"Touched by Joy" - Christmas 1B

Saint Luke 2:22-40

Whenever I go into a home where I know the couple to be grandparents I always look for one picture.  It never fails, try it. Somewhere on the mantle or framed on a wall there is a picture of one of the grandparents holding one of their grandchildren while the other looks on and smiles.

Sometimes, when there are more than three generations present I can find a picture of a great-grandparent holding the baby.

You can see this at baptisms when the pictures are being take and the baby is passed around the relatives like a football at Northwestern or Ohio State game.  Maybe this is because as Mary Ann Evans who, because of the times in which she lived, is better known as George Eliot observed, “We older human beings feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in earth or sky.”1

There is a strong sense of this in today’s gospel where

“Seemingly by chance, Mary and Joseph bumped into an old man named Simeon, and then a woman named Anna who had been a widow for decades. The aged inevitably turn and gaze at an infant, as if the chances to glimpse such precious beauty are numbered.”2

 It leaves one to wonder what that picture would have looked like.

In only there had been a photographer there that day! Imagine a close up: Simeon’s hands, gnarled with arthritis, age spots, boney fingers gently cradling the infant’s head; eyes meeting; smile unfolding across the wise elder’s face – a beautiful exchange under any circumstances, made even more wonderous because of those involved and the Spirit’s presence guiding them all.

This is a picture of generations coming together. “Past, present, and future meet in one intimate, brief moment in the temple.”3

Anna and Simeon had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.  We don’t know how old Simeon is but Anna is one of the few people in the New Testament who has her age mentioned in exact years, she’s 84. 

They have been hanging around the temple in what must have seemed to them a perpetual waiting room.  There must have been moments in their lives when they thought they couldn’t wait any longer. 

It has to be a little like it is for us as we wait for our group to be named so that we can get the vaccine.  Tell us where we need to go and what time to be there!  The Doctor’s office? Walgreen’s? CVS? The sushi counter at the 7/11? Tell us where we need to be and we’ll be there.  

Frustrating as this whole waiting business is for us Anna and Simeon didn’t have the faintest notion about who to see, where to go, or what to do.  So they waited in the temple and prayed.

Until a couple walked in, Mary and Joseph, just fulfilling the law.  It is then that Simeon and Anna “see things about the baby that perhaps even the baby’s parents ... can’t see. By the grace of God, they publically, hopefully testify about tomorrow. Those with many years behind them are able to perceptively see all the way into the distant future.”4

What they see is a mixed bag.  This child will upset the apple cart of those who thought they had it all together.  This child will grow up to be a man who does not roll over in the face of those who think they are the absolute authority over everything and everybody.  This tenacity may bring him to the point where it costs him his life and breaks his mother’s heart.

Yet, the two prophets continue, those who allow themselves to be touched be him will know a peace that carries them to the end of their days.

An unfortunate consequence of the first line of Simeon’s chant: “Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, According to Your word...”5  is that we have made it into his swan song.  We have used it – I have used it – as if it were sung with his dying breath.

That is sometimes why it is sung when the casket is recessed down the aisle at the conclusion of a funeral sermon.  Pastor McGuire and I always used to do that with his lush baritone lofting over the congregation like a sad saxophone.  It was beautiful.  It was meaningful.  It was touching. 

But what if those weren’t the last notes Simeon and Anna ever sung? What if it was not of not only about an end to their waiting but a song about new beginnings?  What if they marched out of the temple arm and arm, into the streets singing that they their eyes had seen their salvation and the light for all people?

Perhaps they shared a song of joy, pure joy.

Perhaps, as we stand on the verge of a new year after one that has been very bad indeed we too can glimpse some joy.  It won’t be a joy of our own devising.

It is a joy that comes when prayers have been heard and answered, when hope is fulfilled, and dreams are made reality. It is a joy that can only come as a gift of God, not something of our making. Joy comes to us as a baby, a child given to us, with our face. God with us. God come to stand beside us and be for us.6

 That is the picture we have before us in the faces of Simeon and Anna looking at the baby as his parents watch in wonder.  

It’s a great picture to have in our hearts. “For now,” with all that we have been through this year, “it is good to pause and admire the picture Luke offers, and, like Simeon and Anna, to give God our praise.”7

Don’t you think?

__________

1. Shirley Isherwood, Chris Molan, and George Eliot, Silas Marner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

2. James D Howell, “What Can We Say? December 27 1st of Christmas” James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notations (blog) (Myers Park United Methodist Church, July 1, 2020), http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

3. Julie Peeples, “Luke 2:22-40. Commentary 2: Connecting the Reading with the World,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2020): pp. 131-133.

4. William H Willamon, “Two Old Prophets and a Baby,” Pulpit Resource 48, no. 4 (2020): pp. 39-41.

5. Saint Luke 2:29. (NKJV) [NKJV=The New King James Version]

6. William H Willamon, “The Fullness of Time,” Pulpit Resource 30, no. 4 (2002): pp. 59-61.

7. Peepers, loc.cit.

"Home" - Christmas Eve 2020

 

Saint Luke 2:1-20

Without a doubt Christmas of 2020 is unlike any other we have experienced in our lives because those of us who are used to being at church are at home.

