Sermon for Christmas Eve 2011

Scriptures for tonight are Here

What is your earliest Christmas memory? Memory is a very strange thing, you don’t remember whole events, you remember pictures – moments infused with sights, smells, feelings, thoughts. Memories stay with us like photographs – frozen moments in time that we can call up and look at, and remember the stories that lie behind the memories.

My earliest Christmas memory is this: picture, like a photograph, four-year-old me, standing hiding a little bit behind my mom, peering out at a tall, thin, balding man sitting on a couch next to a Christmas tree all lit up with lights and tinsel. It doesn’t sound like much of a photograph, but you have to know the story behind it.

This little moment of memory was from the year I was four years old. My father, an army officer, was away in Vietnam. My mother, my baby sister and I lived in an apartment complex full of families like ours – wives and children whose husbands/fathers were at war. My mother made sure I remembered my father – there was a big glossy picture of him on the wall above my bed, taped onto a posterboard that said “Daddy” in big red letters. My mother and I wrote letters to him every day, with my 4-year-old scrawl in red crayon on the outside of the envelope, saying “To Daddy.” And we’re told that the Army mail clerk in Vietnam found that extremely amusing. He would come to my father’s tent with the mail and say, “Let’s see if we have any mail for ‘Daddy’ today – why yes, we do!”

For Christmas in my little world, a world with no dads, the moms did the best they could – putting up lights and trees, getting our families of women and children together to celebrate, putting mysterious presents under the tree. That was the year Santa brought me a tricycle, shiny and green with tassels hanging from the handlebars. I loved that tricycle. But of course what we really wanted was to have our fathers home for Christmas.

That year, my best friend's father actually got leave and came home, all the way from Vietnam, for a week at Christmas. And my Christmas memory, that picture, is this: going over to our friends’ apartment, standing shyly hidden behind my mother, looking at the Christmas tree, all shiny with tinsel and lights, and next to it, on the couch, a tall man. And I remember looking at him and thinking, so that’s what a father looks like.

If this were a Disney movie, the door would have opened on Christmas Eve, and my father would have walked in – but that’s not what happened. My own father didn’t get to come home that Christmas, but he came home one month later. And when we met him at the airport, I was the first one to catch sight of him as he stepped off the plane, and I shouted “Daddy!” and ran and jumped into his arms – a story often told, another memory photo my family treasures.

And I learned, at age 4, that the greatest Christmas present doesn’t have anything to do with tinsel and lights, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything you might find under the tree – not even the fanciest green tricycle. The greatest Christmas present is to be with the people you love.

Maybe you have albums full of Christmas photos like that one too – in your house or maybe just treasured in your memory. Maybe your photo is of running and jumping on your parents’ bed at 5 a.m. on Christmas morning, seeing them grumbling but smiling to see you awake. Maybe you see yourself as a child, scrambling down the stairs to see whether Santa came, turning the corner in your bare feet and pajamas, stopping to see a shiny new bicycle, with a bow on the handlebars and your name on a tag. Maybe your picture is of your extended family, all gathered and ready for Christmas dinner, the house smelling of turkey and your grandmother’s apple pie, and everyone smiling for the camera just before you sit down to eat.

And when you look at those photos, in your photo albums or in your mind, perhaps a little worn and faded with age, perhaps in soft focus so you don’t quite see or remember the hard edges around those old Christmas memories, what warms your heart is not the photos themselves, what you remember is the stories you know behind the photos –and most of all, memory of love.

Probably when we think of Christmas, we all have another photo in mind too. Somewhere in our memory, we have a picture of the first Christmas. We see a cold, clear night with starlight brightening the night sky. We see a field outside of town with shepherds gazing in fear and amazement at a sky full of angels, singing the most beautiful music any ear has ever heard. We see one star that is brighter than the rest, shining on small, humble stable. We look inside that stable, and see hay on the floor, and a donkey and an ox warming the cold air with their warm breath.

We see a steady, responsible, worried husband gazing down at his wife and wondering how on earth he is going to do the task God has given him to do. We see a young wife who has just given birth to a baby, looking at the child in wonder and pondering deep thoughts and questions in her heart. And we see a tiny, warm, newborn baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, no crib for his bed. The baby has a short, dangerous life ahead of him – before he knows it, his family will be fleeing to Egypt to escape the first of many world rulers who will seek to kill him, one of whom will eventually succeed. But for this one night, he is safe, and warm, and loved, and his young mother and her worried husband, and a band of ragged shepherds, and a sky full of angels, stand watch over him this cold, clear night.

And why is this a precious memory for us, this picture of that night in Bethlehem? It’s not that the picture in our mind is so beautiful. That first Christmas had none of what we’re used to – no beautiful trees and twinkling lights, no Santa Claus, no bicycles waiting in the morning. It had no extended family gatherings, no grandmas, no turkey; the young mother gave birth alone, without her own mother to help her. The young family in our mind’s picture is far away from home for Christmas, and won’t be going home to Nazareth anytime soon. The shepherds are dirty and poor, the stable smells of the animals who live there. And yet this picture in our mind is infinitely precious to us, a picture of love.

