"Who Am I? Why Am I Here?" (Pastor's Message, January 2017 newsletter)

Dear Emanuel Members and Friends –

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:
“And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
   are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
   who is to shepherd my people Israel.” ’
 Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.  (Matthew 2:1-12)

As I was considering this passage and reflecting on the start of another year, I was reminded of a famous (or infamous) moment from the 1992 presidential campaign.  Ross Perot, running as a 3^rd party candidate, had selected Admiral James Stockdale, a political unknown, as his vice-presidential running mate.  At the vice-presidential debate, in his opening statement, Admiral Stockdale introduced himself to the American public by flashing a goofy-looking grin as he uttered the words “Who am I?  Why am I here?”  He intended these as rhetorical questions, and indeed he answered his own questions, talking at length about his experiences in the Vietnam War, which he called the centerpiece of his life.  But as often happens, the press took Stockdale’s opening words “Who am I? Why am I here?” out of context, ran with them, and turned them into a punch line that haunted Stockdale throughout the remainder of the campaign. 

“Who am I?  Why am I here?”  These are good questions to consider as we begin another year.  It’s easy just to go from day to day, waking up, eating, working, spending time with our families, sleeping, and beginning the cycle anew the next day.  But there are times when we have to take stock of our lives, and now – as one year ends and another begins – is an excellent time to do so.  What have we done with the year that just passed?  What plans have we for the year to come?  What are our goals, our priorities?  To answer these questions, we need to answer two other questions first:  “Who am I?  Why am I here?”    Our goals and priorities should flow from our answers to these two basic questions.

“Who are you?  Why are you here?”  These are questions the Magi encountered as they went to Herod, seeking “the child who has been born King of the Jews.”  The Magi knew their mission, and were willing to follow their mission, as they followed the star, over many miles.  While they were a little vague on the exact location of the newborn King, they persisted in their search until they found the one whom they were seeking.  They did not allow themselves to be intimidated by the splendor of Herod’s court, nor misled by Herod’s deceptive words, but held fast to their mission.

“Who are we?  Why are we here?”  These are questions on which I hope Emanuel can focus as we begin another year.  Our congregation does a number of things – we maintain our property, hold weekly Sunday worship (plus extra services from time to time), hold two fundraising auctions a year, give away backpacks, provide counseling space for the Second Chance organization, welcome visitors, provide genealogical information, and help people who approach us for assistance – and there are seemingly more seeking assistance with every passing year.   These are all valuable activities in and of themselves.  However, all manner of other community groups maintain buildings and cemeteries, raise funds, provide meeting space, answer genealogical queries, and help those in need. What makes us and other churches unique is that we do what we do as an expression of our commitment to be disciples of the Risen Christ, our commitment to follow in the way of Jesus.   To answer the questions “Who are we? Why are we here?” I hope we can say the following:  as human beings we and our neighbors are persons created in God’s image.  As individual Christians and as the gathered community of Emanuel United Church of Christ, we are disciples of Christ, and we are here to follow in the way of Jesus, loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves.  We should be able to link any activity we do to our mission as followers of Jesus – and indeed, if an activity doesn’t contribute to that mission, we may need to rethink whether to continue it.  Certainly, anything decision we make as a church should take into account our identity and mission as followers of Jesus.

Church consultants sometimes make a distinction between “Great Commission” churches and “Great Commandment” churches.  The term “Great Commission” refers to Jesus’ parting words to his disciples in Matthew’s gospel,
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20)  The term “Great Commandment” refers to Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:34-40, Mark 12:28-34, and Luke 10:25-28, in which Jesus identifies love of God and love of neighbor as the two great commandments.  Churches may tend to emphasize one of these over the other – perhaps putting more effort into witnessing to the Gospel (Great Commandment) than helping those in need (Great Commandment), or perhaps the reverse.  Ultimately, though, both are necessary, and both are connected.  As Christians, we need to be able to tell our neighbors about Jesus, to “give an account of the hope that is within us” (I Peter 3:15), to make disciples, baptize, and teach.  But any teaching about Jesus has to include the great commandments of love toward God and neighbor.

How about Emanuel Church? Who are we?  Why are we here? Are we a “Great Commission” church or a “Great Commandment” church?  Or both? Or neither?  I would say that we are both – some new believers have come to faith in Jesus here at Emanuel Church, and we have helped a number of people in the community.  At the same time, I would say there is much more we can do.  As Jesus said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few, therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”  (Matthew 9:37) I pray that in 2017 we can challenge ourselves to be more effective in making disciples, to be more generous in loving God and neighbor – because that is who we are, and that is why we are here. 

Happy New Year!  See you in church!

