Topsy Turvy

Scriptures:         Isaiah 7:10-16    Luke 1:46-55,    Romans 1:1-7   Matthew 1:18-25

Topsy Turvy

 

I have to begin this sermon with a personal disclosure:  I have no children.  A shocker, I know.  However, one of the gifts of life in the church is being able to spend time – an hour or two on Sunday, anyway – with families with children.   And, of course, most of my friends of mine from high school or college got married and had children – and now these friends are grandparents.  One thing I think it’s safe even for a non-parent like myself to say is that bringing a child into the world is a life-changing event.  There’s life BC – before children – and life AK – after kids.  There’s no going back to what was normal life before children.  After children, there’s a new normal, surrounded by a different set of highs and lows than before, with diapers and feeding schedules and strollers. 

 

Our Scripture readings for today, especially the two Gospel texts – and actually the Luke reading was an optional text for last week – give us pictures of Mary and Joseph dealing with the impending arrival of a child.  And basically, the arrival of the child has turned their lives upside down, being turned topsy turvy.  Neither Mary nor Joseph were planning on a baby at this point in their relationship.  But the angel of the Lord was busy making announcements – to Zechariah that his aged wife, Elizabeth, would be give birth; to Mary, who had not been intimate with Joseph, that she would be with child; to Joseph, to reassure him not to leave Mary, but to see the pregnancy through, because the child was from the Lord.  And all of their lives would be turned upside down. 

 

Our season of Advent waiting is rapidly coming to an end.  At our Christmas Eve service on  Tuesday – at 7 p.m. , be there or be square – we will once again remember and celebrate the coming of the Christ Child.  But in welcoming the Christ child, the baby Jesus, Emanuel, God with us, we’re welcoming the change and adjustment and topsy-turviness that comes with welcoming new life into the world – and not just any new life, but God in the flesh.

 

In our reading from Luke’s Gospel, Mary gives us a very explicit vision of what the coming of the Christ child will mean, for her, and for us.  She begins with expressions of thanksgiving and joy – “My heart rejoices in God my Savior; for God has looked on the lowliness of his servant, and all generations shall call me blessed, for God has done great things for me.”  All understandable, given the blessing God had bestowed on her.  But then she starts talking about society being turned upside down – “God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; God has brought the powerful down from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”  My goodness, Mary started out thanking God for a baby, and now she’s talking about revolution, about society being turned topsy turvy.  How’d we end up here?

 

Mary’s words remind us of how much our culture has domesticated Christmas; how much our culture has domesticated Jesus..  Our society’s tame version of the baby Jesus came to earth to give us Christmas carols and gift wrap and holiday decorations and lines at the mall and a day off work and a big family dinner.  That version of Jesus will change nothing, will only offer us the status quo, more of the same, only to be packed away with the Christmas lights and stored away for another year – and leave us with a boatload of bills to pay come January.

 

But the real Jesus came to turn our life and our world topsy turvy.  Certainly, for those who lived in Jesus’ time, it probably looked like not much changed.   The folks who were in power when Jesus was born were still in power when Jesus was executed.  The high and mighty were still high and mighty and the destitute were still destitute.  But Jesus’ ministry and message, his death and resurrection set in motion changes that are still playing themselves out 2000 years later.  Caesars have come, and Caesars have gone, and Christ and his message about the reign of God are still here.  And the body of Christ on earth, the church, is still here.

 

On Christmas Eve, we welcome the coming of the baby Jesus.  But do we know who it is we’re welcoming?  Are we prepared for what it will mean to welcome the Christ child?  Because the child will grow up into a man, named Jesus, who will demand change.  And those in authority know it, and fear it.  In the years following Jesus’ birth, Herod tried to have him killed, slaughtering many other innocent babies in the process.  Consistently through his ministry, he was a challenge to the religious establishment.   And in speaking about the kingdom of God, the reign of God, Jesus was a threat to the reign of Caesar.  And so Caesar – through his representative, Pontius Pilate, had him executed.

 

Are we ready?  Are we ready to have our lives turned upside down – or maybe, more accurately, turned right side up?  Are we ready to enter the topsy-turvy world of Jesus, where the poor receive the kingdom of heaven and the meek inherit the earth; where the hungry are fed and the naked are clothed and the sick are healed and the prisoners are released, where those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are satisfied, and where the rich and powerful, those who’ve been running the show, and running those on the bottom of society into the ground, they are sent away empty?  Are we ready? Are we ready?

 

If your name is Herod, or if your name is Caesar, you’re not ready, and you’ll never be ready.  But if you’re us here at Emanuel – struggling to scratch out a living, or struggling to scrape by on a monthly check, struggling to find work that pays a living wage, or struggling to find time and energy to hold down multiple jobs, struggling to raise the children God has blessed us with, working hard to keep a marriage or a relationship together – and every single person here today is struggling with something, every last one of us carrying a heavy load -  we are the ones to whom Jesus came to preach good news of great joy.

