Anger in the Christmas Story - Christmas 1A

Saint Matthew 2:13-23

The Facebook posts summed up what can happen on Christmas.   

A long time friend of mine works as a concierge at the Hyatt Regency on Wacker and wrote this of his Christmas morning experience: “Nothing says Christmas more than a full-fledged family feud in the lobby of a hotel.”  In a later post he elaborated: “a couple of guests and their two teenager-ish children were apparently upset that the father had done/said something about a relative at dinner last night.” 

This post prompted another Facebook friend to reply: “Some of my worst memories when working involved Holidays, families........and alcohol.....not usually a good combination.”

I bet all of us have memories of holidays that have not just gone awry but somehow turned into unmitigated disasters. 

I remember one, years ago, in which a friend’s grandmother and his father got into some kind of a royal battle after I had fallen asleep on the floor following Christmas dinner.  I awoke to yelling and packages flying over my head.  It was like being in one of those war movies where I had to crawl along the floor for fear that if I lifted my head I would be hit with an incoming Christmas present.  I made a mental note that if I escaped the from line of fire  I should probably spend holidays elsewhere for my own safety.

The sad fact is that Christmas can be like that.  We want everything to go perfectly.  We want there to be love, good cheer, and warm feelings but sometimes there is anger, sadness, and even some depression when the Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell Christmas’ don’t happen.

We want things to be perfect yet sometimes things happen that are out of our control and instead of carols by the piano we have a five round fight going on in our living room.  It is almost an variation on the old Rodney Dangerfield line: “I went to a Christmas party and a hockey game broke out.”

Now let me be clear about one thing: This is a first world problem.  Having our Christmas ruined by anything, except perhaps the death of a family member    pales in comparison to what Christians and non-Christians in other countries are enduring.

According to The Pew Research Center, over 75% of the world's population live in areas with severe religious restrictions. Many of these people are Christians. Also, according to the United States Department of State, Christians in more than 60 countries face persecution from their governments or surrounding neighbors simply because of their belief in the person of Jesus Christ.1

The Syrian Civil War alone, besides producing countless dead, has also produced two million refugees, 500,000 of whom are Christians.

Most of these people live in countries where there is a totalitarian leader who displays no small measure of paranoia.  Which is why today’s gospel is an important one for us to hear and to ponder.
An important and powerful part of the Christmas story is that Jesus, our Savior, began his life as a refugee, fleeing in terror from a paranoid leader. 

Herod was an irrational, angry man.  We have seen his likes in the dictators of our day who would starve, torture, and even turn their armies on their own people.  They become the faces of evil for us.  They are the faces of anger and hate.  They represent all we do not like about those who will hold on to power at any cost to anybody except themselves.

Herod was a powerful and paranoid man. 

The late Fr.  Raymond Brown in his tome, The Birth of the Messiah, tells us that by the time of Jesus’ birth Herod already had two of his own sons killed when he perceived them to be a threat.  And he instructed “his soldiers to kill notable political prisoners upon the news of his death.  His goal was expressed thus: ‘So shall all Judea and every household weep for me, whether they wish it or not.’”

There has to be something wrong with you when you find out (through the Three Magi we shall hear about next week) that there is an child somewhere who might threaten your power.  Remember, the Magi didn’t tell the king that there were armies amassing on his boarder, they only spoke of a star, and the birth of a child. 

One of the symptoms of paranoia is a belief that everyone is out to get you.  Often paranoid people lash out in unreasonable fits of anger.  Herod should have been locked away in an asylum rather than reigning from a palace, but there he was, angry, powerful and afraid and so he issues an insane order.

He orders that all the male children two and under be living in Bethlehem be killed.  This “slaughter of the innocents,” as it called may have taken the lives of only twenty or so children, because Bethlehem was a small town, but still it was twenty too many.

Jesus escapes because his earthly father Joseph is obedient. 

An angel wakes Joseph again from a sound sleep and says, “Get up and flee to Egypt with the baby and his mother and stay there until I tell you to return, for King Herod is going to try to kill the child.”  While Herod may have been a case study in unbridled anger, Joseph is an excellent example of absolute obedience.

Joseph listens to God’s voice while Herod listens only to his own and so in his only response to anyone who would challenge him is to lash out and destroy.  Joseph’s response is to believe and obey.

Destruction born out of anger is a pretty easy thing to give into.  It is also a pretty simple thing to do. 

It’s easier to kill something off than find ways to help it live. 

It is easier to cut people off from friendships than it is to work on and restore the relationship.  It is easier to walk away than to face a problem and try to solve it.  And, while all of us have the potential to do great harm to people and places we love we also have the ability to listen to God’s voice and dream God’s dreams.

