Thursday, December 22, 2011

Expecting!

(Scriptures: I Samuel 2:1-11, Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:25-56)

Every now and then, events come to pass that we thought we’d never live to see. When many of us were growing up, the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union was an entrenched fact of life, something we thought was an unchangeable reality, like death and taxes. Many who grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s remember bomb shelters and duck and cover drills in school, where, in case of nuclear attack, school children were told to kneel under their desks with their hands clutched around their heads and necks. In 1961, the Berlin wall went up, dividing capitalist West Germany from Communist East Germany. By the 1970’s, when I was in high school, the duck and cover drills had ceased, but the tension between our countries remained, as it seemed like capitalism and communism were in a fight to the death for world domination. And then, in the late 1980’s, it just….ended…in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and events continued rapidly from there. Similarly, many of us remember other moments we never thought we’d live to see – apartheid, which enforced segregation between the races in South Africa, coming to an end in the early 1990’s, what were called “the troubles” in Ireland, in which Protestants seeking union with Great Britain and Catholics nationalists wanting to preserve independence from Great Britain killed one another for decades starting in the 1960’s, coming to an end in the “Good Friday” Belfast Accord of 1998. More recently, years of violence in Liberia have come to end in a fragile time of relative peace under President Ellen Johnson- Sirleaf. In these times of change, there are many theories of what happened, what brought them about. In some cases, these events are still too recent for us to have fully developed a perspective on them; the histories are still being written.

This may seem like a very strange way to begin a sermon for the last Sunday in Advent. We want angels and wise men and a manger, not talk of social change. Our Advent readings include statements that seemed extravagant, unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky. But the examples of sweeping change with which I began this sermon remind us that sometimes entrenched oppression, entrenched misery gives way to new hope; the impossible becomes not only possible, but inevitable, and what seems unreal becomes reality.

On this fourth Sunday of Advent, as we draw near to the end of this season of waiting, today’s Scripture readings give us words from not one, but two mothers. Our Old Testament reading quotes the words of Hannah, the first of two wives of Elkanah. Elkanah’s other wife is Peninnah – in Hebrew the name just means “the second one” or “the other one”. Hannah had been barren, so perhaps Elkanah married Peninnah to assure himself that he would have children, that his name would live on on. Hannah went to Shiloh to beg the Lord for a child, and vowed that if the Lord gave her a child, the child would be devoted to the Lord’s service. As Hannah left her child, Samuel, with the aged priest Eli, she prayed the beautiful words we heard read earlier. And, of course, our Gospel reading includes Mary’s Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of praise to God and thanksgiving for the child within her, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

We have a number of moms in our congregation, those with young children, and those whose children are grown, but no doubt remember what it was like to be expecting. That’s an experience I haven’t had. But I would imagine that as your bodies were going through the changes of pregnancy, you had so many thoughts about the child growing within you. Of course, boy or girl? What will we call the baby? Would he or she take after you or the baby’s father? I’d imagine, as you gave birth and as your baby grew, you’ve had such hopes and dreams for your child. What sort of person would your child grow up to be?

And our two moms in our readings this morning, Hannah and Mary, had high hopes for their children – and that’s putting it mildly. Hannah and Mary both literally expected their children to turn society upside down – or maybe right-side up. Here’s Hannah: “Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat with spoil. He raises the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.” And here’s Mary: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” Not exactly the kind of language we’d include in an invitation for a baby shower. Hannah and Mary are speaking in what is sometimes called the prophetic past tense, speaking with such certainty that it’s as if all these things have already happened. If Jesus heard words like this as he was growing up, it’s no wonder that his first sermon, as recorded by Luke, was on the text, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This was Jesus’ personal mission statement, what drove him, what motivated him to ministry.

You don’t need me to tell you that many people in this neighborhood, in our city, our country, in the world are hurting. The divide between the rich and the poor is as wide as it has been since the Gilded Age of the 1870’s and 1880’s. For those at the bottom of the economic ladder, prospects for improvement are dismal. In these days, it’s easy to lose hope for anything better. In these days, it’s easy to become discouraged, and just expect more of the same.

When we think about the forces that have power to create change in society, we think of guns and tanks, or people of great wealth and political influence. But throughout the Bible, we see that when God wants to bring change, he sends, not an army, but a baby. Think of Isaac, son of the promise, born to the aged Abraham and Sarah. Think of Moses, born to lead the children of Israel to freedom. Think of Hannah in our Old Testament reading giving birth to Samuel, who marked the transition from the social disorder of the time of the judges to the relative stability of the monarchy. And think of the birth John the Baptist, born, like Abraham, to an aged, childless couple, born to proclaim the coming Messiah, and Jesus, born to Mary, God in the flesh, in whom we are all saved.

We may think of Hannah’s and Mary’s dreams for their children as extravagant, over the top. But I think perhaps the question for us is not “why did they expect so much?” but rather “why do we expect so little?” Why do we expect so little? Hannah and Mary expected their children to turn their society upside down – or maybe right side up. But throughout history, the church, which professes to follow Mary’s son, instead of turning the world upside down, so often has just blessed the status quo. Hannah and Mary looked for the poor to be lifted up and the powerful to be humbled. Too often over the centuries, the church has upheld and blessed entrenched power as God’s will, leaving the poor to fend for themselves. Here at Emanuel, I think we sometimes let our size discourage us from hoping that God can use our congregation; we think that because we don’t have hundreds of members in the pews and millions of dollars in the endowment fund, God can’t use us to usher in the reign of God.

In his first letter to the church at Corinth, Paul said that God uses the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, uses that which is weak to shame the strong. Jesus was born, not in a palace, but in a stable. Jesus’ birth was a threat to Herod, a threat to the Roman empire and to all worldly empires, but good news to the shepherds and foreign wise men who came to pay him homage. It is not with the strong but with the weak that we find Jesus. So here at Emanuel, Jesus is right at home.

Hannah’s and Mary’s words gave voice to the hope within them, that the child within each of them would be used by God to turn society upside down – or maybe, turn it right-side up. And we here at Emanuel, as small as we are, still have new life within us – we’ve baptized several babies over the past year. Can a 150 year old church have children – “yes”! Can God use a 150 year old church to change lives, to nourish the life of the Spirit. Absolutely yes!

Did Hannah, did Mary know what plans God had for their children? Who can tell what plans God has for us, for the babies recently baptized and their families, and for those of us whose baptisms happened long years ago? We worship a God who uses old couples, long-childless mothers, unwed mothers to bring forth new life. And God can use us, if we’ll allow it. So, in a way, just as Hannah was expecting, just as Mary was expecting, so are we here at Emanuel – expecting, pregnant with possibilities, capable still of bringing forth new life, if God so wills.

During this Advent season of hope, peace, love, and joy, may we live with a sense of expectation – expectation that God who did great things in the past will do great things here in the future, that Jesus who passed from death to resurrection life will bring about resurrection life here at Emanuel Church. May it be so with us. Amen.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

(Scriptures: Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 126, I Thessalonians 5:16-24, John 1:6-8, 19-28)

We continue on in Advent, that season of waiting, waiting for the coming of the Christ child, waiting for the coming of hope, peace, and now, joy. The 3rd Sunday of Advent is traditionally called Gaudete Sunday, Gaudete, from the Latin for the word “rejoice”. Rejoice!

Our readings speak of a joy that is hard-won, a joy that comes at the end of a long period of endurance. Our reading from Isaiah comes at the end of the exile in Babylon, when the Jews are preparing to return to their homeland at last, after decades in a foreign land. After long decades of brutal exile, God will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom and gently lead the mother sheep. Psalm 126 captures the mood of those returning from exile – “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy.”

The Declaration of Independence lifts up three basic rights of human beings – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And Americans have been pursuing happiness for some 235 years now. During this Christmas shopping season, we’re promised, as we’re promised every year, that if we buy more, better, bigger, faster, we will be happy.

But the joy of today’s readings wasn’t bought at the mall. Some of you remember that early in my time here at Emanuel, I went on two trips with the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference to visit churches in Cuba, as part of a delegation forming a partnership between the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference and the Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba. Despite the signs everywhere proclaiming the triumph of the Castro Revolution – then celebrating its 50th year - by American standards, our hosts had very little – most buildings needed at least several coats of paint and most needed a good bit of exterior and interior repair, functioning indoor plumbing was a luxury, transportation options ran the gamut from surprisingly new Chinese buses to 1950’s vintage American cars, held together with hope and duct tape, to bicycle cabs to horses. On the way to a rural church, I saw a team of oxen pulling a jeep out of a ditch. Havana does have some lovely hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists, and so we ate quite well – and since we were paying, our hosts ate quite well while they were with us - but were very aware that many of those around us were accustomed to missing meals. Similarly, the churches we visited ran the gamut from long-established houses of worship that dated from before the Castro revolution, to churches set up in storefronts and even house churches. And yet at these churches the joy was just bouncing off the walls. From a material point of view, our hosts had very little to sing about – but at all the churches we visited, the joy of the Lord was in the house, evidenced by singing and clapping and shouting and swaying. And they shared the joy with those around them – even the smallest house church we visited raised rabbits and grew medicinal herbs for the members and also for their neighbors.

