"Come On Down!”

Scripture:  Isaiah 64:1-9,  I  Corinthians 1:3-9,  Mark 13:24-37

 

Come On Down!

Perhaps appropriately to the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, as I was reading this week’s Scriptures, I thought of TV show “The Price Is Right”.  The studio audience would waiting in anticipation to see who would be selected to play, and then Bob Barker, the host of the show, would call out the names of the contestants selected from the studio audience, saying, Joe Schmoe, come on down!  Mary Doe, come on down!  And the game would begin.

This Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, marking the beginning of another church year.   It’s one of those times when we are reminded of the disconnects between chronos time – chronological time, the time kept by our watches and calendars – and kairos time – God’s time, the time in which God acts, which always seems too late by our standards, and yet always turns out to be just the right time.  The calendar tells us that we have a few more weeks in 2014, and the new year won’t start until January 1.  By contrast, for the church, a new year has already begun.  We’re also reminded of the difference between the commercial calendar, in which Christmas shopping and Christmas carols at the mall have already begun, and the church calendar, which includes Advent – the four weeks of waiting for the coming of the Christ child – as we sing “O Come, O Come Emanuel” and other carols of longing and expectation.  We’ll get to the Christmas carols in a few weeks, but not just yet.  It’s a reminder that, as the church, we live with two calendars, live between two sets of priorities, those of the world – which wants us to get out there and shop till we drop – and those of God, who wants us to wait with expectation for God to act – just like the studio audience waited expectantly to see if they’d be called as contestants - and in the interim to “occupy till he comes” with words of kindness and acts of love and justice for our neighbors.

In this new liturgical year, most of our Gospel readings will be coming from the Gospel of Mark.  Mark, the shortest of the Gospels, is thought to have been the first of the four Gospels to be written, perhaps three or four decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection, much of the material from which was later incorporated into Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels.  Each of the Gospels portrays Jesus in a different way, and I think of Mark’s gospel as portraying Jolt Cola Jesus or Java Jesus.  In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is active nearly to the point of being hyperactive.  The Greek word euthus, meaning “immediately”, recurs over and over – “immediately Jesus went here and healed these people, and immediately Jesus went there and taught, and immediately Jesus went to some other place and cast out a demon.”…..you get the picture.  In Mark’s Gospel, if nothing else, you have to give the disciples credit for stamina, for being able to keep up with Jolt Cola Jesus.

The church calendar, in trying to set the stage for Advent, does one other seemingly odd thing each year.  Each year, on the first Sunday of Advent, the reading comes, not from the beginning of the Gospel, but from a section near the end, in which Jesus speaks of his second coming.  The point is to remind us that, just as those in Jesus’ time did, we too are waiting – waiting for God to intervene, ultimately waiting for Jesus to come again, and usher in the time when all rebellion against God is ended, and God shall reign in fullness.

In our Old Testament reading, Isaiah is also waiting, and waiting rather impatiently.  Our reading comes from the third section of the book of Isaiah, thought to have been written after the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon, and had begun to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple.  The Jews had been in exile for decades – traditionally, for 70 years – and earlier in his writings, Isaiah had expressed such hope for the time when the Jews would be allowed to return to Jerusalem.  But now that they’d returned, Isaiah was starting to see things go off course, starting to see his people repeat many of the same mistakes they’d made before, repeat many of the same acts of injustice that had led to the exile.  Isaiah sensed that his society was spinning out of control.  And so Isaiah is urgent, crying to God, “O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”  Come down here, and remind these evildoers who’s in charge!  Remind these ungrateful people of all you’ve done for them!  Come down here, and do not forget us, for as sinful as we are, we are still your people.”

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus, like Isaiah, also has a strong sense that his society could go on as it has been doing, that the situation was not sustainable, that things were going to come crashing down.  Using poetic language, Jesus speaks to his disciples of a coming time of great suffering and dislocation, in which the Temple at Jerusalem would be destroyed, and there would be wars and earthquakes and famines, and people would literally have to run for the hills, and there would be great signs in the sky, with the sun, moon and stars darkened.  But he tells his disciples all this, not to freak them out, but to prepare them so that they would keep awake and alert and understand that God’s hand was in all this, that the horrors Jesus described were only prelude to the splendor of Jesus’ return.

Theologians use the term “apocalyptic” to describe language like that of Jesus in today’s Gospel.  There are similar brief passages in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospel as well, and the books of Daniel and Revelations also contain apocalyptic language.  The word “apocalypse” means “unveiling” – you might think of the scene in the Wizard of Oz, where Toto pulls back the curtain so that everyone can see the man behind the curtain.  The apocalyptic passages of Scripture, such as today’s reading from Mark, and such as we find in Daniel and Revelation, reassured their readers that even though from their standpoint, their society was coming unglued and falling apart, God was working behind the scenes, and even though in the short run things would get even worse than they were – and these passages describe scenarios that could easily fit into present day movies like the Hunger Games or The Purge – these passages draw back the veil on the events of the day, give the reader a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, to tell the reader that in God’s own time, God’s intentions will ultimately prevail. 