Joseph did that twice and saved the life of the Christ child. 

He did it when the angel came to him and called him to take Mary to be his wife.  Who knows what Mary would have done alone without Joseph’s support.  Joseph knew that God’s dream was right and so took up his duty to Mary and bore her burden with her until they, and we, could be blessed by the birth of the Jesus.

Now Joseph was called to do it again.  To save his young son’s life by heading to a place of safety beyond the scope of Herod’s evil reach.  Joseph takes Mary and Jesus off to Egypt and waits for an angelic all clear.  He was obedient to the dream God gave him.

I think the power in this story lies in Jesus and his family being forced into exile by an angry, despotic, leader.  Now, when all of those displaced persons around the world, forced to live in land not of their own choosing, pray to God for strength and safety God, because of Jesus, knows what it is like at a young age to be uprooted from your home and taken off somewhere where you otherwise would not have chosen to go. 

God hears the cries of those who are far from home and understands their prayers in a very real way.

And to those of us who whose Christmas exiles are of our own making.  Who let our anger get the better of us in the lobby of a hotel because of who said what to whom the night before. 

I think this story reminds us to, quite simply, cool it and not be so focussed in ourselves that we forget the far greater needs of others. 

This story stands to remind us what the church should be doing at Christmastime and all the time. 

The church stands to remind people that the ultimate mover and shaker in the world is God and not those who represent the empire.

The church stands to remind people that real power lies in hope rather than anger and the desire to get even.

The church stands to recognize and call out false power when it sees it because we know that God, when God chose to come into the world, chose to do so powerless.

The church stands to be like Joseph and respond to the dreams God gives us even if those dreams demand even more time, and effort, and yes, even more sacrifice.

The church stands to remind us that it is in all of those places that we never expected we might go, if we are willing to follow him, Christ will be with us.

After all that is one of the names given to Joseph in yet another of his dreams is that his son would be called Immanuel from the Hebrew “God is with us.”

God is with you amid all that the anger of this world might throw your way. 

God is with you in your exiles be they imposed by a angry tyrant or the anger that is within you. 

God is with you in every moment just waiting for the right moment to call you back home. 

As with Mary and Joseph and their baby boy God is waiting to call you back to where you belong.  Back to him.

Back to the one who has saved you from your sins. 

Back to Christ where anger’s exile ends and acceptance begins.

_______

1. _____, “About Christian Persecution.  Opendoorusa.com.

2. Raymond E.  Brown, The Birth of the Messiah.  (New York: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group, 1993), p.  227.

3. St.  Matthew 2:13.  (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]

"What's The Good Word?" - Christmas Day

The Nativity of Our Lord - Christmas Day
Saint John 1:1–14

“What’s the Good Word?”

For over thirty-years I have been climbing into this pulpit and for thousands of years rabbis and pastors have been mounting platforms of one kind or another because we knew the power of “a good word.”
  
You know it too.  You know that words that are put together carefully and come at just the right moment can do a world of good.  Words that are strung together in anger can do a word of hurt.

Some of you may have been hurt even this week of Christmas by someone’s words that were said in haste.  Words that were said in haste and judged you and can never be taken back. 
 
I pray that most of you heard some words that were so tender and caring that they filled your heart so full you almost heard angels singing. 

Think about the difference four little words can make.  The words “I love you deeply” can bring peace on earth to you.  The words “You are not good enough” can cause your whole world to seem, well, not good enough.

From the beginning God used words as a creative force. 

Remember how the whole biblical drama begins. 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 1

God’s word was the creating force.  It caused light to shine but that was not the end because we know that in this world there is also darkness. 

As one Eucharistic prayer puts it “when we brought on chaos, cruelty and despair” the struggle started between God’s light and our darkness.

As someone who watches a lot of news I can see everyday this struggle being played out.  We can watch now on our television screens how everyday the world seems to turn away from the light back into the darkness. 

And we can see it in our own lives too.  It’s a struggle to keep our face turned the light but we do it because everyone of us in this room have known people whose have so much darkness in their hearts that they know more about fear and anger than they do faith and love.

The Gospel of John tells us that God does not want us to live that way.  God wants us to live  and so sent someone who not only taught us how to live in the light but was the light. 

You see, a word like that just can’t be spoken it has to have flesh and bone, body and blood.  It has to be real.  It had to be a person.  It had to be Jesus.

Last night we heard his story from Saint Luke’s gospel.  It was full of people like you and me wandering around in the darkness. 

A couple looking for a place to stay in a crowded city. 

An innkeeper wondering and worrying if he is going to have enough provisions for his over crowded inn. 

Shepherds who sat around looking at a dark night sky. 