Every other Christmas we’ve had to decide what time we would have to get the family together so that we could get to church.  Would we go to the earlier service and have dinner afterward or would we go to the late service and risk falling asleep during the sermon.  Now it doesn’t matter because you’re at home.  You can fall asleep during the sermon and I will never know.  And all you have to do to remedy the situation is to hit the rewind button.

More amazingly even your pastor is at home!

Like many of you I can’t remember a Christmas Eve where I wasn’t rushing back and forth to church.  Being an acolyte at one service, singing in the choir for another, sometimes doing both. It was glorious!

I’m sure you had the same experience.  Some of you have been churching on Christmas Eve longer than I have been alive and, believe me friends, that is a very long time because I am old.  But this year things are different – you’re at home and so am I. 

It’s unlike any Christmas we have ever experienced because we’ve decided to “follow the Fauci,” as Shepard Smith says, listen to the scientists and the cooler heads and much as we would love to be together to stay at home.

That is quite unlike the first Christmas where, The Rev’d Calum MacLeud, who is the Dean of Saint Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, observed nobody seemed to be at home.

He said in a sermon once:

Travel‑weary Joseph and heavily pregnant Mary journey away from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem, the ancestral town of Joseph. Indeed, not only are they not at home, but they don’t even find proper shelter for the birth of the child.

The angels aren’t home either. They’re on the move from heaven—which I guess is their home—to earth to say and sing of the great good news, to share it with the shepherds that they might them­selves share it with others; the angels are jour­neying, coming to earth, to what the theologian Philip Yancy calls “the visited planet.”

Shepherds—they’re not at home. Of course they’re not even in their usual place in the fields, ulti­mately. They, too, have to make the journey from the fields where they are keeping their sheep to find the baby in the stable after being scared out of their wits by this encounter with the heavenly messengers; they take their own journey.

And, of course, in Matthew’s Gospel, those myste­rious magi, the wise men—they’re on the road away from home, being led by the star to find the new promised king. T.S. Eliot imagines these magi as grumbling in just the worst time of year for a journey and such a long journey, the ways deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter. Indeed we might say that the magi’s grumbling in that poem “The Journey of the Magi” could be true of any of those involved in the story except perhaps Herod and his advisors. They were very much at home.

And I believe that all this activity and movement and journeying is occasioned because not even God is at home on Christmas. God, maker of heaven and earth, creator of all that is, God whose nature and name is love is also on a journey at Christmas. God is journeying on Christmas to

where you and I are.1

That why people who we never see the rest of the year come to church at Christmas and Easter.  On Christmas they come to hear that they are not alone.  On Easter they come to hear that this life is not all there is.

You and I understand that we need to come to the place more often than a couple of times a year to be reminded that God’s great love for us is personal and makes a difference.

Those are messages we long to hear but they are not messages that are easy to hear.  Sometimes we have to strain to hear them like one man did in one of my favourite Christmas stories.  It was written so long ago that it appeared in The Chicago Tribune Magazine section which disappeared in 2009.

It is called “Jerry’s Last Fare” and was written by James F. Garner as a Christmas present for his wife.

It’s about a cab driver, working late on Christmas Eve, who decides to pick up one last passenger before calling it a night.

As luck would have it the guy wanted to go to the airport but first he had a request.  He wanted to pass through Lincoln Park Zoo.  Jerry was not pleased for he had promised his wife that he would be home for midnight Mass and now he was going to miss it.  

To make matters worse his passenger wanted to stop and get out for a moment or two at the entrance to the Zoo.  Jerry had never been robbed but he knew enough not to get out of his cab at the gate of a deserted zoo close to mid­night.

“There is something I always wanted to try,” the man began with a sparkle in his eye.  “There is an old legend about what happens to the animals on Christmas Eve.  Have you heard it?”

Way back in his memory Jerry thought he had so, before he realized what he was doing, he was out of his cab and standing in the snow.  His passenger reminded him of the legend that the only witnesses to Jesus’ birth were animals that gathered around the manger. What they saw was so miraculous that the animals were blessed with the power of speech.

“So on every Christmas Eve,” [said Jerry’s passen­ger,] “if you listen very hard, you can hear the animals talk again.

So they stood and they listened.  They listened for a very long time until Jerry finally said, “I don’t hear them.”

 

“Listen very hard,” the man said quietly.

 

Jerry did, and replied, “Nothing.”

“No not nothing Jerry.  There’s the silence.  Listen to the silence.  You can’t hear the animals or any people, you can’t hear the cars.  Think of the thousands of people who live within a half-mile of where we are standing right now.  You can’t hear a single one.”

 

Jerry paused to let his imagination take him around that half-mile, then further, around the city, across the black lake to the shores of Indiana and Michigan.  He smiled, “It sounds like the whole world is asleep.”

