Why do we come here? What brings us together every Sunday? Plenty of people spend their Sunday mornings in bed, enjoying a quiet and slow start to the day, with a cup of coffee and the voluminous Sunday Times, embodying the truest sense of sabbath rest in these very busy times.

Yet we gather together here instead, for some reason forgoing a restful morning on the one potentially restful day of the week for many of us, spending an hour singing sometimes strange hymns and listening to someone go on and on about a two-thousand-year-old book.

This is very strange to many people in these days. It used to be when you moved to a new place you sought out a doctor, a barber or hairdresser, and a church, but now church is optional, and coming together is pretty rare.

So for many in our world, the psalm this morning seems especially confounding. It talks about coming together to give thanks to God. Now thanksgiving is an understandable thing, but in our society it belongs on the fourth Thursday in November – the rest of the year, you’d think that everything that we have is completely and totally of our own doing. And the “together” part – giving thanks “in the assembly of the upright, in the congregation,” as the psalmist puts it – this doesn’t make sense at all. In this day and age, thanksgiving is our own private matter, something that belongs to me and me alone, maybe with a family role sometimes, but never discussed in public. As usual, though, the psalmist insists that the way of the masses is not the way of the people of God. For the people of God, thanksgiving is an everyday task, one that is at its best when others can join us along the way, when we do it together.

There’s more that’s unusual about this way of life, though. The psalmist insists that God is at hand in everything, not just in the thanksgiving of the congregation of the people. According to the psalmist, God is present and at work in creation, doing majestic and glorious deeds that shine from age to age. God’s mercy and compassion extend to all people, not just in abstract ways but in bringing real justice and peace and in providing for those who are in need. God’s presence and life extend beyond every imaginable boundary, and God’s power overcomes every human limit to show God’s love for God’s people. The God of this psalm is trustworthy, honest, and true, bringing a new way of life into the world and sealing God’s love forever and ever.

This incredible way of God that the psalmist describes is so different from our human ways, not just on Sunday morning but each and every day. For the psalmist, good things are not our own doing but are solely of God’s doing. The beauty and wonder of creation – even those things created by human hands – is from God alone. Mercy, compassion, justice, peace, and love are not optional things in this way of life, to be done when they are convenient or to our advantage, but rather are the way that God lives – and so should be the way that we live, too.

As usual, in offering praise to God, the psalmist helps us to see a little clearer picture of the way of life that God intends for us and our world. Even though the psalmist speaks for himself in these words, the life of praise and newness he describes is only possible “in the congregation of the upright” – in the times when we come together.

This seems like a fitting thing for us today as we prepare to spend some time together this afternoon talking about the life of our congregation. When we gather, we come together not just because we usually like each other as people but because we have a special purpose for our life together, because here we begin our faithful response to God in praise and thanksgiving and here we seek to embody God’s new way of life in our world. When we gather, we are reminded that our life together is not centered in some building constructed by human hands but in the grace of God who gathers us and transforms us more and more into the people God is calling us to be. When we gather, we find that the life we share together here is important not so much because of the history that comes before us but because here we are strengthened for the living of our faith in these days and beyond.

The institution of this place is less important than what we accomplish together. As one of my friends put it so well recently,

What matters most to me about church is that there is an opportunity for people to gather – in some way, shape, and form – around the Jesus that can known through the Gospels and in the company of the Spirit that can be known by who-knows-how.

So as we go into this time of business this afternoon, as we consider some of the earthly things that we must think about as we share this life in this place, as we discuss the sale of the manse that has served as the home of your pastor for the last fifteen years, I hope and pray that these earthly, administrative things will not overwhelm what is really important: that we come together to live the life of praise and thanksgiving that the psalmist describes, that we come together to share hope and love for all people, that we come together to witness to justice and peace in our common life and our individual lives, that we come together to share our joys and our sorrows along the journey, and that we come together to trust God, who gives us everything we need to make it through the day so that together we might share in the resurrection life of Jesus Christ our Lord.

So may we praise the Lord together and give thanks to God with our whole hearts each and every day as we journey together into the new life and light that has already come into our midst through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Timing is everything. If Jesus had walked by the sea on some other day – or even just an hour or a few minutes earlier! – he may not have encountered Simon and Andrew there. Sure, he may have met some other fishermen at work there, but I doubt they would have been as receptive to what Jesus had to say to them.

Timing was the biggest part of Jesus’ message, after all – he was making his way around Galilee, following in the footsteps of John the Baptist, proclaiming, “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!” (CEB)

Jesus and John the Baptist were not alone in suggesting that this was a unique time – we know from the history of that era in other sources beyond the Bible that there were plenty of people talking like this. It was a time of uncertainty and change and transition, with plenty of hope among those who wanted things to be different and much at stake for those who already had the power and were now threatened by the chance of something new. John the Baptist had already been put in jail along with countless other troublemakers, and surely anyone who followed after him risked a similar fate at the hands of the powerful leaders. Yet here in this time Jesus appears, wandering the Galilean countryside, suggesting that a change in the heart would bring real change to all of life, saying that this was the time for things to be different.

So it must have been the right time for Simon, Andrew, James, and John. Jesus stopped as he made his way along the coast of the Sea of Galilee. As Simon and Andrew were tossing their nets into the lake, Jesus invited them to join him and start fishing for people. Then a little further along, Jesus called out to James and John as they were mending the nets on their father’s boat. For some reason, all four of these men dropped what they were doing to join Jesus on his way.

The gospel of Mark says absolutely nothing about why they welcomed Jesus’ call. Maybe they had just been so unsuccessful at fishing that they wanted to try something new, to “fish for people,” as Jesus suggested. Maybe they were former followers of John the Baptist or some other teacher who had worked in their region before. Maybe they were religious people who had been looking for a new teacher with a new message. Maybe there was something special and compelling about this strange man who spoke to them with such authority and presence. Maybe they were just crazy enough to try something new. Or maybe it was just the perfect time for some combination of these or other things. Whatever the reason or reasons, these four fishermen responded to Jesus’ call. They dropped their nets, leaving their boats and families and coworkers behind, strangely ready for something new not just in their lives but in and for all the world. The time must have been right.

For some two thousand years, people have been thinking that the time is right – that it is time for God to do something new, time for everything to change, time to leave everything behind and follow Jesus. For two thousand years, people have been expecting something new to come – but it really hasn’t. Sure, people have been following Jesus all this time, and there have been some changes to things along the way, but the real, dramatic, powerful changes? They sure still seem to be a long way off. Yet Jesus kept saying, “Now is the time!” The apostle Paul said, “The present form of this world is passing away.” From their witness and countless others, we know there is something new yet still ahead – but we don’t know when it is coming. The time is not yet right.

But maybe this is the year… Some people have said that 2012 is the year when it all will come to an end. This is a pretty normal thing, you know – a self-taught biblical scholar named Harold Camping predicted the end of the world twice last year, and other Christians make a regular habit of trying to align current world events with supposed signs in the Bible to determine when the world will end. But this year there’s also the strange threat from another tradition, as the Mayan calendar of the native peoples of Mexico ends later this year. So what if 2012 is the end of the world? Would it make any difference for us? Would we be more likely to drop our nets as Simon and Andrew and James and John did? Would we live like Paul suggests to the Corinthians, with “those who have wives [being] as though they had none” and “those who deal with the world [being] as though they had no dealings with it”?

I think the reality of the call of God is that we are called to a new way of life each and every day, no matter how close or how far we are from the end of things. We are called to work with God to bring the world one day closer to the way that God intends. We are called to prepare ourselves for the time when all things will be made new. And we are called to welcome and enable and bring about change in the world that we have, here and now, in this time and place. So the time is right to live in this way, to follow in the footsteps of Simon, Andrew, James, and John, to walk with Jesus along the way to new life, to trust that there is something more in store for us and our world at a time that we do not yet know.

In this time and this place, I believe that God is calling us in this congregation to a new way of thinking and a new way of living. God is calling us to proclaim within and especially beyond these walls those words of Jesus: “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!” God is calling us to live the immediate and transformative reality of God’s new life in our world. God is calling us to drop our nets and leave our boats behind so that we can respond to God’s call with openness, honesty, and hope.

So God is calling us in this time to join in these new things – to be about something more than we are now, to leave our heavy nets and leaky boats behind – so that we can have the freedom to see something new, to imagine that our future can be something more than our past, to dream that God might call us to do something more than just gather here on Sunday mornings. This is the time to do this important work, the time to change our hearts and lives, the time to trust God and follow where Jesus leads us, the time to set aside our nets and our boats, our assumptions and our expectations, and go in a new direction, for God has called us and wants and needs us to go wherever God may lead.

It wasn’t easy for the disciples to drop their nets or leave their boats, and it won’t be easy for us to follow in that same way, either. Still, the God of boldness calls us to be a part of something more than what we have been before so that all things might be made new.

May God give us the strength and the courage to know that the time is right and to walk in God’s incredible new life, now and always, until we know God’s glory in all its fullness through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Samuel must have been dreaming. Someone kept calling out to him in the night, saying, “Samuel, Samuel.” He kept waking up, wondering if Eli, the chief priest, needed something from him. When he went in to Eli, though, the old man hadn’t called for him, nor had he heard anything. Samuel must have been dreaming.

Except it kept happening. Just as he was getting back to sleep, Samuel heard the voice again: “Samuel, Samuel.” Again he went in to Eli, and again Eli sent him back to bed. Then it happened again. Just as Samuel started to sleep, he heard that same voice calling out a third time: “Samuel, Samuel.” This time, when Samuel came in to him, Eli realized that something might be going on. Even though he himself was not the greatest leader or most faithful priest, even though his sons had abused their power and position in the temple, even though Eli was old and didn’t see or hear or dream very well anymore, he did realize that God might be up to something with Samuel. So Eli sent Samuel back to bed with a new instruction: “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’”

Now it was no dream. When Samuel heard the voice calling out to him again, he responded as Eli had instructed him. The Lord spoke to Samuel that night and for many years to come. First Samuel heard that God was up to something “that will make both ears of anyone who hears it tingle.” Surely that got Samuel’s attention! Samuel’s ears tingled all night long, for God was planning to punish Eli’s house forever, because his sons had blasphemed God and Eli had done nothing about it.

It was a difficult word – worse than a nightmare for Samuel – and the night was long. Samuel did not sleep. In the morning, he didn’t want to tell Eli what God had told him, but when Eli asked him directly, he had no choice but to tell him the whole story. Eli, to his credit, did not harm the messenger, even with such difficult news, though his ears surely tingled a bit, for they both knew that Samuel’s encounter with God that night was no dream.They knew that God’s words would come true.

A night that started out as a dream was the beginning of Samuel’s long and difficult career as a prophet for the people of Israel, where everything he said and did would get the people’s attention even if they wouldn’t really listen, where ears would tingle all the time out of fear and hope for what God would do.

It’s easy to imagine that God’s call to us is just a dream. We even use that language sometimes. We talk about “dreaming” and “visioning” when we try to think ahead about what God is calling us to do. But these words make God’s call seem distant and difficult to make real. We aren’t willing to answer God’s call, thinking, like Samuel, that it must be someone else calling us, and our Elis just keep telling us to go back to bed instead of urging us to listen to what God has to say. We’d rather not imagine that God actually makes our ears tingle these days. Even if we actually hear the call, we often just get overwhelmed, uncertain of what to do with this news because we don’t know how others will respond to us, and we figure that things are just fine as they are.

But God’s call is more than a dream. Samuel could have left it all there in the bed that night, assuming that this strange voice in the night was just a bad dream, but Eli, the one whom God condemned, encouraged him to take it seriously, to trust that this tingle in his ears was really God, to listen to the good and the bad that God would offer him, and even to dream that God would be up to something more than Samuel could ever imagine among his people.

Like Samuel, we have a choice when our ears tingle. We can respond to that tingling out of fear, afraid of what might happen, preferring to dwell in uncertainty, assuming that things will not go well, that the glass is half-empty, that the news will be bad. Or we can let our ears tingle with hope, trusting that God is opening a new way for us even when there seems to be nothing ahead, looking for something beyond our expectations and imaginations when we face a new and different day, showing the world that there is a better and more perfect day still to come.

We need a little of both of these tinglings, pastor Donna Schaper says. “Let one ear tingle with fear,” she suggests, for the reality is that things are not yet perfect. (Feasting on the Word Year B, Volume 1, p. 246) There is still much pain and danger and hurt in our world, and God will deal with it just as God dealt with Eli and his sons. And yet we can’t let all our tingling be in our ear of fear. We need to imagine that God can and will do something more, that our dreams might come true, that God might just choose us and work in and through us, that God might just be ready to bring us what we dream about, that our dreaming might be something more than idle nothingness and might actually become real and true for us, here and now.

I know no one who can balance the tingle of fear and the tingle of hope better than Martin Luther King, Jr. He brought our nation and our world a firm dose of reality as he stood up with so many others to protest racism, war, and injustice. And yet he also called us to dream about something new and different, to imagine that our nation and our world might be something better than what it was.

His dream has not yet been realized. The world is difficult, and things are not yet perfect. There is still more work to be done. But his dream matters for us today. Listen to him proclaim that dream once again:

May we join in that dream of freedom and hope for all people as our ears tingle with God’s call in this and every time and place until we are free at last forevermore.

Amen and amen.

The magi had seen it all before. They had been on these kinds of journeys to other nations when they had seen other stars that indicated the birth of new rulers, so they knew something of what to expect. When they got to Jerusalem, though, things started to look a little different. Even though they had seen the star of the birth of the king of the Jews, the current king could tell them nothing. He had not had a new son recently, and the people around him became very worried when these wise men suggested that there might be some unknown heir to his throne.

But eventually, some of the court advisors sent them on their way to Bethlehem, where some ancient texts suggested a king might be born. There was no palace to be their guiding landmark in this small town, but the star that had begun their journey continued to guide them to the home of a newborn boy in Bethlehem. When they arrived, their familiar routine kicked right in. They kneeled down before the child to pay him homage and offered him their royal gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. It was all very ordinary, but something about it was truly extraordinary – somehow these magi from another land knew that this little child whose birth had been missed by almost everyone would be far more important than anyone could ever imagine.

John the Baptist had seen it all before, too. People had been lining up to listen to his call to repentance for quite some time. Throughout his ministry in the wilderness, people were wondering and asking if he was the one that people had been waiting for, and repeatedly he responded that someone else was coming with greater power to do even greater things. John’s days were surely quite repetitive, with crowds gathering by the Jordan River, ready to listen to his message and be baptized in repentance for their sins.

But one day amidst the crowds, Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee made his way into the water to be baptized. John baptized him like everyone else, but then something strange happened. The heavens were torn apart, and the Spirit descended like a dove onto Jesus. Then, a voice followed: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” In the midst of an ordinary day, something extraordinary happened – a faithful, penitent man who had traveled many miles to hear and respond to John’s proclamation received a word far beyond his wildest dreams as he moved into the next phase of his life.