That was last night’s story.

This morning, in the light of day, we have John beginning his story before time even began.
Knowingly, I think, starting his gospel with the same words that began the creation story, he writes:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 2

The Word we get from Saint John is a word that is unafraid of the darkness.  It is a Word that can pierce the darkness with hope.  It is a word about love and forgiveness.  That’s what you get in Jesus.  According to the biblical drama, your life began not with the words “It’s a boy!” or It’s a girl!” but “In the beginning God...”

And so, according to Dr. M. Craig Barnes when he was pastor of Shadyside Presbyterian Church,
 your life began with the words, “In the beginning God.”

So the gospel truth is that your life began not with your own dreams, but with God’s dreams. And from the beginning, a God has dreamed of being your Savior in Jesus Christ. Before you started making decisions or even mistakes, before you even decided you needed a savior, Jesus Christ has been at work in your life. As the Son was with the Father and the Spirit at creation, shoving aside the darkness to bring light, so has he been at work in your life bringing creative hope into every dark moment.

Dr. Michael M. Brown, the marvelous new Senior Minister at the Marble-Collegiate Church in New York gave a wonderful example of how this works in a recent sermon. 

He said that as a little guy he was afraid of the dark and so his mother and father would, after he said his prayers and they said good-night, leave his bedroom door ajar.  He could see the light from the living room and hear them talking or quietly watching television and he would take comfort in the knowledge that if he needed them they would be there for him in a second.

Then he said, when “the word became flesh” God was no longer down the hall but in the room with him.

When the “word became flesh” it means, he said, “The one in whom we believe, the one who is our pathway to God, the one to whom we pray is became one of us to live as we live, laugh as we laugh, hurt as we hurt, cry as we cry.  So that when we call out “Kyrie Elaison” “Lord, have mercy.”  “I can’t take this anymore!” Jesus is in the room with us saying, “I know.  I know.”

 No matter what happens to you this next year those may be words you may want to hold onto from the Word that became flesh. 

That in Jesus Christ, “God knows.  God knows.”  Amen.

_______

1. Genesis 1:1–3.  (NKJV) [NKJV=The New King James Version]

2. Saint John 1:1-4.  (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

3. M. Craig Barnes, “A Word of Hope.”  Sermon preached at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.  November 30, 2003.

4  Michael Brown, “Why a Baby?”  Sermon preached at the Marble-Collegiate Church of New York City. December 4, 2011.

"With Faces Shining" Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve

Saint Luke 2:1-20

Pastors have a tendency to notice these things more than lay people perhaps but as I drove around this past week I couldn’t help that the signs outside of many churches were announcing Christmas Eve Services at 4, or 8, or 10 P.M. but gone was a staple of most of our  childhoods the Midnight Christmas Eve Service. 

In this sense an old joke is becoming a reality.  My brothers at Saint Mary of the Woods and Queen of All Saints used to howl at how many calls the office staff used to receive on the 24th of December asking, “What time is Midnight Mass.”  “Ahhh.  Midnight?”

Truth be told, before I retired,  we hadn’t held a Midnight Service at Saint John’s for as long as I can remember.  I think we had one when we first arrived but gradually as we all grew older and older the time got earlier and earlier. 

And it is that way for our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters too. 

Somebody gave me an article from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review in which The Rev. William Lechnar, pastor at Mother of Sorrows Church in Murrysville and the director of planning for the Diocese of Greensburg, said Western Pennsylvania's demographics have a lot to do with many churches celebrating their “Mass at night” earlier.

“In the old days, midnight Mass was the big Mass for Christmas,” he said. “It's different now. More and more families, especially those with young children, come to 4 o'clock Mass.

“Making our last Mass start at 10:30, it's not too late at night, so it's easier for people. Western Pennsylvania has an aging population,” he said. “A lot of people who used to go to midnight Mass were younger when they went. They're older now, and it's hard to expect them to come out so late.” 1

Some purists will scoff but I like the image of an earlier service better because it perfectly speaks to the struggle between Christ and culture. 

Moving the services to an earlier hour makes people have to decide between staying at the party and coming to church.  It makes people have to choose between another round with their friends or getting around to going to church.  Will they search for a Savior or, as the Corona commercial puts it, keep trying to “find their beach.”

All the empirical evidence points to the search for the beach. 

Just drive downtown on Christmas Eve and you will find more people milling around the front of the saloons on Ontario than streaming in or out of Fourth Presbyterian, First United Methodist, St.  James Cathedral, or Holy Name. 

All this makes, at least for me, the Christmas story even more relevant.

While our attention may be drawn to the young couple riding into town looking for a place to stay they were vastly unnoticed by most of the citizens of Bethlehem. 

