Advent 2A - "How Are the Roads?"

 Saint Matthew 3:1-12

Since last Saturday the question that has been on most people’s lips is: “How Are The Roads?”

People in the south or warmer climates whose roads are not plagued with potholes from the severe expansion and contraction of winter freezes and summer’s scorching heat don’t ask those kinds of questions.  

I was bumping along with a friend from Virginia one time over pothole scared pavement with traffic doing the usual slalom run to avoid major suspension damage to the car when he said to me: “If a road was this bad back home, it would be closed.”   

I just stared at him while I continued to drive on bravely turning the steering wheel this way and that like they do in the movies.

But we all know he is right because we have heard the dreaded reports that the roads are “snow packed and hazardous” and if we were foolish enough to venture out anyway, we have arrived at our destination with our hands permanently cramped from clutching the wheel in a vicelike grip and our eyes as big as our face. 

I could go on with what we mean when we ask, how are the roads.  Are the plows out? Have they been salted? Are they icy? What about black ice?  Sleet? Freezing rain? Fog? Any reports of those?  The terrors are almost too numerous to consider.

But living in Chicago, how are the roads, is a question applicable to any season.  How much traffic is there with the construction?  Did they ever finish the bridge that was demolished two years ago and has yet to be rebuilt? 

There is a reason that every news station has a traffic helicopter and several traffic reporters to answer the question, how are the roads, before we’ve even downed our first cup of coffee.

About this time of year there is a human speed bump on our road to Christmas.  His name is John the Baptist and try as we might there is pretty much no way to get around him.  All we can do is slam on the breaks and wait for the couple of Sunday’s that he shows up in our readings to pass.

How is the road this morning?  Well, to tell you the truth, there is some wild guy standing in the middle and, as baffling as it seems, John’s detour is the only way we have to the swaddling clothes, angel's wings, and fleecy lambs we hold dear each December.  As baffling as it may seem, the holy drama of the season depends on the disheveled baptizer’s opening act.

Truth be told, I tend to avoid guys like John.  

People who introduce themselves as bearing a message from God do not commend themselves to us easily. If we do turn an ear to them out of curiosity, or perhaps out of an amused and sometimes horrified fascination, they tend to wear out their welcome quickly.1

 Yet we are told.  “People from Jerusalem and from all over the Jordan Valley, and, in fact, from every section of Judea went out to the wilderness to hear him preach.”2

As Dr. Fred Craddock said of him once in a sermon

Crowds came from everywhere ... they came from the towns and from Jerusalem.  Plows were left in the furrows, bread was left in the oven, shops were left unattended, school was let out early because the crowds were moving out into the desert to hear this extraordinary preacher.

I’m sure that many people who went were just curious, curious about the way he looked and the way he talked.3

 There must have been some kind of beauty to John the Baptist.  “I think a lot about his tone of voice.  I have always pictured him with a gravelly, loud voice, like one of those street preachers.”4

He is an unavoidable bump on our road to Christmas. 

And, as Dr. Tom Are, noted when he was the interim pastor at Fourth Presbyterian.  John the Baptist “comes with some anger issues.”

Dr. Are pointed out that in Matthew’s gospel the first words out of his mouth are, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”5

 Both Dr. Are and I can’t remember in all our years of preaching ever starting a sermon by calling our congregations a brood of vipers. We’ve thought about it but thinking and doing are two different matters.6

Anybody who has ever served as an interim can see a lot of our mission in John. Our job is to prepare the way for the one who is coming after us.  Our job is not to be a roadblock in his or her path but make the road less rough and the path straight. We have a lot in common with good old John the Baptist without, of course, we hope, the beheading part. Though that is always a risk when you remind people that their past is their past. 

It is a great deal like the disclaimer that all the television stock experts couch their predictions with. “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”  

John was less gentle.  He said in a paraphase:

It’s your life that must change, not your skin! And don’t think you can pull rank by claiming Abraham as father. Being a descendant of Abraham is neither here nor there. Descendants of Abraham are a dime a dozen. What counts is your life. Is it green and flourishing? Because if it’s deadwood, it goes on the fire.7

We’re not crazy about hearing that we really do need to change.  When someone talks about change or tries to bring about change, we don’t want to hear it.  Change makes us defensive.  

But, if we are open to it, a call to change can also help us say to ourselves. “Maybe I did do that wrong?”  “Maybe I have been listening to the wrong voices or maybe only just my own voice instead of those who might just know better?” Change can lead to growth and sometimes, if we are willing to change, it can lead to big growth.

John had a word for it and the word was repent!  This is more than just a bump in the road that has to be avoided.  This is even more than Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”.  We all remember the closing lines: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.” But we forget how Frost framed the options: “I stood ... And looked down one as far as I could ... Then took the other, just as fair.”8 Two equal options.  One road just as good as the other.

That is not the repentance neither John nor Jesus was talking about.  They are talking about a change so radical that we don’t even have a word for it in English.