We’ve seen it all before, too. We know about the strange men who came from far away to visit Jesus when he was young, and we know that Jesus began his public ministry in an encounter with John the Baptist. We’re probably more used to the other story of Jesus’ birth in a manger and the visit of the shepherds, and we’re probably more comfortable with other manifestations of divine power that came later in his ministry. So all too often, we set these stories aside, assuming that there is little for us to learn here or that we already have everything we will need from them.

We’re people who have seen it all before. Someone in our culture gets a great idea – then everyone else copies it and exploits it so that we’re all sick and tired of it. Think about American Idol or Survivor or most any successful television show of the past few years! “We’ve seen it all before,” we mutter. The life of faith seems to be on endless repeat, with little need to engage things in a new and different way and no time and space to connect to the community that shapes and remakes us. “I already know everything I need to know – there’s nothing new still out there,” we say. “I can do the rest on my own.” The world seems to be on endless repeat, with nothing new coming into being and nothing true worth exploring. How many times do we drive past the same places day after day, never noticing the new things around us? How often do we see only the people we have always seen before when we look around our neighborhood? How long will it take for us to notice that things are different, that the world is not what it once was?

The Epiphany and the Baptism of Jesus that we celebrate today remind us that we must be open to seeing things anew. We cannot simply expect to make it today with only what we have seen and experienced before. We need the wisdom of this time and this moment to flourish, the vision of a new time and place to help us see the fullness of things here and now. Amazingly, these stories tell us that we don’t really have to look that hard to find what is new. The new things here lie not in the revolutionary moments but in the ordinary ones. The extraordinary is seen here in the ordinary.

In our life together in this congregation, there is much new that lies ahead for us in the coming year. We are finally putting the uncertainty of litigation behind us, and in the coming months we will complete the sale of the manse, the purchase of an apartment, and the construction of an office here at the church. But even this is not everything that lies ahead for us. These short-term changes are only a glimpse of the bigger things that can shift in our life together in the coming years. As our world and our city and our neighborhood changes, we must keep our eyes open to discover and participate in the bigger vision that God is opening before us in these days. We can start to glimpse a new and different way of life together that embraces the best of who we are and remains sustainable for the resources we have in these days. And we can hone our eyes and ears and all our senses to watch for the ordinary to suddenly become extraordinary – not by anything that we do but by the wonder and power of God at work in our midst.

This way of life is not easy. We don’t naturally see the extraordinary in the ordinary of our world, but today even as we worship we have a chance to practice this way of seeing and being. Today we remember how the common, ordinary waters of baptism touch our heads and become the sign and seal of God’s presence in our midst. And today we gather at this table where a small portion of bread and grape juice mysteriously become the full presence of God in our lives and our world. As we share these incredible moments of God’s presence in our midst, we can practice seeing things differently even as we trust that God can do incredible things and be truly present in the midst of the most routine, mundane things of our lives.

So even when we’ve seen it all before, may the ordinary become extraordinary for us, in our daily lives but especially in this place, for in those moments we might just see God in our midst and have a chance to follow where God is leading us and all the world as all things are made new. Amen.

I won’t ever forget that day in the temple. It was a strange time back in those days of Caesar Augustus, back when we all got called to our hometowns for the great census and taxation. I didn’t ever move very far from home, so that day I was making my normal trip up to the temple to offer my prayers and sacrifices, joining with the crowds to fulfill our obligations under the law. We all had our different requests and concerns – some people like me just were making our regular trips as we always did, but there were others who wanted a blessing or sought healing from a priest and still others who came because something important was going on in their lives.

I won’t ever forget this one young couple I saw that day, though. They came to the temple with their very, very young baby boy. It was clear that they were not from around here – they seemed to be poor folk visiting Jerusalem from the countryside, probably among those forced to travel because of the census and tax collection. I could tell that they took advantage of their many days of travel and stopped at the temple while they were here in Jerusalem to dedicate their child to God. They way they talked and acted, he must have been their first, so it was especially important that they set him apart for his life ahead.

Now they weren’t the only young couple in the crowd that day – I saw plenty of families seeking to dedicate their children to God. But this family I remember, not because of their simple country clothing, their very young age, or any special features of their son. I remember them because of what happened afterward on that day.

Now after seeing this young family in the courtyard, I went on about my own business and made my offering and prayers. As I was getting ready to head home, though, there was a bit of a commotion in the courtyard, and these folks were at the center of it. An older man had come to talk with them, and they had handed the baby to him. He lifted the tiny child up in his hands and raised his head to the sky. The man’s eyes lit up, as if he had seen something he had been waiting for for his whole life. I walked over toward them, hoping to get a closer look. Then I heard the man break forth into song:

Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.

It was an incredible sight. This man and this family had never met before, but there was something special going on. There was something special about that baby that I didn’t know or understand, but I have never forgotten that day.

As incredible as that was, there was still more that happened that day in the temple. After this old man – I think people in the temple knew him as Simeon – after he passed the little boy back to his mother, I saw Anna come up to them too. Like everyone who came to the temple regularly, I knew Anna. She was there every time I was there, and she always greeted me by name. She had told me before about how she had made her home there in the temple after her husband had died, about how important she knew it was to spend time in prayer, about how she was looking for something new – maybe even someone new – to come and make a difference among the people. Anna must have seen what that old man was doing that day and wanted a glimpse of her own.

I watched as she too made her way over to the mother and father and little boy. When she got there, her eyes lit up as I had never seen them before. She too got excited and started telling this little boy’s parents that he was going to be someone important for his people, that he would be a part of the redemption of Jerusalem. She too started singing songs of praise like I had never heard her sing before.

I’ve always wondered what might have been going on that day. Why were Simeon and Anna so struck by this little boy? Did those old folks at the temple know something that the rest of us didn’t? Did they think that God was up to something special in that family? What was going on that made them so excited to see this little babe?

Even though I don’t really understand why they did what they did, I still wonder what it would be like if all this were true. What would it mean if the things they said were true? How would our world change if salvation really had become real that day? What would be different for us? How would I be different?

There was something special about that day. For once, I felt like something was starting to change, that the help we so desperately need was coming into the world, that we were taking a step in the right direction for once. So often, people are just going through the motions and doing what they seem to have always done even though we all want it to be different somehow. None of us seem to have the time or space or way to make a difference in the world. But that day, something was right.

I wish I knew what I could do to have more days like that one. I wish I could be like those faithful people at the temple and could see special things going on in the world.I wish that I could believe that a little baby could make a difference. I wish I could do even some easy things to make things different. I haven’t seen it yet, and a lot of people I know have given up on it all, but I for one am still looking.

That day, something special happened – and maybe something special will happen again sometime. I’d sure like to see it for myself – to see a way out of our current mess, to see the world change for the better, to see our salvation come and be real, here and now, for everyone. I’m not expecting it today or tomorrow, but I know it will come.

Whether it be on a day as memorable as that one or as ordinary as this one, I know that I will see it with my own eyes. So I’m ready for it – I’m looking for it. Are you?

What is the true meaning of Christmas?

People have offered countless answers to this question over the years. Ask a child, and you might hear something about receiving toys and other gifts. Ask a parent of a child, and you’ll hear about how much more expensive the toys get every year! Ask a corporate executive, and you’ll hear about the importance of the holiday season in cementing the year’s sales and profits. Ask a worker, and you might hear something about the gift of time off to spend with family and friends. There are probably as many different meanings of Christmas among us as there are people in this room.

One of my favorites, though, comes from that insightful character Charlie Brown. In the great and wonderful Charlie Brown Christmas special, Charlie Brown asks his friends about the meaning of Christmas as he struggles to get into the spirit of the season. They give him a lot of different answers, and his dog Snoopy even gets into the act as he wins first prize for the decorations on his doghouse! If that weren’t bad enough, even Charlie Brown’s attempt to find the perfect Christmas tree goes awry, and he ends up with the world’s smallest and scrawniest tree. As his friends berate him for his bad taste in trees and inability to grasp the meaning of Christmas, he ends up wondering out loud, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?”

In response, his friend Linus takes the stage and begins to tell the story that we heard tonight from the gospel according to Luke. Gradually the mood shifts, and Charlie Brown’s friends finally warm up to his little tree as they all realize that Christmas is about something more than they had expected, about a baby born in a manger in a very different and distant time and place.

But there is more to Christmas than even this. The manger, the angels, and the shepherds are wonderful elements of the story, and they help us begin to understand what was going on when Jesus came into the world. But our reading tonight from the gospel according to John gets even closer to the real meaning of Christmas, I think. While Luke – and also Matthew – give us important details of the birth of Jesus, John focuses on the meaning of Christmas without getting into any of these details at all.

For John, Christmas is a part of something more – a little piece of a much bigger puzzle, a glimpse of God’s larger work in the world, a candle lit in the darkness to make things brighter and clearer. So John’s reflection on the meaning of Christmas starts much earlier – “in the beginning,” as he puts it. The Word – Jesus Christ, the one who comes at Christmas – was with God in the beginning. The Word always had a real and vital part of everything that God had done and was doing and would do, and the Word was an active and present participant in the difficult and wonderful work of creation. This Word brought life and light to all people, and there was no way that darkness would or could overcome it. John the Baptist came and testified to all these things, but still not everyone understood what God was doing in those days. And yet God’s purposes were not thwarted. God became real and human, revealing glory unlike any other glory, showing grace and truth to all the earth, and giving all of us the grace we need for each and every day.

And so this is the real meaning of Christmas to me. That God became human; that God became like us; that God became one of us, walking the earth with us, journeying the twists and turns of life alongside us, knowing the fullness of our humanity. As our opening hymn tonight put it so well:

…he feels for all our sadness,
and he shares in all our gladness.

But God didn’t stop there. Jesus came and transformed our world, bringing light to our greatest darkness, sending justice and peace into every corner of our world, showing us that we cannot fix things ourselves but can and must rely on the powerful grace of our merciful God.

There is little that can measure up to this. Not even the latest and greatest toy received by the most excited child can match the wonder of receiving the very presence of God in human form in Jesus at Christmas. Not even the greatest profits from the sales of the season can compare to the great gift that we receive in Jesus Christ. Not even the best time spent with family and friends can measure up to the power and possibility that comes as God journeys beside us in the human form of Jesus Christ. The best we can do to measure up to this probably comes tonight as we gather at this table, this place where we get the best possible glimpse of this great gift. As we receive this bread and this grape juice, we join with the faithful of every age in anticipation and hope, celebrating God’s presence here and now in this feast even as we look forward to the time when we will know the fullness of God’s presence in Jesus Christ at the great feast of all the ages.

And so this Christmas, may we remember the true meaning of Christmas – the wonder of God becoming human as a little baby, the power of God stepping into our world not as a wealthy and powerful ruler but as a tender child, the justice of God transforming the darkness and pain of our world into the greatest glory we can imagine, and the grace of God journeying with us wherever we go to make us and all things new, once and for all, until Christ comes again.

Glory to God, tonight and always. Amen.

Whenever angels appear on the scene, you know that God is up to something. Angel really don’t show up all that much in the Bible – the word “angel” only appears some 104 times in the Old Testament and 99 times in the New Testament – but when angels do appear, they are always bringing or bearing a message, and the message is always more important than the messenger.

In our scripture reading this morning, the messenger came to a young woman named Mary who lived in the hill country of Palestine under Roman rule over two thousand years ago. The message from God was as unusual as the recipient: this young woman was favored above all women and chosen to bear the Son of God, the one who would change things once and for all for the people of Israel and all the world.

Mary was stunned and confused by all this, so she asked the angel how this would happen. She was not naïve and understood that certain things were involved in bearing children, and she knew if this message were true lots of people would be asking lots of questions.

The angel answered her, promising that her pregnancy would come not by a usual human method but by the power of the Most High God. And this wasn’t all that God was up to in these days. Mary’s relative Elizabeth, well past childbearing age and long considered barren, was also expecting a son.

Mary wondered about all this, but somehow she accepted it, whether or not she had a choice, declaring, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

These days, we don’t see all that many angels, and I for one am pretty skeptical when anyone suggests that they have such direct contact with God and God’s message, because that message is usually less about what God is doing and more about what the individual wants to hear.

But the seeming absence of angels in our midst doesn’t mean that God has stopped working in our world or has no message for us anymore. We still find God speaking to us in the words of scripture as the Holy Spirit moves in the community of faith. We still find God speaking to us as we live this message out in our worship, study, and service together in the community of faith. We still find God speaking to us even as we are confronted with the challenges of living in a changed and changing world that doesn’t look like what we remember it being even a few years ago.

But the key thing for us – and for Mary – is how we respond to God’s message. What do we do when we are bowled over by a powerful and challenging call from God? How do we keep on the path that God intends when we hear something unexpected or unknown?

I think Mary could have responded to the angel’s message in one of two ways. She could have freaked out, doing everything possible to avoid the consequences of his words, working to undermine the angel’s message and the hope of her son not yet born, maybe even saying “no” to the angel.

But Mary did none of this. Instead, she welcomed the uncertainty and challenge of the angel’s message. She set aside her fears and anxiety and opened herself to the possibility, gift, and challenge of being the mother of a child who would transform the world.

Mary’s actions after all this were pretty remarkable, too. She decided not to be ashamed of this child being born out of wedlock, clearly conceived before her marriage to Joseph. For support she set out to visit her cousin Elizabeth, the relative whom the angel had mentioned in his message, who was also expecting an unexpected child. And together they rejoiced in the strange and wonderful gifts of God taking shape and form within their bodies.

During their time together, Mary broke forth into song, echoing her ancestor Hannah and offering the great words known for centuries as the Magnificat. In her song, Mary places the fullness of her joy in the gift of God given not just in her time but across the centuries. In her song, Mary claims the justice and mercy of God for all people. And in her song Mary points the way to a new way of life that her son Jesus would make possible as he came into the world.

All along the way, Mary responded to this strange, challenging, and wonderful message by recognizing that she could only begin to understand what God was doing in and through her life, and yet she had no choice but to offer her thanks and praise.

The message of God before us isn’t quite as clear as it was for Mary, but there are definitely things going on around us that we need to be listening for. Even amidst the economic and political challenges of these times in our world, God is speaking words of comfort and hope to all people – and invites us to join in. God continues to challenge us in the midst of the deep need of so many to embody God’s own attention to and concern for the poor and all who are vulnerable. God calls us to listen for the voices of those who are kept silent or ignored. And God invites us to dream and imagine that things can and will be different for us and all the world, that things don’t have to be returned to their previous state or the clock turned back to make them right but rather can be new and different and wonderful and good as God continues the work of the new creation in us and through us and all around us.

So how will we respond to the message of the angels that God sets before us in these days? Will we consider only the ways and paths that we have known in the past? Will we stay true only to where we have been before and open only to the possibilities that are comfortable and well-known? Will we cower in the corner in fear, unwilling to move anyplace new because we are afraid of losing the little that we have?

