"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.

____________

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

____________ 

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.

"Light the Way" - Pentecost 22A

 

Joshua 24:1 & 14-15

Saint Matthew 25:1–13

I don’t know about you but if I live to be 1,000 I hope I never hear the words, “to close to call” ever again.  I has been a harrowing week in a harrowing year.

No matter what side you are on it has been like a visit to Disneyland. There have been roller-coaster rides of emotions with one moment being up and the next being down followed by excruciatingly long waits.  It’s the waiting that was the hard part.

We can tolerate a little waiting.  Some of us can even remember the year when we waited 36 days until the Supreme Court decision in which President George W. Bush’s victory over Vice-President Al Gore was verified.  We remember the wait but we had to be reminded of Mr. Gore’s graciousness in defeat when he said: “history gives us many examples of contests as hotly debated, as fiercely fought, with their own challenges to the popular will.

Other disputes have dragged on for weeks before reaching resolution. And each time, both the victor and the vanquished have accepted the result peacefully and in the spirit of reconciliation.  So let it be with us.

I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country.1

 That is where we are at now.  The election has been decided after a difficult week of waiting, watching, and for some of us constantly checking our Twitter feeds for the latest update.  It has just been more waiting in a year of waiting.  Waiting for the pandemic to end and discovering that at one moment we are making progress while at the next we seem to be sliding backward.  Waiting for jobs to come back.  Waiting for schools to open.  Waiting for congregational singing to return to our churches. Waiting for word on the health of people we love.

We don’t wait well.  

Jesus once told a story about that.  It was remembered by the gospel writer because the original readers were anxiously waiting for Jesus to return at any moment to establish his reign and make all things new. They were growing impatient, restless, about to give up and so he told them a story to remind them of the need to be ready and never forsake the faith.

Weddings in Jesus day were grand celebrations that involved the couples’ entire community and went on for days. There was feasting, dancing, and revelry beyond measure.  Being asked to participate in the event was a high honour. 

An important part of the wedding ceremony was the procession of the bride and groom with their pathway lighted by maids-of-honour holding lamps to illumine their path at night.  Being asked to be a light-bearer was a high honour and it was expected that you do the job well.

Something happens and the groom is delayed.  

I am sure all you have sat in churches, cooling your heals waiting for a member of the wedding party to show up.  Any pastor can regale his or her congregation with one horror story after another. 

In one I was called to officiate  the couple forgot the rings at the hotel and insisted that they could not exchange vows with borrowed rings.  It seemed like forever until they returned.  The poor organist played ever piece of music he knew and some he didn’t.  It was about thirty minutes of uncomfortable waiting.

Some of the bridal party, in Jesus’ story, made themselves comfortable – too comfortable.  The day was moving into night and eyelids weighed down by rich food and probably an open bar were growing heavy. 

Half the bridal party fell asleep.   In the honor/shame society of the time it would have been seen as the greatest of insults which is why the groom reacts so unkindly to the women when they finally showed up.

He was angry because the bridesmaids had neglected their duty.  They had only one responsibility – to light the way – and they failed.

While we are taken aback by the severity of the groom’s reaction of slamming the door in the latecomers face every one of Jesus’ original listeners would have been nodding their heads and saying, “Serves them right.”

Neither should they have expected any help from those who had prepared.  These bridesmaids were ready for any eventuality. They had brought along enough oil to accommodate the delay but even they may have been running short.

One group asks the other for help and their request is met with derision.   “They answered, ‘There might not be enough to go around; go buy your own.’”2

Remember this was a first century village.  There were no late night convenience stores open.  These woman were in real trouble.  They were in trouble with their families for whom their irresponsible actions brought shame.  They were in trouble with their community whose celebration they ruined. And, they certainly were in trouble with the groom who unceremoniously slammed the door in their face.

And so the message of Jesus’ parable is a harsh one.  Be ready! Be prepared or else!  And if you are like me you might be thinking: There had to have been other options.

One of those other options, which I had never thought of before was put forth by Aimee Moiso, a Ph.D candidate at Vanderbilt.  She was really thinking out of the box when she suggested.  “Light cast by a flame is not a zero-sum resource; if the oil could not be shared, surely the light of the lamps could have been.”3

What a wonderful idea!  What a beautiful scene!  The bridesmaids walking next to each other, each helping the other out, caring for each other, still lighting the way.

There is little doubt that for the original audience the was a parable about judgement, pure judgement.  For us, in our day, we need something else.

Bishop Yehiel Currey wrote wisely and well in a letter he sent to members of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod.

As we look closely ...we see clearly that, as a society (and likewise as a church), we remain polarized and polarizing, separated, unable to perceive our neighbors, hear our neighbors’ pains, view our neighbors as humans like us, and invite them into the life-saving work of Christian community.  Like society, we the church remain possessed by a spirit that disallows us from encountering and responding to our neighbors with attentiveness, authenticity, and love.