Scholars, which means those who have better language skills than I do, tell us: “John is calling on the religious and political elite from Judea and Jerusalem to repent. The Greek word {for repent} metanoia literally means taking on a new mindset. It has the connotation of making an about-turn and changing course.”9

Looks like the road John and Jesus are on doesn’t contain just a speed bump but a big brick roadblock that is not asking, but demanding, that if we are to follow Jesus, we are going to have to completely change course.

It means that when we treat others we don’t do so as we may have done so in the past.  Once we’ve met Jesus and sincerely sought to follow him, we just can’t say with a shrug “not everybody is going to be happy at all times”, so what. While they may not be happy Jesus and John remind us that we are ever and always to treat others with respect.

That’s the only way we live out the Gospel.  That is the only we will ever be able to live into the peaceable world Isaiah was dreaming about.  Turning from the threadbare ways of business and the world and acting the way Jesus would have us act is not just taking another road but taking the right road.  

It’s the road that tells us, in another one of my life commandments, that people are more important than things.  That the lives and feelings of others are more important than getting the job done.  That it is not bulldozing over other people to get what we want to get accomplished, accomplished, but remembering that other people’s lives may be affected by what we are trying to do.

I don’t think that it is any accident that the Oxford University Press picked “rage-bate” as 2025's word of the year.  

The Oxford University Press defines "rage bait" as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.”

Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond.  The phrase is shorthand for online content that is intentionally meant to elicit anger. The term has tripled in usage over the last year, according to Oxford.10

It could be said of John the Baptist that he was pure rage bate.  “Brood of Vipers.” “Ax at the root of the tree” I’m sure his listeners heart rates increased when John thundered out this kind of stuff.

Again, as Dr. Craddock said of him, “He was no politician trying to make yes sound like no and no sound like yes. He said, ‘The judge is coming, and I’m here to serve subpoenas.’”11

But he didn’t leave us, like the cable tv pundits, to stew in our rage in order that we’ll come back the next day for more.  Why anybody would do that, I’ll never know.

He pointed us to Jesus who, if I understand him correctly, not only told us but showed us how life could be not just a little different but really different. 

We repent not as an indictment but so that we can clear our minds and imaginations to see the possibilities that have been put before us.

We repent in the belief that in Jesus we don’t have to be who we have always been.

We repent so that we can be the ones who stand tall in a world of smallness.

Maybe John is more than a speed bump or a snowstorm on our road to Bethlehem.  Maybe John isn’t even a detour offering us another road which is just the same as any other.

Maybe John is offering us a completely new direction for our lives, in the babe of Bethlehem, to be sure, but in the man of Galilee who, when he grew up showed us a new way, a better way.

How are the roads?  With Jesus they’ll be different and they may even be better.

________________

1. “Opening Act,” The Christian Century, November 29, 2003, https://www.christiancentury.org/opening-act?

2. St. Matthew 3:5. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible {Carol Stream:Tyndale House Publishers, 1971}]

3. Fred B. Craddock, Richard F. Ward, and Mike Graves, Craddock Stories (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001). 109-115.

4. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say Come December 7? Advent 2,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 2025, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

5. St. Matthew 3:7b. (NRSVue) [NRSVus=The New Revised Standard Version updated edition]

6. Tom Are, “The Metanoia Man.”  Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. 10 December 2023

7. St. Matthew 3:7–10.  (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE:Eugene H. Peterson, The Message {Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004}]

8.    Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken,” The Poetry Foundation, accessed December 5, 2025, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken.

9. Daniel Smith Christopher, “Matthew 3:1-12. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, 1 (Louisville: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2019): 31–33.

10. Melina Khan, “‘Rage Bait’ Is Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2025. What It Means.,” USA Today, December 1, 2025, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/01/rage-bait-oxford-word-of-the-year/87547277007/.

11.     Craddock, loc.cit.

Advent 1A - "Mainstream 'Peppers'"

Saint Matthew 24:36-44

Last October The Week magazine introduced its readers to a whole new, unexpected group of people who are stocking up on non-perishables in preparation for the end of the world.

Traditionally, “preppers”, as these folks are known, have been defined as people “who could survive independently for 30 days” and are usually “white, rural, conservative, male ... survivalists with basements full of firearms, Spam, and canned beans.” 

One prepper told a pastor I know that “when the end times come, I will need to have only two things ready to go: a motorcycle and a lot of cash!”1

The magazine reported that modern day preppers seem to need more that that. 

“Preppers are snapping up water filtration systems, hand-cranked radios, manually powered grain mills, and pepper spray and other self-defense tools. Costco sells the $100 Readywise Emergency Food Supply, a “curated” 150-serving bucket of freeze-dried and dehydrated foods.”2

That is nickel-and-dime stuff compared to what the new group of preppers are spending.  They are urban liberals who “cite climate change as their main driver and the fear that the government will be unable or unwilling to help, others worry that the U.S. could be engulfed by political violence. People understand “that the world as we knew it and counted on it is beginning to cease to be,” said Eric Shonkwiler, who writes the left-wing Prepper newsletter “When/If.”