 

Yes, the baby will turn our lives upside, down, will turn our world upside down.  But the message of the angel to Mary and to Joseph is God’s message to us – do not be afraid.  Don’t be afraid to risk public ridicule, as Joseph did in taking the pregnant Mary as his wife.  Don’t be afraid because you can’t see the end of the path on which God is leading us.  All we’re asked to do is to trust God for the next step, and the next…..the next step on the journey, the next day of our lives, the next year of Emanuel Church’s ministry here in Bridesburg.  Things will be topsy turvy, in our lives and here at Emanuel Church, but God will be in the midst of the topsy-turviness…and so we’ll be ok.  We’ll be ok.  Amen.

 

 

What Do You See?

Scriptures:         Isaiah 35:1-10    James 5:7-10,   Matthew 11:2-11

What Do You See?

 

I think we’ve all been there at some point.  Something new has started in our lives – a new job, a new friendship, a new hobby or volunteer activity.  At first, we’re pumped up, wanting to dig in and experience as much as possible.  But then, over times, the job tasks or work conditions or friendship or volunteer commitment move in a direction we hadn’t anticipated – perhaps demanding more than we’d anticipated, or not providing the satisfaction we’d experienced at first.  Eventually we hit a moment of crisis when we say, hey, this isn’t fun anymore.  This isn’t what I signed up for.

 

Our Gospel reading tells of a moment at which John the Baptist is experiencing disappointment and wavering faith.  Last Sunday, we saw him standing confidently by the Jordan River, baptizing, calling the crowds to repentance, even calling the religious leaders a brood of vipers.  Although John had ample opportunity to call attention to himself, he insisted that he was only paving the way for one who was greater than he.  This one greater than John is identified as Jesus.

 

But today’s reading takes place some time later, and at this point John is discouraged.  His discouragement is understandable – his boldness in preaching repentance to Herod landed him in prison, soon to be executed.  Meanwhile, Jesus didn’t look or act a whole lot like John’s mental image of the Messiah.  Remember that John expected the Messiah to baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire, to gather the grain into his granary and separate the wheat from the chaff – with the chaff being burned with unquenchable fire.  John envisioned something like our action movies, where the bad guys are arrested or killed, and the good guys live happily ever after. 

 

But this isn’t what John is seeing.  Surely, Jesus is empowered with the Spirit.  But instead of separating wheat from chaff – blessing the good guys and punishing the bad guys - Jesus is hanging out with sinners, with those considered the bad guys, to the point where the crowds are calling him a drunk and a glutton, a party animal – two words that nobody would ever use to describe John the Baptist.  Jesus is feeding and healing people without regard to whether they’re deserving or not – for Jesus, such questions just don’t come up.  Where John expected the kingdom of God to arrive with fire and force; Jesus offers a kingdom that comes about quietly, like seed growing in a garden.   And Jesus even preached that, in God’s garden, good and bad seed will grow along side one another until the end of all things.  And, of course, all this is happening while John’s in prison.  And so John is starting to have doubts, thinking, “this isn’t what I signed up for”, starting to wonder if his life’s work of paving the way for Jesus had been a mistake.  So he sends messengers to Jesus to ask, “Are you the one, or should we look for another?”  Underlying the question is a demand of sorts:  “Hey Jesus, if you are the Messiah, isn’t it about time you started acting like one!”  And underlying that demand is the assumption that Jesus should act like the kind of Messiah that John had been expecting.

 

Jesus replies to John’s messengers with words to intended to expand John’s range of vision.  “Go and tell John what you hear and see.”  And then Jesus lists the miracles he has done: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”  As it happens, Jesus’ words to John’s messengers sound a lot like words from this morning’s Old Testament reading from Isaiah 35: “Then shall the eyes of the blind be open and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” Finally, Jesus adds, “And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”

 

When John’s messengers return to their master, Jesus then goes on to expand the crowd’s vision of the role of John.  He keeps asking the question, “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?....What then did you go out to see?.....What then did you go out to see?”  Were you looking for a reed shaken by the wind?  For one in soft robes?  No, you were looking for a prophet – and John was all that and more.  Jesus affirms John’s role as the messenger sent to prepare the way for the Messiah.  But then Jesus also gives us these words: “Among those born of woman there is no one greater than John , but even the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”  Like Moses who saw the promised land but could not enter, John saw what Jesus was doing but couldn’t enter into it, was mentally and spiritually unable to make the jump from what he knew to what Jesus was proclaiming.  While Jesus was baptized by John, John never became a disciple of Jesus.  John was a transitional figure, a bridge from the law and the prophets to the kingdom of heaven – but while he enabled others to cross into the kingdom as Jesus proclaimed it, he never quite got there himself.  All of which is not to say that John wasn’t saved – he was, on the same basis that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and Elijah and all the great Old Testament saints were saved.  But John was never quite able to enter into the new thing that Jesus was doing – that new thing of God, of which we are all a part.