Or will we be open to the power of God moving in us here and now? Will we be open to God’s transformation of the gifts that we offer into something greater and better? Will we let God change us and our world to make room not just for the ways that we have known but for the ways that God intends for us and all creation?

Despite my skepticism, these days remind us that angels are still present and at work in our midst, still bearing God’s message to us, in us, and through us, still showing us that God is up to something in our world and in our lives, still inviting us to join in rejoicing because of what God is up to in our world.

In the familiar stories we will hear over the next week, these strange messengers from God keep speaking, bringing more good news not just for a few people but for all humanity, opening the way to transformation for our broken and fearful world, proclaiming hope and joy and peace and love for all people not just at Christmas but all year long.

So may the message of the angels be alive and well in these days, bringing us good news and helping us to respond in faithfulness and joy as we join in God’s good work that is not yet done in our midst.

Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

“Rejoice always.”

In the wonderful list of exhortations and instructions that the apostle Paul offers to the church in Thessalonica, I think this one has to be the hardest. It’s not easy to pray without ceasing or give thanks in all circumstances, nor can we easily be open to the words of prophets, hold fast to what is good, or abstain from every form of evil. But “rejoice always”? It just seems nearly impossible.

Thankfully there has been a lot of reason for me to rejoice lately. Last weekend, I spent an afternoon with dear friends and their two sons, enjoying many laughs and lots of fun as we saw a movie and took a leisurely afternoon to wander around Brooklyn together. Then I spent last Sunday evening in one of my favorite churches in Manhattan, listening to beautiful music and timeless words of waiting and wonder amidst the quietness of the Advent season. This week has been a good one on the church front, too – first as we learned that the pending litigation against the church is finally being settled and as we took some major steps toward completing the sale of the manse, too. You’ll be hearing more about these things in the coming weeks, but I for one am quite joyful that things are finally moving along with two projects that have occupied a lot of our time and energy in recent months.

But even amidst all this, everything hasn’t been joyful this week. Even all this joy has been tinged with something else – there’s always been something just under the surface nagging me and suppressing my joy. There were little things that went wrong – a broken paper shredder in the midst of a major cleaning project at the manse that led to an unexpected, unbudgeted expense for me – but also bigger things like changing plans that took away from hoped-for time with friends and another friend who lost his job this week and just doesn’t have a clear picture of what is ahead.

But all the little things that suppress joy in my own life seem so small amidst all the pain and struggle around us in our world – the uncertainty around elections in Russia and the Congo, the continued frustrations of economic and political life in our own nation, state, and city, and the heart-wrenching news of another shooting at Virginia Tech University on Thursday just as they finally were beginning to recover from the last tragedy there several years ago.

So in the midst of all the struggles of our lives, it’s not so easy to “rejoice always” – unless you count schadenfreude, that German concept of taking pleasure in the pain of others, as rejoicing! But yet Paul’s exhortation is still before us: “Rejoice always.”

It was surely just as difficult for his first hearers to take this seriously. They were some of the earliest converts to this new religious practice, and they didn’t have a clear path for how to behave or what to do. They were a tiny minority group in a city and nation where even perceived disloyalty to the practices of the empire meant troubles of all sorts. And people around them just didn’t understand why they would embrace this new religious faith and practice that seemed to bring nothing more than difficulty and struggle. And yet Paul instructed them to rejoice always.

I don’t think Paul didn’t understand what this was all about – he knew that rejoicing isn’t always easy. But he knew that rejoicing is about more than temporary things, about more than happiness in the here and now, about more than just seeing our needs and desires fulfilled and realized right away. Our vision of joy has become so limited, captured in an ideal of happiness for this immediate moment, locked up in snow-capped letters with little meaning on holiday cards or alongside the latest display in your favorite store, found first and foremost in gaining something right away for our immediate fulfillment and happiness.

But there is so much more to this joy and rejoicing than just these things. Joy goes beyond this immediate moment, beyond mere platitudes and snow-capped letters that show up in the ever-expanding holiday season, beyond the momentary happiness that comes as we enjoy time with friends and watch long-planned projects finally come to an end. Instead, real joy inspires us and even demands for us to look beyond the immediate things, to trust that there is something more than what we can see happening before us, to open our eyes to the transformation possible in and through our struggle and our happiness, to hope that God will be up to more than we can imagine and understand.

Advent and Christmas bring us true joy not just because Jesus has come but also and even more because Jesus is coming again, because there will be joy beyond all our dreams, because everything that drains us of true joy will be drained of all its power over us, because this world does not and will not have the last word on anything, for there is great joy yet to come in and through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And so on this Sunday when we celebrate joy, when we let a little more Christmas joy creep into the preparations of our Advent, when we look again to God with hope and longing for the new things yet to come, when we light a pink candle and sing songs that speak of deep joy, we remember not happiness but deep and real joy, not empty platitudes of happiness that last only as long as the newness of gifts on Christmas morning but the joy of promises once fulfilled that will be fulfilled again, not temporary happiness for a few privileged people but permanent and transformative new life for all creation.

Pastor Abby Henrich puts it well, I think:

Joy is not easily won. You only get it by giving of yourself. Then, joy cracks the very center of your being open and allows the terrifying beauty of this world to creep in.

Joy has no defenses. With joy the pain of this life creeps in too.

Yet joy is like slipping on a new pair of glasses. Everything in the world becomes more beautiful and more painful when we open ourselves to joy.

So may we have all that we need to “rejoice always,” to give thanks in all things, and trust that God is still working around us to make all things new in Jesus Christ our Lord, the one who has come and is coming again. Alleluia! Amen.

There have been a lot of times lately when I’ve just wanted something comforting in my life. I’ve wanted one of those good home-cooked meals like only my parents can prepare – though I’ve found that some barbecue and some Thai food I can get here in New York get pretty close sometimes! I’ve wanted a good conversation with one of those close friends who can listen and understand all the things that are swirling around in life and make things seem to swirl a little less. I’ve wanted to listen to some beautiful music of the Advent season that somehow makes these days feel complete for me.

Thankfully I’ve gotten a taste of these and other comforting things lately, so I’ve gotten some of the comfort that I want, but I have to wonder if it is the comfort that I really need. I’m sure that my doctor for one won’t think particularly highly of the comfort food I’ve eaten lately when I visit him tomorrow. I know I’ve driven some of my friends a bit crazy over the years in seeking out their presence in the midst of my life. And even my carefully-chosen Advent music isn’t always endearing to those who find great comfort in Christmas carols! So it is that all this comfort I want may not be the comfort I need.

Our reading from the prophet Isaiah this morning deals in this comfort that we need:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

There’s no need to worry – God is finally on the scene.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.

Any punishment the people might have deserved is now over and done with. It’s time to move on.

These words of comfort come out of strange silence – for some forty years, the people of Judah had been suffering in exile in Babylon, wondering when God was going to intervene in their pain and struggle and bring them back home.

So the prophet promises dramatic construction in the wilderness to get back to Jerusalem:

Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;

the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.

This comfort, you see, is not just the promise of stability and a return to something seen before. Comfort does not come in fulfilling the people’s wants and desires to turn back the clock. For the prophet, comfort comes in changing things once and for all,  in transforming the world now and always. This is the great promise of what God is doing, the prophet says, for

Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

This glory is not in the restoration of an old way for one or two people – it comes through a new way of life in the face of a world uprooted and torn apart, through a reconstructed land that pulls together people across all boundaries, through a changed world that shows the glory of God in every place.

In our world filled with much change and uncertainty, we really do need and want comfort and transformation, and probably something more than just a favorite meal, the companionship of a friend, or some beloved music. While our struggles are nowhere near the difficulties faced by the exiles of Judah who were Isaiah’s first audience, it sure feels like it sometimes: the ways of life that we once knew seem to be far off and distant; our nation needs a new and better way of life in our politics, our finances, our economy, and nearly everything else too; and our world faces great danger in the abuse and misuse of its many resources as it needs to show and see more signs of God’s glory every day.

But just like in my own life, the comfort we need in these days isn’t always the comfort we want. Sometimes we think we simply need to turn the clock back to a previous time and place to make things different, but we easily forget that the past had more than its fair share of problems, too. Sometimes we try to fix the struggles of our politics and nation by blaming them on someone else, but the reality is that we ourselves – each and every one of us – are just as responsible as anyone for the mess we face today, and only an honest assessment of our own complicity in our pain and struggle can bring us a different path for the days ahead. And sometimes we mix up God’s glory and our own glory, suggesting that God’s blessing upon America or this church or our privilege and status in life is the great expression of God’s presence in our world, when in reality God’s glory defies all these boundaries and expectations and brightens the darkness of every time and place with justice and life.

So amidst the comfort that we want, maybe we need to seek the comfort we need more like what Isaiah describes – an honest, heartfelt, compassionate, tender expression of love and support combined with real and true steps toward the new way of life that God envisions for us.

I think it’s quite appropriate that we hear this text in these days, for Advent is the time when we remember that God sends us the comfort that we need. God’s comfort for our world comes not with the end of waiting but in the midst of it, not with a powerful and immediate transformation of things but with patience and deliberation and hope for God’s return to our midst, not with blinding bursts of light in the darkness but in the great simplicity of one or two candles shining boldly in the night, not with a giant feast spread across many tables but with a small taste of the kingdom in a little portion of bread and grape juice shared at one table, not with a king sent in royal garb to rule and reign with great power but with a baby born Prince of Peace to show tenderness, mercy, and love.

So may this Advent be filled not so much with the comfort we want but the comfort that we need as God steps in to change things, as we take our own steps along the path toward God’s incredible new thing is transforming our world, as we look for the glory of the Lord being revealed in our midst so that when the Great Comforter comes we might be ready to embrace his presence and live in his love for others and ourselves each and every day.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The people of Israel knew what it was like for God to come down and meet them. By the time of the prophet Isaiah, God had intervened in their history many times, guiding them away from the danger of the Egyptians, through the waters of the sea, and onto dry land; shaking the foundations of their lives to give them the gift of the law to guide their life together; and stepping in to show them a new way when they faced the power of their enemies. God was the only god that they had known – “no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you,” as Isaiah put it.

But now something had happened, and God was not quite so present anymore. The people were in exile, longing to return home. Their land lay in ruins, torn apart by centuries of attacks from within and without. According to the prophet, the people had forgotten God and gone another way, becoming unclean like the filthiest, nastiest rags. Nothing was going right for them anymore, and things were just a complete mess.

So it was time for something new. It was time for the heavens to break open, for God to come down and clean up the mess and start things over again. It was time.

Our world seems to be very much like ancient Israel sometimes. Not only is that tiny stretch of holy land still the focus of great war and conflict in our day, we too wonder why God doesn’t seem to be as involved in things as God used to be. We too can look back and see marks of God’s presence in the past – in a less complicated, less busy world where it was easier to set aside the time we need for spiritual and religious things; in a seemingly stronger, more vibrant church where the pews were full and challenges absent; in a world that didn’t seem to have so many dangers and complications that strike at the core of our humanity; even in the little things of life and living where God’s face has emerged through the haze of our world over the years.

But we too face an uncertain and unknown day, a time mostly of our own making, a place where the presence of God feels distant. Our celebration of the birth of God’s son at Christmas has devolved into a competition for the best gifts and cheapest prices at the expense of the humanity of others and ourselves, as we have seen so clearly over the course of these past few days. The institutions of our society struggle more and more to be relevant to the new and different lives of people in our changing world. Our economy seems to be stuck in neutral for so many of us – and even jammed permanently into reverse for the least of these among us. And yet our indomitable American spirit makes us think that we can take care of ourselves and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps out of the mess we face. Nothing seems to be going right anymore, and things are just a complete mess.

It is time for something new. It is time for the heavens to break open, for God to come down and clean up the mess and start things over again. It’s time.

The prophet’s response to the great laments of his age wasn’t all that comforting. First he reminds the people of the fleeting nature of life: “We all fade like a leaf,” he proclaims. Then he suggests that everyone has given up on God and any chance of God’s intervention – and God has given up too: “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.”

But he doesn’t leave it there. Isaiah says that God hasn’t completely given up, that God is still working on the people like a potter shaping her clay, gently but firmly reshaping the people into something new, just in time for the heavens to break open, for God to come down and clean up the mess and start things over again. It’s time.

We can stand to hear something like Isaiah’s words in these days. Like the fleeting leaves of the prophet, none of us will be around forever, and eventually things will be different because we’ll be out of the picture. Like the people of Israel, we too have often turned away from God and claimed that we can do it on our own. And yet God’s presence is still with us too, molding us and shaping us like clay in the hands of a master potter, correcting us where we have gone wrong, preparing us for the great and new thing ahead.

It is from this place where we begin our journey toward Christmas – not from the manic lines and crowds of the holiday shopping season, not from the bulging feast of our Thanksgiving tables, not from the crazy busyness that marks these days between Thanksgiving Day and December 25th, not in the songs that repeat the platitudes of the holidays over and over again, not in gifts or any things that too often carry the day.

No, my friends, we begin our journey toward Christmas with a longing for something real and whole and new, a heartfelt cry to God for things to change once and for all, not just a change in things for the better for one or two of us or the one percent or even the ninety-nine percent, but a new way of life for all of us, where the heavens break open and God comes down and cleans up the mess and starts things over again. My friends, it’s time.

This way of approaching this season is what it means to celebrate Advent, to make a space for this time in our lives and our hearts for the coming of Jesus into our world, to prepare the way for God’s new thing by putting aside the certainty that we can handle things on our own, to keep awake and be ready for the time when God’s presence will transform us and our world, to make sure that we are longing not just for a baby boy born two thousand years ago but also for the time when he will return in power and glory to make things whole once and for all.

And so it is time for us to do radical things in these days – small but radical things amidst our world. We light candles to show the promise of God’s light shining through the darkness. We sing strange hymns that talk about waiting and longing and hope and promise. We pray quietly and hopefully for the time when something new will break into our world. And we keep being as faithful as we can together, showing God’s claim upon us and our world in baptism as we do today with Eve and never forgetting to let our world know the reality of God’s love as best we can.

And so, my friends, it is time – time for us to set aside the trappings of the holidays in favor of preparing for something radically new, time for us to trust that God will not leave us to our own devices along the way, time for us to clear out what we must so that we can be as faithful as we are called to be, time for the heavens to break open, for God to come down and clean up the mess and start things over again. It’s time.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

What does it mean to be entrusted with something? Has a friend ever asked you to take care of her plants or cat while she goes away? Have you ever been put in a position of authority over a large fund or a person’s estate?

There are good and bad things about being entrusted with something by someone else. It’s good because you know that they trust you, that they think you will do a good job, that they respect your wisdom. But it can also be a little scary, too, because then you have to be accountable for what you do with it. If something goes wrong, you actually might have to take responsibility.

The parable we heard this morning from the gospel according to Matthew talks a lot about responsibility, but there’s a lot more going on here. At this point in Matthew’s story, Jesus is encouraging his disciples to be ready for the kingdom of heaven to come at any time, and so he gives them this parable to inspire them.