Some people are spending big time.

California-based Vivos Group is leasing space in what it calls the world’s “largest survival shelter community,” 575 empty ex-Army concrete bunkers on South Dakota grasslands. In Kansas sits the Survival Condo, a former missile silo converted into a 15-story survival habitat with a movie theater, bar, swimming pool, rock-climbing wall, and units that start at $1.2 million. Then there’s Fortitude Ranch, a collection of eight compounds around the country founded by a retired U.S. Air Force colonel. Over 1,000 members have paid from about $2,000 (which gets you “shared bunk spaces”) to $41,000 to become members, plus annual dues up to $1,550. The compounds are stocked with solar panels, food and medicine, farm animals, and guard dogs. “It’s like the old saying goes,” said a retired CIA officer who has bought in: “When trouble is on the horizon, a wise man takes precautions.”3

But I think an even wiser man was the late comedian John Pinette who said of his relatives who were preppers:

“As far as the end of the world goes, I believe you’re prepped.  There is nothing you can do.”

“If I wake up, look out my window and say, ‘Oh, it’s doomsday.’  I turn off the light, and I go back to bed.  There is nothing to be done.”

“But my relatives, they say things like ‘We got about six months of water, some ramen noodles, and we got a lot of firearms.’

And I think to myself, ‘It’s a good thing you got those guns because after six months of nothing but ramen noodles and water, you’re going to want to use them.”

“And, they think their cellar is in a different universe.

They say, ‘You know we got a two-foot-thick door.’  And I look at them and think, ‘Well, I’m sure that will stop the 30-megaton nuclear blast.  I’m sure nothing will happen to you.  You’ll be safe.  You won’t be doomed like the rest of us poor suckers . . .  scraping for a tomato.’”

Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “All this talk in the Bible about the end-time is intellectually difficult and pastorally problematic.” The apocalyptic texts are ultimately supposed to be messages of hope, but if you focus on the long list of terrifying things — wars, earthquakes, famines, plagues, and the like — then it is hard to hear the hope.4

 For Saint Matthew’s original readers hope would have been hard to hear.  Reading his words in the last quarter of the first century thing looked pretty bleak for them. Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us:

Things had never been worse in Palestine. The chosen people were scattered, the Temple was destroyed, the promised land was a province of Rome, and there was no relief in sight. “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place,” Jesus said, but something had obviously gone wrong. Most of the generation that heard him say that had passed away, and the ones who were still alive had beards down to their knees. God’s alarm clock must not have gone off. Or had God forgotten?

With questions like that in mind, Matthew made sure to include Jesus’ disclaimer that even he did not know when the end would come. “No one knows,” Jesus said, “not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only”5

We don’t like the idea of not knowing. “This is a hard pill for us to swallow in an era of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and long-range forecasting.”  Not knowing what’s going to happen to us makes us anxious. 

I can’t begin to tell you how anxious Lowell and I were on Wednesday and Thursday while we were looking at the forecasts and trying to decide whether I should cut vacation short by a day so that I could be sure to be here on Sunday or take my chances that the snow would be light, flights would be unaffected, and I could stay through Saturday.   Clearly, we chose correctly.

We not only want to know flight schedules in iffy weather, we want to know not only what tomorrow may bring but the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that. That anxiety is especially present when we seem to have lost control of our lives to a universe that appears hostile or even to other people when plans they have made concerning our lives are unknown to us.

We want our lives to be neatly planned out so that we will know what to do.  We want to be able to make plans for our own futures. At the least want to know how many bags of ramen noodles we should buy thinking that if we have a six months' supply of those things in our cupboard, we will be less anxious.  But we won’t be. 

Even if we somehow knew with absolute certainty that the end of the world would come three weeks from next Thursday, we wouldn’t be less anxious.  If anything, we would be more anxious wondering what we should be doing between now and then.

However, as we continue on reading the words of Jesus, we’ll hear him tell us what we should be doing, and it is pretty mundane stuff. 

He describes people who are eating dinner and perhaps having a glass of wine afterwards. Couples preparing to get married. Men and women working at home or in their business.  Jesus is talking about people who wait for his coming not by building bomb shelters but living out their lives.

 And here is where the next images Jesus uses can seem scary and cause even greater anxiety.   Two men in the field and suddenly one is gone and the other is left behind.  Two women grinding at the mill, one is gone and the other is left.  And we think this is some kind of disappearing act.  One moment one person is there. The next moment, poof! Gone!

But it is not a matter of disappearing off the face of the earth and being caught up in the clouds — that was Jesus’ act not ours.  It is a matter of following Jesus and him only.

We owe our modern beliefs about something called “the rapture” for which some of those preppers  who are stocking up their shelves and loading up their guns in preparation for to “a renegade Anglican priest from Ireland named John Nelson Darby, who spent a large part of the 19th century preaching about that moment in time when Christ will return “the wicked will be destroyed in the final battle of Armageddon, and Christ will begin a 1,000-year reign on earth.”6

 You’ve heard this stuff from TV preachers. You may have seen or heard of the “Left Behind” series of books and movies.  You have probably even seen the bumper stickers: “I Break for the Rapture.” “Warning: In case of the rapture, the driver of this car will disappear.” 