 

In times of discouragement, or in times when we have questions about the path we’re on, when something in our lives has us saying, “This isn’t what I signed up for” - Jesus’ response to John’s question, “Are you the one?” can give us hope.  In those times when God seems very far away, we can ask ourselves the same question Jesus asked John’s messengers:  What do we see and hear?  When we see those blinded by their own self-centeredness becoming open to God and neighbor, when we see those deaf to the cry of the poor miraculously responding with compassion; when we see enemies becoming friends, when the poor hear good news – we are seeing God’s work in our midst.  When we see God’s work in our midst, we know we’re where God wants us to be.  God has planted seeds in our midst that God has asked us to tend on God’s behalf.   And if what God is doing – if what’s growing from the seeds God planted - doesn’t look exactly like what we’d envisioned – well, perhaps God is trying to improve our vision. 

 

We all encounter those times in a relationship or at a job or some other life circumstance – maybe even at church - when we’re feeling overwhelmed, when we feel that “this isn’t fun anymore”, that “this isn’t what I signed up for”.  I’ve had these moments also, so I’m preaching to myself as well as to you.   And there are times, if we’re in an abusive personal or employment relationship, when these feelings may be a sign that it’s time for a change.  But, if the situation isn’t completely beyond hope, such feelings may be a sign that it’s time to pray and ask for guidance, whether the problem is with the situation itself or with our vision, our understanding of the situation.  Because sometimes what appears to be a breakdown in a relationship with a person, an employer, even a faith community, may be an opportunity for a breakthrough to a deeper relationship, a deeper level of commitment in which, while the relationship or situation isn’t quite what we’d envisioned, not quite what we signed up for, God may be sending us blessings in disguise, may be giving us a chance to expand our vision of what God is doing in our lives and in our midst.

 

John sent messengers to ask of Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”  And Jesus responded by telling the messengers, “Go and tell John what you hear and see.”  May God grant us ears to hear and eyes to see what God is doing in our midst, and voices to reassure one another of God’s love, and to share God’s love with our neighbors here in Bridesburg, and across the city, and around the globe.  Amen.

Prepare the Way

Scriptures:         Isaiah 11:1-10, Psalm 72 ; Romans 15:4-13,   Matthew 3:1-12

 

 

Prepare The Way

We’re now in the second week of Advent, that season of waiting for the Christ child.   God won’t allow us to wait by ourselves, and so he’s sent someone to keep us company on our journey – John the Baptist.  John the Baptist, however, isn’t the most congenial company.  In fact, if you were in an elevator or a subway car with him, you’d likely be scrambling and climbing over people to get out.

 

Our reading tells us that John taught and baptized in the wilderness, near the River Jordan, where many centuries before, the Israelites had crossed the Jordan River and entered the promised land.  John dressed in clothing of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist.  This would have reminded the people of his day of the prophet Elijah from centuries before, perhaps the greatest of the prophets, who likewise dressed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist.  So by his appearance and his location, he is reminding his audience of times in which God had acted mightily in Israel’s history.  To translate this into our terms, we might think of somebody dressed in a colonial era costume and standing near Independence Mall, making statements about American society.  The choice of colonial-era clothing and the location near Independence Mall would remind people of our country’s Founding Fathers and would lend such a person more credibility in speaking about American society.  In the same way, John’s appearance and location, by reminding his listeners of Elijah, gave John credibility with the people.

 

And John the Baptist needed all the credibility he could muster, because his was not a warm and fuzzy message.    This was not Santa Claus coming with a stocking full of toys.  John the Baptist was more like an irate parent yelling “Clean up your room!  Comb your hair!  Pull up your socks! Company’s coming!”   He came as an instrument of God’s love, but for John, God’s love is tough love indeed.

 

And John didn’t have a lot of respect for the big shots of his day.   When John saw the Sadducees, who were leaders of the Temple at Jerusalem approaching side by side with their religious and political opponents, the Pharisees, who were more popular with and respected by the common people for their interpretations of the law, he called all of them, Sadducees and Pharisees alike, a brood of vipers, a snake pit.   John demands that they bear fruit worthy of repentance – that is to say, if you’re going to present yourself as men of God, the way you live your life had better reflect that.  Your actions have to match your words; you have to walk the way you talk.  John adds a sense of urgency by saying “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  That is to say, John is telling the religious leaders that if the way they treat other people doesn’t match the fine godly words they speak, God will reject them – so they’d best get their act together, and be quick about it.     

 

John goes on to speak of one coming who is more powerful than he, who will baptize not with water, but with the Holy Spirit and with fire.   In John’s time, in order to prepare wheat to be ground into flour, the wheat would be thrown up in the air so that the outer husk would be separated from the inner kernel.  And this is what John says will happen with people; that in our lives which God can use will be kept, and that which God cannot use will be tossed in the fire.