A very rich man prepares to take a long trip and decides to entrust his fortune to three of his servants. He gives five talents to one servant, two talents to another, and one talent to a third, each according to his ability. These talents are not just some small gift, favorite pet, or beautiful houseplant, though. A talent here is a large sum of money, worth something like fifteen years of daily wages for the average worker. The servants are given these large sums and no other instructions about their use, and the rich man leaves on his trip. The servants who received five talents and two talents take their money and invest it, but the servant who received one talent buries his talent in the ground.

Then, after a long time, at an unexpected moment, the rich man returns home and calls in his servants to return what he left with them. The servant with five talents has made five more because of his wise investments. The rich man is happy with this good return and most of all with his servant’s wisdom, so he promises to put him in charge of much more. The second servant with two talents has also doubled his original trust, and the rich man is equally pleased.

Then the third servant returns, carrying his one talent and nothing more. He grovels in fear at the feet of his master:

Master, I know you have high standards and hate careless ways, that you demand the best and make no allowances for error. I was afraid I might disappoint you, so I found a good hiding place and secured your money. Here it is, safe and sound down to the last cent. (translation by Eugene Peterson, The Message)

But the master is furious at his servant.

That’s a terrible way to live! It’s criminal to live cautiously like that! If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least? The least you could have done would have been to invest the sum with the bankers, where at least I would have gotten a little interest. (translation by Eugene Peterson, The Message)

So the master takes the talent away from him and gives it to the servant who has ten already, then he orders the servant to be thrown into the outer darkness.

This parable seems like the perfect kind of story to tell on Stewardship Sunday. It makes it easy for me to suggest that we all need to contribute to the well-being of this community through our faithful contributions. This story reinforces our American mindset that we can earn our way to the top with good investments. And this parable promotes risk in hope of receiving  reward somewhere along the way.

But I’m not sure all that is what Jesus was thinking about when he told this parable to his disciples. At least in Matthew’s telling, he grouped it in with parables that talk about being ready for the coming of the kingdom of God. He focused not on the two servants who made wise investments but rather on the servant who chose not to invest at all.

Now I always wish that Jesus had included a servant who had lost money on his investment. What would the master’s response have been? Would he have welcomed the servant’s risk even at the expense of his own wealth, or would he have decried the servant’s loss? But we don’t have that kind of servant in this story – we have two servants who invested and one who did not, two servants who took a chance on something new and one who did not, two servants who recognized that the time was right to step out on a limb and one who just stayed right where he was, two servants who embraced the possibility of something new and one who just buried a great treasure out of incredible fear.

And so it is fear that Jesus attacks head-on in the story. The safest investor ended up losing it all. The most responsible servant who did nothing, who risked nothing, actually served the master of fear, not the generous master of this story who entrusts even his least-trustworthy servant with something even though he knows that others will do a better job. Then, when the servant’s fear gets the best of him, the master’s fears are realized. As preacher John Buchanan puts it,

Jesus’ warning is that the outcome of playing it safe – not caring, not loving passionately, not investing yourself, not risking anything – is something akin to death, like being banished to the outer darkness. (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4, p. 312)

In the end, I think Jesus tells this parable less to urge his disciples to be good investors and to share their wealth wisely and more to encourage them to set aside their fears, take a chance, and be ready for the new thing that the kingdom of God was bringing to them. Jesus knows that the disciples are and will be afraid, but he trusts that the possibility of something greater ahead will inspire them to choose the wiser path, to use their gifts rather than sit on them, to be open to the uncertainty of something new rather than cowering in fear of getting it wrong.

I think these words should speak volumes to us. In these days – as this liturgical and calendar year comes to an end, as a chapter in our congregation’s life comes to an end as we sell our manse, as we wonder what the days ahead will hold for all of us – how will we live our lives? Which path will we choose?

Will we choose the way of fear, the way of burying what we have so that we won’t lose it, the way of squandering our gifts by not using them, the way of staying in the place we seem to know because we are afraid of the uncertainty that lies ahead?

Or will we choose the way of following Jesus, the way of taking risks so that the world might know the wonder and power of Jesus’ life in our midst, the way of investing the gifts we have into the life that we share in this place so that others can grow into faith here, the way of stepping out into the unknown and trusting that God will guide us in the days ahead?

I think John Buchanan puts this way into more beautiful words than I can manage:

Here Jesus invites us to be his disciples, to live our lives as fully as possible by investing them, by risking, by expanding the horizons of our responsibilities. To be his man or woman, he says, is not so much believing ideas about him as it is about following him. It is to experience renewed responsibility for the use and investment of these precious lives of ours. It is to be bold and brave, to reach high and care deeply. (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4, p. 312)

My friends, we have embodied that way of following Jesus for over 140 years in this place, and it is my prayer that we will choose our path for the days ahead not out of fear but out of responsibility and hope for the possibility that God might still be working in our midst, giving us talents beyond our wildest dreams to invest and use and share with all who need them and making us bold and brave as we embody the way of Jesus Christ in this place so that all the world might see.

So may God help us to set our fears aside and risk all that we have – and even more – for the way ahead, for the power and possibility and promise of new life for all creation in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

“What will happen to me when I die?” People ask this question a lot, particularly as children or in facing a difficult illness or old age, and questions like this are very much on the minds of many people who make their way to church. The afterlife is a part of religious belief and practice around the world and across many centuries, and a great deal of our human thinking about religion and spirituality is centered on this question. The church culture in which I was raised also had a lot to say about these things. I remember hearing about an evangelism program at the church where I grew up that would start conversations about Jesus with the question, “If you died tonight, where would you go?”

While this is an important topic of faith for many people, there are others for whom the afterlife isn’t quite as important – the focus instead is on the ways in which our faith, belief, and practice can change and transform our current world as much as the next. The old gospel hymn “When We All Get to Heaven” doesn’t speak so clearly in this mindset – the traditional images of heavenly mansions, clouds in the sky, pearly gates, and streets of gold represent an incomplete vision of what lies ahead for us as people of faith in this mindset, for the important things lie in this world as much as in the next.

Nonetheless, after we have looked back over the past several weeks to our 140 years of life and ministry here and then with our remembrance of the Reformation last Sunday, our eyes turn heavenward today more than they do at any other time of year as we celebrate All Saints Day. Today we remember the generations of women and men who have gone before us in the life of faith and shown us how to live and love as Jesus did. Today we remember the saints, known and unknown, celebrated and ignored, dead and still very much alive, whose witness strengthens us to live the life of faith each and every day. Today we remember that there is an unnumbered multitude of the faithful who still sing God’s praise with us, but from another shore.

And so today our texts direct our attention to that place I so hesitate to go – to our understanding of what lies ahead for us in the world to come. These two texts are among many throughout the Bible that give small glimpses of the world to come. In the gospels, we hear Jesus describing the coming “kingdom of God” that looks very much unlike any of the kingdoms of this world and suggests a very different way of God at work in the world even today. The prophets of the Old and New Testaments speak words of longing for a world where justice is done for everyone and sorrow and pain are no more. In several letters in the New Testament, the apostles warn us not to inquire too much about the things that are ahead. Daniel and Revelation give us dark insights into the future for those who do not meet God’s approval. And John’s vision in Revelation offers us moments of great joy that come alongside the arrival of a new heaven and a new earth.

All these incredible words are too often merged into one single popular vision of “heaven” and “hell,” with angels and souls of faithful women and men floating around in the clouds of heaven and servants of the devil suffering in the eternal fires of hell. But the overall picture that emerges of the days ahead for us can’t be summed up so easily and wrapped up so neatly.

Our first reading from 1 John today reminds us so clearly of this, and it shows us the first of two really important principles I think we can keep in mind as we think about that day when we all get to heaven. The apostle tries to address the question of what is ahead for people of faith, for women and men who struggled with the challenges of living their faith in a time and place that didn’t welcome their different way of life, for people who knew the reality of persecution and struggle for their faith firsthand. So he reminds them that they are already children of God – an incredible and wonderful gift from God in and through Jesus Christ – even when the world doesn’t recognize it. Still, though, this status as children is not everything – “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Things are not over, and there is something more to come that isn’t fully known yet – but we do know that “when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” In the midst of all that we don’t and can’t understand about the life of faith that is ahead, we can be sure of this much – that we are already children of God and that what is ahead will only make us more like God.

Our second reading tells us the second most important thing I think we can know about the time when we all get to heaven. In this portion of the book of Revelation, we have a brief interlude from John’s vision of great destruction to get a glimpse of the eternal praise that seems to one of the few other things we can be sure about for the days ahead. In this passage, John describes his vision of the new kind of life that lies ahead: a great unnumbered multitude robed in white from all nations and peoples singing God’s praise around God’s throne, an incredible gathering of people who have emerged from great trial and tribulation to celebrate and praise God, a new way of life and living that leaves hunger, thirst, and scorching heat behind for the wonder of life with God guiding and leading and caring for the people at every step of the journey. And so I think this is the second great image of the days ahead that we can take with us: that a multitude will praise God for all eternity because of the incredible ways in which God’s presence is finally and fully known in the world to come.

Beyond these two things, I don’t think we can say much more with certainty about the days ahead. When we all get to heaven, we can be sure that we will see God as God and be more like God and join the multitude praising God for all eternity for overcoming all the hardships and perils of our lives and this world. All this is reason for rejoicing here and now – for giving thanks to God for all the saints who already are making their way to this new way and place of life with God and for the possibility of new life for us and all creation in this world and the next.

But alongside our rejoicing, all this gives us the opportunity to join these faithful women and men in working with God to make all things new. We can embody the reality that we and all people are children of God now by standing up for those whose full humanity is not welcomed. We can show the wonder of God’s glory in our worship and praise and prayer every day. And we can work to make this world one where there is no more hunger, thirst, or scorching heat as we make our way to springs of the water of life. These are the things we should undertake to make our own in these days – the possibility and reality of God’s new thing taking hold in our lives and our world, in the here and now and not just in the world to come.

So until we all get to heaven, may God strengthen us for the living of these days by the memory and witness of all the saints and by the feast we share with them and all creation here as we look forward to the great feast that awaits us in the world to come.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

There’s something wonderful about remembering our history and celebrating where we have been. We had such a great day last Sunday as we celebrated 140 years of ministry in this congregation. Today we celebrate a milestone birthday for one of our members and think about the incredible gifts and lives that people bring to our community of faith. These and all the remembrances of our lives can and should inspire us to many, many more years of faithful life and living.

Today is actually another chance for us to remember our history as we celebrate Reformation Sunday. Today we especially remember that day in October 1517 when Martin Luther posted a list of his “95 theses” of complaint and petition to the doors of the church in Wittenburg, Germany. But Luther’s actions on that day were only a marker in a much larger movement that had begun before him and continued long after him. Luther himself didn’t walk away from the Roman Catholic church of his time but took many years to begin the branch of Christianity that now bears his name. With the rise of the printing press some years before, the text of the Bible had become more accessible to those who literate, and new ideas were more easily spread. Other church leaders of Luther’s time took advantage of a general sense of anger and frustration directed toward officials in Rome to build on the work of others who had been calling for a different way of being the church for centuries. Even some who remained in the Roman Catholic church sought to bring change to the institution that so many had rebelled and protested against.

All these saints encouraged the church to return to its roots, to clear out some of the accumulated baggage of 1500 years, to reclaim its identity in scripture, and to build the most faithful institution possible around these key tenets. And so new leaders emerged across Europe to give shape and form to this emerging way of faith and life in the particular contexts of that day and age. So today, nearly five hundred years later, as we celebrate this important shift in the history of the church – a shift that still shapes and forms our practice of life and faith today – I think we best remember these things by doing exactly what our forebears did and returning to the core principles of who we are by listening for the spirit of the Reformation.

Our two readings today do exactly that. First we heard the beautiful text describing the coming of the new covenant from the prophet Jeremiah. At their heart, these incredible words remind us that God is always seeking to be with God’s people in new ways. If one way of relationship doesn’t fit the need, God will keep trying until another one does. Jeremiah insists here that God changes minds and hearts and lives, that God breaks into our humanity to “be [our] God” so that we can be God’s people. To top it all off, God promises to be in relationship with each and every one of us – and all of us together – so that we can be renewed amidst our missteps and restored to life.

The apostle Paul picks up on much this same theme in our reading this morning from his letter to the church in Rome. Paul takes the prophet’s ideas of renewal and restoration and new life and connects them directly to the life and death of Jesus Christ. He suggests that the law of God cannot save but can only condemn, and so Jesus’ life revealed the full righteousness of God to sinful humanity. Paul declares that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” – and yet God’s grace becomes effective in us and through us in faith and brings us back into relationship with God. Paul insists that this is not any of our own doing – responsibility for all this belongs only to God.

These two texts bring us some of the key ideals of the great Reformation of the sixteenth century and bear the spirit of that time into our own, but they don’t always translate into our day and age right away. The spirit of the Reformation should always be before us, as one of the great principles that has emerged over the centuries reminds us: we are not just the church once reformed; we are also the church still being reformed according to God’s Word and Spirit. As we make our way into our 141st year of ministry in this congregation, we have to sort out what these things mean for us to make the spirit of the Reformation our own. What is it for us to reclaim these great ideals of relationship, self-sacrifice, and trust in God for the church and the world in 2011? How do we live out what we have learned about being in relationship with God in this changing time? How do we help others to see what we have seen and experience the presence of God in our world? Asking these kinds of questions is, I believe, the most faithful way we can be church together in this changing day and age.

Looking closely at what we are doing and how we are doing it to see how it fits into our new reality in Jesus Christ and our changing world is our greatest challenge – but also our greatest opportunity. Helping people sort out what it means to believe and have faith in 2011 and beyond ought to be at the center of our mission in these days. And all along the way, we must embrace the questions that will come up and honestly face the difficult decisions that come before us, for it is in those moments that we truly have the opportunity to embody the spirit of the Reformation in our own time and place.

So as we journey together in the coming months, as we face the change that is certainly coming our way, as we work to wind up some things that have occupied our minds too much lately, as we sell our beloved manse and purchase something new, as we make a new space for the work of the church in this building, may the spirit of the Reformation continue to call us to ask the tough questions, to sort out what it means to be the people of God in this time and place, to remain confident of God’s presence in the face of everything that changes around us, and to keep showing the face of God to everyone we meet throughout the good days and bad. Thanks be to God for this confidence, this hope, this challenge, and this way of life in faith together in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

If someone asked you to draw a picture of God, what would it look like? Would you draw some sort of human form? Would you make a picture of your favorite natural scene? Or would it be something else entirely, something more abstract, something more obscure, something more personal?