Our readings from Isaiah 40 and Psalm 126 show the joy of those returning from exile. It was a hard-won joy – they had been through a lot during the long years of exile. As Psalm 126 put it, they went into exile weeping, bearing seeds for sowing in a strange land, and now they were coming home with joy, bearing the sheaves, the fruits of their long endurance. And there was still much to endure – they were returning to a city of Jerusalem in ruins, a Temple site that had been burned to the ground. They had a whole lot of work ahead of them. And yet they were just so happy to be back home, back in the land that God had promised Abraham and his descendents.

I think I caught a tiny glimpse of what that joy might have looked like during my first winter here at Emanuel. You had worshiped downstairs in the social hall for a number of years because Rev. Grau could no longer climb the stairs. We went upstairs – so you were back in your sanctuary - but we had no organist. The search for an organist dragged on for months. Finally we found Ralph, our organist, and he graciously agreed to come and play for us, and was with us on Easter Sunday. And the joy in the congregation that morning – oh my goodness! - you were so happy to hear your organ again. Christ had risen from the dead, and it felt like something about the spirit of the congregation was resurrected that day as well. And the joy continues.

For a surprising number of our members, 2011 was a difficult year. The passing of various members of our congregation’s families, hospitalizations of other members, other personal tragedies that we’ve carried, and each one of us affected in one way or another by a difficult economy. For me, the joy is that as small as we are, we’ve been able to take each challenge, each tragedy, and wrap it in love and lift it up and offer it in prayer to God. As I’ve heard you say, more than once, we’re a small church, but we pray big. And even in this difficult year, there have been moments of joy – recovery and healing for several of our members, several baptisms, the many former members and friends of the congregation with us on our anniversary, the video you made of so many holy moments over the 150 year history of our congregation. This is joy that is a gift of the Spirit, a joy that can carry us through hard times. This is the joy that Paul was talking about in our reading from I Thessalonians:

"Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances – in ALL circumstances - for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil. "

So on this 3rd Sunday in Advent, we celebrate the gift of the Spirit that is joy. May the joy of the Spirit be with us in this season of Advent as we await the coming of the Christ child. And as we wait,

"May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this."

May it be so among us. Amen."

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Prepare the Way

(Scriptures: Isaiah 61:1-11, 2 Peter 3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-8)

Since early October, we’ve been reading and watching on TV the “Occupy” movement – first “Occupy Wall Street” and then Occupy Oakland, Portland, and, more locally, Occupy Philadelphia, which until Tuesday last week was situated at City Hall. A nucleus of Occupiers – somewhere upwards of 100 tents at any given time – were camped out 24/7 in tents on Dilworth Plaza, outside City Hall. Around this nucleus, a larger and incredibly eclectic assortment of activists – students, environmental activists, anarchists, Quaker and interfaith peace activists, clergy, labor union leaders, assorted other groups such as the “Granny Peace Brigade” – came and went as family schedules and day jobs permitted. There were also many homeless persons, who slept on Dilworth Plaza outside City Hall most nights. While these homeless were perplexed to see so many new neighbors on their doorstep, they were also grateful for the meals that the Occupy group served, over 1000 meals a day. The news media covering the Occupy movement were frustrated, first, that the Occupiers didn’t have a single leader – with their very participatory form of organization, all however many hundred people at Dilworth Plaza, everyone there, were potential leaders – nor did they have a tidy list of demands, beyond an overall message that the wealthiest 1% of Americans are causing financial hardship, political disenfranchisement, and environmental devastation for the remaining 99% of Americans, and indeed, for the rest of the world. Put simply, those at Dilworth Plaza were and are sick and tired of being sick and tired. On Tuesday last week, the police cleared Dilworth Plaza, but while the tents are gone, the feeling of being sick and tired of being sick and tired remains. As one of the signs at the Occupy camp said, “You can’t evict an idea.”

Today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel beings with the words, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark’s is thought by Bible scholars to have been the first of the four Gospels to be written, to which Matthew and Luke added additional material and of which the writer of John’s Gospel was at least aware. To Mark’s material, Matthew and Luke added, among other information, the birth narratives – the announcement of the angel to Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the manger, the wise men. John’s Gospel begins with a cosmic portrait of Christ as the pre-existing Word who was with God and who was God from the beginning, now become flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. But Mark’s Gospel has none of that. Mark begins with a quotation from Isaiah – with some additional material from Micah included – about a messenger preparing the way, and the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!’ And with that very brief introduction, we meet John the Baptist out in the wilderness. We’re told that people from the whole Judean countryside and even from Jerusalem were going out to John, to be baptized in the river Jordan as a sign of repentance. It almost sounds a little like John the Baptist had his own “Occupy the Jordan River” movement going on. Certainly with the description of his being clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt, eating locusts and wild honey, he’d have fit in just fine with the scruffy crowd in Dilworth Plaza – though the description is intended to remind us of Elijah, whom the prophet Micah said would announce the coming of the Messiah.

We may wonder why so many went out to the wilderness to be baptized by John. After all, it isn’t like everyone could just hop in their SUV or even carpool out to the Jordan. SEPTA and Amtrak didn’t go there. It was a long, uncomfortable walk or donkey ride from Jerusalem and the countryside to the wilderness, a major investment of time, a major investment of effort, to go out into the wilderness, where there were no creature comforts, no turnpike service plazas or vending machines, not even a porta-potty, nothing at the end of their long walk but John and the Jordan River.

Why did they go? We’re told they came to be baptized as a sign of repentance. Over 2000 years, we’ve layered a lot of religious glop on the word repentance, but at its core, repentance means a change of mind, a change of consciousness, a change of direction. It’s a recognition that the status quo isn’t working, that change is needed, and a resolve to stop doing what isn’t working in order to do something that will work, or at least that might work. For John’s followers, similar to the current Occupy folk, the status quo that needed to change was both personal and societal. After all, if going to the Temple and performing the prescribed sacrifices and rituals – or going to the local synagogue to hear the reading and exposition of Torah – had been sufficient, they wouldn’t have slogged out to the desert. If they had been living comfortably under Rome’s occupation of Judea, they wouldn’t have slogged out to the desert. But, in fact, none of these things were working. The Roman occupation was messed up, the religious establishment was messed up, and they themselves were messed up. The crowds had no grand social vision, and really neither did John. They just knew that both they and their society were broken, that they were sick and tired of being sick and tired, that they needed God to intervene in a deep way in their lives and in society. And John was very clear that he was the messenger, not the Messiah. It was not for John to save the people or their society; he could only point the way to the One who would.

Today’s reading from Mark reminds us that the Good News of Jesus may begin with the bad news that the status quo isn’t working, that change is needed, specifically, that we – you, me, each of us, all of us - need to change direction. As Jesus said elsewhere in the Gospels, it is those who are sick who need a doctor, not those who are well. Our reading from Isaiah brings a message that would resonate powerfully with the Occupy folks at Dilworth Plaza, and no doubt resonated with John’s followers: “Bring good news to the oppressed, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” It’s a message of radical change, radical personal change and radical social change. It was not for John to bring all this about himself, but to point to Jesus, the One anointed by God to do all these things – remember that in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus chose this very Isaiah text for his very first sermon. Like the 1% who hold great power in our day, the powerful of Jesus day were offended at this text, and in fact tried to throw him off a cliff. But for those who were oppressed, brokenhearted, and captive to the powers and principalities, in Jesus’ day and in ours, Jesus’ words were life-changing, like rivers of water in the desert.

The Occupy folks at Dilworth Plaza were there to point to the need for change. John was out in the desert, to point to the need for change. And we as followers of Jesus are likewise called to point to the need for change, and to point to Jesus as the one who makes change possible, to point to Jesus as the one whose birth and life, death and resurrection have brought in God’s reign. We can point to Jesus by telling our neighbors about Jesus, by inviting them to church. We can also point to Jesus in our lives, by modeling a way of life that’s different, by living in a way that says that Jesus, not the almighty dollar, reigns. We do that by raising money for the food cupboard and for the ministries of the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference. We do that by providing safe space for parents to raise their children. We do that by providing a place where hurting people can come for prayer, and coffee and cake, and a kind word.

“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,” said John the Baptist. In these remaining weeks of Advent, may we at Emanuel Church prepare ourselves and help to prepare our world for the coming of the Christ child. Let every heart prepare him room. Amen.

Wait and Hope

(Scriptures: Isaiah 64:1-9, I Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-37)

Today is the first Sunday in Advent – the first Sunday in the church year. As sometimes happens, the church is out of step with society, and today doubly so. While our society celebrates New Year’s Day on January 1st, we celebrate the beginning of a new church year today. At the same time, most of society is already celebrating Christmas, has been celebrating Christmas since about Columbus Day or thereabouts – but in the church, we wait. We’ll celebrate Christmas in due time, but for now we observe Advent – from the Latin word adventus, meaning “coming” – a time of waiting for One we know is coming, but has not yet arrived.