 

As I said, despite John’s repeated references to fire, there’s nothing warm about John’s message.  John is demanding, uncompromising.  And yet this is the one sent by God to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus.

 

What is God saying by sending such a harsh messenger to prepare the way for Jesus?  Our reading from Isaiah gives us a picture of the world as God would want it, the world God wants for us, a world where the wolf lives with the lamb, where a little child shall lead, where they will not hurt or destroy on all God’s holy mountain – a place where the knowledge of the Lord will be as deep and as plentiful as the waters of the sea.  That is the world God wants for us.  But that world will be messed up, polluted, if we try to come there bringing along all of our sins – our greed, our anger, our envy of others.  The very place where we want to be will be spoiled, for ourselves and everyone else, if we try to go there as we are – sort of like if we hiked far into an old growth forest to experience unspoiled nature at its best, only, once we got there, to start dumping out all our cigarette butts and empty soda bottles and such….we’d have spoiled the very place we had worked so hard to find, for ourselves, and for anyone who came after us.  And that how it is with Isaiah’s vision of God’s holy mountain – God wants us there, but as for all the sinful crud and baggage we all carry around…..not so much.  And so, John says, repent!  Turn around.  Change direction.  Live differently.  John’s baptism was a symbolic washing off of all the sin and crud of a lifetime, so that the people could begin again, fresh and new and clean. 

 

While our Isaiah passage gives us a beautiful vision of God’s holy mountain, it begins with words about a shoot coming out of a stump.  That stump represents the Jewish people under attack, a once-mighty tree cut down by God because of the corruption of their leaders.  Similar to John the Baptist’s warning about the ax laying at the root of the tree, in Isaiah, God had already used the ax and cut down a tree that was not bearing fruit.  Now all that’s left is a stump.  But the stump is not dead.  There’s life in that stump; the branch coming from the stump represents a coming leader who will lead the people with righteousness.  Early Christians looked back in this text and interpreted the branch from the stump to represent Jesus Christ, who came forth from the Jewish people to bring salvation to all.    

 

John’s harsh message is needed to break through our self-satisfied complacency, to shake us up and get our attention so that we can hear Jesus’ message of grace and forgiveness, and respond with changed lives.  After all, if we’re already healthy, why would we want to see a doctor?  If we already think we’re safe, why would we need someone to save us?  So we need John to remind us how far from being healthy and safe, so that we are open to receiving the healing and salvation that Jesus offers. 

 

I believe that God still sends us modern-day prophets, those like John the Baptist, to tell us things we really don’t want to hear but that God needs us to hear.  We could perhaps say that Nelson Mandela, who died late last week, was a messenger sent to proclaim a sometimes-unwelcome message of change to South Africa.  Imprisoned for 27 years because of his leadership of political opposition to South Africa’s policy of apartheid, or separation of races, he spent 18 of those years on Robben Island, where he lived in an 8 foot by 7 foot cell with just a small mat to sleep on and was allowed only two letters and two visits per year.  Today he is mourned as a father figure to the nation of South Africa and an international icon of racial reconciliation, but had been imprisoned for all those years because he was considered dangerous, a threat to South Africa’s government – and not only to South Africa’s government.   The US State Department carried him on their list of terrorists for some 20 years, from 1988 until his removal from the US State Department terrorist list in 2008.  Nelson Mandela was considered anything but a warm and fuzzy figure, as he spoke against South Africa’s policies of racial separation - he was considered a dangerous radical.  But the words he spoke were words his country’s leadership needed to hear, and he kept speaking those words through nearly 30 years of imprisonment until his country was willing to listen. 

 

It’s dangerous to be a prophet, dangerous to speak unwelcome truth to entrenched power.  For speaking truth to power, John the Baptist was imprisoned and later executed, his head presented on a platter as a gift to his political enemies.  For speaking truth to power, Jesus was crucified, though by God’s power he rose from the dead on the third day.  For speaking truth to power, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for nearly 30 years.  And so I’d encourage us to consider who might be the prophetic witnesses in our midst, speaking truth that we are reluctant to hear, insisting on change when we stubbornly and foolishly insist on more of the same.  What husks of sin and complacency is God trying to remove from our lives, so that we can become fit to be nourishing kernels of wheat, fit to bring the good news of Jesus Christ, the living bread from heaven, to others.  When our lives are being shaken up, when we find ourselves going through changes, it may be that, like wheat in the granary, we are being tossed about and shaken up in order that the good kernels of wheat in our lives may be separated from the chaff of sin. 

 

From Psalm 95:  “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.”  May God grant us ears open to the messengers of truth God sends us, and may we have lips and hands eager to respond with kind words and caring deeds.  Amen.