Humans have been trying to depict divine beings of all sorts for centuries. The Greeks and Romans of the ancient world built dramatic statues to show off their deities’ very human bodies. The Israelites got in big trouble with God for making a golden calf while Moses was receiving the Ten Commandment on Mount Sinai. And even in Christendom, artists have made countless depictions of Jesus, some hailed as beautiful additions to the history of art and our understanding of faith and others attacked and destroyed for attempting to paint what should not be painted. Nowadays we keep up our attempts to depict God. More than one blond-haired and blue-eyed man has been cast as Jesus on the big screen. James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman, two black men with deep, resonant voices, have been cast to speak as God. And the recent unexpectedly bestselling novel The Shack depicted the Trinity as an African American woman, a Middle Eastern carpenter, and an Asian woman.

So it’s quite natural for us to want to know more about what God looks or sounds like, to catch a glimpse of God in human form, to have a God sighting every now and then. These God sightings have been a part of our world for longer than we can know, and even the great man of faith Moses wanted to catch a glimpse of the great glory of God. In our reading from the book of Exodus this morning, we hear about this moment when Moses asked to see God’s glory and ended up with his own God sighting. While he was up on the mountain with God to receive the Ten Commandments a second time, Moses had an incredible heart-to-heart conversation with God. The exchange was incredibly human, sounding much like inquisitive banter between old friends, with Moses recognizing God’s considerable steps in guiding him and the Israelites to this point in their journey while also stating his very human desire to have a greater sense of God’s presence with him along the way ahead. Upon hearing Moses’ request for God’s continued presence, God responded with grace and mercy, promising, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”

But Moses kept up the conversation, noting that he and the people of Israel could not get to the promised land  on their own – they needed a very present and real God to go with them. They needed to know God’s favor and see how God made them distinct from others, and without this assurance, Moses felt it was silly for them to go at all. His concerns were well-founded – the Israelites had done little more than complain about the food and the water all along the way so far, and he was on the mountain again with God because the people had been worshiping an idol under the guidance of his own brother Aaron and had already broken the covenant that God made with them. But even so, God again assured Moses of God’s continued presence with them along their journey to the promised land: “I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.”

All this conversation, though, seemed to be a prelude to Moses’ real question, his desire for a God sighting: “Show me your glory, I pray.” God didn’t walk away but instead offered one final promise to Moses: “I will make all my goodness pass before you… But you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live… You shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.” So Moses followed God’s instruction and made his way out onto a rock, where he stood in a cleft of the rock. God covered Moses with God’s hand while God passed by, but then after God had passed, God’s hand was removed so that Moses could see God’s back.

This is truly such a great story – it’s not only great to know that at least one human being has had a real, honest-to-goodness God sighting, it’s also pretty incredible that Moses only saw God’s back side! Still, I can’t quite imagine a world where we see God in this very direct and human way. Sure, we say that we have seen God in Jesus Christ, but that was a one-time glimpse, and we only have the biblical witness to that God sighting and no eyewitnesses among us. The images of God that we do have leave so much to be desired – the old paintings of Jesus rarely speak to the contemporary world, and many people just don’t identify with any of the images and words of faith and belief at all. So the leap of faith involved in seeing God these days is pretty significant, and God doesn’t seem to show up quite so directly or often anymore anyway. But we are here in the church, either because we have experienced the presence of God before and want to experience it again or because we figure this is as good a place as any to have our first God sighting along the way.

I believe that we can reasonably expect to have that kind of encounter with God in our journey together in this place, but there is more to what we must do than just that. We need to be on the lookout for where God is present and at work in our world, for the places where God is already stepping in to change things and make things different, for the comfortable and uncomfortable places where God is embracing us or challenging us, for the dramatic and real presence of God not so much where we would most expect it but maybe where we would least expect it, maybe most in the longings of those in need, in cries of the poor, in the prophetic words calling out for justice. We also need to be ready to tell others about our experiences of God, to describe our God sightings in whatever form they take, to speak about how we have seen God at work in our lives and in our world, even to honestly speak about the times when we have doubted God’s presence in our midst. And most of all we need to be about showing God’s face to others, joining in those times and places where God’s presence is already visible and making it clearer, acting to embody the presence of God among those in greatest need, and living life in such a way that others might have a God sighting of their own in and through us. This is our greatest challenge but also our greatest hope – to keep our eyes open for God each and every day even as we embody God’s presence in our world so that others might also know the fullness of life that we have found along our journey.

So may God inspire us in our hearing and seeing and speaking and doing, that we might hear God’s voice directing us into the way ahead, we might see God’s presence in whatever way we need, we might speak of God’s presence so that others can hear, and we might join in doing and being and living in all the places where God is already present and at work to make all things new until he comes again.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Conversion stories are everywhere in Christian literature. You know how they go – someone starts out living a terrible, horrible life, with all sorts of sinfulness and worldliness, then that person is radically changed through a dramatic experience and comes to faith. We have them in the Bible and beyond – it seems that so many faithful people have wonderful stories to tell about how God has intervened and changed things in their lives.

The apostle Paul’s story is one of the greatest of all conversion stories. The book of Acts tells it from one perspective, and Paul himself tells it several other times in his letters to churches around the Mediterranean that are collected in the New Testament. In today’s reading from his letter to the church in Philippi, we hear a little of that story. Paul was a very faithful Jew, properly circumcised and raised in the tradition, with the right ancestry and perfect lineage in the tribe of Benjamin. He studied the Law at length, and from this knowledge he became a Pharisee and attacked the early followers of Jesus because he felt that they misinterpreted the Law.

But then something happened to Paul. He had an experience that changed everything. He doesn’t recount the details here, probably because the Philippians knew his story very well, but from the other tellings of it in the New Testament, we know that it was a dramatic encounter with Jesus himself long after Jesus had ascended into heaven, an encounter that left Paul blind for several days and may have even given him some sort of lifelong physical affliction.

This conversion experience changed everything for Paul. As he says in these verses, everything that Paul once counted in his favor he now viewed as rubbish, garbage, nothingness. He suffered the loss of all things because of Christ, and this new emptiness gave him the space to gain Christ, not that he could claim all this by his own doings but rather that God could fill him and share with him Christ’s faithfulness and righteousness.

But Paul knew that he was not yet completely filled in this way. He recognized that he still had a long way to go to make this way of life his own, yet he kept on trying to do all this “because Christ Jesus has made me his own,” as he said. Paul put aside the ways of his past life so that he could move forward into something new and different and real and complete in the days ahead: “Forgetting what is behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

Like so many conversion stories, Paul’s story is an incredible one, a powerful witness to the transformation possible in and through the life of faith. While so many over the centuries have experienced this kind of conversion, many other faithful people have a less dramatic story of growing into the life of faith.

Take me, for example. I grew up in the church and never really stepped away from it. Conversion for me almost wasn’t even possible because I was grounded in the tradition from the very beginning – baptized as an infant,raised in Sunday school, active in the youth group and campus ministry, and a natural fit to go to seminary right away. If anything, I sometimes identify more with Paul’s life before his conversion than anything else! I’ve always felt connected to God and the community of faith and can’t really point to a single large moment of powerful transformation or conversion like Paul could.

For a long time, I wasn’t particularly comfortable with this, especially growing up in a culture in the deep South that insisted on a specific moment of salvation as part of an authentic Christian religious experience, but I’m grateful that someone once suggested to me the idea of a “nurturing conversion,” where we find transformation not in a single moment but rather over a lifetime of being nurtured into the life of faith. I know I’m not the only one who lives and feels like this  – others too have spent a lifetime trying to sort out what it means to be faithful in their lives, building on the faith they have had for a full lifetime and seeking to walk with God along all the changes and challenges of life and living even though they have never experienced the kind of dramatic conversion that Paul describes. I’m grateful that our Presbyterian tradition welcomes all of us, both those who have experienced a powerful moment of transformation and those who have been converted through the nurturing life of faith, but I still feel like I’m missing out on something sometimes because I don’t share that transformative experience.

So what do we do with all this? How do we connect Paul’s incredible experience from two thousand years ago to our own lives today? How do we make sense of Paul’s conversion alongside our own faith journeys? What does it mean for us to give up the things of our lives and find our real and true value and worth in Christ?

For me at least, I think this all begins when we open our minds to the possibility of transformation each and every day so that we can live into the new life we have in Christ. Whether we have experienced a powerful moment of conversion or not, God can still work a new thing in us and through us and around us and in spite of us. Whether we can identify firsthand with Paul’s experience of conversion or not, God can transform our lives by the power and faithfulness of Jesus Christ himself and remake us more and more in the image of the one who comes to make all things new. And whether we are new to faith and life or have seen many years in life and the church, we all have to keep trying day by day to make this our own, to sort out the meaning of the cross and the resurrection for us and our world, to share that experience with others along the way, and to trust that there is still more in store for all creation.

But the good news in all this amidst such varied experiences of conversion is that we are not alone. Whether we can point to a moment of radical conversion or have been converted over the whole of our lives, whether we identify with Paul or someone else, whether we have walked many miles along the road of faith or are just setting out on the journey, we are one family, one people, one church, following our one Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ, gathering around one font and one table where we can know his presence even today.

So we are not alone. We are not alone as we sort out our faith in our lives. We are not alone as we figure out what transformation and conversion might be for us and our world. We are not alone in seeking God’s glory and promise We are not alone in struggling to make the cross and resurrection our own. We are not alone in giving up the things of our past and of our world so that we can take on a new and shared identity with all those throughout time and around the world who follow our Lord Jesus Christ.

So today as we celebrate World Communion Sunday, a day when we particularly remember that whenever we gather at this table we gather with sisters and brothers all around the earth, we gather at this feast of celebration, not alone or with a few of our choicest friends but with the whole company of the saints in heaven and on earth, trusting that here Jesus is with us and makes us his own and will never leave us alone as we press on toward the goal of new life in him.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

The journey through the wilderness to the promised land had only just begun, and the Israelites were already getting frustrated. Moses had come back to Egypt to lead the people out of slavery and into freedom, but freedom was harder than anyone had imagined.

The journey kept dragging on and on and on, and the inconveniences kept mounting. For a while it was hard to find food, but God finally provided manna and quail. Then the people started to complain that there wasn’t enough variety on the menu – but there’s only so many ways you can mix up two ingredients! And in today’s reading, the people were complaining that there was no water to drink as they camped.

As you might expect, the people directed their anger, frustration, and complaints at Moses. They even questioned his motives for leading them out of Egypt: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” They were so frustrated that they just wanted to go back home to Egypt, back to the land of suffering and slavery that they knew so well, where they knew what to expect. They’d rather face the perils of life under Pharaoh than take a chance on the uncertainty of a wilderness journey.
 
 

The Israelites aren’t alone – we too know what it’s like to take a wilderness journey to a promised but unknown land. Our world these days has more than its share of uncertainty: How long will our economy keep slumping? How long will it take for our friends and neighbors to find a job? What sort of world will our children and grandchildren receive from us?

As if our world’s uncertainty wasn’t enough, there’s also our church and our presbytery. Will we ever return to the way of life we once knew, where every church had a pastor, where every pastor had a church, where the sanctuaries were full and the nurseries were bustling? How long will it take us to sort through our problems and find some way to live together? Will there be anything left of us when we get to the promised land – if we ever get there at all?

All along the way, we find things to complain about in the church and the world. We question the motives of our leaders. We doubt that we’ll have enough food or water or money or patience to survive the journey. We even quarrel amongst ourselves about how we should or should not be moving forward. Like the Israelites, we too would usually prefer to turn back to the unhappy and difficult ways we have known rather than risk a little bit of uncertainty on our wilderness journey.
 
 

In the midst of all this complaining and quarreling, Moses was nearing his wit’s end, so he turned to God for some advice. “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” God’s instruction to Moses was clear: “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you… I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.”

So God got involved in the Israelites’ troubles yet again, not ignoring their complaints but taking action, setting up a way forward that took care of their present needs in hopes of keeping the people focused on the promised land. God made it clear that Moses was not the only one who could move things forward – he had not been alone in leading the people out of Egypt, so he should not be left alone to face the trials and tribulations of the journey through the wilderness to the promised land, either. So God offered to meet Moses and the elders not where they were but a little closer to where they were going.

When they had gone on a little ways, God met them and gave them water from a rock, keeping them focused on the way ahead and helping them to move beyond the memory of Egypt just a little more. Moses made sure that the Israelites did not forget all that they had put him through, though – he named the place Massah and Meribah, or “test” and “argument,” because there they had wondered if the Lord was with them on their wilderness journey.
 
 

Amidst all the complaining and crying of our day and our own wilderness journeys, there are certainly voices that speak up trying to make a difference. Some folks set right out and go looking for the water we need to survive on the journey. Some women and men look for a way to change the system that keeps getting us off track. Some people try their best to take action to address the complaints going on all around. But all too often it seems that the complainers keep on complaining, that the chorus of quarreling and testing goes on and on, the thirst for the water we need unquenched. There are few who step up to lead the people out of the chorus of woe, few who try to lead the people out into what will move us beyond our impasse rather than just maintaining the status quo of complaining.

But even the best leaders can’t fix things on their own – others have to stand up and join in to move ahead of the people’s doubting and quarreling, not just to resolve the immediate complaints but also to help everyone move into something new. In these wilderness days, we need our elders of all sorts – our Presbyterian ruling and teaching elders, for sure, but also the other elders and leaders of our nation and world – to step away from the murmuring and complaining crowds, to join with those who are not afraid to seek God’s guidance for the days ahead, to look at the problems of our church and our world through new eyes and ask new and different kinds of questions, to go on out ahead of the people to meet God a little further out in the wilderness.

When we go together – when we stop looking back to the Egypts of our past and start dreaming of a new and different promised land, when we step out from where we are into something new, when we support one another in our wilderness journey – we might just meet God, stepping in to give us what we need, challenging us to put aside our bickering and complaining and testing, and inviting us to keep our eyes and hearts on the promised land of new life in this world and the next as we go on our wilderness journey.
 
 

And so we take our next steps on this way by meeting here at this table, by glimpsing here even a minuscule vision of the things ahead for all creation, by gathering here with saints and sinners of this time and of all time to set aside as much quarreling and testing as we can, by hoping and praying and expecting that we will meet Jesus here and find everything we need for the wilderness journey ahead. Thanks be to God. Amen.

In the six years I’ve been in ministry in New York City, it was one of my greatest joys to get to know Charles. Across the nearly forty years that separated us in age, we found so many other things that connected us: a deep love of Presbyterian polity and theology, concern for our common witness to Jesus Christ through the Presbytery of New York City, care for the people of God through service in our  congregations here in Queens, common interest in our Mac computers, a love of travel and especially travel to Scotland after our trip there two years ago, and of course a good glass of single malt Scotch on that trip or most anytime!