– Pastor Dave     

Room

Scripture:       Isaiah 7:10-16            Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19   Romans 1:1-7             Matthew 1:18-25

On this 4^th Sunday of Advent, we finally get to the reason for the season.  Three weeks ago, we had apocalyptic texts connected with the return of Jesus.  Two weeks ago, we were out in the desert listening to the rantings of John the Baptist.  Last week I was away, but you heard Mary sing her song about a God who looks with favor on the poor and lowly, and brings down the high and mighty.  And this week, we get to hear Joseph’s side of the story. 

And Joseph’s side of the story begins with embarrassment and shame – his fiancé, Mary, as found to be “with child”.  With child.  As in, “Baby on board”. As in, preggers.    It would be embarrassing enough if Mary’s child was his – but it isn’t, because they hadn’t been together.  By all appearances, this was not going to end well for anyone, mother, father, or baby.

We’re told that Joseph is a righteous man – he’s a decent person who wants to do the right thing in what appears to be an indecent situation.  In that culture, marriage wasn’t primarily a matter of emotion, but about carrying on family lines and providing economic security – and if the spouses came to love one another, well, that was a bonus - and Joseph would have paid Mary’s family money as part of the engagement. Were Joseph to divorce her in court publicly and repudiate the child as “not his”, Joseph perhaps could have recovered his money and his honor.  On the other hand, had Joseph gone for a public divorce, Mary would have been seen quite literally as damaged goods – again, in that culture, marriage was primarily about continuing family lines and providing economic security – and, unfortunately, Mary’s being pregnant with God only knows whose child was no help with either of those goals.  Joseph didn’t want to subject Mary to shame and poverty by divorcing her publicly, so he resolved to divorce Mary quietly by giving her a certificate of divorce in front of two witnesses rather than in court.  He’d made up his mind along those lines when an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream with another option:  take Mary as his wife and raise up the son – who was from the Holy Spirit, as his own, naming him Jesus.  “Jesus” is the Greek version of the Jewish name Joshua, which means “The Lord saves” – and the angel tells Joseph that Jesus will save the people from their sins.  And Joseph did as the angel instructed.

It was a difficult decision for Joseph.  He could have left the whole messy situation behind, with some degree of damage to Mary’s reputation, but with a chance to start over for himself.  Instead, the angel of the Lord is asking Joseph to embrace the situation with all its embarrassment, rather than running from it.  And Joseph said “yes”.

At heart, the Christmas story is about making room, about making room for Jesus – Mary making room for the child within her and the scandal the baby would bring, Joseph making for Mary and her baby and the scandal that they would share.  And throughout the Christmas stories, characters are  defined by whether or not they allow room for Jesus.  Famously, when Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem, there was no room in the inn and so they ended up in the manger with the animals.  The shepherds and wise men traveled considerable distances, made considerable room in their schedules to see the Christ child.  By contrast, there was no room in Herod’s plans for a new-born king of the Jews, and so he tried to have the baby killed.  

How about us?  Is there room for Jesus in our lives?  The name of Jesus means “God has saved” – but do we feel the need for a savior…or are we doing just fine by ourselves, thank you very much?  Presumably, if we’re here, we’ve made some room for Jesus in our lives, or at least are considering the notion.  But how much room?  Do we turn our whole lives over to Jesus – give Jesus the run of the house – or do we lock Jesus into a little room called Sunday morning and keep the rest for our own priorities?  And that’s not an easy yes/no question – I’ve found for myself that once I let Jesus in the front door of my life many years ago, the rest of my life has been a process of welcoming Jesus into the various spaces of my life, and it hasn’t come all at once – and occasionally I’ve decided I wanted a closet or crawl space back for myself.   It’s one thing to trust Jesus with my Sunday mornings.  But with my money?  With my job? With my family and friendships?  With my free time?

There can be one other problem with making room for Jesus – he has a habit of inviting his friends.  We’d like to have a private, personal relationship with Jesus – just Jesus and me – but if Jesus is in our lives, we will find ourselves among the poor, among those on the margins, among those whom our society rejects.

Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton wrote a meditation on Luke’s Christmas story of there being no room in the inn.  I’d like to share a few lines of it.

“In the time of the end there is no longer room for the desire to go on living. The time of the end is the time when men call upon the mountains to fall upon them, because they wish they did not exist. Why? Because they are part of a proliferation of life that is not fully alive, it is programmed for death. A life that has not been chosen, and can hardly be accepted, has no room for hope. Yet it must pretend to go on hoping. It is haunted by the demon of emptiness. And out of this unutterable void come the armies, the missiles, the weapons, the bombs…and all the other crimes of mass society….