The place was packed because of a government ordered census.  With this intrusion of the state upon their lives the people attention was turned elsewhere.  Perhaps toward wondering what they were going to do with their friends and relatives who were in town, they hoped, just long enough to fill out the required paperwork and then head back home. 

A census can be an intrusion but a house filled with relatives can get to be a bother.  Hey!  It could be Christmas not just in Chicago but at your house as you do everything but put on your pajamas and wind your alarm clock in the hopes that your dinner guests will get the hint and go home.

They didn’t notice the intense look on the faces of Mary and Joseph who without the benefit of Expedia® or Travelosity® had to search door to door for a inn with a room. 

Nobody noticed the harried face of the innkeeper as the couple came to his door and he had to search frantically for one more space in his already overcrowded establishment. 

I’ll bet you nobody even noticed the eager faces of the shepherds as they carried out their angelically inspired mission to come and worship the Christ child.

The Bethlehem of Jesus birth was a lot like the Chicago on the night of its celebration with most people going about their lives as if nothing important was happening. 

But to those of us who are called to this place and places like it there is something more. 

To those of us who long to hear to story and come face to face with the beauty and wonder of it all we find something that is lasting.  Something that will stay with us longer than the “boom, boom, boom” of the dance music in any bar. 

The light that illumines our faces is, what St.  John would later call, a light shining in the darkness that the darkness cannot over come.

That is something all of us will need as we face the days ahead.  We may need it amid our fears of what is going to become of us.  We may need it as we face the loss of  someone we love or an illness of our own.  We may need it as we face any dark moment, any dark path, that comes our way.  And the message of Christmas is that we are not alone in the darkness, not pinned in by the darkness, because light has come. 

As theologian Douglas John Hall, has said, “God is alongside you – in the darkest place of your darkest night.” 2

Tonight your face will become one of the most important faces of the Christmas story and you will see how in a very real, very powerful way. 

I only wish that you could stand where pastors get to stand on Christmas Eve as we Standup front, looking out at you, we will see the light of Christ passed from one person to the next. 

It is a tradition in liturgical churches and, to tell you the truth, in neighborhood congregations, it can become a little “ho hum.”  We’ve seen all the illuminated faces before.  Perhaps not since last Christmas or Easter but we have seen them! 

In Lutheran congregations the moment can become even a little “white bread” because, if you have seen one Scandinavian face you have pretty much seen them all.

But in my final year as Pastor of Saint John’s the meaning of Christmas came alive for me. 

Because it was a joint worship with the three other churches that shared one building I was awestruck as I realized that the light of Christ was coming to faces who I had never met and faces who had known each other for years. 

The light was passed between people who grew up in different denominations but who had all that swept away because they had come to worship the same Savior.  The light was passed between people who didn’t sometimes even speak the same language. 

The light was passed and the most important face of all in the Christmas story suddenly glowed brightly even in a darkened room.  It was your face, and mine, singing about that birth that unites us all and changes our lives.

Silent night, holy night! Wondrous star, lend thy light;
With the angels let us sing, Alleluia to our King;
Christ the Savior is born, Christ the Savior is born.



________

1. R.A.  Monti, “When It Comes to Midnight Mass Times Have Changed.”  (Triblive.com), December 24, 2012.

2. Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness.  (Louisville:Westminister/John Knox Press, 1980), p.4.

The Baby is Coming - Advent 4a

Saint Luke 1:46b–55
Saint Matthew 1:18–25

Every pastor can tell you a story like this which sounds almost as if it could be the beginning of a joke.

 A couple walks into the office.  Months ago they had talked about how beautiful a June wedding would be with perhaps a champaign and strawberry reception on the terrace.  Now, it seems, they have changed their plans and they want their wedding in April.  I usually just find their form and  replace one date with another but one couple was foolish enough to ask if I wanted to know why.

 “Nooooooo.  You don’t have to tell me?” I replied. 

“You know!” they responded in horror as if we were living in Victorian England or they were dealing with the most prudish pastor in Christendom (which all of you can attest, I am not). 

“No, I don’t know but I can guess.” 

“Guess?” they foolishly dared. 

“Listen,” I said, “I have been doing this a long time and there are only two reasons a wedding date gets changed.  Either, the groom is in the military and being deployed or the bride is pregnant.”

Turning to the now fire-engine red groom, I said, “Since I know you are not in the military my guess is your bride to be is pregnant.  Relax!  Rejoice! This happens more than you think.”

I went through a period of time, where I had performed three ceremonies outside of this congregation for young people who were in my youth group in another church and who were at the time of their nuptials, as my aunt would say, at least “three times seven” only to have them, or their parents meet me on the street shortly after the wedding and announce a baby was on the way.