Charles and I shared these and so many things – we were connected at so many levels – and one of them was a deep love of this text. This text from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome stands as a true monument of our faith. Somehow Paul composed these incredible words to a congregation that he did not know in a city he had only dreamed of visiting when he wrote, yet even without these direct connections he found words to embody the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

First of all, here Paul acknowledges our weakness and God’s strength. When we are so weak that we don’t know even how to pray, that’s when God steps in for us. When we are in greatest need, the Spirit reaches out and makes us whole. Charles knew this as well as anyone. Over the last two years, as his nerves and muscles became less and less able to communicate and he gradually became weaker, Charles asked for help more and more. He recognized his own weakness and God’s strength working through others to care for him with simple and wonderful grace. He was never afraid to ask for help from his brother Fred or anyone else. He never masked his difficulties, never gave up his daily reading of the New York Times and his well-worn Greek New Testament. He never stopped knowing the fullness of God’s love that overcomes all weakness in him and for him and through him.

After these words, Paul moves on to remind us that our connection to God is not something that we control. God calls us according to God’s purpose, sealing us in the family of God through Jesus Christ before we can even know it or begin to understand it. God makes things right for us by no action of our own and glorifies us for life beyond our understanding. These core tenets of our faith – and especially our Presbyterian way of thinking about these things – are so clear in these verses. Our relationship with God happens not because of anything we do but because of God’s own initiative. God’s own relationship with us makes us all part of God’s family, with Jesus Christ the firstborn in it. And the glory that awaits us is not because of our own merit but because of the grand promises of God to make all things new.

Charles made these things so real in his life. He was always confident that God’s own initiative came long before his own. He had a wide understanding of family that included everyone here in this room and countless others around the world because he knew that he was united to all humanity in and through Jesus Christ. And he didn’t worry about the things of this world or the stresses and pain of his life here because he knew that there was yet more glory still to come.

Paul closes this great chapter with a succinct and brilliant statement of the comfort and confidence of the gospel. Even amidst this look at God’s strength in our weakness and God’s initiative in our life of faith, Paul makes it clear that living this way isn’t always easy. He asks the hard questions that centuries of faithful Christians have kept on asking. He wonders aloud how we can say that God is in control when things go wrong. He know that sometimes there are not words to describe our grief and confusion. Sometimes it feels like everyone is set against us. Sometimes it feels like we won’t see any benefit of God’s love. Sometimes it feels like we are charged, condemned, and ready to be led away to the gallows, separated from God’s love forever and ever by the hardships and perils of this world. But in all these things, Paul says, we are victorious through our Lord Jesus Christ. We have nothing to fear because God has done in Christ what only God can do to make us and all creation whole and new.

Paul then pulls all of this together as only he can do:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I’ve known lots of folks who have embodied these words in their life and living and connected their lives to God’s own in Jesus Christ, but few measure up to Charles.

In these days, as we remember that death has not separated Charles from God’s love in Jesus Christ, we can also take comfort that life also did not separate him from God’s love. As much as anyone, Charles didn’t let the things of this world disconnect him from the confidence and hope of living in the life of the risen Christ. He didn’t let anyone or anything get in the way of staying connected to God and God’s people, you and me and everyone he met. He never forgot God’s claim upon him and each one of us. He always remembered the life of Christ that shows God’s strength in the midst of our every weakness.

So on this day when we remember our friend and brother in Christ and we bear witness to the resurrection for him and all the saints, may this be our comfort and our hope, that like Charles we too belong to God here and now, in life and in death, in strength and in weakness, and may God’s faithfulness that Charles mirrored so well show forth in our lives, our communities, and our world until all the world shines in the glory of God’s love and we are united with our brother Charles once and for all time in the wonder of new life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

It hardly seems like three years ago that the stock market crashed, the housing bubble burst, and the economy went south, but exactly three years ago today the government began the process of bailing out failing financial institutions. Three years ago, the last time we heard this parable from Matthew in worship, we were just beginning to see the massive confusion and disruption that would occupy our lives for so long. The last time we looked together at these words, I don’t think any of us anticipated that we would still be in this position the next time we read them, yet here we are today, hearing again Jesus’ parable about God’s economics when ours are such a mess.

We’d always like to think that we are working toward the right kind of economic system,setting up everything for the fair and equitable treatment of people, offering opportunities for investment, advancement, safety, and security all along the way, and building something that will work for generations to come. We’d like to think that we are looking at economics God’s way – but something tells me that we probably aren’t.

In the parable we heard this morning from the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus challenges his disciples to think differently about the economics of labor and wages and work. Here a landowner needed day laborers for his vineyard, so he went out in the morning and hired those who were waiting in the market to work for the usual daily wage. He did this several more times over the course of the day, hiring as many people as he could from those who were standing idle in the marketplace. Even just an hour before the day was done, he went out and brought in a few last workers who had not yet been hired.

At the end of the day, the owner told the manager to pay everyone, starting with the last and going to the first. The people who had been hired for only an hour of work were surely startled when they received pay for a full day’s work. Those who had worked all day got excited at this news – they figured that this landowner must be particularly generous with his workers and thought they would be paid more too! But when the next group of workers who had worked longer stepped up to be paid, they too received the usual daily wage. As each group who had worked a few more hours more stepped up, they all received the usual daily wage – the same as those who had been hired at the end of the day and worked only one hour.

The workers – especially those who had worked all day – began to grumble and complain. They said it wasn’t fair to pay people the same for different amounts of work. By their logic, if the landowner wanted to pay those hired last a full day’s wage, he should also pay extra to those who had worked all day. But the landowner rejected their complaints, noting that he had paid everyone the usual daily wage – exactly what he had agreed to pay them. He owed them nothing more, he said, and if he chose to be generous with what was his and pay other workers a full day’s wage for only a partial day’s work, that was his right. If the workers wanted to be envious because he was so generous, that was their problem, not his.

God’s economics seem to work like they do in this parable throughout most of the Bible. In God’s economics, people don’t get what they deserve – everyone gets what they need. Those who have received much are expected to give back with similar generosity. Those with greater need can look to others to help fulfill that need. And those who take more than their share are called to account for their actions.

But in our system, we think about things differently. We insist that people be paid only for exactly what they work – and look for every imaginable way to short them. We seek less and less from people to support others and insist only that everyone be given a fair shake to make it on their own. And half of Americans even think that the Bible tells us that God helps those who help themselves – when in fact it says essentially the reverse, that God helps those who cannot help themselves. We figure if our economy worked like this parable, no work would get done at all – people would just show up for an hour and get paid no matter what. People would be lazy and just milk the system for everything rather than putting any value into the economy. And without the fundamental fairness of equality of pay for the hours worked, we would lose so much productivity that the economy would just stop functioning.

Or would it? Have we ever really tried to operate in this way? Have we ever thought of ourselves as having everything we need rather than worrying about what we do not have? Have we ever moved from the human economics of scarcity to God’s economics of abundance? Sure, there are some real problems with operating like this – some people will take more than they need; some people will skip out on work or show up at the last minute because they know they will get paid anyway; some people will find a way to game the system – but are those problems any worse than our current system?

The last three years have made it all too clear that our current system is broken. The housing market is still a mess, and all indications are that we are a long way from getting everything sorted out. Millions of women and men are still unemployed or underemployed – and many of them have simply stopped looking for work because it is too depressing to continue. The rich keep getting richer, but the poverty rate is higher than ever before. While we may not technically be in a recession, things just don’t feel right for us these days, and another official recession feels like it could only be a matter of days away. No one seems to be willing to take the blame for the problem – or to take the risk of finding a real solution.

So why don’t we try God’s economics, at least in our own lives? Why don’t we approach each day with a mindset of abundance rather than a fear of scarcity? Why don’t we try to be more generous than we are fair? And why don’t we seek out ways to make sure that all people have what they need to be whole and complete? We do a lot of this as a congregation – we pay our staff the fairest wage we can afford, we give away several thousand dollars every year through the Deacons’ Fund and other mission offerings, and we offer the community special events around health and wellness that are less about what we can get out of them and more about what we can offer to others. Yet we can always offer more abundance in our world – there is no such thing as an overabundance of generosity, and that kind of grace can and will change the world.

So we ought to try it more and more, I think. Maybe we’ll find that generosity works as well as anything else we’ve tried to fix our stuck economy. Maybe in three years when we come back to this parable we’ll have a good story to tell. Maybe nothing will change – but maybe our hearts will be opened and broadened anyway.

So may God strengthen us to think about God’s economics for a change, to take generosity seriously and work to make sure that everyone has what they need so that we all can know the fullness of God’s love for others and for ourselves now and always. Amen.

(Author’s note: An earlier version of this sermon was posted here, and I keep both versions on the blog to expose a bit of my creative process.)

Where were you?

People have been asking that question all week, remembering where we were on that clear and beautiful September morning ten years ago today. But it’s not as if you really could ever forget it – moments like that are things that we cannot forget.

And so for the last ten years, people have been crying out, never forget –

never forget the horror of nearly three thousand people dying at the hands of a carefully coordinated terrorist attack on American soil;

never forget the faithful service of thousands of women and men working as police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders, bringing thousands of others to safety;

never forget the worldwide outrage and lament at these incredible things that somehow managed to unite us in grief as we sought to figure out what to make of this unspeakable tragedy;

never forget the stories of fear and hope from friends and neighbors and acquaintances all around us that made us cry and made us laugh and everything in between.

Our gospel reading this morning from Matthew tells us of another time when Jesus wanted to make it clear that we should never forget – this time, that we should never forget forgiveness. This reading that centers on forgiveness is difficult to stomach on any day, but the memories we bring with us here today certainly don’t make it any easier. Even after ten years, it is really hard to bring up the idea of forgiveness around the horrors of September 11, 2001, for the pain and hurt and terror are still very, very raw for us, and talking about forgiveness seems to deny so much of what we are feeling. Too often, though, I think we’ve twisted our understandings of forgiveness into some part of the trite and easy saying, “Forgive and forget,” but that’s not at all what Jesus says here – in fact, he almost seems to say the exact opposite: “Forgive and never forget.”

Peter starts things off in the story, following up on Jesus’ words that immediately precede this passage, words that we heard last week about how to deal with wrongdoing in the community of faith. Clearly a bit confused and concerned about Jesus’ call to forgive, Peter asks him directly: “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus, ever the generous interpreter, responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” Now this isn’t a limit on forgiveness that suggests that Peter can add ten extra rows of checkboxes to his spreadsheet as he tracks how often he forgives his friends. No, in suggesting seventy-seven offers of forgiveness, Jesus insists that there is no limit to the kind of forgiveness that he makes possible. As commentator Charles Campbell notes, “…there can be no limit on forgiveness, because it is a never-ending practice that is essential to the life of the church.” (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4, p. 69)

With this difficult word about forgiving seventy-seven times, Jesus also tells his disciples a parable in hopes that they will not forget his point. A king called in one of his slaves to pay off a debt of ten thousand talents. Now one talent was more than a year’s worth of wages for the average person, so this debt was astoundingly large and truly impossible to pay off. The slave asked the king for more time to make good on what he owed, but the king went a step further than the slave asked and forgave the debt entirely! As the slave made his way out of the king’s chamber, he saw another slave who owed him a small debt, and rather than showing any of the grace that his king had shown him, the slave had the debtor thrown into prison until the debt was paid. The king got word of this and called the slave back in to account for his actions. While the slave had forgotten how the king had treated him when he demanded immediate payment from his debtor, the king had not forgotten. The forgiveness offered the slave was taken back and the debt reinstated immediately – and the slave put into prison until he could pay back the insurmountable amount.

We may say, “Forgive and forget,” but Jesus clearly has something else in mind here. The king in the parable grants forgiveness with great generosity, forgiving a debt that could never be paid, but when the slave forgets and the king remembers, Jesus makes it clear that generosity and grace are never to be forgotten.

Just as we cannot forget the events of September 11, 2001, we cannot forget the gracious and generous forgiveness that Jesus describes and demands here. As we remember the indescribable horror of that day ten years ago, we also must remember that the perpetrators of these things are a tiny minority amidst millions of women and men who share our humanity and our faithfulness even as its expression might look a little different. As we remember the sights and sounds and smells that followed 9/11 – the overwhelming sight of watching two planes crash into two iconic skyscrapers and then those towers collapse to the ground, the sounds of mourning from so many whose loved ones were killed by such violence and evil, the smell of burning tires and unsettled souls, as one writer so aptly put it,  that stuck with you long after you left Lower Manhattan for months after the attacks – we also must remember that Jesus offers us a new and different attitude in the face of unspeakable horror. As we remember the stories of fear and hope shared by our friends and neighbors, we also must remember that hope will triumph over fear and grace will always reign supreme because of the forgiveness of Jesus Christ.

In the light of September 11, 2001, I don’t think it is so important for us to completely forgive those who perpetrated such horror upon our city, our nation, and our world, but I think there is some part of forgiveness that we must offer for our own sake because of who we are in Jesus Christ. As commentator Charlotte Dudley Cleghorn puts it,

Forgiveness means to release, to let go of the other. Forgiveness is not denying our hurt…. Forgiveness is a possibility only when we acknowledge the negative impact of another person’s actions or attitudes in our lives…. (Feasting on the Word, p. 70)

It is time for us – us as individuals, us as New York City, us as the United States of America, us as the world God so loves – to remember some part of this forgiveness again, to begin letting go of the horrors of this day a bit, to start viewing this difficult day through new and different eyes, to sort out how we can live in a way that stops the cycle of violence once and for all.

I think we are ready for this move, and we want it to happen, but somehow our individual readiness never quite translates into real change in the broader society. We are ready to put the cycle of revenge and oneupsmanship behind us, but not at the expense of our own preferences and safety. We are ready to bring an end to the culture of war and violence, but only once our side has won without compromise. We are ready to treat everyone as equals and put an end to abuse and torture, but not if it means that someone doesn’t get the punishment that we think they are due. We are ready to give up the fear that the attacks of 9/11 brought upon us, but not if we have to risk even the slightest minimal threat to our apparent safety.

But even if we are not fully ready for all these things, we can still remember and never forget the horrific events of ten years ago without letting them define us forever, and perhaps that is what we really need. That is what forgiveness is all about.

Charlotte Dudley Cleghorn relates a story told by Rabbi Harold Kushner:

A woman in my congregation comes to see me. She is a single mother, divorced, working to support herself and three young children. She says to me, “Since my husband walked out on us, every month is a struggle to pay our bills. I have to tell my kids we have no money to go to the movies, while he’s living it up with his new wife in another state. How can you tell me to forgive him?”

I answer her, “I’m not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable. It wasn’t; it was mean and selfish. I’m asking you to to forgive because he doesn’t deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter angry woman. I’d like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of it physically, but you keep holding on to him. You’re not hurting him by holding on to that resentment, but you’re hurting yourself.” (“Letting Go of the Role of Victim,” Spirituality and Health, Winter 1999, 34. Quoted in Feasting on the Word, p. 72.)

May the extravagant, endless, incredible forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ inspire us this day and always so that we might be free from all that weighs us down, so that we can be empowered to remember and never forget what we will and should always carry with us, and so that we can live in the fullness of new life we have in Jesus Christ here and in the world to come, forgiving and never forgetting.

