Favored

Scriptures:  2 Samuel 7:1-17, Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:26-55

Favored

You’ve probably seen the commercial at some point in your life…..a van drives up to the curb of a house, and out of the van come two people in dark blazers and khakis carrying balloons, roses, and a great big check for a whole lot of money to the lucky resident of the house.   Yes, it’s the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes Prize Patrol in action, driving around telling a number of very surprised people that they are lucky sweepstakes winners!  And people react in all kinds of ways – they laugh, they cry, they hug.  One thing they never seem to do, though, is refuse the sweepstakes winnings.

Today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel also features a prize patrol of sorts, in the form of the angel Gabriel, a messenger from God.  And in the first chapter of Luke’s gospel – of which we only read a portion – Gabriel’s been busy.   It is said that the Publisher’s Clearinghouse prize patrol will find you wherever you are, at home, at work – I read online that one check was even delivered to someone  who’d been admitted to the hospital earlier that day.  In our Gospel reading, the angel Gabriel, God’s prize patrol, found an aged priest named Zechariah, while he was in the most sacred part of the Temple, the Holy of Holies, offering the incense – something that was a once-in-a-lifetime privilege among the priesthood.  At this once-in-a-lifetime moment of standing before the Lord and offering incense, the angel Gabriel brings news of an even greater blessing, an infinitely greater privilege, when he said to Zechariah, “Do not be afraid”, and then informed the aged Zechariah that he and his elderly and long-barren wife Elizabeth were about to become the proud parents of a bouncing baby boy –and we later learn that the boy will grow up to be John the Baptist, of whom we’ve heard so much in our gospel readings from the previous two weeks.  Folks who get that once-in-a-lifetime visit from the prize patrol react in unpredictable ways, and Zechariah’s reaction wasn’t quite what Gabriel was looking for.   Zechariah couldn’t quite wrap his mind around what the angel Gabriel was saying, and so his power of speech was taken from him until John was born.

Six months later, the angel Gabriel, God’s prize patrol, pull up in front of the home of a virgin named Mary.  He doesn’t pull out a giant check, but Gabriel says to Mary, “Greetings, favored one, the Lord is with you.”  Mary isn’t quite sure where Gabriel is going with this – “ok, Gabriel, thanks for sharing, but could you say a little more?”…..when Gabriel tells her, as she told Zechariah, “Do not be afraid”, and tells Mary that, though she’s a virgin, she likewise is about to become the proud mother of a bouncing baby boy.  Like Zechariah, Mary had trouble wrapping her mind around the angel’s words – but the angel reassures her, saying, “nothing is impossible with God.”  And Mary responds, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word.”

When someone wins the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, expectations are fairly simple – the winner will live, if not happily ever after, at least comfortably for a while.  If they win a really big jackpot, they may be able to retire early.  At the very least, the expectation is that life will become easier, at least for a while.

How about when Gabriel, God’s messenger, God’s prize patrol comes with good news?  Far from becoming simpler, life becomes more complicated.  We hear nothing about Zechariah and Elizabeth after John is born – presumably, since they were already quite elderly, they died while John was quite young.   But John was rewarded, not with prosperity, but with controversy, and eventually with martyrdom.  Similarly, Mary’s life became, at least in the short run, harder rather than easier.  In order to comply with a Roman census, Mary was forced to travel, while pregnant and approaching delivery, some 90 miles (on foot or donkey) from Nazareth up in the north to Bethlehem down in the south, a few miles outside Jerusalem; at the end of her long, uncomfortable journey, there was no place to stay, no room in the inn, so she ended up giving birth in Jesus in the manger, in a barn, amid the barnyard smells of the animals, laying the newborn baby in the trough which normally contained the slop for the animals to eat.

What does it mean to be favored by God? It surely doesn’t mean an easy, uncomplicated life.  Rather, it means being willing to be a servant of the Lord, willing to cooperate with God, willing to be privileged to have a role in God’s work of bringing salvation to a world that doesn’t necessarily want to be saved or even know it needs to be saved.  To be favored by God is to have a small part in changing the world.  Somehow, Mary seems to know this.  Hear again Mary’s words of praise to God:

‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
   and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
   Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
   and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
   from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
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.
He has helped his servant Israel,
   in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’

“Brought down the powerful from their thrones…..sent the rich away empty……” – Mary knows that the news she proclaims is good news for the poor, but disruptive news for those in power.  And those in power don’t like disruption.  After giving birth to Jesus, Mary and Joseph will be on the run to Egypt, running away from Herod, who feels so threatened that he’s willing to kill, willing to kill children, in order to stay in power.