 Again, most pastors have better things to do with our lives than to calculate the months between day of a wedding and projected day of birth.  However, and it is one of those moments where I can take you to the exact spot where the announcement took place, after hearing two stories of unusually quick conceptions, the mother of the last newly minted bride met me coming out of Happy Foods and told me her daughter was pregnant.   I honestly heard myself say, before my mental filter kicked in: “For the love of God.  Don’t any of the males in this community shoot blanks anymore?”

Really most of us when told of a birth don’t bother to do the math in our heads.  Most of us hug the couple or their parents celebrating and pray for a healthy birth.  But there was a time, in many of our lives when the birth of a baby, “out-of-wedlock”, could turn into the talk or the secret of the neighborhood and family. 

You and I can probably even remember a time when parents fretted over telling their children they were adopted.  Gone are those days and it is probably for the best.

Twenty-first century Marys and Josephs do not face the same strain that the original first couple did.

Experts in family systems theory will tell you that the introduction of anything – from a new baby, to a new puppy, even a bird, will radically alter the dynamics within a family.  Any change, at any level of your life radically alters your lifestyle.  We may tell ourselves, “What’s another child?”

We may stop to make a contribution to Anti-Cruelty and come home with a cat or a dog and find that there is more to their care and keeping than we thought of when we looked into their soulful eyes and fell in love.  We can even think we can make changes in our lives and discover that a change that we kept telling ourselves was going to be so easy turns out to be anything but. 

In this, Mary and Joseph can be our prime examples. 

You know the story.  Or, you know, at least the romanticized version of the story.  In reality what Joseph and Mary had on their hands was a scandal of the first order. 

Remember theirs  was not a betrothal the way we think of one.  They didn’t date for awhile until Joseph got down on one knee and proposed marriage. 

In the first century marriages were arranged.  It was a deal not  between Joseph and Mary but between their two families.  It may have even been made between their fathers long before either was aware of it.  A rabbi and two witnesses were all that was needed to consummate the arrangement. 

All of that had been done when Gabriel shows up at Mary’s doorstep with perhaps the toughest “sell job” in human history.  The angel has to convince Mary that she should go along with God’s plan, and bear God’s child, “out-of-wedlock.” 

At first Mary is not convinced and rightly so for she knows in her heart what is going to happen to her.  The late Morton Kelsey in his book, The Drama of Christmas, imagines the gossip.

Most people are more comfortable with violence than unconventional sexual behavior and Mary’s neighbors were no exception. The villagers could count and they talked about the impropriety of Mary’s pregnancy. They smiled knowingly as Mary passed them to draw water from the village well. When the story of a heavenly visitor leaked out they snickered openly. 1

 Joseph, if he took Mary to be his wife, would have to endure the same backlash.  According to Greg Keener in his commentary, “Mediterranean society viewed with contempt the weakness of a man who let his love for his wife outweigh his appropriate honor in repudiating her.” 2

Both of their honors were at stake.  Both of them risked at least ridicule if not outright rejection from their family and friends.  And that is our first take away from this story.  If any one tells you that following God is going to be easy or something done in your spare time don’t you dare believe them. 

Most folks are smart enough to have figured out what one Duke University student told his chapel dean, Dr.  William H.  Willimon.  “You’ve got some pretty smart students here.  Smart enough to realize that if they came to church they would be putting their lives at risk of being commandeered by Christ, who might make some demands on their lives, making them only the more unmanageable and difficult.  So they say safely home.” 3
 

That is one of the reasons people who want the church only as a crutch when times are tough or a hobby to be dabbled in stay away.  They are afraid that if they come here they may be asked to be braver than they have ever been and truer with themselves than they could possibly imagine. With  God closer and more involved in their lives than they would ever want sometimes things get more, not less, difficult.

My guess is that all the couples that I have married who discover that their baby would be coming a little earlier than could be accounted for had to make the same decision.  The baby was going to come anyway and so might as well go through with things as planned, or juggle the schedule, and hope none of the friends are bean counters or month counters.

So too it is with Jesus and you. 

Whatever you are facing, whatever is wrong with your life, Jesus is going to come.  Amidst your greatest crises and your biggest worries about tomorrow, Jesus will come. 

He is going to be born into the human family and cast his lot forever with us.  Jesus will come to walk beside us into the next chapter of our lives, however uncertain that chapter may be and stay with us in our rejoicing and our weeping; our struggling and our loving; in our living and in our dying. God will be with us though it all. 

Just as God was with Mary.  Just as God was with Joseph.  God will be with us and for that we too can count ourselves blessed.