This year, Advent begins at a time when it may feel like things are coming unglued, falling apart. We just went through a Black Friday in which gung-ho shoppers used fists and pepper spray to drive off fellow shoppers - at a mall in North Carolina, the soundtrack of Christmas music was momentarily drowned out by the sound of gunfire. At good old Penn State, wholesome Happy Valley – my alma mater – the university president, Graham Spanier, along with longtime football coach Joe Paterno were dismissed amid accusations of having covered up the sexual abuse of teens and pre-teens. There’s an increasing sense that our national government is dysfunctional, political leaders from both parties bought (or bought off) and paid for by Wall Street – and at Occupy Philadelphia and other Occupy gatherings across the country, people are taking to the streets to demand change. While the protesters have been mostly peaceful, in many cities the police have not, and we’ve been treated to the ugly sight of police officers pepper-spraying and beating nonviolent protesters. International news is no more comforting, amid the threat of financial default in Europe, the threat of war in the Middle East. Amid frightening national and international news, we’ve had our own personal traumas – death of family members or friends, illness, unemployment, domestic violence striking us or those close to us. At our community Thanksgiving service on Wednesday, I heard that the cupboard, with the help of our donations, served over 300 families last week. 300 families who, but for God’s grace and the generosity of Emanuel and other churches, would go hungry. What a witness of the struggles our neighbors are grappling with here in Bridesburg and surrounding neighborhoods. We may be tempted to throw up our hands in despair. For people of faith, we can hardly be faulted for asking, “Why doesn’t God do something? Is God on lunch break, or did God maybe clock out early and go on vacation? Where’s God when we need Him?”

Our Old Testament reading from Isaiah was written at a time when it seemed like things were falling apart, spinning out of control. It comes from one of the last few chapters of Isaiah, written after the Jews had returned from exile and settled back in Jerusalem. They had returned from exile with such high hopes. But the rebuilding of the Temple had been slowed down by threats and interference from surrounding tribes, and also bogged down by community infighting. Similar to some of our current controversies over inclusion within the church, there was disagreement over who could be called a Jew, who could gather to worship the Lord, with some calling for exclusion of all except the super-observant, the purest of the pure, while others called for broad inclusion. The devastation of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem matched the disorganization and conflict among the Jewish people.

And so in his frustration Isaiah cries out to God, “Get down here and do something, will ya! Tear open the heavens and come down! Send fire and earthquake, so that our enemies will know you’re still in charge!” Isaiah recalls God’s works in the past – “When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.” Isaiah confesses the guilt of the people – “We have all become unclean, and even our righteous deeds are like filthy rags….our sin blows us away like the wind….nobody calls on you.” And Isaiah even blames some of the people’s misdeeds on God, “You were angry, and we sinned, because you hid yourself we messed up.” Isaiah reminds God “Yet, O Lord, you are our father, we are the clay and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Now consider, we are all your people.”

In Advent, we remember that God did indeed tear open the heavens, did indeed come down here and do something. He came down here in the child Jesus. Mark’s Gospel tells us that at his baptism, Jesus saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ crucifixion includes an earthquake. So, in Jesus, Isaiah’s prayers were answered, though likely on a schedule far different – and better – than Isaiah had envisioned.

From our Gospel reading we are reminded that Jesus will come again, not as a baby this time, but in power and glory. Jesus employs apocalyptic language and figures of speech used in his day to express the overwhelming scale and impact of this coming event – there will be signs in the heavens, and the Son of Man will come with great power and glory, to gather the elect from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

Jesus also said that only the Father knows when all this will happen – the angels don’t, even the Son doesn’t. There are lots of folks who want to try to set dates for us – this year marked the failure of not one but two of Harold Camping predictions, that of the Rapture on May 21 and the end of the world on October 21. I’m confident that the predictions of Hal Lindsay and John Hagee and the other screamers and shouters on radio and TV are just as far off-base – for example, Lindsay’s prediction of the Rapture a generation – estimated by Lindsay at 40 years - after the 1948 founding of the state of Israel is well past its sell-by date these 60+ years later.

That said, it’s easy to understand why so many listen to these predictions – because our world, like the world in Isaiah’s time, like the world of Jesus’ day, is threatening, especially to people of faith. Things seem out of control. Our natural environment is under assault on a global scale. There is great spiritual wickedness in high places. It may seem like God has left the building, like God has left the planet, has left us to our fate. When all that seems familiar is coming unglued, it’s a very natural human impulse to want the disruption to end. And it will, someday. But when it will happen, is not for us to know. In the meantime, in our reading from Mark’s Gospel, we have our instructions - to keep awake, to be faithful servants who are at their post whenever the Master returns. We have our instructions, to wait faithfully, and to live in hope.

The point of Jesus’ words is not for preachers on radio and TV to try to commit God to their timelines – the TV and radio preachers simply don’t have that authority over God. Rather, the point of Jesus’ words is for God to commit us to living our lives in a way that’s faithful to the Gospel. God in God’s sovereignty keeps God’s own council on matters of timing. Meanwhile, we are to preach and live out the Gospel. Jesus says, “Therefore, keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all – Keep awake!”

The day will come when Jesus will return in unimaginable power and glory. Until then, Christ’s body, the church, is here. Until then, Jesus said that wherever two or three gather in His name, he’ll be in the midst. Until then, every day in some congregations – among the Roman Catholics, for example - and at least every week here at Emanuel, the gathered church prays to God, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Until then, we’re praying for the coming of the Kingdom, for Jesus to return, and God will honor those prayers. Until then, through the work and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Christ is present in our words of love and deeds of compassion.

Remember that, as the saying goes, our lives – your lives, my life - may be the only Bible that unbelievers will ever read, the only Gospel they will ever hear. Let us at Emanuel Church not lead them astray by scribbling our own agendas in the margins. Instead, may we at Emanuel Church let God’s word shine forth from our lives, day by day for however many days God grants us on this earth. May those who walk through our doors truly say that “surely the Lord is in this place”, through our words of love and deeds of compassion truly come to know and love Emanuel – God with us. Amen.

Love Wins

(Scriptures: Ezekiel 34:11-24, Ephesians 1:15-23, Matthew 25:31-46)

Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, known as Christ the King Sunday, or more recently as Reign of Christ Sunday. And so we sing the church’s coronation hymns: All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name….Jesus Shall Reign where’er the sun does his successive journeys run….Crown Him with Many Crowns. (I always think that last hymn should be a favorite of dentists…..bad joke, I know.) Our hymns point to the reign of Christ, point to where all our faith in Christ and faithfulness to the church is leading, that great and glorious day when Christ will ascend the throne of his glory.

Our Scripture readings invite us to ponder what it means to call Christ our Lord, to say that Jesus will reign. It’s interesting that Christ the King or Reign of Christ Sunday always comes in November, just a couple weeks after our November elections. This year, there were mostly local and some statewide races, no big national names on the ballot – although, in Liberia, for whom we’ve been praying for some weeks now, there was a hugely important national runoff election – I understand President Sirleaf was re-elected. But even here, locally, on election day we collectively made decisions – who will we name as our city councilman, our county judges, our county row offices – recorder of deeds and prothonatary and dogcatcher and so on. If we voted, we made choices. If we didn’t vote, we also made a choice – to rely on the votes of others to select our political leaders. In any political process, the candidates make lots of promises before the election, but it is only after they have been sworn into office that we truly learn how they will govern and carry out their responsibilities, be it as mayor or dogcatcher or anywhere in between. Only after the election do we learn what kind of mayor or councilperson or dogcatcher they will be. In the same way, in today’s readings we consider what kind of ruler Jesus will be, what sort of reign Jesus will carry out.

It’s clear from our Scriptures that Christ is not aloof or remote or detached or above-it-all. Rather, his rule, his reign is very hands-on, very much involved with the details, passionately, intimately involved with humankind.

Both our Old Testament reading and our Gospel reading use the actions of sheep as a metaphor for human behavior. Our reading from Ezekiel is part of a message from God against the rulers of Israel, who, rather than caring for their flocks – that is to say, the people of Israel – have only looked out for their own interests. Rather than feeding their flocks, they have fed only themselves, leaving their flocks – the people – to fend for themselves. God proclaims that God himself will gather the sheep who have been scattered. But Ezekiel’s message from God is not only against the negligent shepherds, but against those sheep who in their arrogance have driven the weaker sheep from the fold, who in their greed have not only grabbed the best for themselves, but spoiled what was left for everyone else. We here in America may find ourselves in this text, where we consume far more than our share of the planet’s resources, and leave environmental destruction affecting the planet in our wake. Indeed, it’s a surprisingly current image when, in a news story unfolding day by day before our eyes, moneyed interests in our nation and even right here in Pennsylvania are willing to risk environmental degradation to parts of the state, ripping open the earth and potentially poisoning the water, in order to get rich by extracting natural gas from the Marcellus Shale reserves by the highly polluting process of hydrofracking. The developers will get the big bucks, and the rest of us will be stuck with the mess. Well does God say, in the words of Ezekiel, that God will judge between sheep and sheep.

And then we have the well-known parable of the sheep and the goats found in Matthew chapter 25, which develops Ezekiel’s image of God judging between sheep and sheep into an image of the final judgment. We are given a picture of Jesus as a king so concerned about his people that, not content to rely on his court officials for information and guidance about his populace, he disguises himself as a beggar and walks around incognito to see how his subjects treat one another. The king behaves almost like a modern-day secret shopper who enters a store and pretends to be a customer, in order to see how the store treats its customers. Or like an undercover investigative reporter who wears a hidden camera and approaches members of a religious cult or a drug gang, ostensibly seeking affiliation, but in reality trying to learn what goes on behind closed doors.