 

“Asleep?” asked the fare.

“No, not asleep.” [Said Jerry.] “You’re right.  It’s like everyone is wide awake and holding their breath.”

 

“That’s the sound of hope, Jerry.  It’s Christmas Eve, when the Savior of the world was born, but no one is praying, not in the words they think of as prayer.  Just hoping with their hearts at ease and their eyes filled with wonder.”

 

“So Christmas Eve is the time when animals talk and the people shut up.” Jerry said with a chuckle.  “It sure is a beautiful sound.”

Maybe tonight as the only journey you make is in your very own home. Maybe tonight as you wend your way from your computer to your bedroom  you’ll hear the sound of the God of love creping in beside you, bringing healing and hope.

If you do, even for just a second, it sure will be a beautiful sound.

And maybe the sound of that silence will only be broken by your memory of the words and tune of the hymn as “The world in solemn stillness lay, To hear the angels sing.”

Happy Christmas.

________

1. Calum I MacLeod, “Christmas Eve Worship,” Christmas Eve Worship at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago (December 24, 2012).

"Wait for It!" - Advent 3B

 

Saint John 1:6-8, 19-28

Seasoned preachers should know better.  Pastors who have been in the business for years and have large, tall steeple churches in the centre of town should know not to challenge members – especially young members - of their congregation.

So it comes as a surprise that one of my favourite preachers, Dr. James D. Howell, whom you have heard me refer to often, one Sunday in Advent inadvertently laid down a dare to a member of his church in Charlotte, North Carolina when he said in a sermon that he had never seen a John the Baptist Christmas Card and he doubted that he ever would.

When he arrived back in his office after the 11 o’clock worship this was waiting for him on his desk.

Yes, the good pastor was holding in his hand the first ever John the Baptist Christmas Card.  Look again and you will see that the person who drew it was really paying attention.

Not only is “Repent Ye!” written in bold letters across the top but the card has everything.  John’s hair a mess.  He is dressed in the obligatory leather belt - referred to as a girdle in the picture, and camel’s hair raiment and, for good measure, there is a plate of locust and wild honey at his feet.  The picture is clearly labelled as being located in the wilderness of Judea but there is one more thing.  Let’s take a closer look. 

To the artist those squiggly lines emanating from John’s arm pits may signify that even though he spent a great deal of time in the River Jordan what he really needed was a good, solid bath.

This is the picture that Matthew, Mark and Luke drew of John.  All three cover the repentance angle of the story but Matthew and Luke remember John getting very personal with the religious leaders who ventured forth into the wilderness to find out who or what was causing such a commotion among the people.  They remember him saying something like:

“Brood of snakes! What do you think you’re doing slithering down here to the river? Do you think a little water on your snakeskins is going to make any difference? 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 blossoming? Because if it’s deadwood, it goes on the fire.”1

With a message like this it is very likely that Dr. Howell is in possession of the one and only John the Baptist Christmas Card.

The picture of John the Baptist we have before us in today’s Gospel is “mellower  and more evasive. There is no fire and brimstone spewing forth this Sunday, no calls for repentance and wilderness travel.”2

Sill the posse of the highly religious come out to see him with one question on their minds:

“Who do you think you are, anyway?” “Well,” he laughed. “I’m not the Messiah, if that’s what you’re thinking.” “So, who are you then?” they sneered. “Elijah?” “Nope.” “The Prophet?” “Uh-uh.” “Well, who are you then? Give us some kind of answer.” “Okay. You can tell your friends that I’m the one Isaiah was talking about, the voice crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord!’” “But why are you baptizing then, if you’re not the Messiah, or Elijah, or the Prophet?” “Look, fellahs,” John said, running out of patience, “I baptize with water!”3

That’s it!  That’s all John had. Water and the Word.  That is where we all started our journey of faith with water and the Word.  Then somebody did for us what John did for his people.

When the people emerged from the water John didn’t just pat them on the head and say “Now you’re all clean be on your way!  And try not to get so dirty next time.”  He pointed them to something and said, “Wait for it!  Wait for it!”

It’s like the punch line to a joke that we can all see coming a mile away.  It’s like the moment in a movie when you know what is going to happen before it does - maybe because you’ve seen it before - and you turn to your partner next to you and say, “Wait for it!  Wait for it!”

It doesn’t take much to see two confirmation students outside of Dr. Howell’s office.  He enters, takes off his robe, and rummages around on his desk.  “Wait for it!  Wait for it!”  One student says to the other.  The card is found. The pastor doesn’t just smile he laughs out loud and maybe just claps his hands together in joy.  

He calls for his staff to come from their offices.  “Hey gang!” he yells.  “Come quick!  You gotta see this!” And he passes the card around the room.  It’s the moment of joy the artist has been waiting for.”

John’s “Wait for it!” is what Advent is all about.  This year the waiting is going to be particularly difficult.  The wise among us will wait on those large gatherings with family and friends.  We’ll have to wait for the traditional Norman Rockwell holiday to come this year.  We’ll have to wait to see the people we love who are separated from us by time and distance. We’ll have to wait.