Whenever I see one of those bumper stickers I can’t help but think of an opening scene from the classic program “Six feet Under” where a woman whose car is sporting one of those stickers is listening to a radio program where the host and hostess are telling her that she should be submissive to her husband no matter what is driving along and nodding her head.

Not far from her, two probably “high-as-a-kite” wise guys are driving a truck loaded with helium filled inflatable mannequins.  Laughing and not paying attention they almost hit a skateboarder.  Slamming on the breaks the netting holding the dolls in the back of the truck begins to come loose and the dolls begin to float skyward.

Seeing the dolls rising up through the air the woman mistakes them for people being raptured, angels being taken up into the sky.  She stops her car and, with eyes closed and arms outstretched, she wanders out into traffic where she is immediately run over. 

In one of their classic “fade to black” moments the next screen reads simply: Dorothy Sheedy. 1954–2003.

I have always been one of those cynics who wanted a bumper sticker that read: “When the rapture comes, can I have your car?”

That’s because what little Greek I have mastered tells me that word for “taken” here doesn’t mean “to go up” or “to meet” but “to go along with.”  It comes from the same root as our word perambulate which simply means “to walk.”

The people who are with Jesus in the end are those who have decided to follow him now.  They are the ones who, like his disciples, decided to “go along with” Jesus. 

Think of it like what happened when they were called. Remember?

 Jesus saw two brothers: Simon (later called Peter) and Andrew. They were fishing, throwing their nets into the lake. It was their regular work. Jesus said to them, “Come with me. I’ll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I’ll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass.”7

 “Immediately, they left their boat and their father and followed him.”8

Do you see it now?  They were taken as they decided to follow Jesus and their father, through no fault of his own, was left behind in the boat.  Some taken, the other left.

If we’re walking with Jesus we’re prepped.

The people who are with Jesus in the end are those who have decided to follow him now.  They are the ones who, like his disciples, decided to “go along with” him.”  They are the ones who are walking with him.  Here is a message that serves to engender hope rather than fear among the faithful.

The truth of today is something we all know. “That Christ comes again, and again, and again.” The truth we all know is that Christ “has placed no limit on coming to the world but is always on the way to us here and now. The only thing we are required to do is notice – to watch, to keep our eyes peeled.”9

So, put away your baseball bat protecting your house from being broken into when Christ comes “like a thief in the night.”  The good news is he’s already in not only your house but your heart, and mind, and soul.

Boil up all those Raman noodles that you have been stocking up on there are lots of good recipes on the internet that won’t remind of those dark days in college when you really thought the end of the world was coming because you were fresh out of cash.

Drink all that stored up water.  A healthy, active adult is supposed to be drinking 8 to 12 glasses a day anyway.

And, for the love of God, don’t run out into traffic thinking the end has come because, if you do, I say most assuredly that if you’re lucky and it doesn’t come for you at that very moment it will scare the life out of the panicked driver breaking frantically to avoid hitting you.

Christ is coming into our lives every day.  Watch.  We’re prepped. We’re ready because our lives, our time, is ultimately in Christ who comes to us at Advent, at Christmas, at Easter, and Pentecost and every day in between. 

________________

1. Camille Cooke Howe, Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, November 16, 2025.

2.  The Week US, “Ready for the Apocalypse,” The Week, October 21, 2025, https://theweek.com/culture-life/apocalypse-preppers-survivalist-movement.

3. The Week, loc.cit.

4.    Cook Howe,  loc.cit.

5. Barbara Brown Taylor, “Don’t Say When: Expecting the Second Coming,” The Christian Century, September 21, 2004, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2004-09/dont-say-when?

6.    ibid.

7. St. Matthew 4:18–20. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE: Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004)]

8. St. Matthew 4:22. (NRSVue) [NRSVue=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

9. Taylor, loc.cit.

Christ the King C - "No King Here"

Saint Luke 23:23–33

 On last week on CBS’ Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley there was a segment on something called the “Online Prediction Markets” which is an app that entices its users to gamble on all sorts of things beyond the usual sports books that invite users to predict who will win and who will lose any given contest and by how much. 

This app is not the nickel-and-dime game people used to play in the bleachers at Wrigley where guys {and it was almost always guys} would bet usually a dime and as much as a quarter on any given pitch.  “Bet you a nickel that the next pitch will be a fastball outside.” “Bet you a quarter that the batter gets a hit.” “Bet you a dime that the runner will try to steal second.” 

“Online Prediction Markets” will allow you to not only bet on the outcomes of sporting events but everything from whether egg prices will go up or down next month, to the number of hurricanes that will strike the United States, to how many times a politician will use a certain word in a speech, and even to who Taylor Swift will chose to be her maid of honor.  Only the stakes are much higher then they were in the bleachers or even at Arlington Park. 