As people of faith, God is calling each of us, calling our congregation, not to be comfortable, not to be respectable, but to be faithful, regardless of the cost.  Remember that at the center of the Christmas story is a homeless unwed mother named Mary. We know that Mary was pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit, but her neighbors surely didn’t, and questions from the neighbors about the identity of Jesus’ father were for Mary a part of the cost of being faithful.   God’s good news came into the world, not through those in power such as Herod, or those considered respectable, such as the temple religious hierarchy, but through that homeless unwed mother.   For Herod, for Caiaphas, for Annas, there was no room for Jesus.  It took Mary, that homeless unwed mother for whom there was no room in the inn, to make room for Jesus, to make room for our salvation.

I’d like to close by reading portions of the Roman Catholic Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s  Christmas meditation, “The time of the end is the time of no room.”

“We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end.  The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price power and acceleration..

The primordial blessing, “increase and multiply,” has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror.  We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life….

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited.  But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room.  His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.  He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst….”

           

May there be room in our lives, and room at Emanuel Church, for the poor, for the homeless, for the refugee – room not only in our hearts, but in our homes, at our tables, and in this building.  For the baby Jesus was all of these, and to welcome them is to welcome him.  May we at Emanuel Church be among those who can truly sing, and mean it, “There is room in my heart, Lord Jesus” – in my heart, in my home, at my table, at my church - 
“there is room in my heart for thee.”  Amen.

Witness to the Light

Scripture:  Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11,  I  Thessalonians 5:16-24,  John 1:6-8, 19-28

Witness to the Light

Today, the third Sunday of Advent, is called Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin word for “joy” – joy that, even though we are waiting in darkness, the light will very soon be dawning, as the Christ child is almost here.

In last week’s Gospel reading, we were introduced to John the Baptist, with his relentless of message: “Repent and be baptized.”  I guess it felt so nice, we’re doing it twice, as we are introduced to John the Baptist once again, this time in John’s Gospel – and I should clarify that the person who wrote John’s gospel is not John the Baptist – we have two different Johns, John the narrator of the gospel and John the Baptist.  Mark’s introduction of John the Baptist is fairly straightforward:  John the Baptist was in the wilderness by the river Jordan, urging people to repent, baptizing those who did so, and telling people to prepare for one coming more powerful than he.  In John’s Gospel, the religious establishment gave John the Baptist some pushback:  “Who are you, you weird person dressed in camel skin and eating grasshoppers in a wild honey glaze and ranting and dunking people in the river.  Who sent you?  Why are you doing this?”  (And, of course, along with this came the unspoken question, “And when are you going to stop?”)  The people learn a lot about who John isn’t, as John tells them, “No, I’m not the Messiah.  No, I’m not Elijah come back to life” – by way of explanation, there’s a verse in the book of Malachi (4:5) that talks about the return of Elijah.  Similarly, in Deuteronomy (18:15), Moses said that God would raise up a prophet like Moses from among the people – and John the Baptist also said that “No, I’m not that prophet either.”

So who was John?  John’s gospel gives us two answers.  John the Baptist describes himself as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘make straight the way of the Lord.’”  And John, the writer of John’s gospel, describes John the Baptist as “not the light, but a witness to testify to the light”.

It was in the wilderness – away from the worldly powers that were, the powers of Rome and of the official Temple religious establishment - that John could best see and testify to the light.  I remember growing up in northern Berks County, in the metropolis of Hamburg PA – population 3,000, counting cows and chickens – and loving to look up in the sky at night and see all the stars.  When I was Eric Jr’s age and Lilly’s age and Alyssa’s age, sometimes at night I’d lay on the grass and look up, and I used to know the names of the various constellations and what they look like – the big dipper, the little dipper, and so forth.  Living in the city, we really can’t see the sky at night.  It wasn’t until I went on my first church trip to Cuba – where outside Havana, there’s very little artificial lighting and when it gets dark, it gets really dark – that I could see the sky again in the way I remembered growing up, with all the stars and constellations.  Ironically, I had to travel with church folk to a country our government doesn’t even want people to visit, in order to see the sky like I did growing up back home. To adapt a line from the Coldplay song “A sky full of stars” – and since the notes get kind of high I’ll spare you my trying to sing it - you’re welcome – stars gets brighter the more it gets dark.  Ironically, if you really want to see the stars, you have to get away from the light – the glare of artificial light – in order to see the light.