John the Baptist reminds that we wait in hope.

Christian hope looks at the world around us and acknowledges that things are very bleak.  We don’t pretend that loss of life, or health, or confidence, or mobility, or the ability to gather is something to be taken lightly.  This year its hard to bury our heads in yule tide cheer.

This year our hope is more like the candles on the Advent wreath which every week grow a little bit brighter, and a little bit brighter, and a little bit brighter every Sunday straining against the darkness.  We light our candles and wait.

The best news I can give you this day is the reminder that the one are waiting for is already here.  Christ has come!  He is already with us!  We are only celebrating the commemoration of his birth.  He has never been away!

Through all the turmoil of 2020 he has been here.  Through every difficulty that we have faced he has been here.  Through isolation, and fear and frustration Christ has been... “wait for it” ... “wait for it” ... with us.

That’s the news that John the Baptist announced and it is a news that we know to be true.  

That witness alone is enough to merit John the Baptist at least one mention on a card, Christmas, or Advent, or otherwise.  Don’t you think?

____________

1. St. Matthew 3:7-10. (MESSAGE) [Message=The Message]

2. William H Willamon, “Waiting for the Light,” Pulpit Resource 33, no. Fall (2005): pp. 53-56.

3. James Sommerville, “Stronger Stuff,” A Sermon For Every Sunday (A Sermon for Every Sunday, December 8, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jim-Somerville-Advent-3B.pdf.

"Sing" - Advent 4B

Saint Luke 1:26-38

Saint Luke 1:46b-55

Almost everybody becomes a singer at Christmastime.  Even those who don’t believe they can carry a tune in a bucket have a hard time not risking it and chiming in.  

This is especially true in Lutheran congregations where often time the abilities of those in attendance have been enhanced by several glasses of glug at the Christmas Eve gatherings.  Then, to add to the fire hazard, we give those very same glug filled parishioners candles to hold while they sway and sing.  It is a wonder to me that there are any Lutheran churches standing in all of Christendom after such hijinks. 

For many, if not most people, singing is why they come to church on Christmas Eve and it is good for preachers to remember this.

Dr. John McCormick Buchanan, now the pastor emeritus of Fourth Presbyterian Church, was stressing over the last Christmas Eve sermon he was to preach in that place before retiring.  As he laboured over his lap-top he wondered if he could “say anything that would illumine or enhance a story everybody already knows and loves.”

His wife Susan took note of his struggles and reminded him. “Stop worrying about this. We don’t come on Christmas Eve to hear a sermon. We just want to hear the story, sing the carols, light a candle, and get home at a reasonable hour.”1

This year we won’t be doing any of that although I do hope the room you are watching this in has at least a few candles burning brightly.  I also hope you’ll sing along with the carols providing that you have not had so much glug in you that your singing wakes the neighbours. 

Music is central to the Nativity stories and leading the chorus was Mary whom Luther called Jesus’ first disciple.  

Do you ever wonder what her voice may have been like? 

I can’t imagine it was a big, booming voice like a Wagnerian Soprano. I have always thought of it as more Bel Canto, beautiful singing better suited to Mozart or the lighter, “champaign” operas by Italian composers. 

Yet it has also suggested that Mary’s Song might have sounded like our modern day blues. 

She would have had a great deal to sing the blues about when she made her visit to her cousin Elizabeth.  She is not “Mary-with-a-halo” but rather a young girl who “lived in Nazareth, a small, backwater village of no account, population in the dozens, her family and neighbors eking out a hardscrabble existence. We would say that she married young – but so did most women back then.”2

That is why bible scholar Dr. Lynn Japinga thinks in “most of the paintings, she is looking down at her folded hands, her face a mask of prim piety.

She does not smile. She does not look happy, even when she is holds the baby Jesus. She looks as if she is carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, instead of the Saviour of the world in her arms.3

 Still she sang.  She sang in faithfulness ... shaped by courage and love in equal measure: love for her child of promise and her courageous belief in the seemingly unbelievable promises of God. 

In this Advent during a long, dark winter of worry over a virus and the daily death toll it brings, do we dare hope?  Do we dare sing?  Can we sing ourselves back into believing?

We can if we hold on to the hope, hold onto the belief, that God does not wait for a perfect time and place.

God does not wait for pandemics to end. God does not wait for all the messes to be tidied up. God does not wait because “Jesus is being born where people need him most.” God makes God’s home in the messiest of places—a stable—in the messiest of times— under the control of the Roman Empire—and with the most ordinary of people—a teenage girl and her fiancé and the shepherds. Jesus is being born where we need him most. In the messes. In the hard places. In the dark and desperate places. In the lonely and lost places. In the places and with the people who seem too far gone. Jesus is born into exactly those kinds of places and he spends his life with the most vulnerable and ostracized and brokenhearted of people.4

 Jesus came for people like us and for such a time as this.