It’s been said that “character is how we behave when we think nobody’s looking.” In Jesus’ parable, the king’s ploy works – both sheep and goats think nobody’s looking, and go about their business as they always do. The king’s disguise works so well that neither the sheep nor the goats recognize the king, and so both the sheep and the goats behave in character, behave as they do when they think nobody’s looking – the sheep offering assistance, and the goats offering nothing. Both sheep and goats ask the king, “When did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison?” Both sheep and goats were told, “as you did – or did not do – unto the least of these, you did – or did not do – unto me.”

The point of Jesus’ parable isn’t about trying to work our way into the kingdom. Rather, it’s about Jesus, like the shepherd in our Ezekiel passage, trying to gather his sheep who have been mixed among other flocks. Shepherds would mark their sheep, so that if they got mixed up among other flocks, they could distinguish their sheep from the rest. And Jesus’ sheep are marked as well – marked initially by the waters of baptism, marking the death of our nature of sin and by God’s grace, the beginnings of new life in Christ, and as we live into our baptismal vows, by love for God and neighbor. In Jesus’ parable, love, compassion, hospitality, caring are the marks that separate the sheep from the goats.

It’s striking that in Jesus' parable, the goats are characterized not by having overtly done evil – the goats didn’t kill or steal or pillage or plunder - but by having failed to do good, by having done - nothing. And this aspect of Jesus’ parable challenges me – sometimes terrifies me. Maybe it challenges you as well. I can remember many times when I’ve fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick, visited prisoners - when I was at Old First, there were several persons with ties to Old First who got into trouble and were arrested, because of drug addictions or mental illness, and who I visited from time to time. And I can remember many times when I haven’t – times when I have passed by street people seeking donations without so much as speaking a word, times when I meant to visit someone in the hospital but never quite got there, never even got around to sending a card, times when somebody asked for something as simple as a ride, and I was too busy. Too busy. My record of compassion is a mixed bag. I feel like I’m not entirely sheep or entirely goat, but some of each, some sort of critter even stranger than the ones you’ll find at the Philadelphia zoo.

So maybe Jesus’ parable speaks on more than one level. It’s been said that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Maybe the line between the sheep and the goats is not only between people, but also within them. As we live into our baptismal vows, as the Holy Spirit we received at our baptism works within us over the course of our lives, as we ask God’s forgiveness week by week and implore God’s grace, by God’s grace we conform less and less to the world, and are more and more transformed into the image of Christ. God begins to give us an extreme makeover, as we begin to be transformed more and more from goats into sheep. The formal theological term is sanctification. It’s a process that begins in this life, but is completed in the life to come.

It’s a process that begins not only in our own lives, but in the lives of others. Genesis tells us that human beings are created in God’s image. Sin distorts that image, but does not erase it. When we’re tempted to lash out at another human being, to insult them, to ignore them….remember that they, like we, are created in God’s image. Sometimes the divine image is really, really, really hard to find – but it’s there. Somewhere. And so it really is true that how we treat other human beings is how we treat God.

Every week as we pray the Lord’s prayer, we say the words, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” The Reign of Christ has begun – began with the resurrection of Christ, is spread in part through the work of the church – but is not complete. Jesus reigns, but not everyone has gotten the memo. We live in the space between “now” and “not yet.” But today’s Gospel reading tells us what God’s kingdom, God’s reign, will look like. Also remember that I John 4 tells us that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.” And so, if God is love, and God reigns – then love reigns. Love rules. Love wins. All within ourselves and all within others that is unloving, will be left outside the door of God’s kingdom. God loves us, and at last we will be able to love God as we should, will be united in our love for God, and God’s love for us.

You don’t need me to tell you that we’re not there yet. We won’t get there in this life. But the beginnings of the kingdom are sprouting, even sprouting here at Emanuel Church. The love of God and love for one another we experience here, even though we don’t always get it right, is a small sample of the love we will experience unfailingly in the world to come. You could say that, at our best, we’re like a little outpost of heaven. Paul’s lofty words in our reading from Ephesians: “God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” – may seem far away from our own experience. But even as Paul looks ahead to Christ’s reign coming in its fullness, Paul is so certain of it that he speaks as if it’s already happened – as if, even though we only get glimpses of it in this life, it’s already a done deal. And it’s a done deal that will include us, the church, as Paul goes on: “And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” For the church – hey, that’s us, the church, the body of Christ.

May we at Emanuel Church continue to be a place where God’s love can be found. May we continue to be a place where people can come and see and taste that the Lord is good, where people can get a glimpse of heaven, a glimpse of the goodness that is to come. May it be so with us. Amen.

For All The Saints

(Scriptures: Joshua 24:1-25, I Thessalonians 4:13-18, Matthew 25:1-13)

Today we celebrate All Saints Day – Tottenfest is what the German founders of the congregation called All Saints, when we remember our saints – our family members, members of Emanuel church, other people who have touched our lives before passing from this life to be gathered to the Church Triumphant. It’s a time of gratitude, a time of giving thanks for the ways in which God’s grace was at work in the lives of our loved ones. And by remembering our saints, those who have gone before us, we are led in turn to remember who we are, and more importantly, whose we are.

All three of today’s Scripture readings have something to tell us about the importance of remembering who we are. Our reading from Joshua gives us Joshua’s farewell speech and final charge to the Israelites whom he had led into the promised land. The children of Israel had driven out the Canaanites and settled the promised land. The Lord had granted Israel rest from the enemies. But Joshua is concerned that peace and prosperity may lead the children of Israel to forget their covenant with the Lord. And so Joshua begins his farewell speech by retelling the entire story of Israel, beginning with God’s call of Abraham, the entry of Joseph into Egypt, the Exodus of Moses from Egypt, the long years in the wilderness, and the various conquests made by Israel as they settled the land of promise. Joshua recounts all this history in order to tell the people of Israel – remember who you are. Remember where you have been, and what you have gone through to arrive where you are. Most of all, remember how all this came about: not by your might, but by God’s gracious will. God says, “I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.” All this goodness is God’s gift.

Having recounted all of God’s mighty acts on their behalf, Joshua begins to tell how the people must respond, beginning, “Now therefore….” God’s mighty deeds on their behalf demand a response. “Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt.” Joshua challenged the people with the choice that was before them: “Choose this day whom you will serve.” You can serve the gods that your fathers served beyond the River, or those of Egypt, or those of the people you just got done driving out of this land, but – Joshua says – “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Those Emanuel saints whom we remember today confronted that same choice. Faced with options to devote their lives to accumulating wealth, or to pleasure, or to any number of other things, they chose to serve the Lord. They served the Lord by attending this church or other congregations, by being active in the life of their faith communities and supporting the church financially, by living their faith in their family lives, by clinging to the Lord in time of trouble and remembering the Lord in time of plenty. Just as the Israelites had their stories of how God had called them and delivered them from slavery and led them through many difficulties, we at Emanuel have our stories of those saints who taught us the faith, who served this church faithfully through good times and bad.

In our epistle reading from I Thessalonians, Paul is comforting those who have suffered the death of loved ones, and are worried that they’ll never see their loved ones again. Paul relieves their fear by telling them that those who have died in Christ will rise first, before those who are alive at the time of his coming. So we have assurance that we will see our loved ones, our saints, again. Reunited with our loved ones, we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore, Paul says, encourage one another with these words.

Finally, our Gospel reading reminds us that while we don’t know the times God has appointed, we are to live in such a way as we are ready at any time – to meet our Lord at the moment of death, or to meet our Lord at the second coming. Not a one of us here – not you, not me - has any assurance that we will wake up tomorrow morning. So we need to be ready. If there are those to whom we owe a phone call or a letter, a word of forgiveness, or an “I love you” - do it now. Do it now. Don’t delay. Don’t wait until tomorrow, for tomorrow may never come. We are prepared – for Christ’s coming, or for our own departing – when we share the good news of Jesus with those around us, when our love of God overflows into love for neighbor. In our Gospel reading, what made the bridesmaids wise wasn’t that they knew when the bridegroom was coming. After all, when the bridegroom was delayed, both the wise and foolish bridesmaids fell asleep. But the wise bridesmaids brought extra oil, so that their lamps would go the distance to the wedding banquet. In the same way, we need a durable faith, so that the light of our faith will go the distance, lighting a path for others.

Our saints here at Emanuel had that durable faith that went the distance. Through a Great Depression and two World Wars many of them married, raised families, and supported the ministries of the church. They were faithful during the years Emanuel was growing, and they continued faithful in more recent years as our numbers declined. Now they are with God, part of that great cloud of witnesses spoken of in the letter to the Hebrews. That great cloud of witnesses surrounds you, and you, and you, and me, and all of us. They have run the race of faith, and I think of them now up in the stands, up in the bleachers, cheering us on as we run the same race they ran. We feebly struggle; they in glory shine.

In a portion of the book of Joshua immediately following this morning’s reading, after the people covenanted to serve the Lord, Joshua set up a stone, and when he had set up the stone, he said to the people, “see, this stone shall be a witness.” And we have stones that have been set up as witnesses. The headstones outside our window are a witness to the faith of our fathers and mothers. On this All Saints Sunday, may their faith inspire us to keep faith with the God of our fathers and mothers. May their faith live on in all we do, as individuals, and as the gathered community of Emanuel Church. Amen.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Always Reforming

(Scriptures: Joshua 3:7-17, I Thessalonians 2:9-13, Matthew 23:1-12)

Today is Reformation Sunday, when we remember that time in our heritage when differences with the Roman Catholic church to the formation of the churches of the Reformation – among them the Lutheran, Reformed, and Presbyterian denominations, along with the Church of England and its descendents. The birth of these churches was traumatic, a split in the body of Christ. While much of the immediate emotion – the mutual recriminations and, indeed, mutual excommunications, political wrangling, even armed conflict – has dissipated over the centuries, the effects of this split persist to this day. While today we celebrate the insights of the Reformers – that we are saved by God’s grace, not our own merit; that the Scriptures are available to all believers in their own language, not only to the clergy in Latin – we may feel some ambivalence about the divisions and misunderstandings that came out of that period of history.