________

1.   Morton Kelsey, The Drama of Christmas.  (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1994), p.  20.

2.  Gregg Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew.  (Grand Rapids: William B.  Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), p.  91.

3.  William H.  Willimon, “Embarrassed by God.”  Pulpit Resource.  December, 2013.  p.  53.

“Weirdos on the Way” - Advent 3A

Isaiah 35:1-10
Saint Matthew 11:2-11

For two long months I sat on the board of a specialized ministry for young people in a college setting.

The meetings were regularly  three hours long and dealt mostly with how to raise money. [Read: Get blood out of a turnip.]

It was the same old stuff I had spent most of my ministry dealing with. How do we get more money from the same pool of donors?  How do we increase our pool of donors?  Every church member who has ever served on a committee can feel my pain.

The ministry was mostly to students and could never be self-sustaining.

Then somebody suggested that we open the ministry to the neighborhood and not just to the students.

I thought the idea was genius! I thought of real people I knew.

The couple with three children, two of them twins, struggling to get the brood in the car for the ten minute drive to church.  I thought of the woman with the broken hip who couldn’t drive yet but could probably make it three doors over to worship. 

I thought it would be great for college students to worship with children around and a few older folk to take care of.  It would help them see the larger church being a place for others.

The pastor didn’t see it that way and asked: “What if the people who come are weirdos?”

I was stunned. Had the pastor ever rode on the CTA?  Had the pastor walked the streets of a downtown in any major city?  Sooner or later one should, I think, meet a weirdo or two.  If you don’t want to walk around looking for a weirdo, come over to my house, I might be home and you can meet one.

Weirdos are everywhere.  As the hymn says about saints the same thing could be said about weirdos:  “You can meet them in school, on the street, in the store, in church, by the sea, in the house next door; they are saints of God, whether rich or poor, and I mean to be one too.” 1

One of the most eccentric of all Biblical weirdos is John the Baptist - aka. Saint John the Baptist.

As I said last week I wouldn’t have gone across the street much less into the wilderness to hear John preach.  He’s a beatnik with a bad attitude.

His outfit is bizarre.  Now you can buy a camel’s hair blazer from from Ralph Lauren for around $200.00.  John’s wardrobe was straight from the camel and I can’t imagine that his leather belt was a fashion statement either.  It probably didn’t even match his shoes.

Fad diets are all the rage for us and while there is nothing like wild, fresh from the hive honey, the locusts might prove to be a plague for even the most iron stomached of Iron Chefs.

His message, as my pastor Shannon Kershner said last Sunday, has a “turn or burn” quality to it.  “Turn from your sins...Turn to God...For the Kingdom of Heaven is coming soon.”2

And when it comes, look out.  “He will separate the chaff from the grain, burning the chaff with never-ending fire and storing away the grain.” 3

Yipes.

For three Sundays we have to deal with this guy, two in Advent and one on the Second Sunday after Christmas - the Baptism of our Lord. Fortunately you can now move the feast of the Epiphany to that Sunday and get rid of John altogether after today.]

Yet, we cannot deny the fact that people came from far and near to listen to John preach.  Was it his weirdness that drew them or his message? We’ll never know while people left what they were doing and went out into the wilderness to hear John preach.  If we have learned anything from this year it is that weirdos have a way of drawing crowds. 

I think the crowds are what caused John to overplay his hand and wind up in the clink.  I think they emboldened him to speak out about sin and judgement wherever he found it, even if he found it in the king’s palace.

What landed John in jail was not his preaching but when, as they say in the south, “he stopped preaching and got to meddling.”  John called King Herod’s adulterous affair with his sister-in-law into question. That he even spoke of it out-loud wasn’t such a good idea. 

Herod didn’t take kindly to John’s scandalizing his private life so he had him jailed and sentenced to death.

Locked behind prison doors John had to be wondering: What happened to the fire? What happened to the judgement? Herod was chaff and John was wheat. What happened to the vision?  Maybe this isn’t the guy we have been looking for after all.

Jesus doesn’t give John a direct answer to his question but rather tells him to look at what he is doing.

“Go and tell John what you see and hear -—that blind men are recovering their sight, cripples are walking, lepers being healed, the deaf hearing, the dead being brought to life and the good news is being given to those in need. And happy is the man who never loses faith in me.” 4

That is a coded message that John’s captors would never understand but John and John’s followers would know by heart.

Dr. John Buchanan paraphrased it this way.

Remember, John, as you sit there, in that cell—- cold, hungry, thirsty, waiting for your inevitable execution - remember the promise that came to our people at the darkest, most frightening moment in their lives, the worst moment in our history, when a cruel and powerful enemy was about to attack and kill and defeat and imprison and exile. Remember

They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. . . .Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear!" 5

Fear is what makes us want to keep the “weirdos” at bay.  Fear is what confuses.  Fear is what separates us one from another.  This year was filled with fear.  Fear of the other.  Fear of people who are not like us.