 

 

 

Anticipation

Scriptures:  Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14;  Matthew 24:36-44

Anticipation

 

I’m glad to see everyone here this morning – because the fact that you’re here means that you survived Black Friday.  Seriously!  The traditional big shopping day after Thanksgiving is a time of hope and dread for shoppers everywhere – hope that the store will have that perfect present your child has been asking for every hour on the hour since roughly Halloween; dread of the crowds, and worry that someone else may get the last item in stock.  The feelings of dread, at least, are justified:  at Franklin Mills mall, a fight broke out between several patrons that was said to involve the use of a stun gun.  And it’s not just a Philly thing – in Garfield, New Jersey, two shoppers who were fighting over a TV at a Walmart were pepper-sprayed by police.   In Chicago, a suspected shoplifter who drove his car while dragging a police officer was shot by another police officer.  Stabbings took place at various other stores around the country.  According to the website Black Friday Death Count.com – yes, there is such a website - casualties for Black Friday 2013 included 1 death and 15 injuries – which is a significant improvement from 2011, when two pepper spray attacks, one in North Carolina, one in Los Angeles, pushed the injury total up near 50 nationwide.  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  Like the old sergeant on the TV show Hill Street Blues used to tell the officers at the beginning of each shift, “Be careful out there.”  Just as an aside, I’m grateful to report that yesterday’s auction here at Emanuel was free of casualties – nobody shot or stabbed or even so much as tased - and I’m very grateful for everyone’s hard work that went into a successful auction.

 

Hope and dread – these emotions also characterize this morning’s Scripture readings.  Similar to our readings from two weeks ago, involving passages from Isaiah and Luke, today’s readings for the first Sunday in Advent set images of hope and dread side by side – Isaiah’s beautiful images of the nations coming to Zion for instruction, images of swords beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks – and Matthew’s ominous images of one person taken, another left – part of a larger apocalyptic section of Matthew’s gospel.  Many TV preachers interpret the Matthew passage, and similar passages in Mark and Luke, as prophecies of Christian believers being raptured away off the earth – as in “beam me up, Scotty” - before the coming of a time of great tribulation that will usher in the end of the world – although if you read the passage carefully, while Jesus says “one will be taken and one will be left”,  Jesus says nothing about where those taken are taken or why those who are left are left, and there’s a line about “where the corpse lays, the vultures will gather” which was left out of our reading.  Much of the imagery in the Matthew reading is based on the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 AD – which many Jews saw as the end of the world – certainly the end of their world as they’d experienced it to that point.  Some of the imagery looks back even further, to the desecration of the Jerusalem Temple by the Greek emperor Antiochus IV in roughly 170 BC, when Antiochus sacrificed a pig on the altar of the Jerusalem Temple.  But the passage also looks forward to the return of the Messiah, while cautioning that along the way there will be many false Messiahs and false attempts at trying to set dates and locations for the return of the Messiah – the kind of false attempts at date setting that Harold Camping got spectacularly wrong when he predicted, not once but twice, that the world would end back in 2011 - the kind of false almost-but-not-quite date setting that has kept Hal Lindsey re-writing and adjusting his predictions of the end of the world since the publication of his book “The Late Great Planet Earth” in 1970.  To look back at the original 1970 edition of the Late Great Planet Earth, with its predictions of the involvement of the old Soviet Union and “Red China” in the Battle of Armageddon, is like stepping into a time capsule of Cold War-era paranoia.  But Lindsey is still writing, still adjusting and updating his predictions every few years.  Hey, if nothing else, it’s good for book sales – “what in God’s name (literally) is Lindsey gonna predict this time” - and Lindsey’s readership has had his books virtually flying off the shelves for the past 40 years and counting.  Maybe you found some on sale while you were avoiding Black Friday’s stabbings and stun gun fights.  And then, of course, there’s Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” books, which spin tales of end-time tribulation that makes Black Friday at Walmart look like Kumbayah around a camp fire.  At Franklin Mills, the worst weapon involved was a stun gun; in the Left Behind books, even the good guys carry Uzi’s, and you don’t want to know what the bad guys are carrying.  Praise the Lord and pass the ammo.

 

So, turning away from our modern-day mongers of doom and gloom, what are we to make of troubling passages such as our reading from Matthew, and seemingly “too-good-to-be-true” passages like our reading from Isaiah. Believe it or not, both come out of similar circumstances, namely people of faith living under tremendous oppression and trying to make sense of their circumstances, given their faith that God is in charge – really, it’s the classic question that the faithful have always struggled with: “If God is in charge, why is there so much rotten stuff going on in the world.”  In the Isaiah passage, the Jewish people are suffering under their own corrupt political and religious leadership in the years leading up to Assyria’s conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel; during the time Matthew’s gospel was being written, Jews and early Christians are being ground into the dust by Roman oppression.  In both cases, the people are looking to the Lord for change – for the oppressors to be removed from power, for justice and peace to break out.  Today’s reading from Matthew is an example of what is called apocalyptic writing, which tries to look under the surface of all that’s wrong with our world to affirm that God is still in charge and working to set everything right, even in the midst of seeming chaos. Of course, in Biblical times there were no IMAX movie theaters showing 3-D films, so the writers of our Biblical texts struggled through their words to leave their readers with incredibly vivid mental images of what it would look like when God finally at long last stepped into the middle of life’s chaos and confusion to finally make things right.  The prospect of change – of God intervening in history to set things right – is a source of hope for some, a cause of dread for others.