I think we can all welcome that reassurance.   We live in a frightening time of war abroad and of a broken, gridlocked political system and of societal upheaval at home, of resurgent racism, sexism, and homophobia – reading the news, lately it seems like all the crazies have come out of the woodwork - of unsustainable extremes of wealth and poverty, of increasing disrespect for low wage workers and for the poor.  Historically, Americans have been optimistic about the future, assuming or at least hoping that their children’s lives would be better than theirs, but I’m not sure that feeling is as widespread today.  Many commentators, from the left and from the right, sense that our country’s best days are behind us. While we get by from day to day, we may look to the future with an unsettling sense that, at some point, the whole system is going to come crashing down, possibly taking us down with it.

The bad news is that it’s entirely possible that, at some point, the system will come crashing down.  A worldwide financial collapse was narrowly averted in 2008, and the same financial scam artists, who by and large were never held to account, are back to the same financial shenanigans. The money our country could have spent maintaining our power grid and our infrastructure – roads, bridges, rail systems – and building up a public school system to educate our children has instead over the past 25 years been spent bombing other peoples’ power grids, roads, bridges, rails and other infrastructure and killing other peoples’ children.  And so our country, even with our vaunted military strength, all our drones and bombs, is incredibly vulnerable.  An enemy wouldn’t even have to bomb us – all that would be necessary is to launch a cyberattack not only on our defense systems, but on our power grid, on the computer systems that power our rail systems and drive our communications systems and purify our water and deliver heat to our homes – and we could all end up dying of hunger and thirst while freezing in the dark.  Merry Christmas.

The bad news is that the system – the political system, the economic system, the social system -can’t save us.  It never could, and it never will. The good news is that God can and does save us.  God has saved us, is saving us now, and will save us eternally – not only in the sense of getting into heaven when we die, important as that is, but walking with us and working through us while we live, walking with us and working through us to save, not only ourselves, but our neighbors.  Because the God’s reign is not only about heaven – it begins here, now, today, in this place.

The bad news is that our society is going to shake, rattle and roll.    The good news is that God hasn’t left the building.  The good news is that God has sent Jesus, and until Jesus returns, God has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit working through each of us, so that each of us is a gift to the other. The good news is that, in the words of the hymn, “And though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.” 

“O, that you might tear open the heavens and come down!” Isaiah wrote.  The good news of Advent is that, in Jesus, God did come on down.  The good news that God did tear open the heavens at Jesus’ baptism to say, “This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”  The good news is that, as sinful and broken as we are and as sick and broken as our society is, God has not abandoned God’s people.  This is the good news of the Gospel.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Eyes

Scriptures:       Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24;

Ephesians 1:15-23  Matthew 25:31-46

Eyes

Over the past three weeks, we’ve heard Jesus describe the reign of God in three parables.  In the first parable, we heard about the five bridesmaids who brought extra oil for their wait for the bridegroom and the five who didn’t, and how these latter were shut out from the wedding feast.  Last week, we heard the parable of the talents, in which the servant who did nothing with the money entrusted to him incurred the wrath of his master.  And now we have what is commonly called the parable of the sheep and the goats, or as it is also called, the judgment of the nations.  In this case, the nations meaning the Gentiles, those who were not part of the chosen people of Israel.  These would be judged according to whether they helped those in need or whether they didn’t – for in so doing, or not doing, they served, or didn’t serve, Jesus.  

The Revised Common Lectionary, which we along with many other churches follow, spreads these parables over three weeks.  Because of this, I think we miss the fact that all three parables were taught by Jesus in one teaching session.   That is to say, we tend to see them as three unrelated parables, but I believe Jesus intended them to be seen together, to be seen as three different angles from which to understand the reign of God.   All are said to be describing the kingdom of God or the reign of God.  And we have three related ideas. First, we have the need to have a faith that is prepared to go the distance, even if the bridegroom is delayed – that was the parable of the bridesmaids from two weeks ago.  Then we have the parable of the talents from last week, in which all the master’s servants are entrusted with gifts, which were intended to be used, not buried or hoarded.  And today we have the parable of the sheep and the goats, a picture of the judgment of the nations, which tells us how God’s gifts are to be used – not for ourselves, but to care for the least of these.  

As it happens, our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel also talks about sheep.  It begins with a denunciation of the shepherds who don’t care for the sheep – indeed who scatter the sheep and who stuff their own faces rather than feeding the sheep.  And I’d like to read this portion:  

The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them—to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord God: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with no one to search or seek for them.

 Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As I live, says the Lord God, because my sheep have become a prey, and my sheep have become food for all the wild animals, since there was no shepherd; and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves, and have not fed my sheep; therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: Thus says the Lord God, I am against the shepherds; and I will demand my sheep at their hand, and put a stop to their feeding the sheep; no longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, so that they may not be food for them.

Basically, the master fires the shepherds and goes out himself in search of the sheep – the spirit of the passage is, “if these clowns can’t or won’t do their jobs, I guess I’ll just have to do it myself.”

In the context in which Ezekiel was written, the term “shepherds” would have referred to the religious establishment of the time, the Temple priesthood, who literally fattened themselves on the sacrifices and offerings of the people, but did little or nothing to care for them.   The word “pastor” means shepherd, and indeed pastors, priests, rabbis, imams, religious leaders in general will be held to a higher standard and judged more harshly when we fail in our responsibilities – and none of us always gets it right.   As pastor, one of my responsibilities, besides making sure that the word is rightly taught and the sacraments rightly administered,  is to care for the flock, for the congregation, for you, to keep the congregation together and protect it, to drive away anything that would harm or threaten the congregation.   And we’ve all read in the newspapers about those shepherds who don’t care for the sheep or fatten themselves on the sheep or prey on the sheep or drive the sheep away – the many religious leaders, not only Catholic priests, who prey on children, the televangelists whose often-impoverished supporters scrape together small donations - $5, $10 - at great sacrifice to send to the TV preachers, who spend them on luxury home and cars and such.  And for every horror story that hits the papers, there are countless stories that don’t.  Of course, on the other hand, for every horror story that hits the papers, there are also countless more stories about faithful religious leaders who carry out their duties without ever making the newspapers - and that’s as it should be.

So Ezekiel denounces the bad shepherds –but then he moves beyond the bad shepherds to go after the fat sheep.  He sees that some sheep are fat, having gobbled up more of their share of the food and driven the weaker sheep away so they can’t eat.   This happens, in part, because the shepherds have been out to lunch, not keeping an eye on things, and so the sheep compete among themselves for what’s available.  The master wants to make sure all are fed, and so he comes down hard on the fat sheep, who, having fattened themselves, are slaughtered, so that the hungry sheep at last can get their fair share.  And so, says Ezekiel, God will judge between sheep and sheep.

Where do we find ourselves in the story?  Hint:  Not as the king or the master or the Son of Man – that’s God’s place in the story.   Probably not as one of the shepherds in the Ezekiel story, although to the extent that we have responsibility for others – as parents, as teachers – we are shepherds with a flock to care for.  But I think we can certainly find ourselves among the sheep in the reading from Ezekiel, or somewhere amidst the sheep and goats in Jesus’ parable.

We live in an era of unimaginably bloated fat sheep and unimaginably thin, starving sheep, right here in America.  The Walton family, owners of Walmart, six people in all – their names are Christy Walton, Jim Walton, Alice Walton, S. Robson Walton, Ann Walton Kroenke, and Nancy Walton Laurie - have wealth roughly equal to the poorest 40% of Americans combined.   Many, perhaps most Walmart employees are on food stamps, even though they work, because their wages are so low – behind those low, low prices, guaranteed are low, low wages, unfortunately also guaranteed.    In effect, our tax dollars are subsidizing the unimaginably wealthy Walton family, our taxes paying their workers the money the Waltons are unwilling to pay.  Moreover, according to Oxfam, a global charity which works against world hunger, the 85 wealthiest people on the planet own more assets than the poorest half of the human race combined.   The disparity in wealth between the top 1% of the top 1% - that’s the top 0.01% - and the rest of us is on a scale that’s almost unimaginable.  And today’s Scripture readings tell us that God is sorely displeased by this situation.  It’s not only unfortunate, not only undesirable – it’s Satanic, evil, as in straight from the pit of hell evil.   I don’t use language like that very often, but in describing our society’s level of economic and social injustice, it’s appropriate.  The powers that be, meanwhile, have society set up so that the rest of us are in fierce competition with one another, so that we’re resentful at someone scraping by on disability or public assistance because they may qualify for some scraps of publicly funded health care or food or housing, resentful at undocumented immigrants – most of whom work at jobs many of us wouldn’t want, such as day labor jobs picking fruit and doing the grunt work of landscaping at business office complexes - and pay taxes, by the way – for wanting some tiny piece of the American dream, if not for themselves, for their children, resentful at people of different races – who don’t look like us and don’t talk like us – because they want the same things we want.   Those at the top, the powers that be, have us at one another’s throats fighting over crumbs.  By keeping those with little or nothing divided against one another, at one another’s throats, seeing one another as enemies rather than potential allies, they keep us from asking questions of those at the very top.    And those questions need to be asked, are long overdue to be asked.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who worked for freedom in apartheid South Africa, said that “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”   And so, Ezekiel says truly, God will indeed judge between sheep and sheep, and will feed the fat sheep with justice.  