When we cannot sing together.  When we have to light our candles and hold on to hope at home we are reminded that faith can be born again by saying “yes” to the promise of this one child’s birth.  The child who is named, Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us.

He comes to a world that is overcome with darkness, separation, loss, grief  to bring truth and grace in his light and life that will forever shine. He comes to a world of clanging discord and worried voices and invites us to sing a melody of peace.  He comes to a world that was all consumed by the big and powerful but was brought low by a tiny virus. He comes as a testament to the quiet ways God goes about redeeming God’s creation.  

He comes in the song of his mother and all who have joined in the chorus and had their lives illumined by the light of God’s love revealed in the love song of this birth. 

Love came down at Christmas,

love all lovely, Love divine;

Love was born at Christmas;

star and angels gave the sign.5

That's the song that we sing.

___________

1. John M. Buchanan, “Christmas Eve Sermon,” Christmas Eve Worship. The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. (December 24, 2011).

2. James D Howell, “Weekly Preaching Notions,” Weekly Preaching Notions (blog. (Myers Park United Methodist Church, July 1, 2020), http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

3. Lynn Japinga, “Saint Luke 1:26-38. Commentary 2: Connecting the Reading with the World,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2020): pp. 66-67.

4. Courtney Allen Crump, “Where Is God in This Mess?,” A Sermon for Every Sunday (asermonforeverysunday.com, December 15, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Courtney-Allen-Crump-Advent-4B-2020.pdf.

5. Christina Georgina Rossetti,  "Love Came Down at Christmas." Hymn

"Waiting and Watching and Hoping and Praying" - Advent 1B

Saint Mark 13:1-5 & 24-37

We all know that Advent is a time of waiting, watching, hoping, and praying. 

And this year I am willing to wager that every preacher will somehow say during the course of the season that what we are waiting for this Christmas is not that one special present, a big red or blue GMAC truck, or a diamond, or an expensive watch, or anything else purely personal what we are waiting for is a vaccine.  Whether it has to be kept at 90 below zero, or in a common refrigerator, or even in cardboard box in a cupboard what we want is the shot-in the-arm or shot anyplace else for that matter that will help us get our lives back to normal.

We want to have holiday dinners once again with family and friends. 

No matter how nicely we set the table, no matter how well the meal was prepared, it got more than a little lonely for most of us last Thursday as we looked at the same one or two faces around the table that we have seen every night since March.  

We want to break out of our little safety cacoons and fly and not just metaphorically but really fly, like on an aeroplane.  We want to be able to think about going on a vacation without having to worry about the positivity results for the places we’re going.  

If you’re like me you have a stack of mailings from cruise lines and travel agencies that are sometimes mindlessly sifted through with the thought, “Someday...someday.”

This year has been a year of waiting, and watching, and hoping, and praying.  Are we doing all those things just for a vaccine or are we hoping for something more – not just a normal, or a new normal, but a newer and better normal.

For one of the disciple a sign of normalcy was the temple because of its seemingly stability.  The disciple thought it would be something that would last forever.

The temple, however,  was essentially a public works project built by Herod a person who exhibited no north star of faith but whose god was only raw political power.  Herod’s interest was in rescuing at least part of his otherwise despicable reputation by building great structures and slapping his name on them.  The Temple being admired was built not because Herod was faithful to anyone but himself but because he wanted to make Jerusalem the number one tourist destination of its time.  He knew that it would draw thousands upon thousands of tourists whose visits would be good for the economy and that he would get, or take, the credit.

When they admiring it was less than twenty-five years old and looking good as it shone in the midday son. 

Jesus throws a wet blanket over the moment of architectural appreciation when he says: “You see these great buildings? Not a single stone will be left standing on another; every one will be thrown down!”1  Think of the audacity of such a prediction. 

It would have been like someone saying to us last Advent as we decorated this beautiful place; as we brought creches from home; as we hosted friends, neighbours, and a menagerie of animals at our live nativity  – “You do realize that next year this place will be empty.  You won’t be able to gather. You won’t be singing hymns.  On most Sunday there won’t be anybody here.”  We wouldn’t have believed them.  We would have thought they were, if not crazy, at least they had been smoking something.

 But that is where we are and it is like our universe has come crashing down around us.  The sun, moon, and stars are still in their places but few other things seem to be as they once were leaving us only to wait, and watch, and hope, and pray for a breakthrough that will bring us a better day, a better tomorrow.

If we look very carefully amid the misplaced devotion to buildings and the mayhem in today’s text we will find what we have been hoping for.

Amid his gloom and doom predictions Jesus wedges in a promise: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”2

Isn’t that exactly what we have been clinging to during this year.  Gathered for a few short weeks in church or gathered for more than a few long months at our computers we have longed to hear a word of hope in all this. 

We long to hear that the human family is not doomed to destruction and loss.  We long to hear that violence and hatred will not have the last word.  We pray that we will not always be separated from each other by masks or any other reason.  We hope that we will not always be the subjects of the whims and whimsies of the powers that want to rule our world.  