 Conservative columnist Erick Erickson reminded his readers last Wednesday.

Both sides are convinced that if their guy loses, the country is going to hell in a handbasket. I assure you, despite the hysteria, that is not really the case. But it is the case that someone in your community is falling through the cracks and you can help.

Whoever becomes President and whichever party controls the Senate or your state legislature will be unable to fix those things. They will have zero impact in any meaningful way on the lives of those people.

We have all obsessed with this election. We are all fretful. We all have an interest in it. But the homeless, the battered wife, the child, the hungry, and the isolated do not need a president, a senator, or a congressman. They all need your commitment to your local community. They need a neighbor’s love. . . .4

They need us to bear the light for them and with them.  For as the hymn writer puts it. “It’s not with swords loud clashing, or roll of stirring drums, but deeds of love and mercy, God’s heavenly kingdom comes.”

Now is our time to be light-bearer and light sharers for it is then we will be the kind of people the kingdom of heaven is made.

____________

1. CBSNews.com staff, “Text Of Gore's Concession Speech,” CBS News (CBS Interactive, December 14, 2000), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-gores-concession-speech/.

2. St. Matthew 25:9.  (MSG) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message Devotional Bible (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2018).

3. Aimee Moiso, “Matthew 25:1-13. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with the World,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Teaching 3 (Louisville, KY: Westminister | John Knox Press, 2020): pp. 473-474.

4. Erick-Woods Erickson, “Can I Have Your Attention for a Minute, Please?,” Erick Erickson's Confessions of a Political Junkie, November 3, 2020), https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/can-i-have-your-attention-for-a-minute.

"Saints" Pentecost 22A

 I John 3:1–3

Saint Matthew 5:1–12

Recently a friend and a very fine pastor in the ELCA posted on his Facebook  page this little bit of doggerel: “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, all the rest have 31, except any month in 2020 all of which have 5,328.”

This year we’ve dealt with a pandemic, hurricanes, wildfires, murder hornets, political turmoil, economic turmoil, and online church. Parents and teachers struggle to know how to care for their children, pastors struggle to know how to care for their parishioners, and none of us knows completely what the future holds.1

 Tom Hanks proved he was as good a writer as an actor in a collection of short stories called Uncommon Type.  In one of the stories he writes about man who “has a short, stressful relationship with a hyperactive woman: ‘Being Anna’s boyfriend was like training to be a Navy SEAL while working full-time in an Amazon fulfillment center in the Oklahoma Panhandle in tornado season.’”2

That sums up what this year has been like for “those of us who have led worship in empty churches, for those who have faithfully attended church from their living rooms, to those who have kept daily prayers, to those who have lost jobs, freedoms, and loved ones to the pandemic, to all of those who go through”3 the seemingly endless days of 2020.

Jesus comes to people just like you and me with words of comfort and assurance.

As a preacher I can imagine this scene from Jesus’ perspective. I can see the people’s reactions with smiles or tears of recognition as one person after another turns to their neighbours and says: “He’s talking about me!  This man is talking about where I am in my life!”

Up until this dreadful year we may not have seen ourselves in much of what Jesus was saying.  We may have exhibited some of those characteristic at one time or another but if this year has taught us anything it is that everything we value can be ripped away from us by something so small it can only be viewed under a microscope.  Now we know, in the words of the hymn writer, “all the vain things that charm us most” can disappear so fast that we might even feel the need to “tie-one-on” only to discover that all the saloons are closed.

Now, like it or not, we are in that crowd with Jesus hanging on his every word and discovering what he really means.  

The Beatitudes, as we have come to refer to them are not The Be Happy Attitudes as Robert Schuller once called them in the title of a book.  They are not something we can conjure up. They are not a product of our wishful thinking.

The Beatitudes are not a sacred checklist to organize and download into a Google calendar.  The Beatitudes reflect who is honored and exalted in God’s eyes. It is not that being poor in spirit earns the kingdom of heaven or being merciful means that mercy lands on your doorstep.  God’s purposes are to lift up those who are burdened and broken. The Beatitudes are not about trying to “get on the list.” The Beatitudes reflect what God values, not how to curry God’s favour. [Following them] we begin to value what God values. We come to honor what God honors.4

 That is what it means to be a saint.  

We don’t think of ourselves as saints because of all of the baggage associated with the word.  Saints are celebrated with statues and appear in stained glass windows.  We’ll be lucky if our relatives and friends will be willing to pay for an obituary in the Beacon.  

Saints live exemplary lives; ours by comparison are quite ordinary. 