Herod and his kind only add to that fear. They play on it. Their rhetoric starts us staring at each other with suspicion. They start us blaming each other and distrusting one another.

Yes, my brothers and sisters, even in places that are supposed to be the most loving on earth there is distrust at the highest levels of anyone who might be weird.  No wonder people look at the church and say “if these are Jesus’ followers there must be another way.”

There is!  It is the way of Christ and not always his church!

Dr. Mike Lindvall wondered

Does it work, Jesus’ way?  Does it work, his way of love and compassion?  Does it work, his way non-coercion and kindness?  Does it work, his way of service and sacrifice?  In the short run, sometimes.  In the long run (maybe the very long run) always.  That’s the promise of the gospel. 6

It’s the promise of all of scripture.  There is another way “it shall be called the Holy Way and it shall be for God’s people; no travelers, not even fools, shall go astray.” 7

God could not have said it any stronger? God could not have given directions any better.  God could not have given us a map more clearer.

Christ is calling us: “Hey! Follow me! Down this road! Follow me and I promise that no travelers - be they fool or weirdo - will go astray.”

Thanks be to God who comes in this season and every season makes this so.  Amen.

_________

1. Lesbia Scott, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.” Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal. (Louisville: Westminister/John Knox Press, 2013), #730.

2. St. Matthew 3:2. (TLB) [TLB:The Living Bible]

3. St. Matthew 3:12. (TLB)

4. St. Matthew 11:4-6. (PHILLIPS) [PHILLIPS= The J.B. Phillips Translation]

5. John Buchanan, “Fear Not” Sermons from Fourth Church, Chicago, IL, December 16, 2001), http://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2001/121601.html

6. Michael L. Lindvall, “Shall We Wait for Another” (sermon, Brick Presbyterian Church, New York, NY, December 13, 2013),  http://www.brickchurch.org/Customized/uploads/BrickChurch/Worship/Sermons/PDFs/2013/12152013.pdf

7. Isaiah 35:8. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

"The Peacable Kingdom" Advent 2A

Isaiah 11:1-10
Saint Matthew 11:2-11

Anybody who has a Facebook account know how divided, vitriolic, and confused our country has become.

A friend’s posts are the prime example of all of this. 

Scroll down his Facebook page and you will hear a diatribe by Tess Rafferty. I have no idea who she is but she bills herself as a writer and author.  Tess is clearly miffed.

She calls churches “white power meet-ups” and suggests that if you voted for Trump you are essentially a member of the KKK.

“If you voted for Trump,” she goes on, “you are a racist, homophobic, misogynist” from “a petty backward state full of small angry towns.”

She invites her Facebook followers to unfriend her if they voted for Senator Sanders, Governor Gary Johnson, or Dr. Jill Stein. Then she tells her real friends and family who didn’t vote the way she though they should that she is not going to “pretend this is all cool and pass them the plate of turkey
at the family dinner.” 1

I voted for Secretary Clinton but, I’m telling you, if I had made the mistake of inviting Ms Rafferty over for Thanksgiving, I would have found a host of Trump supporters to join our celebration just so Tess wouldn’t come.

I might even invite Jon Stewart who said on CBS This Morning.

“I thought Donald Trump disqualified himself at numerous points. But there is now this idea that anyone who voted for him is -- has to be defined by the worst of his rhetoric,” Stewart said. “Like, there are guys in my neighborhood that I love, that I respect, that I think have incredible qualities who are not afraid of Mexicans, and not afraid of Muslims, and not afraid of blacks. They’re afraid of their insurance premiums. In the liberal community, you hate this idea of creating people as a monolith. Don’t look as Muslims as a monolith. They are the individuals and it would be ignorance. But [seeing] everybody who voted for Trump as a racist is a  monolith. That hypocrisy is also real in our country.” 2

Lest they be any mistakes I know that “the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that there were four hundred and thirty-seven incidents of intimidation between the election, on November 8th, and November 14th, targeting blacks and other people of color, Muslims, immigrants, the L.G.B.T. community, and women. One woman in Colorado told the S.P.L.C. that her twelve-year-old daughter was approached by a boy who said, “Now that Trump is President, I’m going to shoot you and all the blacks I can find.” At a school in Washington State, students chanted “build a wall” in a cafeteria. In Texas, someone saw graffiti at work: “no more illegals 1-20-17,” a reference to Inauguration Day.” 3

Both kinds of hatred - Ms. Rafferty’s and that outlined in The New Yorker article has to be condemned by every person of good will but we also must admit that people are confused.