 

What fills you with hope?  What fills you with dread?   Will your hopes be satisfied and your fears relieved by something on sale at the mall – probably not.  I believe we’re all searching in our own way for something more lasting, something more satisfying – a sense that our lives count for something, that all our work and worry and struggle and fear and hope amount to something beyond just scraping by from one day to the next, searching for evidence that we can be something better than a bunch of hostile strangers scrambling for survival like a bunch of crazed shoppers scrambling for the last item on sale at the mall.  I believe we’re searching for a sense of connection to other people – family, friends, neighbors, community - and to something beyond ourselves, searching for a sense that we’re not, in the words of A. E. Housman, “strangers and afraid in a world we never made.”    

 

Advent is a season of waiting.  At the beginning of our service Al lit the Advent candle of hope, reminding us that our time of Advent waiting is a time of hope, a time of anticipating.  We wait, not like death-row inmates awaiting our date with the electric chair, but like children waiting on Christmas Eve for something or someone better than anything we’ll ever find at Franklin Mills.  Or, perhaps waiting like prisoners of our own sins and failings, and the sins and failings of our society, waiting to be told that our sentence is over, that, in the words of Isaiah chapter 40, “that we’ve served our term, that our penalty is paid”, that we’re free at last.  While we wait, we can live in the hope of Paul’s words from Romans that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”  And Paul tells us how we are to live during our time of waiting as he writes:  “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

 

As we begin this season of Advent, this season of waiting for the coming of the Christ child, may we keep in mind these words from a familiar Christmas carol. 

 

O little town of Bethlehem How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years Are met in thee tonight

 

May the presence of Christ calm our fears and fill us with joyful anticipation in this season of hope.  Amen.

Hope, Anyway

(Scriptures:  I Kings 17:8-24, Galatians 1:11-24, Luke 7:11-17)

 

 

 

Today’s readings give us, not one, but two accounts of men of God restoring life to the sons of widows from the dead:  Elijah, in I Kings, bringing life into the son of the widow of Zaraphath who had sheltered him, and Jesus, bringing life to the son of the widow of Nain.   The two accounts, while taking place centuries apart, have many elements in common – vulnerable widows who, in preparing to bury their deceased sons, are mourning not only their sons, but the loss of support that these sons would provide, mourning a future for themselves of poverty and hunger.   And in both cases, mourning turns to rejoicing as life is restored to the sons – in the case of the miracle performed by Jesus, the funeral processing is literally stopped in its tracks as the deceased sits up and starts to talk.

 

I suspect most of us have been to many funerals over the course of our lives, and I’ve been to my share.  During the summer after I graduated from high school, I worked for a family owned furniture store in which the same family ran the funeral home next door – that was often a common arrangement in days gone by, as the skills used to make a wooden casket aren’t that different from those used to make a wooden cabinet – and so during that summer, I experienced funerals from a slightly different angle.  And yes, I’ve conducted a handful of funerals, for church members and for non-members.  Each funeral has its own character.  And some have unexpected participants, such as the memorial service held here at Emanuel for a family in the neighborhood a few years ago, whose mom had passed.   It was summertime, and at some point, a sparrow had somehow gotten into the sanctuary – and during the memorial service, the sparrow insisted on flying back and forth from one side of the sanctuary to the other.    And every time the bird flew across the sanctuary, those at the memorial service kept pointing at the bird and saying “It’s her spirit, it’s her spirit!”  So funerals can take unexpected turns.  But they almost always end with mourners leaving a cemetery or church or funeral home grieving and preparing emotionally for life without a loved one by their side.

 

And so I have to confess, I really struggle with preaching on Biblical texts about miracles, and so I struggle to preach on today’s texts…and indeed, my sermon had all sorts of different titles at various points before I went with the title that’s in the bulletin, and even after I settled on a title  so that I could run off the bulletins, as I wrote today’s sermon, it seemed to have wandered in a slightly different direction than I’d planned.  Witnessing the dead restored to life seems so far from our experience.  How do we wrap our mind around accounts like today’s gospel reading?  I know that if I were conducting a funeral and the dearly departed sat up in the casket and started asking whether the Phillies were ahead or behind, I’d run out the door screaming, leaving footprints on the back of anyone who got in the way.  I daresay most of us would do the same thing.