Saints do great heroic deeds; ours may be only only the deeds done in daily living.

Saints are known by their unwavering devotion but sometimes our faith, in the words of another hymn writer, causes us to “tremble, tremble, tremble.”

Yet we had something in common with them and the author of the epistle of John tells us what it is.  “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”5 “Think of it!” another paraphrase of this passage virtually shouts, “we really are!”6

All those people we lit candles for this morning they were children of God.  All of those people you will light a candle for later in the chapel, they were children of God.  All of those whom you are closing your eyes for now and remembering, they were children of God.

They followed Christ in this world knowing that death would not be the final word spoken about them.

We follow believing that things will not always be as they are now. We follow believing that we will not always be surrounded by a shadow of a death toll that grows by the day.  We follow knowing that we are children of God and our lives are in God’s hands.  We follow, even amidst the tumult and uncertainty of an upcoming election believing that we  live with one foot in this world and one foot in the kingdom of God.

In the next few day and weeks it might be more emotionally and spiritually healthy for us to lean into the foot that rests in the kingdom of God.  To turn off the television, read a book, rest awhile, shut off all of those talking heads who have both feet firmly planted in the world and do something that reminds ourselves that are are children of God for that is what you are even in what seems to be the longest year of your life.

____________

1. Charles  Lane Cowen, “Holy! Holy! Holy!,” Modern Metanoia (modernmetanoia.org, October 19, 2020), https://modernmetanoia.org/tag/allsaintsday/.

2. George Will, “Opinion | The Coming Decade of Democratic Dominance,” The Washington Post (WP Company, October 28, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-coming-decade-of-democratic-dominance/2020/10/27/538d4cb2-188e-11eb-82db-60b15c874105_story.html.

3. Cowen, loc cit.

4. Sammy G. Alfaro, “Saint Matthew 5:1-13. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture.” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Teaching 3 (Louisville, KY: Westminister | John Knox Press, 2020): pp. 437-439.

5. 1 John 3:1. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]

6. 1 John 3:1. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]

"What's Important" - Pentecost 21A

 

The 503rd Anniversary of the Reformation

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Saint Matthew 22:34-46

If there is anything these past ten months of pandemic has forced  us to do is decide what is important and what is not.

Is it important that we go out for dinner, gather at a house party with friends, attend a concert, play or sporting event or not?  We’ve had to decide if the wedding we were planning to attend or, for some couples even have, is worth the risk to family and friends.  

Even as a church we have struggled are struggling still with just how important is it to gather for worship.  There is no doubt that we want to it is just that we wonder if it is safe.

There is a certain level of emotional maturity to has to be exhibited by people of every age in realizing that we can’t always do what we want to do when we want to do it.  Emotional maturity forces us to ask if what I want to do safe.  And true emotional maturity requires us to ask not only is it safe for me but is it safe for those friends and strangers around me.  

Every parent of a teenage son or daughter has had to say to their offspring at one time or another: “You may want to do it but you can’t.” And that is a struggle that we face as individuals, as a society, and even as a congregation.

Is coming together safe?  Should we continue to gather in person or would it be better to only offer online worship experiences?  Will we be like restaurants open at limited capacity one Sunday only to be closed the next.  Will we get confused, frustrated, fatigued?  Will we want to throw caution to the wind, rip off our masks, sing at the top of our lungs and say, “It the Lord wants me let him take me!”  Or will we wait it out patiently?

The question before us is simply what is important.  The question put to Jesus in today’s gospel can help us answer the “what’s important” question that has been  before us throughout the year 2020.

Jesus and the leaders of his day have been asking the same question of each other ever since he began his ministry.  

Mostly Jesus has been the one doing the asking.  He heals people whenever the need arises be it on the Sabaoth or not asking, “What’s more important keeping the law or alleviating someone’s suffering?”  He talks and dines with anybody and everybody who comes his way and in so doing asks, “Is it really important that there be insiders and outsiders?”

It is no wonder that the leaders wonder to themselves, “What is important to this guy?  What truths does he hold to?  Where are his guardrails?”  

The Pharisees have failed to figure Jesus out.  The Sadducees haven’t done much better and so a lawyer tries his hand.  Remember this is long before one the characters in Shakespear’s play Henry VI suggests that one of the ways the band of pretenders to the throne can do to protect their country is: “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”1

Jesus doesn’t appear willing to do even this because he treats the learned man’s question with respect giving him a direct answer.  

You want to know what’s the most important, what matters to God, out of all that God commanded what’s the biggie, the first? It’s exactly the command that God said to bind on your arms and your forehead for prayers so that it’s as close to your mind as possible, so that you can’t forget it even if you tried: Love God with all you’ve got to love God. God gave you heart and soul and mind for that reason: so that you’d be able to love God. “This is the first and greatest commandment,” Jesus says.