Our Gospel reading this morning reminds us that religious conflicts were no easier in Jesus’ time than at the time of the Reformation, or in our own time; that conflicts within a faith community can grow heated indeed. Our Gospel gives us one side, Jesus’ side, of a disagreement between Jesus and the Pharisees. When we read Jesus’ contentious words, it’s easy to forget that Jesus was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died a Jew – and that his disagreement with the Pharisees was, in a sense, an argument within the Jewish faith community, a family argument. Jesus’ earliest followers were Jews, and in the years immediately after Jesus’ ascension, many of them continued to practice their faith within the context of the synagogue. Over the course of several decades, the synagogue leadership increasingly excluded the followers of Jesus from their assemblies. And the early Christians responded in kind, condemning the synagogue communities from which they had been expelled. The Apostle Paul spent time on both sides of this divide, first as a Jew persecuting the upstart Christian movement, and then as a Jewish follower of Jesus wrestling in conflict with his former supporters in the synagogue. The influx of Gentile converts, who had no memory of the synagogue, only served to reinforce the parting of ways between church and synagogue. And that division continues to this day; just as we in the church are the spiritual descendents of the early Christian movement, the Jewish communities of our day are the spiritual descendents of the Pharisee movement of Jesus’ day.

In the midst of these divisions, it’s easy to forget that the Pharisees and Jesus agreed on a great deal; indeed, they agreed more than they disagreed. Both passionately worshipped God, and both passionately sought to live in accordance with God’s law as revealed to Moses and the prophets. In contrast with the Sadducees, whose obedience to God was almost entirely limited to carrying out the Temple’s rituals of sacrifice and worship, Jesus agreed with the Pharisees on one key point: that obedience to God is not simply a matter of maintaining correct Temple ritual, but that God’s will is to be carried out in all areas of life. The Pharisees tried to accomplish this with their ever-expanding oral tradition of interpretation. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gave his views on how God’s will is to be lived out daily. Where they differed was in discerning their basis for interpretation. For the Pharisees, purity – maintaining ritual cleanliness, remaining separate from anything or anyone unclean – was the key to understanding God’s law. The Pharisees showed their love for God by upholding the rules of purity. Love of neighbor was important, but mostly limited to those within the community. For Jesus, love – love of God and love of neighbor, with the term “neighbor” broadly defined as “anyone in need” – was the key to understanding Scripture, and trumped purity.

The disagreements that led to the Reformation are not all that different from those between Jesus and the Pharisees, that led to the break of the church from the synagogue. All of those we know as Reformers – Martin Luther, whose thought informs the Lutheran Church, John Calvin, whose ideas live on in the Presbyterian church, Ulrich Zwingli, whose thought informed the German, Dutch, and Swiss Reformed Churches and their descendents, including the United Church of Christ - and others – began within the context of the Roman Catholic church. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk. He was overwhelmed by a burden of guilt and unworthiness before God, that all the rituals of the church could not overcome. His reading of Romans – that the righteous shall live by faith – led him to disagree with the penitential system of confessing one’s sins to a priest and doing deeds of penance, and most especially the buying and selling of indulgences, essentially ecclesiastical “get out of purgatory free” cards. He experienced the Roman church’s system of penance – confession of sin to a priest, prescribed acts of penance, and, for him, ongoing guilt no matter how much penance he did, as a burden, and so his reliance on God’s grace, by contrast, Luther considered gospel freedom. Luther did not seek to leave the church – when he nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenburg church, he was only seeking to start discussion, much like posting a document on Facebook or a blog today. But what started as a post evolved into a medieval version of a email or Facebook flame war, with accusations flying back and forth. Ultimately the church excommunicated Luther, and the ministry of Luther and his followers continued outside the Roman church.

While the Reformers differed among themselves on specifics, they held much in common. They uplifted Scripture as the primary authority in the believer’s life, indeed, the only authority – “sola scriptura” was one of the rallying cries of the Reformation. There were others. The purpose of Scripture is to point to the faith – “sola fide” that unassisted by our own works brings us to salvation. And we come to an understanding of saving faith entirely by God’s grace, and not by virtue of our own merits, so “sola gratia” was yet another mantra of the Reformation. In all, there were five “solas”, five essentials involved in the Protestant doctrine of salvation: By grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide), in Christ alone (solus Christus), known through Scripture alone (sola scriptura), and to God alone be the glory (sola deo gloria).

Despite sharing these foundational beliefs, the various Reformed churches organized themselves in different ways and evolved in different directions. From the same Bible, various reformers found support for very hierarchical churches such as the Lutheran churches, which have bishops, while others found support for congregationalism, where the local church sets its own course – that was the path of the Puritans who settled in New England, while still others adopted a structure in which authority rested, not with the local congregation or a bishop, but with local or regional synods – that was the course charted by the Presbyterian church as well as the Evangelical and Reformed Church prior to the merger that formed the UCC. From the same Bible, Christians found support for the continuation of slavery and for the abolition of slavery. From the same Bible, some Christians found precedent and support for the authorization of women for ordained ministry, while others to this day still don’t.

Indeed, in the centuries since the time of the Reformation, while denominations have stayed separate, there has been much cross-pollination of practices. Roman Catholic churches have embraced at least some of Luther’s insights; indeed, our first hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God, is sung in Roman Catholic churches. Roman Catholic worshippers hear at least as much Scripture read in church as Protestants do, and probably more than in most Protestant churches. (Years ago when I invited a Roman Catholic friend to join me worshipping at a Protestant church, he was amazed that there was only one Scripture reading; in Catholic churches, there are four readings – Old Testament, Psalm, Epistle, Gospel.) By the same token, Protestants are increasingly embracing traditionally Roman Catholic prayer and devotional exercises, such as the daily prayer of self-examination and lectio divina, divine reading of Scripture or devotional literature. Catholic and many Protestant churches alike use the Revised Common Lectionary, reading at least some of the same Biblical texts every Sunday, so that, literally as well as figuratively, we are at least in some ways on the same page.

A motto of the Reformation is “Reformed and Always Reforming.” This means that we do not content ourselves to hold the insights of the Reformers of 500 and 600 years ago, but rather we are always open to new light and truth breaking forth from God’s holy word. God is not done with us yet, as individuals or as a church. God is constantly calling us forward on a pilgrimage of faith, constantly sending us out to be salt and light in the world.

The world in which many of us grew up, in which the church was the center of family and community life, is gone. As our third hymn states, “new occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth.” Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever – but our society is constantly changing, and even though the message of salvation is the same, the church cannot proclaim this eternal message to this changed society by doing the same things we’ve always done. In some ways, our society is similar to the society encountered by the early church, in which many people have never been inside a church, have only second-hand knowledge or maybe no knowledge at all of the Gospel. Churches are rediscovering the need for evangelism – we can no longer rely on family and societal expectations to bring people into the church, and so church members are finding it necessary once again to go out into the community and witness to their faith. More and more churches – including Emanuel – cannot afford full-time professional clergy. New models of ministry involving teleconferencing and social media are emerging – I know one church who, when it snows, holds worship via videoconference. Old patterns of ministry such as tentmaker ministries, where the pastor earns his living elsewhere in order to reduce the financial burden on the church – that model goes back to St. Paul - and shared ministries in which nearby churches are yoked together into two and three point charges served by one pastor, are being rediscovered and repurposed.

Society has changed, but society’s need for salvation has not changed. We live in a neighborhood, in a city, in a society that needs good news. Perhaps the church is on the cusp of a new reformation, not based so much on fine points of theology, but on discerning God’s will for us in a transformed society, on loving God and neighbor in a way that speaks God’s good news to this generation. May we always keep our eyes and ears open for the light and truth which God reveals to us. Amen.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

First Things First

(Scriptures: Deuteronomy 34:1-12, Psalm 90, I Thessalonians 2:1-8, Matthew 22:34-46)

Our Gospel reading for this morning reminds me of a quotation – it was popularized by author Steven Covey, who wrote “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, but it may not have originated with him. Here’s the quote: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” In the 1990’s there was a sense among some business leaders that their businesses had gotten so lost in the day-to-day details, the daily muck and mire, that they forgot why they were in business – and so there was a movement among businesses to create mission statements, short statements, just a sentence or two long, stating the purpose of the organization, the reason for its existence. For example, here is the mission statement for McDonalds, which is often cited as an example of a well-written mission statement: “McDonald's vision is to be the world's best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile.” I like that last phrase….”make every customer in every restaurant smile.” Now, I don’t say this because I want everyone to go home from here to eat at McDonalds; in fact, I’m not sure I want anyone to eat at McDonalds anytime – eating at McDonalds will not make your doctor smile; in fact, eating there on a regular basis will make your doctor very unhappy with you indeed. But I wanted to quote their mission statement as an example of how just a few sentences can cut through all the noise, all the distractions, to get at the point for a company’s existence. Management of such companies can make day to day decisions on the basis of these mission statements – does this or that action have anything to do with the company’s mission. Anything that doesn’t advance the mission is a distraction, and should be rejected.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus is challenged by a teacher of the law, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” The teacher was asking this question to test Jesus’ orthodoxy as a Jew, perhaps to entrap him into uttering some heretical interpretation – but Jesus, as always, turned it into a teaching moment. Jesus said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