Believe this or not, scrolling downward on the same Facebook page where my friend posted the diatribe is a video of Nathan Pacheco and David Archuleta singing, “The Prayer.”

I pray we'll find your light
And hold it in our hearts
When stars go out each night

Let this be our prayer
When shadows fill our day
Lead us to a place
Guide us with your grace
Give us faith so we'll be safe.

Clearly, like so many of us, my friend is confused and conflicted. Are we going to guided safely by God’s grace or are we going to hurl insults at each other as we pass the peas at holiday dinners?

We could go John the Baptist’s way and call each other a “Brood of snakes!” And wondering, “What do you think you’re doing slithering down here to the river? 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 blossoming? Because if it’s deadwood, it goes on the fire.” 4

Frankly, I wouldn’t go across the street to hear John the Baptist preach.  I am not found of being called a snake-in-the-grass. I don’t like it when it is suggested that my people are “a dime a dozen.” And I don’t like the idea of becoming toast when I don’t measure up.

Fortunately John the Baptist’s message is not the only one we have in Scripture.  There is another that I find far more promising, more appealing.

It is a time when God “will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.” 5

There really isn’t much difference between Isaiah’s first audience and us. 

Israel’s time in exile was indeed a time of suffering and sorrow but this time it was self-inflicted.  Babylon was the place they ended up because they had gotten things very badly wrong.  We might begin by admitting that we have done the same thing.

In their Babyalonian exile they felt estranged from God and each other and so do we.

A nation that longed to be united is more divided than ever.   The red states are more red and the blue states are more blue. 

Into this mess God comes with an alternate vision.  It is best depicted in the painting I love so much  “The Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks.  (See above) It is the vision Isaiah shares with us in today’s first reading depicting a time when God triumphs and peace reigns. 

It is the vision of a time when mortal enemies can dwell together.   The lion with the lamb.   The bear with the cow.  The leopard with the goat. All of God’s creatures dwelling in peace.

But that moment  can only come when we begin to see each other the way Jesus’ sees us.  Remember the old Sunday School hymn?  “Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.” Maybe if we saw the world through his eyes it would be a vastly different place?

The prophet Isaiah tells us that God, even in the midst of great turmoil, still  offers us comfort, and direction, and strength.

On our own we have about as much power to bring lion and lamb together as we do to bring peace to Tess Rafferty’s family gatherings or a joint meeting of Trump and Clinton supporters but we can begin by trying to see everyone as a beloved child of God.

If it can happen in Mississippi in the midst of the nastiness this  election brought who knows where the shoot may blossom next.

Hours after the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church was destroyed by arsonists who spray painted  “Vote Trump” on the buildings walls the Reverend James Nichols Senior Minister of First Baptist Church - Greenville reached out to them.

The following Sunday both churches were using First Baptist’s building.

"If it had been our church that burned, somebody would have reached out to do the same for us," Nichols said.

What makes this newsworthy is that Hopewell M.B. Church is an all black congregation while First Baptist is mostly white.  Sadly, this is the norm in both southern and northern cities.  Congregations divide over racial, ethnic, or economic lines.

"They opened their doors to us to stay as long as we want and do whatever we need there," Clarence Green, Hopewell’s Pastor, said. "What God is doing -- it's not about race, creed or color.... The God we serve is neither black nor white, Jew nor gentile."

Some of the First Baptist people are worshiping with the Hopewell people and vice versa with neither pastor hearing anything negative.

"Forty years ago, it was unheard of for a black congregation and a white congregation to worship together," Green said. "A wall of hatred is being torn down through the spirit of love." 6

If we allow it to spread this spirit of God’s love just might lead us to the peaceable kingdom.

Let this be our prayer:
Lead us to the place,
Guide us with your grace
To a place where we'll be safe.  Amen. 

Sunday, December 6, 2016
______
1. Tess Rafferty, “Aftermath 2016.”  https://vimeo.com/191751334.

2. CBS News, “John Stewart and Donald Trump.” “CBS This Morning.”
January 17, 2016.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jon-stewart-the-daily-show-former-host-election-2016-donald-trump-republicans/

3. Alexis Okeowo, “Hate On Rise After Trump’s Election.” The New Yorker. November 17, 2016.

4. St. Matthew 3:7-10. (MSG) [MSG=The Message.}

5.  Isaiah 11:3-4.  (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version.

6. Emily Wagster Pettus, “Two Mississippi Churches Transcend Racial Barriers After Arson.”  Associated Press. November 23, 2016. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mississippi-churches-transcend-racial-barriers-arson-43734241