One guy reported that he had lost $6,000 on a trade but he smilingly reported that another day he made $11,000.  When pressed he said that, on average he makes about $3,000 a week.  Enough to allow him to stay at home and quit his day job.

Some might say that any of us who has ever bought a stock, invested in a 401k or even purchased green bananas are in “Prediction Markets.”  We buy in the hopes that our stocks will go up, our 401k will increase, and that our bananas will ripen just in time for us to eat them. Looking at the sky and deciding to bring an umbrella is playing the prediction game.  

But I am willing to bet, yes bet, that nobody, absolutely nobody on that grey day at Calvary would have, could have, predicted that one of the guys hanging on the cross would have had a day named after him called Christ the King or that his reign would last through the centuries.

Jesus is not the kind of king they, nor anybody else, then or now, would be looking for.  

While we would like our leaders to be strong, we also hope that our rulers would be compassionate, reasonable, well- mannered, and well behaved.  We don’t want our kings to be like the imperious monarch in Rogers and Hammerstein’s The King and I who at one point tells Anna, “When I ‘sit’ you shall sit and when I ‘kneel’ you shall kneel.”  

If you have spent the better part of your evenings this week watching Ken Burns’ The American Revolution on PBS you know that what began as just a cause for equal and just treatment from the crown became one giant No Kings Rally.  Kings rule by force, by power, by might, by an iron fist, and eventually “in the course of human events” they face rebellions.  

Jesus was a different kind of king who faced a different kind of rebellion.  The people who rebelled against Jesus wanted a different kind of king.  They wanted someone who would overthrow the yoke of Roman Rule.  They wanted someone who would throw off the occupiers and restore their old way of life.  

In some ways our music today is at odds with the message.  All our hymns are grand, triumphant, but our gospel finds the one of whom we sing helpless and hanging on a cross.

Saint Luke makes certain that we don’t miss what happens when human power shows its darker side.  Jesus was killed by people who knew exactly what they wanted, knew exactly what Jesus should do and, when he didn’t do it, a whole host of people, powerful people, and what we would call the rank-and-file conspired to do away with him.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”1 he said from the cross.  But, if you would have asked them, they would have told you that they knew exactly what they were doing.  

The political leaders killed him because he was a threat to their reign and rule. The people killed him because he wasn’t what they wanted him to be – a leader who rode into town on a white horse and overthrew the powers of oppression.  

On Palm Sunday the multitudes shouted “Hosanna!”  “Save Us Now!” but it turns out that while they may have wanted to be saved, they didn’t want to be saved the way Jesus was saving them.  They knew what they wanted and, in the end, they determined that Jesus just wasn’t it.

As Father Robert Farar Capon once wrote:

We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God and then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It's not that we weren't looking for the Messiah; it's just that he wasn't what we were looking for. Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross. He wouldn't do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying.2

 So, this king on a cross business comes as a complete surprise to them and to us.  We know what we know and we know what we want.  

The problem can be summed up in one of my personal life commandments.  It’s a little long to be embroider on a throw pillow or to be framed in needlepoint above the couch but it is good thing to remember.  “The height of hubris is not knowing that we do not know.”

So it is that the people in their know-it-all hubris bet against Jesus.  If they had an “on-line prediction market,” in their know-it-all hubris, they sure wouldn’t have bet that the carpenter turned rabbi who was hanging before them on a cross would change anything let alone the world.

But there is a Christ the King Sunday because of him.  As Reza Aslan, an Iranian American scholar points out in his book about Jesus called Zealot, “among all the other failed messiahs who came before and after him, Jesus alone is still called messiah.”3

He gained that title by not doing what others were expecting him to do. While crowd stood by watching “the rulers even sneered at him. They said, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is God’s Messiah, the Chosen One.’”4

As one scholar, Patrick Oden, of Fuller Theological Seminary wrote:

He may be a loser in the game, but he does not dispute the rules or structures. The only way for Jesus to prove himself in light of the established systems, the only way, is to save himself from the crucifixion.  Everyone seems to agree – except Jesus and, we find out, the other criminal dying beside him.5

 One of the criminals joins with the crowd in mocking and disgust: 

“Some Messiah you are! Save yourself! Save us!” But the other one made him shut up: “Have you no fear of God? You’re getting the same as him. We deserve this, but not him—he did nothing to deserve this.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you enter your kingdom.” {And Jesus} He said, “Don’t worry, I will.”6

 That promise is given to us and to all. “If we live with the true knowledge of the kind of King Jesus Christ is, then perhaps we will know what salvation is and is not.”7

Following Jesus we realize that our best bet is to steward our lives as faithfully as we can aligning everything we do with what we believe about Jesus.

This is easier said than done, but we make great strides in our faith if we can, together and individually, grow in our awareness of to what and to whom we give our power. To whom do we give the power to tell us who we are? Who has the power to tell us whether or not we are valuable or successful? Who or what has the power to shape our moods and our minds, influence our decisions, tell us whether we are safe or unsafe, and help us discern what is important and what is not?8

The not-so-well-hidden secret is that ever and always Jesus is with us, accompanying us, offering forgiveness on our behalf even when we are broken and bruised or have broken and bruised others. 