Advent is a season of waiting in the darkness for the coming of the light.  Over the past two weeks I’ve talked a lot about the darkness of our society, the brokenness of our society.  Without rehashing the details of what I spoke about over the past two weeks, suffice to say that in part because of unchecked corporate power at home and an unchecked military-industrial complex abroad – what Trappist monk Thomas Merton some 40 years ago called “the Unspeakable” - politically, sociologically, economically, ecologically, our situation is bleak.  In the midst of this bleakness, the most vulnerable in our society are being targeted for official injustice and violence, as evidenced in recent events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, and too many other places.   Right here at Emanuel, many of our members are suffering the fallout – unemployment, mounting bills, even the threat of being turned out of house and home into the winter cold just before Christmas – along with personal crises such as illness and the passing of loved ones.  But could it be that, amid the bleakness, we might better be able to see the light?

The writer of John’s Gospel said that John the Baptist was not the light, but a witness to testify to the light.  What does that light look like?  Today’s text from Isaiah, part of which Jesus adopted as his mission statement in Luke’s gospel, reads,

 The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
   because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
   to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
   and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,
   and the day of vengeance of our God;
   to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion —
   to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
   the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

They will be called oaks of righteousness,
   the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.
They shall build up the ancient ruins,
   they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
   the devastations of many generations.
For I the Lord love justice,
   I hate robbery and wrongdoing;
I will faithfully give them their recompense,
   and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.

That’s what Jesus was about – bringing good news to the oppressed, patching up the brokenhearted, releasing prisoners, comforting those who mourn.  I will say that when Jesus read these words in his hometown synagogue, he left out the part about the day of vengeance of our God – it wasn’t yet the time for that.  But make no mistake, when Isaiah wrote that the Lord loves justice and hates robbery and wrongdoing, that’s what Jesus is like, and in his earthly ministry Jesus did all he could to help and empower the victims of injustice.

John the Baptist was not the light, but was a witness to testify to the light.  To use the illustration from my children’s sermon, the sun in the sky is the light and generates light, but while the moon generates no light of its own, it reflects the sun’s light, and thus is bright.  John was like a mirror, reflecting the light that was given to him. 

We, too, are witnesses to testify to the light.  Any brightness we have comes from God, but we are to share that brightness with others.  In the bleakness of our present situation, while we are not the light, we can bring the light for one another and for our neighbors.  And by bringing the light, I mean praying for one another, but also providing practical help – sometimes we pray with folded hands, and sometimes we pray with open arms and walking legs.  I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that I’m so proud of how well our members do at caring for one another.  In our present bleak situation, deep, persistent, practical caring – at the level of making sure none of us is going hungry or is out on the street - is going to be more and more necessary.  In a society in which the powers that be have seen fit to cut government services more and more, so that Bridesburg elementary school has to request donations of basic supplies like pencils and paper for heaven’s sake, we are going to have to be a safety net for one another, and for our neighbors. On Facebook pages about Bridesburg, I often see the phrase “Bridesburg - Stick together”.  I think sometimes that phrase has sometimes been used in a negative way – as in sticking together to keep those deemed undesirable out of the ‘Burg – but I believe we really need to stick together in a positive sense of being there for one another – not in an intrusive way, not like bulls in a china shop - we all are fragile in different ways, and if we come on too strong we can sometimes do more harm than good - but in practical ways and always with gentleness and humility, knowing that it may be us asking for help the next time around.  Sticking together means not letting one another or our neighbors go hungry and homeless.  Certainly, we all have different resources and skills to offer.  I can buy you food, but I don’t know how to fix your leaking pipes – but I bet somebody here can.  I can give you a ride, but I can’t fix your car – but maybe someone here can.  I have phone numbers and connections for some kinds of free services – I know that there’s a Catholic Worker house in the 1800 block of Lehigh Avenue that runs a free medical clinic periodically, for example – but my network of contacts is limited – I’m only one person.  Each of you has information and contacts that I don’t, and if we share that information, we may be able to keep some people and situations from falling through the cracks of our society.  Cheri Honkala, director of the Poor People’s Economic and Human Rights Campaign, keeps people in their homes if possible, and finds them homes if she can’t – it’s her life’s work.  She’s doing God’s work, and I’ve invited her to talk after worship about what she’s doing for Susan in her situation, and what we may be able to do to help.