We wait, and watch, and hope, and pray for  a power that is above all that. We wait, and watch, and hope, and pray for a power that is so powerful that it can reveal itself fully in the birth a baby who became a man and gave us an entirely different idea of what a new world would be like.

Long ago I remember hearing the master preacher and storyteller, Dr. Fred B. Craddock remind us in a sermon:

Before Jesus the people used to tell stories about when the Messiah came and like we would begin our stories with “once upon a time” their’s would begin with the words, “when the messiah comes.”

To the beggar sitting on the side of the road they might pat the poor fellow on the back and say, “When the Messiah comes there will be no more poverty.”

To the battered individual, broken and bruised, they might say, “When the Messiah comes, no more violence.”

To the marginalized and outcast they might say, “When the Messiah comes, you’ll be included.”

In our day they might say to the ones who faced an empty chair at their Thanksgiving table this year because of either sickness, fear of illness, or worse yet, death: “When the Messiah comes, no more misery”

And then, I remember Dr. Croddock saying, the Messiah came and their still was violence, and poverty, and exclusion, and misery.

It was then, he pointed out, that the disciples had to do what he called, “a magnificent flip-flop” where they realized that wherever there was misery of any kind, any kind of misery at all, there was the Messiah. 

This Advent let us remember that God’s relentless love is still at work in the world even amid our anxieties and weariness.  In these days let us remember that even in the midst of pandemics, and injustice, and division, and violence that God’s power is at work in the here and now and our only task is to see the Messiah at work in all the places we have been waiting, and watching, and hoping and praying.

The Messiah, Jesus Christ our Lord, is here in the midst of all the this with his promise that his word of hope will never pass away and that in him all that we had ever hoped, and watched, and waited, and prayed for will be fulfilled.  Jesus Christ our Lord who is present through it all.  Amen.

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1. St. Mark 13:2. (PHILLIPS) (PHILLIPS=J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English (New York: Simon Schuster, 1995).

2. St. Mark 13:31. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]

"A King That Surprises" - Reign of Christ Sunday

 

Saint Matthew 25:31–46

One of the few nice things about us being separated with you at home and me here in church alone is that I can show you things that if we all together I could only tell you about. 

So, come with me now to the campus of Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Roman Catholic Church in America. It’s a short walk from the Brookland - CUA stop on Washington’s Metro and you can see its magnificent Romanesque-Byzantine Revival dome from the platform.

Once inside this magnificent building the first thing you will notice as is you walk down the centre aisle is the Mosaic above the high altar. It is an impressive work  called “Christ in Majesty”, or “The Apocalyptic  Christ,” or to some only “Angry Jesus.”

If one could picture the Son of Man coming in glory to judge the nations this would be it.  He doesn’t appear happy. If he were to judge the goats would probably outnumber the sheep 1,000 to one and most of us would be sure that, under his stern gaze, we would be a goat.

It is this process of separation of which Jesus speaks and it is his final parable in Saint Matthew’s gospel.  

Jesus has been fending off the scribes and Pharisees for several chapters now: answering their questions, calling their bluff, and warning them and his disciples of the devastation that is about to come on all the earth. But now he shifts our gaze to the time just after the End, when the smoke has cleared, and all the nations of the world are standing there blinking in the bright sunshine of eternity. That’s when the Son of Man will come in all his glory, Jesus says, and all his angels with him.1

The notion that he would be wearing this kind of expression on his face is enough to make even the least pious person tremble.

We don’t need an angry Jesus to help us to recall those times when we could have helped but didn’t.  We don’t need the penetrating gaze of “Christ in Majesty” to remind us that we have often not loved our neighbours as ourselves.  We don’t need a judge to remind us of all the times we should have plead guilty but got off the hook.

We are hard enough judges of ourselves. We don’t need a Christ of the the Apocalypse to remind us of all those times we look back on in our lives and cringe.  Very few of us go through life believing that we never have, nor have had to, ask for forgiveness.  

It is the first thing we do when we come to church we confess that we are in “bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”  So we may only shrug our shoulders and quietly take our place with the goats waiting for whatever will happen to happen.

Then this parable of sorting and condemnation takes a sudden and abrupt turn.  

It is important to notice the element of surprise on the part of both groups.  “When did we see you in need and help you?” the sheep ask. “When did we see you and not help?” the goats ask. And in their question the importance of the word seeing begins to emerge.

A very fine Baptist pastor, James Somerville, tells of the time in seminary when he and a friend participated in a seminary class exercise called “The Plunge” where they immersed themselves in an urban experience in which they were called upon to spend 24 hours on the streets as homeless guys.

They panhandled, spent a night in a Salvation Army shelter, and in general just hung around looking destitute. 