God’s promised judgment – and it is promised, by the way, promised in the Old and New Testaments – God’s promised judgment on the fabulously wealthy does not leave us, the unfabulously unwealthy, off the hook.  The earliest believers were mostly from the bottom of their society – as Paul says in I Corinthians, “for consider your calling, brothers and sisters; not many worldly-wise, not many wealthy, not many noble” – that is to say, not many of society’s movers and shakers.  That’s the way it is overseas, where, for instance, in India, where most Christians are from the Dalit caste, formerly known as the untouchables, rather than the Brahmans.   Christianity is good news for all, but especially it is good news for the poor.  Remember Jesus’ mission statement as recorded in Luke 4, which is basically a quote from Isaiah 61:  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  And certainly, here at Emanuel, we all fit into the category of “not worldly-wise, not wealthy, not powerful”.  Last I checked the church rolls – and before coming here today, I checked the membership rolls very carefully indeed, several times, in fact -  I found nobody named Walton – nor Sheldon Adelson, nor either of the Koch brothers, neither Charles nor David Koch.  We here at Emanuel are not the movers and shakers; indeed, many of us are, at least in worldly terms, the moved and the shaken.

Even so, even though the earliest believers were for the most part poor, these earliest believers were expected to share what they had, be it ever so little.  The early chapters of Acts told of these earliest believers selling what little they had – houses, fields – so that the proceeds could be shared around with the poor.  Later on in Paul’s letters, we read about Paul taking up collections in various parts of Greece for the believers in Jerusalem – and we’re told that the people gave sacrificially, generously, and gladly. It sounds too good to be true – and certainly is hard to imagine in our context.  But there are modern-day examples:  in Latin America, in impoverished areas, Roman Catholic believers have formed into what are called Christian base communities.  Often these Christian base communities are located in areas far from established parishes, areas where Catholics couldn’t just walk or drive to church, and where the established churches never bother to send their clergy.  Instead, these community form around trained lay leaders.  While people in this community are desperately poor by our standards, all they have, what little they have, is shared around the community, for the benefit of all.  It’s not a matter only of charity, but of solidarity, being there for one another, day in and day out, so that what benefits one member benefits the entire community, and so that an attack on one member of the community is an attack on all.  Often these communities are characterized by a powerful commitment to giving, serving, and non-violence.   Clearly, our circumstances here are very different.  But I’d encourage us consider working toward that level of commitment to one another, so that we can support one another and be stronger in supporting our community.  

It sounds like pie in the sky.   Why all this talk about solidarity, about caring for one another so much that your welfare is inseparable from mine and mine from yours? Only this – it’s the kind of solidarity that Jesus not only commanded, but lived.  Jesus describes himself as a king who is so close to his people that, according to Jesus’ parable, to help one of the least of these is to help him.  Not to help them is not to help him.  To hurt them is to hurt him.  There’s no daylight between Jesus and those he calls “the least of these my sisters and brothers.”  Jesus didn’t just talk about feeding the poor; he fed them.  He didn’t just talk about healing the sick; he healed them.  He didn’t just talk about releasing those in bondage; he released them.  Jesus identified with us so fully that it led him to the cross.  In the same way, Jesus asks us to identify fully with him, by identifying fully with those he served, the poorest, the last, the least, and the lost.

In his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul used a striking phrase.  Paul writes, “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.”   What an odd phrase, “the eyes of your heart.”  Of course, we know that from a physical standpoint, our eyes are in our head, and our hearts are in our chests, the twain never to meet.  But Paul is asking us to see, not only with the eyes in our heads, but with the eyes of our heart, the eyes of faith, the eyes of compassion.  Our eyes cannot truly see without hearts of faith and compassion, and our faith and compassion needs our eyes, our vision, in order to direct them to the proper recipients.  And it takes eyes of faith, eyes of compassion, the eyes of the heart to look at our society’s greed and violence, and know that somewhere in all of that, we may know the hope to which God has called us, the riches of his glorious inheritance among us, and the immeasurable greatness of his power for us.

May God enlighten the eyes of our hearts, so that we can see Jesus in the faces of the hungry and the hurting, the sick and the imprisoned.  May God enlighten the eyes of our hearts, showing us ways in which we can serve Jesus by serving our sisters and brothers in need.  May God enlighten the eyes of our hearts, so that we may see the great love God has for each of us, and share that love with all we meet.  Amen.