These commandments did not originate with Jesus. They are integral to Judaism as well. The first commandment – love of God – comes from Deuteronomy 6: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This statement is central to Judaism, recited daily in morning and evening prayers among the observant. The second, love of neighbor, comes from Leviticus 19, in a chapter on ethical behavior including these words: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” The importance of how we treat our neighbor was lifted up by Rabbi Hillel, perhaps the best known of the rabbis. He was famously asked one time to recite the Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel stood on one foot and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; that is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary, go and learn it.” As Christians we often caricature Judaism as a religion of law, as compare to Christianity, which we call a religion of love. But Judaism is based in love as well, though a few of its leaders occasionally got lost in the details. While in Judaism there are indeed many laws – 613 by one count – Jesus saw all of them as an integrated system, hanging on these two commandments, love of God and neighbor. The whole thing hung on love. Love of God, love of neighbor – in a word, “love” - that’s the main thing.
We may have some questions. We may say to ourselves, I’ve got some people in my life I don’t love. In fact, I don’t even like them. They work my last nerve. They make me see red. Sometimes they scare me, make my skin crawl. And I get mad at God from time to time, when something tragic happens to someone I do love. How am I supposed to love God and neighbor at these times? Am I supposed to fake it, to be a phony?

The love of which Christ speaks isn’t about warm fuzzies. It’s about a commitment to stay in relationship – with God, with neighbor. Think of it as a mission statement, as our mission statement – to commit to staying in relationship with God, even when we’re angry at God; to commit to staying in relationship with those around us and help them, so seek their good as we seek our own, even if they drive us crazy. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ sermon illustration about love of neighbor was his parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan showed love toward his political enemy, the Jew who had been set upon by robbers, not by singing the guy a love song, but by picking him up and treating his wounds and carrying him to an inn and paying for his room and board till he recovered. We are to measure our own actions by the standard of love: does this or that action have anything to do with love of God or neighbor?

Our Old Testament reading includes a tribute to Moses at the time of his death, “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses.” Moses loved God and loved the people whom he led. He didn’t always like them. He sometimes wanted to throw his hands in the air and give up – but he was committed to keep on keeping on in love. Our Epistle reading also gives us a picture of what Christian love in action looked like. Though he knew he faced opposition, Paul’s commitment to God’s love compelled him to go to Thessalonica to preach the good news of Christ. Paul writes: But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

It was said of the early church, “See how these Christians love one another.” As the old campfire song goes, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” But will they? Do they? We have one, perhaps two generations of Americans who have for the most part had no contact with the church, for whom going to church isn’t even a long-ago, faded childhood memory, but a complete blank, a mystery. The Scriptures and hymns many of us know by heart, for these generations may as well be written in ancient Sanskrit. These younger generations, for the most part, know Christianity only from how they see Christians behave, on TV, in the news. If those with no first-hand church experience like what they see from the media, who knows, perhaps they’ll check out the churches. If what they see on the media repels them, likely they won’t.

So what do they learn from the news media about Christians? All too often, they learn that Christians are judgmental, intolerant, even hateful. In the news they read about gay teens going home from church after hearing their pastors call them abominations, and killing themselves. They see Christians in the news picketing funerals of military personnel. They may know that it says somewhere in the Bible that Jesus said “blessed are the poor” and “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven” but they see Christian clergy in fine robes and stately buildings, or well-dressed televangelists endlessly asking for money. The Christians who are highly visible in the media aren’t poor, and viewers don’t see these well-off Christians doing much of anything to help those who are poor. They may flip between TV channels and see glowering TV preachers, their faces red shading into purple with wrath, thundering damnation at anyone who disagrees with their agenda. From watching Christians, outsiders may learn that Christians have many priorities, but love isn’t high on the list. Maybe it’s not on the list at all. They’re just plain not feeling the love! And yet Jesus said love is the main thing. On love hangs the law and the prophets. Jesus said that. Are churches keeping the main thing the main thing?

In last week’s Gospel reading, using a coin with an image of the emperor as a teaching tool, Jesus said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar, and unto God what is God’s. On the coin is the image of the emperor, and so to the emperor goes the coin. But human beings – you, me, our neighbors, our coworkers, our friends, and yes, our enemies, are created in God’s image. As the coin bore the image of the emperor, we – all of us - bear the image of God, and so we are God’s. As followers of Christ we are to render to God what is God’s – love of God, love of neighbor – to live our lives as an outpouring of love in gratitude for God’s great love – in the words of our first hymn, God’s “love divine, all love excelling” - toward us.
I think at Emanuel Church we do a fairly decent job of keeping the main thing the main thing. As small as we are, we can’t do a huge number of different things, so it’s important that we choose wisely the things we do, and do them well. We may not be able to do huge things, but we do small things with great love. And when we get together on Sunday, I think we can feel the love, most Sundays at least.

Unfortunately, our neighbors likely will never see Emanuel Church on TV. We got an article in the Bridesburg Bulletin about our 150th anniversary – I wrote it - but it’ll be another 25 years till we have another “big” anniversary we can publicize. Given limited resources, we do what we can with a website, a blog, and free social media such as Facebook, but we can’t pay for TV or radio time. So if we want to show our neighbors that they can find love – God’s love, our love – at Emanuel, realistically, it’ll mostly happen one person at a time. As the old saying goes – and especially with multiple generations in our country who grew up outside the church - our lives – your lives, my life - may be the only Bible our non-Christian neighbors ever read. So let’s make sure that what they read in our lives is truly Gospel, truly good news. How we treat our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends, and yes, our enemies can draw people to Christ – or turn them away. Let us make a commitment that nobody will be turned away from Christ by any word or action of ours.

St. Francis once said: “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” May we at Emanuel preach the Gospel, in our words and in our actions, at all times, to all with whom we come in contact. Amen.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Glory Be!

(Scriptures: Exodus 33:12-23
I Thessalonians 1:1-10, Matthew 22:15-22)

Those among us of a certain age may remember the old 1950’s TV show “The Honeymooners”. Or if you were a little younger, you might have watched the Flintstones, which was sort of a cartoon version. The main character, Ralph Cramden, was loud and volatile, but his wife, Alice, knew how to manage him, and certainly knew how to cut through Ralph’s bombast. Just about every episode had a moment when Ralph and Alice were squabbling, and Ralph would come out with lines like, “One of these days, Alice, Pow! To the moon!” But just about every episode ended with Ralph telling Alice, “Baby, you’re the greatest.”

In our Old Testament reading, Moses has been talking God down from a “pow, to the moon, Alice!” moment with God’s people. The context of today’s reading from Exodus is the aftermath of last week’s reading from Exodus, when Aaron made a golden calf for the people to worship. At this point, the relationship between God and the chosen people is strained nearly to the breaking point, with Moses caught in the middle, between the sinful people and an angry God. Not a really comfy place to be. Certainly not a place I’d want to be. In last week’s reading, God had threatened to destroy the people and start over with Moses’ descendents, but Moses implored God not to destroy the people. While God relents, God also tells Moses that he would not accompany the people, lest God’s anger break out and destroy them. Once again, Moses implores God to go with them, and God once again relents. Reading the text is like watching a married couple or a pair of close friends after a really bad falling out, when they’re awkwardly trying to repair the relationship and aren’t quite sure what to say in order to get past the previous ugliness. Sometimes it takes longer than a half-hour sitcom to get to the “Baby, you’re the greatest” ending. But sometimes during that time of patching things up, we’re open to sharing ourselves at a much deeper level than we do when things are going smoothly.

Something of the sort happens in today’s reading. After Moses’ success in imploring God to turn away from God’s anger, and Moses feels like things are patched up at least a little bit, Moses becomes a bit bolder and asks God, “show me your glory.” Remember that God led the people of Israel, appearing as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. We’re told that Moses used to go to what was called the tent of meeting, located outside the camp. Moses would enter the tent, and the Lord would speak to Moses, and we’re told that the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Moses experienced God’s presence in a special way, and the Hebrew even uses the word “face” to describe God’s presence. As we sometimes talk about God’s strong arm as a metaphor to indicate God’s power, the Hebrew uses the word “face” in this passage as a metaphor to indicate presence. But even with all that, Moses wants more. “Show me your glory, Lord.” Let me see you, not just as appearances of cloud and fire, not just your “face” as in a metaphor for your presence, but as you truly are, in your fullness.

Moses may not fully have known what he was asking. We’re told that God in God’s holiness is not like us, but “other”. God is utterly holy, and we are sinful. Remember that Moses first saw God in the appearance of a bush that burned but was not consumed. Scripture tells us that “our God is a consuming fire.” To see God in all God’s glory would be more that Moses could stand, and still live.