The not so-well-hidden secret is that in his final moments, with arms outstretched on the cross, Jesus exhibits capacities fit only for the King of Kings whose reign and rule extends for all times.

That is something we can predict with certainty.  That is something we can bet our lives on.

________________

1. St. Luke 23:34.  (NKJV) [NKJV=The New King James Version]

2. Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox; Images and Mystery in Christian Faith (New York: Seabury Press, 1974.)

3. Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York, NY: Random House, Inc, 2013). 175

4. St. Luke 23:35 (NIV) [NIV=The New Internation Version]

5. Patrick Oden, “Luke 23:33-43. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, 3 (Louisville: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2019): 507–9.

6. St. Luke 23:39–43.  (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE:Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).

7. Chelsey Harmon, “Luke 23:33-43,” Center for Excellence in Preaching, November 17, 2025, https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2025-11-17/luke-2333-43-4/.

8. Kate Givens Kime, “Sunday, November 24, 2013,” The Christian Century, November 13, 2013, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-10/sunday-november-24-2013? 

Pentecost 23C - "Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy"

Saint Luke 20:27–38

Everybody who has owned a television set since March of 1964 is familiar with the concept behind the game show "Jeopardy."  The program reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given general knowledge clues in the form of answers, and they must identify the person, place, thing, or idea that the clue describes, phrasing each response in the form of a question.

The program, as all quiz shows do, challenges the viewer to pit their knowledge against that of the contestants.  Sometimes the questions are easy, sometimes they are hard, and sometimes they are just unanswerable.

When the contestants are stumped, there is that pause where they all stare, looking puzzled, at the studio cameras, and wait for the dreaded buzzer to sound so that they can take their chances with another question.

Sometimes questions that we do not know the answers to puzzle all of us.

The encounters can leave us speechless, dumbfounded, and maybe a little more than frustrated.

I had a man in my old congregation whose questions were not only frustrating but mostly ill timed.

Just as the bells were ringing and the choir was about to march in, he would inevitably steam up to me and ask a question like: "Do you know how to light the oven on the stove in the kitchen?" 

"No," I would reply and, either unsatisfied or unbelieving that I didn't know, he would ask the same question all over again to which the answer was always no.

This would go on for several attempts sometimes with the accent being placed on different words or syllables.  This made him sound like an American tourist in some foreign land.  “Do you know how to light the oven on the stove in the kitchen?”  Again, I would reply “no” but since he was talking to me like I was I was from a different country I really wanted to reply with a “Nein”, or an “nyet”, or “non.”  Or, if from Britain, “I’m so sorry old fellow but I haven’t the faintest idea.”

Sometimes he would change the word order and pause for effect, as if that would jog my memory, "The oven ... on the stove ... in the kitchen, do you know ... how to light it?" he would ask as if a new approach would bring about clarity.  The answer was still no.

After several questioning attempts he would change the question into a declarative statement.  "So, you don't know how to light the oven on the kitchen stove."  The answer could have been yes, but I chose no because by this time, completely unaware of the cross examination going in the narthex the organist had launched into the first hymn.

Taking a big breath before asking the question another time in another way I had to stop him because, by now, the choir was long gone and the hymn was on its final verse, and no direct revelation had come as to how the stove could be lit.

Finally, exasperated, I said to him.   "Listen Bill, you can ask me that question a million times in a million ways. You can even try asking it in English, French, and German but I'm still not going to know how to light the stove."  And I hurried to the front to repaint the smile on my face and gasp out the greeting, "The grace..."

Unfortunately, I will have no such stories to tell about this congregation in the future because, clearly, there are no eccentricities here.

Difficult questions can be asked at the most difficult occasions.

Dr. Amy Jill-Levine, who may be setting a record for consecutive times being quoted in a sermon, told of the time her mother, who was on her deathbed asked her “‘What will happen to me when I die?’ I immediately answered, ‘You’ll see Daddy.’ My father had died decades earlier. She replied, ‘I look like hell.’ ‘Well, Mom, you’ve looked better, but when you see Daddy, you’ll look as beautiful as you looked the day you got married.’ ‘How do you know this?’ ‘Mom, I‘ve got a Ph.D. in religion; I know these things.’”1

One day, Jesus was asked an impossible question to put him to the test.  If you had a hard time following the question you are not in jeopardy because it’s a convoluted one that boggles the imagination.  It’s about marriage, death, remarriage, and who is married to who in the resurrection.  It could be called instead of seven brides for seven brothers, seven husbands for one bride.  Summed up, the trick question is: “Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? For all of them were married to her!”2

Now if I were Jesus I might have answered: “Huh?” because sometimes this kind of highbrow theological stuff goes way over my head.   Or, if he was feeling a bit more snarky he would have been right to answer, “What difference does it make to you guys? You don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead anyway!”  