 

And maybe that says more about me, and more about us, than we may think.  We think of death and taxes as the two things that are inescapable.   The death of loved ones brings pain and grief. Sudden or accidental death – such as that of those who were crushed in the building collapse downtown earlier this week – bring shock and even anger – anger at crooked contractors, at inspectors who didn’t do their jobs, even – or especially – anger at God.  Why did God allow this to happen?  And probably the most honest answer we can give is, “I don’t know.”  But we do have resources – our faith in God, the support of the church, the care of friends and family – to carry us through the dark valley of bereavement to come out on the other side.  But what if life springs up in a place in which we expect to find only death?  Are we prepared to handle that?   Or would it send us running out the door screaming?  Might we even be tempted to slam the lid back down on the casket?  I suspect that many of us can, at least some of the time, count ourselves in some measure among the members of the writer Flanner O’Connor’s fictional Church without Christ, where, as O’Connor wrote, “the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.”

 

And yet, as followers of the risen Christ, we can say that it is not the will of God that “what’s dead stays that way.” God’s will for us is not blindness nor lameness nor death, but life, abundant life, eternal life.  Jesus restored life to the son of the widow at Nain – not because she was especially virtuous or had especially strong faith, not because of any particular merit on her part, but rather because the widow and the mourners happened to have crossed paths with Jesus and his followers, and Jesus was moved by her grief and took pity on her. 

 

Earlier I said that seeing the dead restored to life seems beyond our experience…but is that true?  While we may not have an experience exactly like that of the widows in our readings, we worship a God who offers new hope and new life in the most seemingly hopeless situations.   Perhaps we know a friend or family member who at one time seemed hopelessly addicted to alcohol or drugs, who was restored to sobriety.   Or perhaps a relationship with a family member or former friend was seemingly broken beyond repair…but some months or years down the road, one of the estranged gave the other a phone call or sent a short note or email, and eventually the relationship was restored.  Perhaps we know of someone out of work who had lost hope of ever regaining employment, or someone stuck in a dead-end job that they hated, and someone reached out to them with a phone number or the name of a friend to contact, and lo and behold, they’re back in the workforce doing work that fulfills.  Here at Emanuel, we’ve prayed for healing for a number of people, and been surprised with joy at the recovery of people whose health problems had seemed desperate.  And in our congregation itself, we’re experiencing a renewal of life, with visitors finding their way here and becoming members, and with children being mentored in the faith in Sunday school.  These are all situations in which, out of death, God is bringing new life – all situations in which, on the other side of a crucifixion, is a resurrection. 

 

But with new life, with a resurrection, comes the unexpected, comes change.  The family of someone recovering from addiction will find their relationship with that person changing in unexpected ways, as the recovering person becomes more assertive in taking responsibility for his or her life.  We may be delighted at the restoration of a previously broken relationship – but may also find ourselves on the phone more than we had planned catching up on past events with the other person.  Someone returning to the workforce after a long dry spell may find fulfillment – but may also have to adjust mentally to the change in schedule, and may have to make some practical adjustments such as arranging for child care.  We’re surprised and delighted at new life – but also find ourselves having to make adjustments.  New life can be unpredictable, even messy at times.  It can be like that in the church as well… as our congregation is renewed, things may be less tidy and less predictable than before.  A few weeks ago, I saw some drawings in the social hall that were done by our Sunday school kids...and it had been a few years since I’d seen any drawings from Sunday school kids in this church…and as I looked, I just said to myself, “Thank God….thank God.” 

 

We worship a God who brings new life in the most unlikely circumstances – as Abraham and Sarah gave birth to Isaac in extreme old age, as Zechariah and Elizabeth gave birth to John the Baptist in their old age.  As followers of the Risen Christ, we believe that on the other side of crucifixion is resurrection.  So may we live in hope, even when our circumstances seem hopeless, knowing that we worship a God who makes a way out of no way, a God who guides our steps through the wilderness.  May we, like the widow at Zaraphath, have the hopeful generosity to share what little we have with others, even when we feel like we’re at the end of our resources.   And may we have the openness and the imagination to accept the new life God is offering us, even if it brings change and unpredictability.   May God continue to use Emanuel Church to bring new hope and new life to our neighbors in Bridesburg.  Amen.

 

 

Where You’d Least Expect

Scriptures: I Kings 8:22-23, 41-43,   Galatians 1:1-12,    Luke 7:1-10

This passage from Luke, among my favorite passages from Luke’s gospel, is rich with meaning because of the many connections the people in the account make across boundary lines of social position and religion.  It provides a surprising portrait of a Roman centurion – a Gentile, and part of the Roman occupation of Galilee – who, rather than oppressing, overflowed with care for his servant and for the Jewish community in which he was stationed.  In a Roman culture in which slaves were considered just another form of property, to be treated with the level of care we would show for our household appliances, the centurion went to considerable lengths to gain healing for this slave whom he valued highly.  In a Jewish culture which maintained strong boundaries between Jews and Gentiles, this centurion had already gained goodwill among the Jews by building the community synagogue – remarkable in itself - and now reached across ethnic lines to seek the help of the community elders in contacting Jesus.   And the Jewish elders showed surprising compassion and humility as they approached Jesus on the centurion’s behalf.  As Jesus responded to the plea of the centurion as relayed by the Jewish elders, we learn that the centurion overflowed not only with compassion, but with extraordinary faith as he trusted that Jesus could heal his servant from a distance.  So extraordinary was his faith that Jesus told the crowd, “Not even in Israel have I found such faith.”  For our sisters and brothers in the Roman Catholic tradition, a slightly adapted version of the centurion’s words live on to this day in the congregational response immediately before reception of the Eucharist, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

