and health, but rather a response to God’s overwhelming power and grace.

This faith and faithfulness we find in the famous heroes of the faith, and we’ll be talking about them over the next three weeks, but for the rest of this sermon, I’d like to focus on the unsung heroes of the faith.

This is the faith and faithfulness that resides in the steadfast generations of the faithful. These are the teachers, nurses, helpers, public servants, mothers, aunts and grandpas who do more leading than most folks like to admit.

These are the necks that turn the heads of the household, the hands and feet that show up everyday to lead the youth group and count the money and serve and serve and serve.

Sometimes this faith strikes us in ways and places that we don’t expect.

I’m going to leave us with two stories of unexpected faithfulness, one ancient and one modern, that illustrate this point. The first is about the parting of the Red Sea.  It comes to us from the Jewish oral tradition, in a genre of story called a Midrash.

Basically what the Rabbis did was compiled all of the old stories and interpretations that people told about the Bible throughout the years. Over time, these stories and traditions held a sacredness that parallels the written texts that we share together as Christians and Jews.

This midrash is from the parting of the Red Sea by Moses, and highlights the leadership of the mighty Moses or the faith of the priest Aaron, but the bravery and faithfulness of Naschshon.  Here it is, as told by Stacey Zisook Robinson:

The story of Nachshon is my favorite midrash. Nachshon was a slave with all the other Israelites who found redemption at the hand of God. He was Let Go, with a capital L and a capital G, brought out with a Mighty Hand. He packed and didn’t let the dough rise and ran, breathless and scared and grateful, away from the land of Pharaohs and pyramids and slavery. Nachshon ran into freedom.

And then he got to the sea. He and some 600,000 other un-slaved people, stopped cold by the Red Sea. It was huge and liquid and deep. They couldn’t see the other side. It was so big they couldn’t see any sides. Just wetness from here to forever.

And behind him, when he and the 600,000 others dared to peek, were Pharaoh and his army of men and horses and chariots, carrying spears and swords and assorted sharp, pointy things. Even at a distance, the sharp, pointy things loomed quite large in the eyes of Nachshon and his recently freed landsmen. They were caught between the original rock and a hard place – or, I guess, between water and sharp, pointy things. At that point, I don’t think anyone involved cared much about getting the metaphor exactly right; what they cared about was getting out from that perilous middle – and fast.

Moses went to have a chat with God, and just like that, he got an answer— a Divine Instant Message. All the Children of Israel needed to do was walk forward into the sea, that big, wet, deep forever sea. God would provide a way. “Trust Me,” God seemed to say, “I got you this far, didn’t I? I wouldn’t let you fall now!”

Nachshon and the 600,000 stood at the shivery edge of that sea, staring at that infinite horizon in front and the pointy, roiling chaos of death and slavery behind them. They stood, planted – and let’s face it: not just planted, but rooted in their fear and mistrust and doubt. They may have felt reassured by the image of God as a pillar of smoke or fire – impressive pyrotechnics, to be sure – but the soldiers and the sea were so there, present and much more real.

Then, in the midst of that fear and doubt, something changed. Nachshon – recently freed, trapped between death by water and death by bleeding – did the miraculous. He put one foot in front of the other and walked into the sea. The 600,000 held their collective breath, watching the scene unfold before them as Nachshon did what they could not: He decided to have faith. And though the water covered first his ankles, then his knees, then his chest, then kept rising, until he was almost swallowed whole, Nachshon kept walking, kept believing. And just when it seemed that he was a fool for his faith, that he would surely drown in that infinite sea, another miracle: The waters parted.

The other story, the modern one, comes to me from one of my professors in seminary, who’s a pastor.

This professor/pastor, by the way, taught my church music class, and is a fantastic pianist.  His church, 4^th Presbyterian in the South End of Boston has a fantastic and vibrant music program: they have a 30 person plus choir featuring professional soloists that does everything from gospel to traditional hymns and jazz, and they do a broadway style musical as outreach every year. Fantastic music program.

He told us one day about a man who was dying in his church and was in the hospital.

My professor, the pastor of this church goes in to see this man who is dying, a pretty long time attendee- about 15 years or so, a blue collar working class guy who always sat in the back- not all the way in the back, but about three rows up from the back.

And the man tells the pastor that the thing he misses most is the music of the church. So, the pastor asks if they’d like to sing some hymns together, and they do, and they have a wonderful time.

And then the pastor asks if he wants to bring in one of the solo singers to sing along with them next time he visits- They could some of the wonderful choral pieces that the church is known for.

And the man says no.  The pastor is a bit confused about this and asks why? The man says that those singers up there aren’t what church and the faith are all about to him. Those aren’t what he missed.

Instead, the man asks to bring in not the professional singers, but the two guys who sat behind him week in and week out at church. That was faith to him.  That was church to him.

Not the trained beautiful voices that he could see up there at the front of the church, doing fantastic things in the name of God that were widely recognized.

But these two guys, completely untrained singers with no professional training or credentials who were the faithful ones behind him, there week in and week out. They were the ones who knew his life, and who’s singing reminded him of the angels.

They were church to him. They were the heroes of the faith to him. For faith is not about what you see, but who you trust.

Amen.

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.