Amen.

a sermon on Matthew 18:21-35 for the twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
to be preached on September 11, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Where were you? Where were you on that clear and beautiful September morning eleven years ago today? September 11, 2001, is one of those days that we cannot forget where we were or what we were doing, especially if we were in or around New York City. Take a moment, as if you have not done it already today, and remember where you were when you first heard or knew about the strange and horrific attacks on the World Trade Center.

Those moments are times that we truly cannot forget. For the last ten years, people have been crying out, “Never forget” – never forget the horror of nearly three thousand people dying at the hands of a carefully coordinated terrorist attack on American soil; never forget the faithful service of thousands of women and men working as police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders to bring thousands of others to safety; never forget the worldwide sense of outrage at these incredible things that united us as we sought to figure out what to make of this unspeakable tragedy; never forget the stories of fear and hope from friends and neighbors and acquaintances all around us that made us cry and made us laugh and everything in between.

Memory like this stands at the center of our gospel reading today from Matthew. This reading that centers on forgiveness is difficult to stomach on any day, but the memories we bring with us here today don’t make it any easier. Even after ten years, it is really hard to broach the subject of forgiveness around the attacks we remember today, for the pain and hurt and terror are still very, very raw for us. However, while this reading seems to center on forgiveness, I believe it also has something important to say about forgetfulness too – it also says “never forget.” We’ve twisted our understandings of forgiveness into the trite and easy saying, “Forgive and forget,” but that’s not at all what Jesus says here – in fact, he almost seems to to say the exact opposite: “Forgive and never forget.”

Peter starts things off, following up on Jesus’ words that immediately precede this passage, that we heard last week, about how to deal with wrongdoing in the community of faith. Clearly a bit confused and concerned about Jesus’ call to forgive, Peter asks him directly, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus, ever the generous interpreter, responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times,” not putting a limit on this forgiveness and suggesting that Peter add ten extra row to his spreadsheet that tracks the forgiveness of his friends but instead insisting that there is no limit to the kind of forgiveness that he makes possible and saying nothing whatsoever about the level of forgetfulness that must be involved in forgiveness.

As usual, when the disciples got confused and needed some clarity, Jesus tells them a parable in hopes that they will not forget his point. A king called in one of his slaves to pay off a debt of ten thousand talents. Now a talent was more than a year’s worth of wages for the average person, so this debt was astoundingly large and truly impossible to pay off. The slave asked the king for more time to make good on what he owed, but the king went a step further than even the slave asked – he forgave the debt entirely! As the slave made his way out, though, he saw another slave who owed him a much smaller debt, and rather than showing any of the grace that his king showed him, he had the debtor thrown into prison until the debt was paid. The king got wind of this and called the slave back in to account for his actions. While the slave forgot how the king had treated him when he demanded immediate payment from his debtor, the king had not forgotten. The forgiveness offered the slave was taken back and the debt reinstated immediately – and the slave himself put into prison until he could pay back the insurmountable amount.

We may say, “Forgive and forget,” but Jesus clearly has something else in mind here. The king in the parable grants forgiveness with great generosity, forgiving a debt that could never be paid, but that generosity and grace are never to be forgotten. As commentator Charles Campbell notes, “…there can be no limit on forgiveness, because it is a never-ending practice that is essential to the life of the church.” (Feasting on the Word, p. 69) Just as we cannot forget the events of September 11, 2001, we cannot forget the gracious and generous forgiveness that Jesus describes and demands here. As we remember the indescribable horror of that day ten years ago, we also must remember that the perpetrators of these things are a tiny minority amidst millions of women and men who share our humanity and our faithfulness. As we remember the sights and sounds and smells that followed 9/11, the overwhelming sight of watching a plane crash into an iconic skyscraper, the sounds of mourning of so many whose loved ones were killed by such violence and hurt, the smell of burning tires and unsettled souls, as one writer so aptly put it, that stuck with you long after you left Lower Manhattan for months after the attacks, we also must remember that Jesus offers us a new and different attitude in the face of unspeakable horror. As we remember the stories of fear and hope shared by our friends and neighbors, we also must remember that hope will triumph over fear and that grace will reign supreme always because of the forgiveness of Jesus Christ.

In the light of September 11, 2001, I don’t think we have to completely forgive those who perpetrated such horror upon our city, our nation, and our world, but I think there is some part of forgiveness that we must offer because of who we are in Jesus Christ. As commentator Charlotte Dudley Cleghorn puts it, “Forgiveness means to release, to let go of the other. Forgiveness is not denying our hurt…. Forgiveness is a possibility only when we acknowledge the negative impact of another person’s actions or attitudes in our lives…” (Feasting on the Word, p. 70)

It is time for us – us as individuals, us as New York City, us as the United States of America, us as the world God so loves – to remember some part of this forgiveness again, to begin letting go of the horrors of this day a bit, to start viewing this difficult day through new and different eyes, to sort out how we can live in a way that stops the cycle of violence that emerged from these horrors once and for all. I think we are ready for this move, and we want it to happen, but somehow our individual readiness never quite translates into real change in the broader society.

We are ready to put the cycle of revenge and oneupsmanship behind us, but not at the expense of our own preferences. We are ready to bring an end to the culture of war and violence, but only once our side has won without compromise. We are ready to treat everyone as equals and put an end to abuse and torture, but not if it means that someone doesn’t get the punishment that we think they are due. We are ready to give up the fear that the attacks of 9/11 brought upon us, but not at the expense of risking even the slightest minimal chance of apparent safety. But we can still remember and never forget the horrific events of ten years ago without letting them define us forever, and perhaps that is what we really need.

Charlotte Dudley Cleghorn relates a story told by Rabbi Harold Kushner:

A woman in my congregation comes to see me. She is a single mother, divorced, working to support herself and three young children. She says to me, ‘Since my husband walked out on us, every month is a struggle to pay our bills. I have to tell my kids we have no money to go to the movies, while he’s living it up with his new wife in another state. How can you tell me to forgive him?’ I answer her, ‘I’m not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable. It wasn’t; it was mean and selfish. I’m asking you to to forgive because he doesn’t deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter angry woman. I’d like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of it physically, but you keep holding on to him. You’re not hurting him by holding on to that resentment, but you’re hurting yourself.’ (“Letting Go of the Role of Victim,” Spirituality and Health, Winter 1999, p. 34. Quoted in Feasting on the Word, p. 72.

May the extravagant, endless, incredible forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ inspire us this day and always so that we might be free from all that weighs us down, that we can be empowered to remember and never forget what we will always carry with us, and that we can live in the fullness of new life we have in Jesus Christ here and in the world to come, forgiving and never forgetting. Amen.

Six years ago last Sunday, I stood in front of a worship service down in Oxford, Mississippi, and answered yes to nine questions before becoming a minister. One of them is incredibly beautiful and almost deceptively simple:

Will you seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?

Many of you who have been ordained as elders and deacons here have answered that same question, and I think it really describes the kind of attitude we are to bring to service in the church.

This week, as Lisa and I were working on outlining, writing, and editing a couple of documents that are required by recent changes to the Book of Order, we found a strange variation on this great question. One of the checklists of the things that needed to be included in our new document asked if we were doing whatever task with “energy, intelligence, and imagination” – but not love. Who decided that we could do anything without love? Obviously the authors of this checklist had forgotten the great wisdom of the Beatles:

I’m not sure that the apostle Paul would completely agree with Ringo, George, John, and Paul, but love sure seems to be all we need based on the portion of the letter to the Romans we read this morning. Here Paul brackets many important commandments by summing them up in the single action word “love.”

Owe no one anything, except to love one another.

The one who loves has fulfilled the law.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Love does no wrong to a neighbor.

Love is the fulfilling of the law.

For Paul, love is the center of the way of life for those who follow Jesus – it shapes each and every day as we try to make our lives more and more like the way of life that God intends, as we set aside the old ways that leave us in darkness and take up a new way that brings us the full way of life and light in Christ. That love is what we signify today as we bring one of our children for the Sacrament of Baptism – the love of God that goes before us, beside us, behind us, in us, and through us to show us the way that God intends so that she might know and grow into the light of new life as the new day nears.

For Paul, love sure seems to be all that we need, but as usual, Jesus gives us a dose of reality. In our other reading this morning from the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus talks about what to do when love isn’t quite so present and people do wrong against one another.

It’s a pretty simple process that he proposes. First, directly confront the person who has done you wrong in private. If that works, great – you’re done. If that doesn’t work, go back and take one or two others with you so that no one is alone. If the other person still refuses to come clean about what he or she did wrong, bring the issue to the gathered community. And if that still doesn’t work, send the offender on his or her way. Jesus even says to treat the unrepentant “as a Gentile and a tax collector” – but he himself was notorious for welcoming Gentiles and tax collectors and sinners of every sort into his presence when no one else would!

Jesus continued by suggesting that the disciples had a great deal of power and authority to bind and loose things on earth as in heaven and to make things happen by simply agreeing with one another. He concludes these instructions with a well-known saying that gets used pretty often around small churches like ours: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

But the focus here is less on making a small group of the faithful feel comfortable and more on recognizing the importance of community, for throughout this section Jesus makes it clear that we need one another. We need others to correct us in the ways of love when we go astray. We need others so that we can learn from one another’s right actions and mistakes. And we need one another so that we can see Jesus in our midst, for we can’t see Jesus in the mirror, but we can see Jesus in one another. As pastor Jin Kim puts it, “We are not free from each other; we are free in each other.” (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4, p. 48)

And so when we put it all together it is in one another that we see the love that we so desperately need, the love that is all we need – not just a romantic love that fulfills a deep carnal desire, not just some halfhearted love that takes and takes and does not give anything back, not just a love that will make sense one day – but when we are at our best we see in one another the love that we see in Jesus Christ – a love that does no wrong, a love that offers honest and real and direct confrontation when things go awry, a love that shines light into the darkness of the world, a love that becomes clear whenever and wherever we gather faithfully as the community of those who love and serve and follow Jesus Christ.

We show that love today in the sign and seal of this water. We show that love whenever and wherever two or three or thirty or forty gather. And we show that love each and every day in our lives in the world, living out the love we have seen in Jesus Christ and in one another as we fulfill the law and love our neighbors near and far with energy, intelligence, imagination, and, yes, love.

May God give us all the love we need – and continue to show us all the love we have seen in Jesus Christ in and through one another – so that we might never leave out love until all things are made new.

Lord, come quickly!

Amen.

Back in Sunday school, I learned a lot of fun and interesting stories about Jesus healing the sick, but I don’t think we ever studied today’s gospel reading from Matthew. In all those great stories from my childhood, Jesus seemed to welcome anyone and everyone who needed to be healed. He was glad when some folks cut a hole in the roof and lowered down a man on a cot to get through the crowd that had mobbed the house. He stopped everything to offer healing when an unclean woman in the crowd crept up to him and touched his cloak, even though it meant that a more powerful man who sought healing for his daughter would see his daughter die during the delay before Jesus arrived at his house. Jesus even stopped on the side of the road to heal a blind man who didn’t even ask for it.

The stories of Sunday school stuck with me to this day. Over and over again, Jesus reached out to unexpected people who were simply in his path and seemed to be in need to offer them his healing power and touch and to invite them to be a part of the new way of life he was bringing into the world.

So amidst all these wonderful stories I learned in Sunday school, today’s reading sounds quite different, making me wonder if we’re even talking about the same Jesus. Here, when a Canaanite woman meets Jesus and asks him to heal her daughter, he ignores her. It’s almost like he was walking the sidewalks of New York City or something – he doesn’t even acknowledge her and keeps on walking! But she keeps following him and pestering the disciples, so much so that they come and ask Jesus to do something about her: “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” Jesus encourages their narrow-mindedness, remarking loudly in hopes that the woman would hear, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Still, this Gentile woman does not leave them alone. She finally throws herself at the feet of Jesus, echoing the cries of the psalms: “Lord, help me.” But Jesus has nothing to do with her and instead offers her what sounds to me like an insult to her and her status: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

But this persistent woman just doesn’t give up. She spars with Jesus one more time: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Jesus gives in. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And the woman’s daughter is healed instantly.

It makes sense to me why we don’t teach this story in Sunday school – Jesus doesn’t look all that good here. In my view, he comes off as something close to a real jerk. First, Jesus tries to completely ignore someone in need who seeks him out. While countless others have been welcomed to his healing grace, and some have even received it without asking for it or giving permission, here Jesus chooses not to care about the woman. He seems to be too busy – the healer is not in, so too bad if you showed up today expecting something from him. That doesn’t seem to be the norm for Jesus, but it’s what this story makes clear.

But if that’s not enough, Jesus picks and chooses who he will help here based on race and culture and maybe gender too. This woman is not an Israelite, so she’s just not important enough to demand his attention today. But Jesus has healed Gentiles before, so if you ask me, Jesus is just being mean.

And at least to my ears, Jesus seems incredibly disrespectful. You just don’t respond to someone’s plea for help by suggesting that helping her would be like throwing good food to the dogs. For the savior of the whole world to behave in this way toward a woman who just wanted her daughter to be well just doesn’t seem right.

Too often, we try to explain all this away. Several commentators on this story suggest that Jesus is just trying to keep focused on his main mission that he declared from the very beginning – a ministry in and among and toward the people of Israel, a grounding that then gives him the ability to reach beyond this initial group and do something more. Other commentators insist that this story would mean something different to its first hearers, that they wouldn’t be offended by Jesus calling this woman a dog or that his seeming insult to our ears was not quite that bad after all.

But even considering all this, even if there are good theological and narrative reasons for Jesus’ actions in this story, I’m not entirely comfortable with a savior who lives out his mission first by ignoring someone crying out in need and then by comparing her to a dog. Instead, I think our last hymn speaks more truthfully about the way God in Christ responds to the cry of the poor and needy:

Heaven shall not wait for the poor to lose their patience…
Jesus is Lord; he has championed the unwanted;
in him injustice confronts its timely end.

– John L. Bell and Graham Maule

But even if this image of a savior is problematic for us, even if we don’t see Jesus acting at his best here, I think we can still get a little hope from Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman. Here we get a little glimpse of a very human Jesus who is a little more like us. Here Jesus is so focused on the big picture that even he misses out on the small details that matter too. Here Jesus responds to the pressures of his friends and falls short of the kind of interaction with this woman even he would expect. Here Jesus is open to being challenged and called out to embrace new and different perspectives even by people who he tried to shoo off. And here Jesus goes beyond his original assumptions to think about things differently when the old way doesn’t show the fullness of life for all people.

Now this doesn’t mean that we have to like the Jesus we hear about today, and we don’t have to start teaching about him in Sunday school, either, but nonetheless he remains one and the same savior. He remains fully human and fully God. He responds to our pleas for help whether it is the first time or the hundredth time. He heals our every ill and makes us whole as only he can do. He offers up his life on our behalf in his death, and he opens up a new way of hope for us today and every day in his resurrection.