“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.”  May we, too, be witnesses to the light, sharing the light that Christ has given us with one another and our neighbors.  On this Gaudete Sunday – the Sunday of joy – may we bring joy to one another and our neighbors through words of kindness and deeds of love.  May it be so among us.  Amen.

The Beginning of Good News

Scriptures:       Isaiah 40:1-11,  Psalm 85: 1-2, 8-13,

2 Peter 3:8-15a,  Mark 1:1-8

  

The Beginning of Good News

You may have seen the local news accounts on TV, or perhaps you were there yourselves:  earlier this week, persons protesting the grand jury verdicts acquitting the officers who shot Michael Brown and Eric Garner held a die-in at 30^th Street station.  After the die-in, they marched to City Hall, when their protests disrupted the ceremonial lighting of the Christmas tree.    What the crowd gathered at City Hall wanted and expected was a comforting, familiar community ritual, with twinkling lights and sweetly-sung Christmas carols.   What they got, this year, was an unwelcome and disruptive message, even amid the twinkling lights, that black lives are being lost at the hand of police and that, even amid the twinkling lights, families and communities are weeping and in pain.

Believe it or not, I think the writer of Mark’s Gospel would have approved.  Mark’s Gospel, thought to have been the earliest of the four gospels to be written, is anything but warm and fuzzy.  Mark offers us no shepherds, no wise men, no choirs of angels, no baby lying in the manger.  [As an aside, for those who want to discuss the familiar birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, stay after church for our adult Bible study.]  In Mark’s gospel, we don’t even meet Jesus’ family until the 3^rd chapter – almost a quarter of the way through, well after Jesus has started his ministry - and the first time we meet Jesus’ family, they think Jesus has gone insane.  Basically Jesus’ family is chasing after Jesus with the proverbial butterfly net and are trying to have him put in restraints.   Mark gives us none of the comforting Hallmark greeting card imagery we associate with Christmas.  Instead, Mark’s disruptive gospel begins by introducing us to John the Baptist, the wild man in the wilderness, whose appearance would have reminded his audience of the Old Testament prophet Elijah.  And like Elijah before him, John the Baptist spoke unwelcome truth to entrenched power, and John’s bold words would ultimately cost him his life.  And, of course, we know that Jesus’ life will follow a similar course – but with a surprise at the end, which we’ll learn about on Easter.

At this time of year, we seek the comfort of Christmas carols, but John the Baptist is more like an alarm clock, loud, screeching, impossible to ignore and essential to hear.  And, like the screeching of an alarm clock, the message of John the Baptist is “WAKE UP!  WAKE UP!  Someone greater than I is coming, who will change everything!  GET READY!”  He told people not only to wake up, but to repent and be baptized.  You would think that, with such an uncompromising message, he’d be out in the desert talking mostly to himself, but instead, crowds of people traveled from the familiarity of their homes far, far into the wilderness in order to listen to what John had to say.

They came because they were dissatisfied with their lives.  And they had a lot to be dissatisfied with.  Israel had for many years been a dusty, out of the way province of the Roman empire.  The vast majority of the people were impoverished.   People were taxed heavily in order to support Rome, and then taxed again to support the Temple and its religious hierarchy.   Soldiers could conscript passersby – those the soldiers caught “walking while Jewish” - to carry their gear for a mile – that’s where Jesus’ saying that, “If you are forced to go one mile, to go the second mile” comes from.  And the chief priests were in cahoots with Rome in giving Rome’s oppression of the people divine sanction – so they brought no relief.  And, bonus points, if you objected to any of the above strongly enough, you’d likely end up on a cross – Rome crucified lots and lots of folks in Jerusalem, and Jesus is unique not for being crucified, but for being resurrected.

In their dissatisfaction, the people went to John.  In response, John told them to look at their own lives, and to turn from their sinful ways.  Granted, they suffered greatly from forces beyond their control, but John invited them to look at what part they were playing in their own oppression.  And in the waters of baptism, John freed them up to begin anew, freed from the burden of sin they’d been carrying, freed to live in a new way.