Before we make the Sadducees into total bad guys I think they might have just been engaging in the kind of rabbinical rumble that the learned leaders of his day, and our day, seem to enjoy.  Let’s ask each other big complicated, life and death, questions and see if anybody can figure out the answer.

  

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” To which my witty, Anglican professor of ethics, Dr. Paul Elmen, said the answer was, “Not as many who would like to?”

I don’t know if this is just lore, but it was said that Billy Graham arrived in a small town to preach, and he asked a boy directions to the post office. The boy told him, and Graham thanked him. Graham said in parting, “If you come to the Baptist church tonight, I will tell you the way to get to heaven.” The boy said, “No thanks, you don’t even know your way to the post office.”3

After entering to the resurrection quibble for a bit Jesus tells us that the whole debate, they just had was irrelevant because God is God “not of the dead but of the living.”4

In my limited understanding of Jesus, I’m pretty convinced that Jesus was less concerned about where we’ll spend eternity and more interested in how we live out our lives in the here and now.  Jesus is more interested in how we treat others.  His question is always about the living: Do we treat them fairly?  Do we treat them squarely?  Are we always honest with them?  Or, as they say in the south, are we so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good?”

In the Academy every day our little ones pass a bulletin board with some words on it in big, bold, bright letters.

At their age they are probably not pondering the questions of resurrection, or where they will spend eternity. However, I bet if you asked them their answer would be with you, their parents, their grandparents, and we hope and pray, with the members of this faith community or some other faith community who will love them, and nurture them, and by their lives remind them of the bulletin board they saw even before many of them could read.

The first words: “Treat others fairly.”  I think that Jesus and even the Sadducees would agree on that.  That’s a pretty good way to follow Jesus who reminds us that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sister we do to him.  

So, it seems to me, that blocking food aid to families who receive   – According to a US Department of Agriculture website – on “average ... a monthly benefit of $332. That’s $177 per person based on the average SNAP household size of 1.9 people.”5 seems, if not fair, a little chintzy. 

Let the record show that yesterday I spent slightly less than that on a weeks worth of groceries and that was only for me, one person.

Somehow, this doesn’t seem fair when, it was announced in the same week that lines at food banks were growing longer and longer, that a billionaire would be granted a “new trillion dollar pay package” by his company.6

Perhaps the second sign should be hung on the walls of that company and not just our school for it said: “Do good without expecting a reward.”  Or, as Jesus said once, “if anyone wants to ... take your shirt, give your coat as well.”7

Or, in the perfectly delightful paraphrase called The Message by Dr. Eugene Peterson: “If someone drags you into court and sues for the shirt off your back, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously.”8

Finally, the sign said: “Invite someone to join you at lunch.”  Jesus ate with and welcomed all kinds and conditions of people.  He welcomed tax-collectors, and people of “ill-repute” – which is pretty much everybody – and he seemed to have a special affinity for foreigners.  Think Samaritans who he kept making the heroes of his stories.

There didn’t seem to be any jeopardy with Jesus.  He didn’t care if you got the answers right or wrong, but he did seem to care if you thought you knew all the answers.

So, I guess what Jesus might be asking us now is about “how we are going to live our lives and create our communities. Are we going to get any better? 

“Are we going to get any better, or will we continue to allow politics to divide and make us self-righteous about our views? 

“Are we going to get any better, or will we continue to make groups of people feel invisible and marginalized? 

“Are we going to get any better, or will we continue to live in estrangement from each other and from God?”

What Jesus’ questioners forgot, and Jesus reminded them is that the resurrection reminds the world that the partnership God made with humanity, is a partnership aimed toward life.

So, it seems to me it is by how we live our lives, how we treat others, that will show how much we believe in the promise of the resurrection and the one who gave his life for that promise.

So, for me, “I’ll take resurrection for a bazillion, Alex” and only hope that I not only get the question, but the answer correct. 

By the way, since we are in church, the answer is always, Jesus.

________________

1. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say November 9? 22nd after Pentecost,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 2025, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

2. St. Luke 20:33. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]

3. Camille Cook Howe, Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, September 28, 2025.

4. St. Luke 20:38. (NRSVue) [NRSVue=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

5.    “Characteristics of Snap Households: Fiscal Year 2023,” Food and Nutrition Service U.S. Department of Agriculture, accessed November 7, 2025, https://www.fns.usda.gov/research/snap/characteristics-fy23.

6.    Julia Shapero, “Tesla Shareholders Approve Trillion-Dollar Pay Package for Musk,” MSN, November 6, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-shareholders-approve-trillion-dollar-pay-package-for-musk/ar-AA1PXoKr?ocid=BingNewsSerp.

7. St. Matthew 5:40. (NRSVue)

8. St. Matthew 5:38–42. (Message) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004)]

9. Camille Cook-Howe, Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, October 12, 2025.
 

Pentecost 21C - "Don't Stop Saying Their Names"

 

Saint Luke 6:21-31

The quote has been attributed to several people some famous, some infamous, and some nobody has ever heard of. Some internet sources trace it all the way back to ancient Egypt. I first saw it on a friend’s Facebook page, and I have been sharing it around ever since.