And it is this same Jesus who calls us out of his own experience not to act as he did with this Canaanite woman but to deal generously with all those in need, to embody compassion and hope in every encounter, to share from our abundance and give up our privilege of place and power, to show the new life we have in Christ as we respond to the need of the world, and to join in God’s work of remaking even this world, acting “in our present imperfection” to show that Jesus is Lord even now and steps in to transform all things into the new creation that God intends.

So may we for once not act as Jesus does but instead show the fullness of his love and compassion for all people from the very beginning and cry out in faith and action until all things are made new through the new life we have in him.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

It was not a good night for the disciples to be out on the lake alone. They were expert boaters, many of them – after all, Jesus had called several of them to put aside their nets while fishing – but in this storm, they needed every set of hands they could get, including Jesus. But on this night, Jesus had sent them on ahead to the other side of the lake, planning to meet up with them the next morning after a little private retreat for prayer on the mountain, leaving them alone to struggle against the elements on the lake. The wind was against them, the waves were strong from the storm, the boat was taking a beating, and everything looked bleak. An extra set of hands would have helped, not to mention Jesus’ generally calming presence, but when they called out for him, he wasn’t even on the boat but rather off on his own praying.

Does all this sound familiar? I’m not talking about how this was the first text I ever preached on for the congregation here exactly six years ago today – I’m talking about how it sure seems pretty common for us to suffer through similar storms. The storms of life are rough – the waves batter us, the wind pushes us farther out from the land that we know, and sky keeps getting darker and darker. But like the disciples we could probably handle things if it were just the storms battering us. We not only face the wind and the waves – we seem to be so alone as we face them. Right when we need help the most, people don’t seem to show up. When times are tough, no one answers the phone or responds to our emails. Just when we are looking to others to fill in some of the gaps, we find that they are off on vacation or taking care of something that they have deemed more important or even off praying!

In the middle of the storm, just when things seemed to be at their worst, Jesus finished his time of prayer and decided to meet up with the disciples on the boat. He took the easiest and simplest route to join them – he walked out to the boat on the lake. This did absolutely nothing to ease the disciples’ fears and uncertainties amidst the storm – in fact, they just freaked out all the more because it just isn’t normal to see a man walking on water! When he saw all this, Jesus tried to calm their fears with simple words: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Still, Peter needed more proof that it was actually him, so he asked Jesus to have him come out on the water to meet him. So at Jesus’ instruction, Peter got out of the boat and started walking on the water – the water that only minutes before had been the source of all their fear and uncertainty was now supporting Peter’s full weight, and he had no reason to be afraid. But then he realized what was going on. He thought about exactly what was happening. This lifelong fisherman was walking on water in the middle of a storm that had him and his friends scared to death, and the wind and the waves finally overwhelmed his sense of Jesus’ presence. Peter began to sink and cried out to Jesus, “Lord, save me!” Jesus scooped him up like a divine lifeguard, then chided him for losing his footing: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Then as Jesus got into the boat with Peter, the wind and the waves calmed down, and they could do nothing but watch in amazement and worship Jesus because of his amazing signs and wonders beyond their understanding.

Just as happened with the disciples, Jesus often shows up unexpectedly in the midst of the storms of our lives, too. When things get weird and uncertain, something happens to ease our minds and open our hearts to a new way. When need a way out of a time that just seems to be getting worse and worse, something or someone unexpected shows up to change it all for the better. When the wind and the waves batter us and we just need a break, an unexpected visitor comes to calm things down a bit – even if we end up a bit scared of it all at first. But we also get overconfident and overzealous sometimes, wanting to show off what we have learned, hoping to get assurance that this new way that God opens for us will be safe and good and permanent, desiring to feel God’s presence a little more closely than is healthy for us. We end up back out amidst the wind and the waves again, feeling unsafe and uncertain all the more, questioning and doubting what we were up to in the first place, sinking amidst the storms of life, looking for God’s comfort and presence all over again. Still Jesus picks us up and helps us into the boat – then joins us there himself. We might get asked a little about what we were thinking, but that’s only out of the greatest imaginable love – not a critical, dismissive question rooted in fearfulness but an honest query of wonder about how we could ever doubt God’s amazing care and love for us.

So just when the disciples least expected it – and just when they needed it most – Jesus showed up, transforming their uncertainty into hope, their fear into new life, their doubt into confidence, and their despair into joy. May Jesus show up for us, too, today and always. Amen.

The struggle and pain of our world seem to weigh so heavily upon us these days. It’s not just the heat and humidity that weigh down our spirits – the seemingly endless debates in Washington where it’s almost as if each side chooses not to budge on exactly the things where the other side will also not move, the economy that just keeps sagging in our lives even though almost all of the traditional measures say that we emerged from recession over a year ago, wars continuing to injure and kill the bodies and spirits of armed forces and civilians everywhere and yet have no real end in sight, and Friday’s horrific terrorist attacks in Oslo, Norway, with dozens dead and injured in senseless and unthinkable violence. Beyond these things in our world, many of us have things that weigh us down in our own lives – the ordinary frustrations of daily life only complicated recently by the dreadful and dangerous heat of the last few days, the illness and hurt that strike us and those we know and love all too often, and the death of our friends and loved ones, anticipated or not, that always makes our spirits sink a little because we have one less companion fully present with us on the journey.

So in moments like these, unintentionally but certainly providentially, the lectionary leads us to these familiar verses from Romans today. Paul knew the kind of pain and sorrow and suffering that we feel in these days, and I think he expected his readers to know it well, too. So he offered these incredible words of comfort and confidence in times of uncertainty to all who need hope for God’s presence. I think it’s worth hearing these words again, this time in the fresh translation of the Common English Bible that I hope we’ll be using more often in worship in the months ahead:

In the same way, the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don’t know what we should pray, but the Spirit itself pleads our case with unexpressed groans. The one who searches hearts knows how the Spirit thinks, because it pleads for the saints, consistent with God’s will.

We know that God works all things together for good for the ones who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose. We know this because God knew them in advance, and he decided in advance that they would be conformed to the image of his Son. That way his Son would be the first of many brothers and sisters. Those whom he called, he also made righteous. Those whom he made righteous, he also glorified.

So what are we going to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. Won’t he also freely give us all things with him?

Who will bring a charge against God’s elect people? It is God who acquits them. Who is going to convict them? It is Christ Jesus who died, even more, who was raised, and who also is at God’s right side. It is Christ Jesus who also pleads our case for us.

Who will separate us from Christ’s love? Will we be separated by trouble, or distress, or harassment, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘We are being put to death all day long for your sake. We are treated like sheep for slaughter.’

But in all these things we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us. I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created [– nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord.]

There’s so much here for those who are enduring the troubles of the world, so much here for all the suffering and pain of our time, so much here for the things that divide us and seem to keep us separated from one another, so much here for anything and everything that makes us want to cry out to God in wonder and sorrow and lament.

Somehow in these simple words Paul manages to pull together the comfort and hope of the Christian faith – the amazement that the Spirit knows our prayers before we can even imagine them or voice anything, the comfort that comes in knowing that God’s relationship with us is so important that God chose us long before we could even think of choosing God, the blessed hope that God’s action for us in Jesus Christ overshadows everything else in all the world and is the seal of so many more promises, the confidence that the ultimate judge is our great redeemer Jesus Christ himself, and the wonder that in life and in death, wherever we are, wherever we have been, and wherever we go, we cannot and will not be separated from God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Whenever we feel distant from God, disconnected from our sisters and brothers, lost in the uncertainty of our lives and our world, these words give us confidence and hope that even now God is transforming the pain and suffering of our lives into something far greater.

But these words seem empty sometimes, too. When the oppressive heat just doesn’t stop and we can’t cool off anymore, Paul’s words fall flat. When our political leaders just can’t seem to sort out how to work together to lead our nation through potential crisis, Paul doesn’t have much to say. And when innocent women, men, and children are bombed and shot by terrorists who claim that their actions are in the name of Christ and that God would have it no other way, these words offer us little comfort.

But then we hear that last promise again: nothing, not even our doubts, not even our emptiness, can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ. Nothing – not the struggles of illness or death, not the pain or sorrow of life and living, not the frustrations of a fractured political system, not oppressive heat and humidity, not the economy that just doesn’t seem to be able to fully bounce back, not the things of the everyday that get us down, not even the horrible misuse of the name of Christ that gives us confidence and hope. Nothing can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord.

These are the ultimate words of confidence and hope, words that assure us of everything we need to know, words that seal the promises of God in Jesus Christ upon our hearts. Anglican theologian N.T. Wright pulls it all together:

This love of God calls across the dark intervals of meaning, reaches into the depths of human despair, embraces those who live in the shadow of death or the overbright light of present life, challenges the rulers of the world and shows them up as a sham, looks at the present with clear faith and the future with sure hope, overpowers all powers that might get in the way, fills the outer dimensions of the cosmos, and declares to the world that God is God, that Jesus the Messiah is the world’s true Lord, and that in him love has won the victory. This powerful, overmastering love grasps Paul, and sustains him in his praying, his preaching, his journeying, his writing, his pastoring, and his suffering, with the strong sense of the presence of the God who had loved him from the beginning and had put that love into action in Jesus. (N.T. Wright, “Commentary on Romans,” The New Interpreters’ Bible)

So may the wonder of this love sustain us amidst all the heat and humidity, all the hurt and horror, all the hopes and hitches of our lives, so that we might always live to God’s praise and show all the world that nothing can separate any of us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

I’m not a great gardener, but I’m as good as anyone at raising weeds. The backyard at the manse, as some of you know, is  incredibly difficult to keep clear of weeds. There’s a lot of planting space and an older brick patio with plenty of cracks for weeds to sneak through. For a couple years, I just let the weeds take over everything – it was a nice green space, but soon the thorny bushes had nearly suffocated the more beautiful azaleas and other plantings. Thanks to the special efforts of some dedicated church members and my parents, the backyard at the manse is no longer overrun with weeds, although even continuous removal and treatment with the nastiest chemicals isn’t enough to keep the weeds away for any length of time!

Jesus’ parable this morning, as told in the gospel according to Matthew, deals with weeds, so I feel right at home. However, Jesus puts this parable in the midst of a series of stories about the kingdom of heaven and uses these pesky plants to talk about how God’s new way of being will take hold in the world.

So here Jesus tells of a farmer who sowed good seed in his field only to have an enemy come along at night and plant weeds alongside his wheat. When all the seeds – good and bad – sprouted, the damage was apparent, and the farmworkers reported the mess to the farmer. He knew right away that someone had tried to sabotage his crop, thinking that he would rip up the whole field and lose everything for the season. But instead this wise farmer instructed his workers to let the weeds grow alongside the wheat and leave everything to be sorted out at harvest time, the weeds into bundles for burning and the wheat into the barn.

Jesus left the story there, but his disciples were a little confused, so when his message to the crowd was over, they asked him to explain this parable to them. Jesus made it clear again to his disciples that this parable was all about the kingdom of heaven. The Son of Man – seemingly Jesus himself – sowed the good seeds in the world, and the children of the kingdom of heaven were the good seeds that he planted. The weeds were the children of the evil one, planted by the evil one himself. The harvest came at the end of the age, and “just as the weeds [were] collected and burned up with fire, so… the angels will collect out of [the] kingdom [of heaven] all causes of sin and all evildoers… and throw them into the furnace of fire.” In the midst of all this, though, “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom” of God.

A few years ago, I would have said that this treatment of the weeds was a little harsh – but after dealing with those pesky things in the backyard at the manse, I’m a little less sympathetic. Weeds are just insidious plants. You pull them up, they keep coming back. You kill them with some chemical and another one pops up two inches away. You think you have them beat, then another stalk emerges from out of nowhere. You try anything and everything to get rid of them, and somehow they manage to survive. But the reality is that weeds have their advantages, too. Weeds, like any other plant, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – a very important thing in this day and age of global warming. Weeds can cover up bare spots and add a touch of green where there was none before. Some flowering weeds add color and interest to an otherwise boring palette of greens, and weeds like dandelions can even be healthy and good food for us to eat. And many weeds keep growing in times of drought, requiring much less water than the carefully-maintained green yards that have become the norm. But when dealing with those weeds in the backyard at the manse – and with the weeds Jesus describes here – it’s tough to see the good in them. As far as I’m concerned, you can burn those up in the fire anytime you want to!

Still, I think there has to be something more to this parable than just a basic and standard condemnation of the plants and people that God doesn’t seem to approve of or a simple statement of who is in and who is out in the world to come. Maybe this parable can give us some insights into this world just as much as it can tell us about the kingdom of heaven. After all, Jesus insisted over and over that the kingdom was not just coming some day soon but was rather being revealed in this world in and through his life and living and so also in and through the continuing faithful work of those who followed him. The farmer may not have just meant his crops for the world to come – maybe what was growing in the field mattered even before the harvest, too. Maybe something was growing there that even he didn’t fully understand. He told his servants not to pull up the weeds until the time of the harvest not just because it’s hard not to disturb the wheat when you pull the weeds but also because you can’t always tell whether something will be wheat or weed until it is harvest time. You can’t always know immediately if some strange, unknown stalk might be the beginning of something unusual and new. You can’t always sort out the good from the bad right away but sometimes need to figure it out in time.

Preacher Ted Wardlaw suggests that this strange delay on the farmer’s part might be purposeful and good, reflecting that “the God who is glimpsed in this parable models for us an infinite patience that frees us to get on with the crucial business of loving, or at least living with, each other.” Maybe even the not-so-good weeds around us can be helpful and beneficial to the good wheat, too! (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 3, p. 264) This doesn’t mean that the weeds won’t be held to account when the time comes, but it does remind us that God’s judgment and redemption will come – but in God’s own time and with God’s own purpose, not ours. Again, Ted Wardlaw gives this more beautiful words than I can: “Christians believe that, for the sake of this hurting and impatient world, and through Jesus Christ our Lord, God’s realm will at last be completed and revealed in all its fullness. Meanwhile, this realm is thriving in us, around us, and even, miraculously, sometimes through us; and God is pleased to let all of it ‘grow together until the harvest’ (v. 30).” (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 3, p. 264-266)

I can speak from experience to say that this approach of letting the weeds and the wheat grow together doesn’t work all that well sometimes, particularly in the backyard at the manse, but I think there is nonetheless some wisdom here for us. We aren’t the ones to decide what gets saved and what does not – we must leave that choice up to God. We don’t have to jump in so quickly to condemn the weeds of our world and potentially destroy the good wheat along the way – God will sort things out when the time is right. And we can even see things growing unexpectedly in the fields of God’s love – we can expect nothing less of our amazing and surprising God.

So may we have wisdom and hope to see the weeds and the wheat in our midst; may we have trust in God the master farmer to grow a harvest enough for all; and may we have love and grace to look for new expressions of wheat even among the weeds as we await the fullness of the kingdom of heaven now and in the world to come. Lord, come quickly! Amen.