We can almost hear the Pharisees listening in as their lawyer examines Jesus start to sigh as Jesus gives this answer. It must be what they were hoping to hear, a nice traditional answer, hearkening back to one of their favorite passages.

Jesus continues, “And the second is like it,”  raising some eyebrows. Didn’t the lawyer only ask him which was the greatest? What’s he mean, “the second?"

The second is, “You must love your neighbor as you love yourself”. The pharisees sigh a second sigh of relief. He’s just quoting Leviticus. He knows Israel’s scriptures, quotes the Torah. Maybe he’s not such a novel and dangerous teacher after all.

Jesus concludes, “All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” That seems reasonable to us. Why wouldn’t the Law, the Torah, God’s commandments for God’s chosen people, and the Prophets, God’s words to Israel through God’s human messengers, depend on loving God and loving neighbor as self? Really, when we think about it, loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves doesn’t sound like particularly revolutionary moral guidance either. Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do anyway? Isn’t that what nice people regardless of denomination, creed, religion, sexual orientation, nation of origin, or political party are trying to do? To be loving of God, neighbor, self?

 No.  We know that is isn’t.  We wish that is was but it isn’t.  There is a lot of meanness in the world and a lot of divisiveness.  

That’s why some churches don’t make much of Reformation Sunday any longer.  It was only used to be another way of dividing Christians one from another. We try not to do that anymore because there are enough divisions already in the world.  

Jesus upped the anti of what’s important by adding this “loving our neighbour” business.  We may like our neighbours!  We may tolerate our neighbours! We may wave to them over the fence on occasion, but love them? 

The guy with the bigger than a billboard yard sign with the name of a candidate I oppose if not downright hate, I’m supposed to love him?  The family down the block who seems to have a never ending summer of barbeques (even in an age of Covid!) all accompanied by the boom, boom, boom of loud music, I’m supposed to love them?  The person at work who is a pain, them?  “Yes,” Jesus says, “Them.”

And we say, “Wouldn’t it have been better if you would have stuck with the original ten commandments rather than adding this condition?”  

In his commentary biblical scholar Douglas Hare reminds us:

In an age when the word 'love' is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the primary component of biblical love is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that Deuteronomy demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment. Similarly, to love our neighbor, including our enemies, does not mean that we must feel affection for them. To love the neighbor is to imitate God by taking their needs seriously.3

 That kind of love calls us to speak out when we see a neighbour hurt, or devalued, or treated poorly because, like them or not, we see them as a child of God deserving of love, and care, and compassion.

That is something that is so hard it can’t just be somewhere in writing it has to be in the words of Jeremiah: 

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.4

 If you ever visited an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood you might see  men wearing two boxes known as phylacteries (the Greek word) or in the Hebrew a Tefillin.   One is strapped to the head to represent thought and the other is strapped to the arm at the same level of the heart.  “The head-tefillin imbues ... the idea of subjugating [the] intellect for the love of God.  The arm-tefillin, focuses on devoting the person’s strength to the Almighty."5  I admire not only what Tefillins stand for but the courage of those who wear them.

What they represent is just like Jesus said. Love of God and Love of neighbour. Love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.  As Dr. James Howell reminds us:

God is just pivoting around you, asking you to love God with every fiber of your being, not casually, not when it’s convenient, or just when there’s trouble.  To be sure they understood God wishes to be loved all day long, every day, in everything.”6

And God wishes us to show that love to each other as well.

 Times like these remind us again of what is important. 

Jesus never said that if we loved him he would take away any challenge but he reminds us that we do not face these challenges on our own because we know that on our own because we know that on our own we don’t have any chance of facing what life throws at us.  No one can, or should, ever say, “I alone can do it.” 

We need to remember that God is with us and God will show us how to face adversities step by step, day by day, linked to Jesus.  And God has given us each other – brothers and sisters – trying to follow God by staying close to Jesus.

Today Jesus has reminded us to hang on to these two most important things during these times and at all times: To love God with all of our heart, and soul, and mind and strength. And to love our neighbours as ourselves.  

All the law and the profits hang on these two commandments for they remind us what is important now and forever. 

____________

1. William Shakespear, Henry VI.

2. William H. Willimon, “Christ Shaped Love,” Pulpit Resource 48, no. 4 (2020): pp. 12-14.

3. Douglas R. A. Hare, Matthew: Interpretation: a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 260.

4. Jeremiah 31:31 & 33. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

5. Shraga Simmons, “Tefillin: A Primer,” aishcom, accessed October 24, 2020, https://www.aish.com/jl/m/pb/48969816.html.

6. James  C. Howell, “What Can We Say October 25? 21st after Pentecost,” James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 1970, http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.