It was sometime that morning that I noticed people weren’t looking at me. I was sitting on a bench outside a big department store, enjoying the sunshine, when a mother and her daughter came walking toward me. I smiled and said hello but the mother at least looked right through me as if I had become invisible. And once I noticed it in her I noticed that everyone was doing it. They were looking around me, or past me, or through me, but they weren’t looking at me. If they had looked at me they might have seen me, and if they had seen me they might have had to acknowledge my presence, and if they acknowledged my presence then they might have had to do something for me. It was so much easier just to pretend they didn’t see, just to look around, or past, or through. Just to walk briskly by with their heads held high while I disappeared a little piece at a time.2

 

On the other side of the nation, in another one of my favourite churches to visit I saw what happened when someone really took the time to see.

I was worshipping one Sunday morning at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco a majestic place located in the Nob Hill neighbourhood.  

In the more moderate weather they hold their coffee hour in the plaza behind the Cathedral which is often populated by more than a few of the city’s extremely large homeless population.  I could see them all sitting quietly and politely before worship when I entered the church for a spectacular experience in word and song.  

The men and women were still their afterward as the worshippers emerged to have coffee, sweets and fellowship on the same plaza.

It should be noted that the Cathedral feeds countless under-served people during the week and at Sunday night dinners.  But on the day I was there one dishevelled fellow approached the table where the coffee and cake was being served by an elegantly dressed woman of the congregation.

As man reached for the last of the coffee cake that was on the tray the woman said, “Oh no! Not those” I bristled.  The man was taken aback.

“Those have been sitting out far too long” she said.  Unwrapping some of the fresher baked goods behind her she placed them before the man. “Take some of these.  They’re fresher” she said then asking if he would like coffee or tea she served him with the dignity of royalty.  

“Take as many as you’d like and then come back for more.  There is plenty!”  I smiled and thought I had seen this parable being lived out. 

It reminded me of sculpture at another place that I love, The Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul, otherwise known as the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  

The Rev’d Barbara Brown Taylor describes the scene as only she can:

[T]o enter the is to enter a sacred cave, filled with whispers and footsteps ... to see the high altar you have to travel past all the monuments of the faith, past all the memorials to human achievement and long-gone saints ... only after you have taken that walk do you arrive at the high altar, where Jesus sits on his throne at the end of time, surrounded by the whole company of heaven as he balances the round earth on the palm of his hand like a ripe fruit.3

On either side of him, the Cathedral website tells us, the “110 carved figures surrounding the sculpture of Christ are composed of saints and angels, but the six prominent figures on either side are actually anonymous.”4

Through them the stone mason is preaching a little sermon because the figures closest to Christ are not Saints Peter or Paul after whom the Cathedral was named.  The figures closest are not Matthew, Mark, Luke,  John, or any other of the big name players.  Through these anonymous figures the sculpture is telling us that the those closest to Christ are the ones who gave food to the hungry, clothed the naked, visited those who were in prison, gave a cup of cold water to a stranger, and took someone they did not know into their homes.  Those are the ones who are closest to Jesus.

Sometimes we fear that when we meet Jesus he’ll look angry like the “Christ in Majesty” mosaic at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.  And for some he will because they have looked at the poor, and hungry, and downtrodden, the least, the lost, and the last, and said: “So what.  What is that?  What are they to me?”  And they, who have been rewarded in this life with riches beyond measure, the angry Jesus tells us,  will certainly be surprised by the reward they get in the next.

But those of us who have heard Christ’s word in this place and places like it and just went about trying to follow him as best we could.  And even those who have never heard about him or even given a second thought to him in years but yet went about doing his will will hear the one who holds the whole world in his hands, say: “Truly I tell you, just as you helped one of the least of these who are members of my family you helped me.”

And when that happens, whenever that will be, even the “angry Jesus” there at the shrine in Washington just might smile at our surprise.

So we pray: “Destitute King, one with the hungry, the naked and the scorned: may our faith be proved not in dogma or piety but in serving you in the last and the least, through Jesus Christ, the stranger’s Lord. Amen.”5

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1. James Somerville, “I'd Have Baked a Cake,’” A Sermon For Every Sunday (ASermonforEverySunday.com, November 17, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/sermons/a53-christ-king-sunday-year/.

2,  ibid.

3. Barbara  Brown Taylor, Sermon. Morning Worship at the Duke University Chapel Durham, S.C. (November 25, 1987).

4. ”Washington National Cathedral - High Altar.” (The Washington National Cathedral), accessed November 21, 2020, https://cathedral.org/what-to-see/interior/high-altar-3/.

5. Steven Shakespeare, Prayers for an Inclusive Church (New York, New York: Church Publishing, 2009), 43.

"Got Talent?" - Pentecost 23A

Saint Matthew 25:14-30

This may surprise you but over the last few months I have developed a grudging respect for politicians.  Admitting this makes me also, and exceedingly glad that you and I are separated by some distance – you at home and me alone again naturally in the sanctuary.  If you were here I would be afraid that you would be rushing the pulpit right now to pummel me about the neck and shoulders.

Think about it.  The first thing you have to do as a politician, is to start raising money, lots of money.  Essentially you become a beggar hitting first on family, then on friends, then on total strangers asking for a handout.  