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 person, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is mysteriously present.  He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.”[1]

May we at Emanuel make room in our lives for Jesus, and for those whom Jesus calls us to serve.  May we be able to pray, in the words of an old hymn, “O come to my heart, Lord Jesus; there is room in my heart for Thee.”  Indeed, may every heart prepare Him room. Amen.

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[1] Thomas Merton, ‘The Time of the End is the Time of No Room’, in Raids on the Unspeakable

Pastor's Message - December 2016 Newsletter

Dear Emanuel Members and Friends –

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
 Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Aram, and Aram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.

 And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon. 

And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Salathiel, and Salathiel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.
 So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.  (Matthew 1:1-17)

Matthew– thought to have been written by a Jewish convert (by tradition, Matthew the tax collector) to the way of Jesus to convince fellow Jews that Jesus is the Messiah – begins his Gospel with a genealogy, a list of Jesus’ ancestors going back to Abraham.  For modern readers, while it’s possible that we may be interested in our own family’s genealogy, we probably can’t imagine anything more tedious to read than an ancient genealogy for somebody else’s family.  As we begin to read through it, our eyes glaze over, and most of us just skip over these verses to get to Mary and Joseph and the baby.  But for ancient cultures and for more traditional cultures even today, genealogies are very important.  In these cultures, remembering the family line was and is crucially important; one’s lineage says a great deal about who a person is.  So what does this genealogy tell us about who Jesus is?

On one level, the genealogy is intended to associate Jesus with Abraham and David, key figures in Jewish history.  It was expected that the Messiah be descended from King David, and this genealogy demonstrates this connection.  Indeed, the descendants in the second set of fourteen names (from David to the deportation) were likewise kings, and so generations of royal blood flowed in Jesus’ veins.  It should be noted that In numerology, the number seven is the number of perfection, and so the number fourteen – two time seven - signifies double perfection.  (It should likewise be noted, though, that David’s descendants included kings that were regarded as relatively faithful, such as Hezekiah and Josiah, as well as kings who were extremely unfaithful, such as Manasseh and Jeconiah.)

On the other hand, while most of those listed are males – not unusual for a highly patriarchal culture – four women are identified early in the genealogy.  What’s notable is that each of these women acted in ways that were unconventional and even scandalous, and yet each had a crucial role in continuing the family line of King David.  Tamar (Genesis 38) pretended to be a prostitute and slept with her father-in-law, Judah, in order to continue the family line.  Rahab (Joshua 2, Joshua 6) was a prostitute who provided hospitality to the spies from Israel who were scouting out Jericho in preparation for the conquest of Canaan.  Ruth (about whom the book of Ruth was written) was Moabite woman who married into the family of Boaz; their son Obed was the grandfather of King David.  (Ruth’s marriage to Boaz would have raised eyebrows, as Israel detested the Moabite people. Deuteronomy 23:3 states “No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.  Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.”)  And “the wife of Uriah” was Bathsheba, with whom King David committed adultery (2 Samuel 11-12).   (In this last mention, the genealogy not only references Bathsheba but her husband, Uriah, whom David set up to be killed in battle in order to claim Bathsheba.) The mention of these unconventional women with their scandalous stories prepares Matthew’s Jewish readers to accept that just as God was at work in their lives, God was working through Mary, who was “found to be with child by the Holy Spirit” and in a potentially scandalous situation.  Matthew was preparing his readers for the reality that Mary’s son was not from an illicit union, but from God.

The lineage of Jesus includes patriarchs and kings – some faithful, some not so faithful – along with some unconventional women, at least one of whom was a Gentile, Ruth the Moabite. An old hymn states that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross” – that is, all of us without exception are equally in need of God’s grace – and this is the case at the manger as well.   As we read this genealogy almost 2,000 years later, we can be comforted and challenged by the reality that just as the genealogy of Jesus included all sorts of people, likewise, all sorts and conditions of people are welcome to worship the Christ child.  Indeed, God can use anyone, even us, as unworthy as we are, or even somebody we detest, as unworthy as they may be, for God’s purposes.  All of us are in need of God’s grace, and none of us is beyond the reach of God’s grace.   As human beings created in God’s image, we are not defined by the worst thing we’ve ever done, and no scandal is beyond the reach of the forgiveness Jesus offers.  At the manger, as at the foot of the cross, all the lines we draw to separate ourselves from others, to define our neighbors as “other” and “less than” – all of these lines vanish.

In this season of Advent, may we prepare our hearts to make room for the Christ child.  May we come to the manger to worship, and there may we be reconciled to God and neighbor.  Let every heart prepare him room.    

With prayers for a blessed Advent, Christmas, and New Year – Pastor Dave