"They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your name for the last time." So, the wise friend concluded the way to keep somebody’s memory alive is to keep saying their name.

I think that’s why people carve the name of their loved ones on tombstones so that even strangers walking through a graveyard will look at the headstone and say their name.  Some of those names we read will be famous, some infamous, and other’s known only to us.  We might look at the marker and say something like “Boy! He was young.”  Or “Gee! She lived to a ripe old age.”  If the cemetery dates back to the nineteenth century, as our does, with a row of markers devoted to the children of the same family one can only wonder how hard that must have been on the family but, still they bought a marker to in the hopes that somebody wandering around some cemetery somewhere would stop for a second, notice all the names in the family, and perhaps say them out loud.

I’m not making this up, but in Maryhill Cemetery in Niles there is a substantial monument that is inscribed only with the word “Mom” in big, bold, script letters.  At first the funeral director friend and I speculated that it might have been a floor model like the refrigerators that are available at Abt Electronic for a significantly reduced price.

I thought it some more and pictured the woman’s eight children sitting together at the monument office and being asked by the salesperson what their mother’s name was.  I pictured them all looking at each other with blank stares until one of them finally spoke up and said, “You know, all any of us called her was mom.” And so “Mom” it was and “Mom” was probably tribute enough.

Every culture has different ways of remembering their loved ones.

There’s All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Halloween and Día de los Muertos. There’s the Gaelic festival of Samhain, in which the dead are guided home by lights left in the windows.  

In Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Animal Dreams, there is a wonderful scene describing how the citizens of a town called Grace observed the Day of the Dead: lavishly decorating the cemetery, nothing solemn, but much laughter, running, and many flowers.

Some graves had shrines with niches peopled by saints; others had the initials of loved ones spelled out on the mound in white stones.  The unifying principle was that the simplest thing was done with the greatest care.  It was a comfort to see this attention lavished on the dead.  In these families you would never stop being loved.1

 That is what we are doing today.  We are naming names, lighting candles, placing pictures, and tolling bells so that our blessed dead will never stop being loved.  We’ll keep their memories alive by “saying their names.”  Their names will never be spoken of for the last time.

We are also clinging to Jesus’ promise: “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”2 That’s what St. Luke remembered Jesus saying once. Only, for this day, we might prefer Matthew’s account: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.3  We can hold on to both those promises.

For Jesus’ first listeners they were even more profound then they are for us. 

We do not have to work very hard to imagine the lives of 1st century Palestinian Jews as very susceptible to poverty, hunger, and loss. Nor do we have to work very hard to imagine the lives of many of our 21st century sisters and brothers.” 

In a strange twist of fate many of Jesus’ listeners then, many of his listeners now, lived in fear of a government that was supposed to protect them.  Many of Jesus’ listeners then, many now, eked out a modest day to day existence living, as we might say, from paycheck to paycheck, while others lived in the lap of luxury. Not so much different than our day when eight families have more money than 3.5 million people combined.

While most of us delight in the “blessed” part of Jesus’ first sermon sometimes we need to be taken aback by the “Woes.”

As my good friend Sarah Hendricks, emeritus professor at Luther Seminary wrote: 

There is, then, a kind of divide between the blessed and the woeful. It is, however, precisely NOT the divide that our world would create between winners and losers, successful and unsuccessful, elites and non-elites. The blessed are those who have caught at least a glimpse of God’s future and trust that it is for them. The blessed may be poor or needy, even weeping in life by the standards we humans have in our very bones, but they are blessed in both trust in God and in God’s future, in their hope of justice. The woeful are those who have forgotten that the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The woeful are those who say “yes” to the title question of an old song, “Is that all there is?”4

In the end those who live their lives at the expense of and with a distain for others may just discover that the words of another not so old song may prove to be true — “No one mourns the wicked. No one cries...” or “lays a lily on their grave. Goodness knows ... The wicked's lives are lonely ... the wicked die alone. It just shows when you're wicked ...You're left only on your own.”

And it is not long before people stop mentioning them for the last time.  It is not long before people stop saying their names.

So we’re going to say the names of members of that great untold number of saints who were known to us — our relatives, our friends, our beloveds who came into our lives and, in ways large and small, made them richer, fuller than the world would have been without them.

They were saints to us and so were going to keep saying their names. We’ll say them now.  We’ll say them forever.  We’ll say them until people are remembering to say our names to keep our memories alive.

The names of your loved ones.  Keep saying them and I promise you in the words of an old Irish proverb: “The day will come when their memory, their name, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.”

Shed a tear, smile, but say their names as a testimony that they will never stop being loved.

________________

1. Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2018).

2. St. Luke 6:21. (NRSVue) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Edition Updated Edition]

3. St. Matthew 5:4.  (NRSV)

4. Sarah Henrich, “Commentary on Luke 6:20-31,” Working Preacher, November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/all-saints-day-2/commentary-on-luke-620-31-2.