The original readers of this account would have been reminded of another stories about the healing of foreigners – perhaps most strongly, that of Naaman, the Syrian commander who was healed by Elisha.  Like the centurion in our Luke account, Naaman sent emissaries to the king of Israel, asking the king to refer Naaman to someone who could heal him of a skin disease.  Like the centurion, Naaman the Syrian was willing to approach the Jewish prophet Elisha for healing.  Unlike the centurion, Naaman was furious when Elisha did not personally speak to Naaman, but merely gave instructions through a servant to dip himself seven times in the Jordan.  Fortunately, one of Naaman’s servants talked Naaman out of his anger at feeling snubbed, so that Naaman did as instructed and was cured – and became a worshipper of the God of Israel.

 The original readers of the Luke account might also have been reminded of the healing of the son of the widow of Zaraphath, about which we will read next week.  The widow lived in Sidon, and so, again, she was a foreigner.  Elijah, fleeing from the wicked king Ahab and queen Jezebel, heard the word of the Lord directing him to seek refuge with this widow.  The widow and her son were almost out of food, and about to eat their last meal together before dying – and yet, prompted by Elijah, she shared a little bit of that meal with the prophet.  In response, the prophet multiplied the food so that it lasted many days, and later raised the widow’s son, who had died.

 What are we to say of this?   One thing we learn is that God does not color within the lines we draw, so to speak.   In the Old Testament accounts, God’s generous mercy extends beyond the chosen people to foreigners, who respond with gladness and gratitude.  Amos tells of God’s grace in a way to shame Israel for feeling overly entitled, writing, “Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt, and the Philistines up from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?”  That is to say, God’s gave deliverance not only to Israel, but also to the Philistines and the Arameans.  And Luke picks up this theme – of all the Gospels, Luke’s Gospel has the strongest message about Jesus’ inclusive ministry, and God’s inclusive love, not only of the chosen people, but of all those on the margins of society.  Indeed, in his very first sermon in his hometown synagogue, Jesus proclaimed, “There were many widows in Israel during the famine, but Elijah was sent to the widow of Zaraphath; there were many lepers in Israel, but Elisha was sent to Naaman the Syrian.”  For these words of inclusion, Jesus nearly got thrown off a cliff.  All’s the more wonder that the Jewish elders later were willing to seek Jesus out for the healing of the centurion’s slave – hey, maybe they actually did learn something from Jesus’ sermon.

2000 years later, we in the church are still trying to wrap our minds around the reality that God still insists on coloring outside the lines, that God’s generous love overflows in all directions.  God indeed loves those who have grown up in the church from infancy onward – but not only those once on the church’s cradle roll.  God’s love extends toward many people whom we’ve never met and never will meet, and toward many who are caught in our society’s struggle over who belongs and who doesn’t.  Think of the many debates raging in our country and in the church today.  In Bridesburg, the presence of racial diversity was historically a touchy topic – perhaps still is.  Our country is divided against itself on whether a path toward citizenship should exist for immigrants, and the number of hoops through which immigrants should be expected to jump along that path.  Muslims are routinely demonized, even more so since the 9-11 attacks, and with renewed venom since the bombings in Boston.  Likewise, while consensus is slowly moving at long last toward inclusion, our country is still deeply divided on the extension of civil rights; indeed, on the extension of so much as simple, basic human decency toward the LGBT community.   Pastors who preach about God’s generous love in these situations still risk being thrown off cliffs – or having weights tied around their necks and drowned in the nearest body of water.  And yet, as with the Roman centurion, faith in God can show up where you’d least expect.  We may find ourselves saying that “Not even in the church have we seen such faith.”

 Archbishop William Temple, of blessed memory within the Anglican community, famously preached that “The church is the only institution that exists for those who are not its members.”  Our church’s name, Emanuel, means “God with us.”  But not exclusively with us, and not exclusively for us.  God is with us at Emanuel, so that through our ministry, God can be with others.   

 

In a few minutes, we’ll be gathering about the table to share in Communion.  A strong message of the United Church of Christ, and a practice of Emanuel Church for many years, is that all seeking a closer relationship with Jesus Christ are welcome around the table.  There are no second class citizens in the Kingdom of God.  As we are invited to gather around the table, may we in turn invite others to share in the feast.  May it be so among us.  Amen.

Pastor Dave is back!

Apologies for being away for several months.  Emanuel Church has gone through a difficult transition in lay leadership.  Many of the sermons of the past few months were directed at guiding the congregation through the transition.  Things appear to be settling down, and so I'll be posting regularly again.