So God offers to give Moses as much as Moses can handle without being destroyed. God says that all of God’s goodness – not his glory in all its fullness, but his goodness, would pass before Moses. God would share with Moses the divine name, and allow Moses to see God’s back after he had departed. For, God tells Moses, you cannot see my face and live. Moses hears the divine name, which amounts to hearing the divine identity: The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. The name is related to the phrase “I am who I am” or “I will be who I will be.”

While our Exodus reading seems strange and far removed from our own life experience, this account may help us gain a deeper understanding of our relationship with God. We all yearn to draw closer to God. As Augustine wrote, God has made us for Godself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in God. In our yearning for closeness, we look for some tangible token of God’s presence, something we can see and hear and touch and even smell and taste – maybe even something we can use and control, like a lucky rabbit’s foot. This is why shrines of saints and relics of departed saints were so popular in the Middle Ages – as tangible evidence of someone else’s encounter with the divine – and why even today we read news accounts every now and then about someone who sees the face of Jesus or Mary in the bark of a tree or in a piece of toast or a sticky bun or whatever. In a very different way, but with similar intent, many Christians misuse Scripture to try to hold Jesus to some sort of rigid timetable for Jesus’ return. To put Jesus on a timetable is to try to control Jesus – some Christians even try to orchestrate events in world politics to try to accelerate the 2nd coming of Christ. But Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation and everywhere in between, is very clear that while God listens and responds to our prayers, God will not be controlled by human beings, will not be held to a timetable, will not be contained within the boundaries of human theology or human understanding. God’s graciousness in hearing our prayers should not be mistaken for our entitlement in expecting God to wait on our every demand.

Martin Luther contrasted what he called a theology of glory – a theology which Luther opposed, a theology which relied on displays of church pomp to point to God’s glory - with what Luther called the theology of the cross. The theology of the cross, which Luther embraced, said that God is known, not in human power, but in human weakness; not in our wealth, but in our poverty; not in our self-reliance, but in our brokenness and consequent reliance on God. Paul wrote that in Christ, the foolishness of God is wiser than all human wisdom, and the weakness of God, stronger than human strength. As we read in Philippians a few weeks ago, we worship a God who in Jesus Christ emptied himself of all glory for the sake of the salvation of humanity and all creation. Those times when we feel most desolate and forsaken may be the exact times when God is closest, carrying us when we’re too weak to stand on our own.

God allowed Moses to see God’s back, after God had passed by him. And that’s often how it is with us. We may not see God coming, but we may see him going. It is often in retrospect, looking back after we’ve gone through some life-changing experience, that we know God was somehow in the midst of that experience, that “surely the Lord was in this place, and I didn’t even know it.” Remember that the two disciples on the Emmaus road didn’t recognize Jesus until Jesus broke the bread – and as soon as the disciples recognized Jesus, Jesus disappeared, lest the two disciples try to hold onto the moment. Or we may remember the story of the risen Christ, on his encounter with Mary in the garden, telling her “don’t touch me.” Some writers interpret Jesus’ words as meaning “stop holding onto me” or “don’t try to hold onto me.” Our God is not static, not a statue or idol, but a God always in motion. So our task as Christians is to discern where God is, and meet God there.

Our Gospel reading gives us in a few sentences the contrast between human attempts to grab at glory and the elusive glory of God. Jesus used a trick question about taxes as a teaching moment. He asked whose image was on a coin, and of course it was that of the emperor. In a typical human attempt to strive for glory, the emperor had his image stamped on the coin so that people couldn’t even buy the necessities of life or sell or conduct business without encountering an image of the emperor. Meanwhile, God’s glory is hidden, not in the imperial glory of Rome, or in the arrogance and contempt of the religious establishment, but in the humble person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Theologians tell us that God is both imminent and transcendent. God’s imminence is in those personal, private or even congregational “holy moments” when we feel God’s presence so strongly we can just about touch it. We heard about some of Emanuel’s holy moments during our anniversary in September. But God in his transcendence is the God who created everything, who is beyond all earthly things, who is utterly unlike us, utterly other than us. God is both imminent and transcendent – far beyond our understanding, yet closer than our own breath. In a sense, God can even be seen as playful, always just beyond us, playfully teasing us with the most tantalizing hints of his presence, able to be felt and experienced, but not controlled.

I’ll mention it for probably the 100th or more time – at any rate, not for the first time, or the last – that our name, Emanuel, means God with us. We remember those holy moments when God was with us, our parents and grandparents, in years long past. But we cannot relegate God-with-us to the past, to memory. Emanuel doesn’t mean “God was with us” but “God is with us.” God’s name can mean “I am who I am” or “I will be who I will be.” Even in our weakness, God is with us and will be with us, for, as Paul wrote, God’s strength is made perfect or complete in human weakness. May we here at Emanuel, as a community and as individuals, continue to experience God’s goodness passing before us – and may we at Emanuel invite others to taste and see that the Lord is good. Amen.

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Please join us at Emanuel United Church of Christ on Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. We're in the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia, on Fillmore St, just off Thompson. www.emanuelphila.org

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Holy Cow!

At our 150th anniversary celebration, I was struck by the video that Kris put together, that we watched in the social hall following worship. It was like going through an old family photo album – literally, two, three, four or more generations of some of our longtime members have been members here, so for them, the old confirmation photos and such were photos of grandmom and grandpop or mom and dad when they were little.

Going through our own old family albums can bring up lots of memories - we may feel sad, or wistful, or we may find some old photos really funny, or even embarrassing. For those of us –like me - who grew up in the 70’s, where long hair and pastel colors were the fashion, we may wince a bit looking at our high school graduation photo. And then some of us have those photos we hope nobody else will ever see, the photos we pray nobody will ever post to Facebook. Sadder but wiser now, we may look back on some of our old photos and ask ourselves, “What on earth was I thinking?”

Today’s Old Testament reading is like one of those embarrassing photos in the family album of God’s people, one of those moments in the journey of the Hebrews where you just want to smack your forehead and say, “What on earth were they thinking?” The old movie The Ten Commandments had a lot of fun with this Scripture, conjuring up all sorts of wild ceremonies as part of worship of the Golden Calf. Fortunately for us, the writer of Exodus and those who preserved this book over many centuries, did not feel an obligation to try to gloss over these moments when God’s people fell flat on their faces. The Hebrews are presented, warts and all, and so perhaps in looking at those times when they went astray, we can recognize ourselves.

Last week Ralph, our organist, read, with great gusto, the Ten Commandments. I’d joked with Ralph that last week was Ralph’s Charlton Heston moment. But Moses did not immediately come down the mountain – along with the Ten Commandments, God gave Moses all manner of other instruction about how God was to be worshipped and how society was to be organized. In Exodus, God’s instruction to Moses covers more than 10 chapters. Some forms of Jewish tradition hold that on Mt. Sinai, Moses received not only the written Torah – what we call the first five books of the Old Testament – but also what Jews call the Oral Torah, the traditions of interpretation that would not be written down for centuries, but that helped God’s people make sense of the written Torah through changing circumstances – in Jewish thought, Moses was thought to have received all of that at least in seed form. And all of this took time.

Meanwhile the people are at the bottom of the mountain, wondering what happened to Moses. They saw him go up the mountain, but he hadn’t come down yet. And so they became uneasy. Perhaps God had struck Moses dead up on that mountain. Perhaps Moses had abandoned them. Meanwhile, there they were. How long were they supposed to hang around, waiting?

So the people went to Aaron, Moses’ brother, and asked Aaron to make gods for them. And Aaron complied, making a golden calf. The people sacrificed to it, and as Scripture memorably says, “they sat down to eat and rose to revel.” God threatened to wipe them out on the spot, but Moses interceded with God and the people were spared.

Why a golden calf? Some scholars tell us that Aaron’s intent was not to worship a different god, but to create an image of the Lord for them to worship – after all, Aaron did say that their sacrifice would be “a festival to the LORD”. A calf would have reminded them of youth and strength, perhaps also of fertility and new life, and would have expressed the conviction that God is all these things. But certainly such an image would say nothing of God’s justice, God’s mercy, God’s love, God’s holiness. This is the reason that God commanded his people never to try to make an image of God, because God is so great and so far beyond our comprehension that any image would inevitably leave out much that is important about God. This prohibition is still followed in Judaism and especially in Islam. In Christianity, while we don’t literally worship images, there’s a broad range of tradition about the use of images of Jesus and the saints in worship, from the Eastern Orthodox traditions, where icons are everywhere, to the Protestant traditions, which may accept images such as the empty cross or pictures of Jesus, but is not as receptive of portrayals of the saints – and in some traditions the worship space is almost completely unadorned.

This Exodus passage is not the last we hear of a golden calf in the Bible. Many centuries later, following the breakup of united Israel into the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, the golden calf makes a return appearance. Since Jerusalem was located in the southern kingdom of Judah, for those in the northern kingdom, Jerusalem was essentially located in foreign territory. Those in the northern kingdom could not go to Jerusalem without leaving their country – and it was feared that if people from the northern kingdom went to Jerusalem to worship, they might stay there, or they might turn against the northern kingdom. The solution was to set up alternate worship sites at historic holy places in the Northern kingdom, such as Bethel and Dan. And at each of these alternative worship sites in the north, in the temple was a golden calf. And Jeroboam used the same words used by Aaron – “Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you forth from the land of Egypt.” Prophets from both north and south spoke out against these worship sites, calling their worship idolatrous.