Many Christians wonder why we have to deal with Advent, the season of waiting.   Why the slow coming of the light as we light the advent candles, one more candle each week than the last, until at Christmas Eve we finally light the Christ candle.  Why the mournful hymns like “O Come, O Come Emanuel?”  Why can’t we just fast-forward to “Joy to the World?”  The reason we need Advent is that Advent reminds us that Christ’s coming is not just an extra zest to add to our usual routine, not just the heavenly cherry on top of our banquet of earthly delights.  Rather, when we say that Jesus came to save, it means exactly what it says - that Jesus came, not just to tweak our lives to make them a little more satisfying, not just to bless our own efforts at self-fulfillment, but to save, to rescue, those in deep pain and deep despair.  This is why Jesus said that it is the sick, not the well, who are in need of a physician.  That’s why Jesus spent most of his time, not with the movers and shakers, but with the moved and the shaken, why Jesus got along best, not with the priests and Pharisees, but with the prostitutes and others utterly pressed into the dust by their society, by the powers that were.  When we say that Jesus is the light of the world, that light is not just like an extra light bulb in a brightly-lit shopping mall display, but like a candle in a pitch-black room.   And so if we deny the existence of the darkness – in our society and in our own lives – we likewise deny Jesus, the light of the world, the opportunity to pierce that darkness. 

I began this sermon by mentioning those protesting the grand jury verdicts acquitting those police officers who gunned down Michael Brown and Eric Garner.  Part of the darkness of our society, part of the darkness that the protestors at the Christmas tree lighting were pointing out, part of the darkness that Advent recognizes and part of the darkness Jesus came to dispel, is that our views of events are so deeply divided along lines of race, class, socio-economic status, gender, sexual orientation.  It’s not only racial – actions that persons of one gender may interpret as “just being sociable” can be seen as intrusive and threatening by persons of the other; actions that heterosexuals may interpret as “just teasing” can be experienced as devastating by non-heterosexuals.  Where we sit – our social location – often determines where we stand, what we see, and what we hear.  One of the most difficult challenges of discipleship is to see and hear things through the eyes and ears of others, our sisters and brothers who are different from us.  Many of us who are white see those who were killed, and imagine ourselves being menaced and threatened by similar characters.  Many blacks, by contrast, see those who were killed, and imagine themselves at the wrong end of a police officer’s gun.  Many of us who are white cannot imagine ourselves in that position, and therefore may have trouble empathizing with those who do.  Some of us may have had the odd skirmish with the law – a traffic ticket, for example – and while we may have been angry at the officer for pulling us over – or angry at ourselves for not paying attention to the speed limit – it may be hard for us to imagine such an encounter ending with a trip to the hospital, or the morgue.

Along those lines, I’d like to talk about a long-ago incident of extremely foolish behavior on my part, something that happened about 30 years ago – and I’ll preface my story with a very loud “don’t try this at home.”  Please, please don’t try this at home…..I’m about to tell you something I did as a dumb stupid 25 year old, not to my knowledge illegal, but certainly highly unadvisable.  I’ve mentioned in previous sermons that I’m not the most patient person behind the wheel of a car – and that’s at age 53, after I’ve mellowed considerably.  You can imagine what I was like behind the wheel of a car 30 years ago.  Some friends and I – all from the suburbs – had driven into the city and gone to a comedy club.  Along with the laughs, we’d all had a drink or two, including me – at two beers, I was well under the legal limit of intoxication, but perhaps a bit less uptight and buttoned down than usual.  I was driving my friends, who lived on the mean streets of Wayne, Pennsylvania, out on the Main Line, where even 30 years ago the homes were valued at over a million dollars, home; it was late, and I was starting to get tired.   I just wanted to drop them off, get back to my 3^rd floor walkup apartment in a considerably less luxurious part of Chester County, and call it a night.  As I was driving in Wayne on a dark side street, I had just stopped at a stop sign, then driven through the intersection, and about halfway up the block was a car, dark color, motor running, lights off, right in the middle of the street.  I tapped on the horn.  No response.  I whonked on the horn, really leaned on it.  Still no response.  I just laid into the horn a third time – WHOOOOONK - and when there was still no response, I rolled down the window and at the top of my lungs I yelled, “If you don’t move that piece of crap, I’m gonna move it for you.”  And that time I got a response, as the car’s red and blue lights started flashing, and I hear a siren go “bloop…..”….turns out the car stopped in front of me was an unmarked police car.  Ooops!  As my friends in the back seat started trying to slide down and hide themselves underneath my seat, the car turned on its headlights and tail lights – and, amazingly, pulled over to the curb and stopped again, and turned out its lights.  The officer never got out.  I’d imagine he must have looked in the rear view mirror, seen a bunch of clean-cut, well-dressed, harmless looking twenty-somethings, and figured it wasn’t worth making a scene.  In any case, I rolled up my window, drove past the unmarked vehicle, dropped my friends off, and went home, with no lasting consequences beyond having a funny story to tell in a sermon some thirty years later.  And yes, I must have had a guardian angel or two in the car with me that night.