In order for them to part with a buck on your behalf you have to convince them to believe in you and your cause.  It’s like “Shark Tank” only instead of four sharks there are schools of them.

Then you have to go out and ask more people to believe in you by holding meetings, coffees and, if you become popular enough, rallies where you give the same basic speech over and over again.  

Then you loose control of not only your schedule but your life. 

Chasten Buttigieg talks about this at great length in his book I Have Something to Tell You.  He writes that when his husband Mayor Pete’s campaign took off he was in the hands of handlers, professional campaigner  managers and their minions, who told him not only what to do and where to go but what he could or could not say without “running it by them” first.  

Can you imagine living your life like that?  Having to worry about everything you say or do.

Still men and woman run for office and they do so believing they might win but knowing also that they might loose.  That must be the hardest part of all.  Once you’ve lost suddenly you have nothing to do. 

Again Chasten Buttigieg remembered having a million things to do one day and then, after withdrawing from the campaign, finding that the next day the only thing on their schedule was making dinner and walking the dogs.

Still, men and woman are willing to try.  They are willing to put it all on the line and run for something from dogcatcher to the highest office in the land.  In so doing they risk losing. 

That’s the fear that keeps most of us out of high stakes games like poker and politics.  We are afraid to loose. Sometimes that fear is rational and sometimes it is not.

Jesus told a story about irrational fear once in a story that has lost some of it’s punch because the word “talents” has been mistranslated and therefore cheapened.

How many sermons have you heard where the preacher took the modern day use of the world “talent” and then listen to them ask while they grinned:  “What talents has God given you? Use them for the Lord, don’t hide ‘this little light of mine’ but ‘let it shine.’”  I’m groaning or snoring already but Jesus original listeners must have been slack-jawed when they first heard Jesus say this.

“The Greek talanta isn’t an ability. We should translate talanta as “a huge bucket full of solid gold.”1

So, to the first slave the man gives control of about one hundred years of wages. The second slave gets the equivalent of forty years’ wages, and the last slave about a year’s worth. So, in the end this isn’t just like leaving the neighborhood kid in charge of the plants and cat food. These are vast sums of money, and with them comes vast responsibility and authority. Jesus says the man entrusts the slaves with it. One translation says he “handed over” his property to them, which means it is implied they are supposed to do something with it. In fact, it sounds like they are supposed to do with the man’s property whatever he would have done with it while he’s away.2

The first two slaves did very well.  They invested wisely and made their master a little dough. In fact, they doubled the guys money! And he rewards them by inviting them to become, in effect, partners.  And who wouldn’t want these two guys as partners?  They believed that, no matter what, there was a bull market out their somewhere and, if there was, they were going to find it.

The third guy has let his fear of losing win the day.  He digs a hole and buries the money.  His fear is based on a total misconception of his master.  For whatever reason he sees him as harsh, unscrupulous, “reeping where he does not sow,” and so he becomes afraid to do anything.  His fear has paralysed him to the point that he couldn’t even bring himself to bring the money to the bank, buy a CD and at least earn a little interest.  He takes the safest route and comes up more than empty all because he fundamentally misjudged his master.

Mike Ditka once said of the late George S. Halas’ payroll philosophy.  ''He throws nickels around like they were manhole covers.''3

The master Jesus tells us about it just the opposite.  He invests in the lives of his servants so that they can enter into his joy.  The only thing that held one back is fear of failure, the fear of losing what he had been given and labelled a loser.

Without a doubt these are fearful times we are living in.

A virus is running rampant through our land and keeping us apart from each other which is why I’m here and you’re there.  In this case fear is a good thing.  Nobody wants to be responsible for infecting another person.  

Painful as it may be we may miss the big Thanksgiving gathering this year.  If we went “over the river and through the woods” to grandmother’s house she just might slam the door in our face and make us sit on the stoop until our rapid result test came back.  

We may fear the loss of income.  We may fear for the health of a loved one.  We may fear that the divisions in our land might never heal.

But we are not losers.  

For God is the master in this story just as God is the master of your story and mine.  God is the one who has given us everything we have, had, or are.  And the best news is that this is not something we have to campaign for. God has given us grace upon grace and God’s grace, God’s love, is something that we can never lose.

This parable in not about our talents or even gobs of gifts represented by the word talanta it’s about the whole of our lives, our heart, our joy.

It’s about being a partner in God’s good work and hearing God say to us, come in and be a part of my joy.  A joy that can make winners of us all.

____________

1. James D Howell, “James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notions,” James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notions (blog) (Myers Park United Methodist Church, July 1, 2020), http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

2. Philip Martin, “Parable of the Talents,” A Sermon For Every Sunday (A Sermon for Every Sunday, November 11, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Phillip-Martin-Parable-of-the-Talents-1.pdf.

3. Dave Anderson, “The Bear Who Really Was One,” The New York Times (The New York Times, November 2, 1983), https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/02/sports/sports-of-the-times-the-bear-who-really-was-one.html.