We may look back on these stories, these very old snapshots from the family album of God’s people, as relics of a long-ago past, as evidence of thought processes that today we would consider primitive. Today we don’t literally create golden calves or totem poles and bow down to them. But let’s remember what was behind the creation of the golden calf – impatience, fear that God had abandoned the people. God’s promises of God’s presence weren’t enough, and so the people asked for an image to reassure themselves that God was still with them. And later on during the time of the northern kingdom, a king’s insecurity for his throne led him to create golden calves for his worship sites. In a word, behind the creation of the golden calf was a feeling of insecurity.

It seems that most of our very secular society doesn’t bow down to much of anything. But secular people still feel insecure. It’s part of the human condition. Even a secular society will find ways to act out its insecurity. Given the extreme divide in our society between the fantastically wealthy and the miserably poor, where investment bankers and CEO’s of major corporations earn hundreds of times what their average worker makes, where corporate leaders use their wealth not to create jobs but to outsource or automate or otherwise eliminate them – and given the resistance among some in government to putting any restraint whatever on corporate greed – it would seem that worship of the golden calf is alive and well – and is even blessed and encouraged by some clergy on TV and radio who give lip service to God but whose real religion is worship of the almighty dollar. And how is idolatry to wealth, to the market, working out for our society? How’s that working out for us? Adam Smith, in his long-ago economic treatise The Wealth of Nations, said that if each person was allowed to pursue his own economic self-interest, the invisible hand of the market would work to the benefit of all. But these days, the invisible hand seems to be punching the poor in the gut. The very wealthy sit down to eat and rise up to revel – and if you want to watch, you can turn on Wealth TV - while the rest of us struggle and the poorest of us starve. I suspect that decades from now, we’ll be looking back on this time, smack our heads, and ask, what were we thinking?

In our Bible study of the minor prophets that we’ve had after church, we’ve seen that during times when the very wealthy in Israel and Judah looked out only for themselves and abandoned the poor to their fate, prophets such as Amos and Micah and Habakkuk and others came forward to denounce their greed and call them to account. And in our time, there finally at long last seems to be the beginnings of some movement to call our corporate and financial leaders to accountability. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has spread to many cities, including Philadelphia, where City Hall seems to be the gathering place. Thus far, these are peaceful gatherings. I can only pray they stay that way. Two weeks ago, at historic Tindley Temple Baptist Church on South Broad Street, an interfaith coalition of churches and synagogues, called POWER – Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild – was formed to speak from a position of faith to government and corporate leaders about the need to return jobs to our city. These gatherings are not coming from a place of rage and hostility, but thus far have been surprisingly gentle, coming from a desire to remind those in leadership that with power comes responsibility, of calling government and business leaders to a better way of using their wealth.

Psalm 23, which appears in our call to worship, and our reading from Philippians give us ways to deal with insecurity that rely on God, not golden calves. Psalm 23 reminds us that the Lord is our shepherd, no matter what. In a passage often read at funerals, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” But God’s care is not only for the dying, but for the living. The Psalmist sings of God setting a table for us, even in the presence of our enemies – even in a dangerous place, God cares for us. In his letter to the church at Philippi, written at a time in which both Paul in prison and a church undergoing internal division were experiencing insecurity, Paul tells his readers, of all things, to rejoice. “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice! Let your gentleness be known to everyone. Don’t worry about anything,” Paul writes, “but in prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God.” And, Paul assures his readers – and us – “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Our Gospel reading, even with its violent imagery, reminds us of the vision of God’s reign, a vision which goes back to Old Testament times, not as sitting through a sermon droning on through all eternity like this one, but a heavenly feast. Not a boring lecture, but a banquet, where there is more than enough for all. It’s a banquet to which we’re all invited, at which we’re all welcome. Many in our society turn away from this banquet in order to feast at the world’s table, where plenty for a few means starvation for many. But at God’s table there is room and plenty for all. God continues to invite us to the wedding banquet, and urges us to invite others. So may we go out into the highways and byways with the invitation to God’s love and grace. Amen.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Press On!

(Scriptures: Exodus 20:1-20, Philippians 3:4b-14, Matthew 21:33-46)

In the United Church of Christ and in many Protestant churches, today is World Communion Sunday. This designation originated in 1936 within the Presbyterian Church, and was rapidly adopted by other denominations. The Federal Council of Churches (later renamed the National Council of Churches) began promoting World Communion Sunday in 1940, as a reminder that Christian churches around the globe, though divided by many differences in belief and observance, are ultimately and finally united in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.

I’ll share the story that I often share on World Communion Sunday, of the day perhaps 20 years ago or more when I told a Roman Catholic friend about World Communion Sunday. Perhaps I waxed a bit grandiose about the unity displayed by Protestant Churches all around the globe in celebrating communion together. To all of this, my Roman Catholic friend responded by informing me that Roman Catholic churches around the globe celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday, so for Catholics, every Sunday is World Communion Sunday. And, yes, his words deflated my grandiosity a bit. Just the same, it’s a blessing that we Protestants, who fuss amongst ourselves over so many differences, can manage to get our act together once a year and join our Catholic brothers and sisters at the table of the Lord.

Here at Emanuel Church, we celebrate communion at least monthly, with additional observances for special services such as Christmas Eve, Easter, and Pentecost. As we come forward later in the service for our cube of bread and sip of wine, on this World Communion Sunday, we are reminded that when we approach the Lord’s table, we approach a table that in a spiritual sense extends around the globe, as we join believers of every race and nationality and socioeconomic level, join Christians who worship in cathedrals and Christians who worship in storefront churches and Christians worshipping in tents and open fields in eating bread and drinking wine in memory of Jesus, in sharing the body and blood of Christ, broken and poured out for us. At various locations of this great table, some believers are eating pita bread and some are eating rye bread, some pumpernickel bread, while others are eating the wafers used in Catholic and Anglican churches – and yet in a spiritual sense, all these different types of bread are part of the one celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

Through the ages, God has given God’s people gifts around which God’s people can unite and form community. For the ancient Hebrews and for Jews to this day, the law, as represented in this morning’s Old Testament reading by the Ten Commandments, was and is a point of unity. For those of us who are used to the interpretations by Luther and other reformers of Paul’s writings about the law, who are used to seeing the law in negative terms, as a burden from which we are delivered by the grace of Jesus Christ, it may be difficult to wrap our minds around the reality that the law was received as a tremendous gift, a unique sign of God’s favor, God’s special gift to God’s chosen people. The words of this morning’s call to worship in the bulletin are taken from Psalm 19, and I’d ask you to look at the call to worship again. The writer of the Psalm 19 expressed overflowing joy and gratitude for the law, calling it more to be desired than much fine gold, sweeter than honey, rejoicing the heart. Even today, in synagogue services of some traditions, when the scroll of the law is brought forth, the congregation dances around the scroll and even kiss it as it passes by.

Along with the law, the ancient Hebrews were united by the sharing of a meal, the Passover, to celebrate their liberation from slavery in Egypt, as God led them forth with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm from the land of bondage. In the same way, we are united by a meal, Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, as we give thanks for our deliverance through the death of Jesus Christ from bondage to sin and death and liberation to the freedom of the resurrection life in Jesus Christ.

As we share this meal, our Gospel reading reminds us that we are not hosts, but guests, at the banquet of the Lord. In Jesus’ parable, the tenant farmers started to act as if they were the owners of the vineyard rather than renters. Some churches act in a similar way around Communion, acting as if they own it, as if it is for them to bar others from the table. But Jesus said that the blessings of the vineyard would be taken from the wicked tenants, and given to those who produce fruit. In the same way, the Lord’s table is not ours to hoard to ourselves, but rather to invite others to partake. This is not our table, but the Lord’s table, and at the Lord’s table all seeking to draw close to Christ are welcome.

To me, it is striking that, in the midst of the Great Depression, with such widespread suffering, the Presbyterian Church conceived the idea of a day for all Christians to celebrate communion, to gather at the table. And it’s even more striking that, with World War II as a backdrop, the National Council of Churches adopted and promoted World Communion Sunday. Amid hunger and conflict, the church responded to God’s call in a way that seems impractical, but from a Christian perspective is compelling. After we’ve broken bread with someone at the Lord’s table, it’s much more difficult to turn them away from our own table hungry, isn’t it. After we’ve broken bread with someone at the Lord’s table, making war and bombing that person’s home and family is no longer an abstraction, but the annihilation of a human being with a face and a name and an eternal soul, a child of God like ourselves. The conception and promotion of World Communion Sunday in that troubled time, then, can be seen not just as a sentimental gesture, but as a prophetic act, pointing beyond the alarms of the day to the “beloved community” to which God calls us all.

We may forget that Paul wrote to the Philippians amid a similarly foreboding backdrop – he was separated from his beloved brothers and sisters at Philippi, confined to prison, with his future uncertain. In today’s reading, Paul gives us his resume as a Jew, to remind us of the cost of his obedience to Christ. It would have been easy for Paul to tell God, “hey, God, I didn’t sign up for this.” Instead, he tells the church at Philippi,

“Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

As Paul pressed on, so the National Council of Churches pressed on despite dangerous times toward that same prize. And so we, who just celebrated our 150th anniversary but are beset with many challenges, we who proclaim Christ in a time in which many suffer and cry out for justice, are called to press on, to press on toward the goal, to keep our eyes on the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Amen.