Let’s replay my story with me and my friends being black – we’d driven into the city, gone to a comedy club, had a couple beers each, and I’m dropping my friends off in the suburbs.  I come across a car stopped in the middle of the street, running, with its lights out, and make the mistake of mouthing off to the driver, who turns out to be a police officer….who looks in the rear view mirror, and notices that my friends and I don’t fit the neighborhood profile, don’t look like most of the folks who live on that block, maybe to that officer don’t look all that harmless.  So the  officer figures that, at the very least, he should check us out.  And so, instead of pulling his unmarked car over to the curb and letting us go on our way, he steps out of the car, walks up to my car and asks for license and registration.   Perhaps he asks my friends and I to step out of the car.  Perhaps, smelling beer on my breath – I’d had two earlier that evening, remember - he asks me to walk a straight line.  A reasonable enough request, except I have recurring problems with dizziness, especially when change positions, such as when I first stand up after having been sitting for a while, and so it’s entirely possible I would have stumbled and lost my balance.   And perhaps things would have gone downhill from there.  If the officer is upset enough, perhaps I don’t go home that night.  If I panic and do something to cause the officer to reach for his gun, perhaps I don’t go home ever.   And, if that happens, the police department could always release a video of me yelling out the window, and justify the shooting on the basis of my inappropriate behavior, saying I was behaving in a threatening manner.  As the event actually occurred, even though I did something monumentally stupid, the officer gave my friends and me the benefit of the doubt.  Had we been black, we still might have gotten the benefit of the doubt – or not.  And the consequences of “not” could have been quite detrimental, could have sent my life careening off in an altogether different direction, or perhaps ended it altogether.

I go through all that, just as an example that, like me, if we did deep enough into the recesses of our memories, I think most of us have done stupid stuff, maybe even stupid borderline illegal stuff, stupid stuff that, under only slightly different circumstances, could have had us run afoul of the police, stuff that, if caught on a snippet of video and played over and over on prime time TV, would give people a misleading impression of who we are.  Fortunately, most of us will take those memories to the grave, with none the wiser.  It’s safe to say that no human being, created in God’s image, of any race, deserves to have the value of their life negated because they shoved a clerk, or shoplifted cigars, or sold loose cigarettes, or played with a toy gun, or because these or other inappropriate actions were caught on film.   In today’s reading from Mark’s gospel, John the Baptist invites us not to point the finger at “those people” – however defined – but rather to look at the three fingers pointing back at us, ponder our own complicity in the evil we see around us, and to repent, to turn and begin anew, to begin changing the world by changing ourselves.

In a few minutes, we will be sharing in the sacrament of Holy Communion.  As we share, may we remember that the table at which we gather is a small part of a much larger table that extends around the world, a table at which sinners and saints of every description gather.  In the waters of our baptism and as we share bread and wine at the table of the Lord, Christ has broken down every dividing wall, so that, as St Paul wrote, there is neither Jew nor Greek, free nor slave, male or female.  It’s a foretaste of that heavenly banquet table where many will come from the north and the south and the east and the west and sit together, where Officer Darrell Wilson and Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Officer Daniel Pantaleo, where George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin will sit at table together and eat and drink in Christ’s presence, surrounded and enveloped by Christ’s encompassing love.  May our lives today reflect that love, inviting our neighbors, those neighbors we love and those neighbors we can’t stand, to taste and see that the Lord is good.  May we live such transparent lives that, in all we say and do, our neighbors can see only the crucified and risen Christ.  Amen.