That memory of a night in Bethlehem is precious to us is not because that picture itself is unusual: children are born to worried, poor, lonely parents every day. It’s precious because we can look at it and remember the rest of the story. It’s a story about the God of the universe who took on human flesh and lived an ordinary human life, as vulnerable to hunger, sorrow, cold, pain as you and I. A story about God, not a god who sits on a throne and watches us from a distance, but a God who decides to be born as a vulnerable and poverty-stricken child, who cries and eats and sleeps and grows just like any child; who will be so vulnerable that he will die under the power of those same Roman soldiers counting heads in Bethlehem at his birth; but who will triumph over the powers that put him to death by rising to life again.

This is the God whom we will remember in everyday substances like bread and wine, the God whose real presence lies not just in angels and stars. This is the God who is truly present in every fleshly moment of our lives, the God who loves us in the very earthiness of our existence, the God who will never abandon us, no matter how ordinary or troubled our lives might be. This is the God who comes into our everyday human lives, and makes them holy.

We love this picture because we can see ourselves in it. A God who was born in a stable in the year 1 is a God who is also born in our lives in the year 2011, whose love reaches out to warm anyone who has ever been cold, lonely and far away from home. A God whose parents were traveling at the whim of a faraway emperor, with no place to stay at the time of his birth, is a God who understands about the distant forces that affect our lives, families and governments and economics, and who comes to us to offer a solid foundation when everything else seems to shake.

A God who was visited by dirty shepherds from a dark field outside of town is a God who welcomes every person who lies awake in the dark and prays for light to shine from somewhere, somehow. A God who was born to a young girl who ponders these things in her heart is a God who offers love to every person who yearns for meaning and purpose. And a God whose angels proclaim peace and goodwill in a backwater country that has known only war and heartache for hundreds of years, is a God whose peace is deeper and more complete than any peace the world can offer, and yet who offers that peace to the world, on a silent, holy night, in a dark street shining with everlasting light, in a newborn child who is infinitely dear to us, because his new and precious life is the picture of perfect and eternal love.

Merry Christmas, everyone. May the Christmas memories you make this year fill your hearts with the light of Christ’s love.

Sermon for 12.18.11

Scriptures for today are Here

Frederick Buechner, in his book Peculiar Treasures, wrote: “She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her and he gave it. He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. ‘You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,’ he said. And as he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings, he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.”

We don’t see the angel in our icon of the Annunciation (created by Laura Fisher Smith) – we have no way to know whether Gabriel was truly trembling or not. We see Mary, as she becomes aware of a reality unseen by anyone else. An icon is more than a painting, a decoration – an icon is painted with prayer at every step, from selecting the background material to making the paint to every brushstroke the artist makes.

And therefore an icon is intended to be an aid to prayer – not something you pray to – but something a bit more like an icon on a computer screen. When you click an icon on your computer, a new world opens up. This is what Christian icons are: think of this icon as a passageway between our ordinary everyday reality and the deeper reality that exists around us at all times and places – the reality of God.

In God’s reality, we see Mary as a dark-skinned peasant girl – not yet transformed into the Queen of Heaven in our other icon – but in the moment that she becomes aware of an angel’s presence. In this moment, she herself has become the window, the entryway, the portal between heaven and earth, as angels hold their breath and wait for her reply.

She stands expectantly, hands upraised, bathed in light. Young, dark-haired, she seems to be a young woman poised on the threshold of adulthood, still full of the dreams of childhood. You can imagine what the girl Mary has been dreaming – dreams of the carpenter Joseph, of the new home that awaits her when she marries him, of the large and happy family she hopes will come her way. And maybe she has bigger dreams too – dreams that the Romans who oppress her people, and the Israelite hierarchy that profits from the common people’s distress, will be overthrown, that peace and justice will come to her people so that no one will starve and no one will risk crucifixion by speaking against injustice.

Maybe she dreams of a new world in which the rich and powerful will be brought down and in which God will lift up the lowly. Maybe she dreams of a God who will defeat death and renew all of creation. Maybe she dreams of a new kingdom of God, of possibilities that seem impossible. And maybe it is her sheer openness to impossible dreams that allows her to become aware of the presence of an angel.

We don’t see the angel in our icon – we see only Mary experiencing him: a rush of wings beating around her ears, a sudden warmth that fills her with fear and longing, a light that bathes her in the illumination of angel’s presence. And, as Gabriel and all the angels tremble in anticipation, Mary says yes, and becomes the mother of God, the window that opens up to allow heaven to pour through into our world.

About a year before my first child, Sarah, was born, I had a dream about a little girl who would be my daughter. The little girl in my dream looked a lot like Sarah turned out to be, and she acted a lot like the daughter I eventually had. Maybe that dream was just my own hopes of what a daughter would be like. Or maybe God had a way of letting me see the gift he was bringing me – I don’t know. But I treasured that dream as a picture of my hopes for my daughter.

As mother of our Lord, Mary is more than a passive vessel – she is somehow open to the hopes God has for her and for her child. In the gospel of Luke, Mary is clearly a prophet. A prophet is not someone who foretells the future. A prophet is someone who is a window into a different reality – God’s reality. A prophet sees things with God’s eyes, is able to speak God’s words to us and open up our eyes to God’s reality that exists all around us at all times and places, if only we had eyes to see. A prophet is an icon of God’s kingdom.

So Mary opens her eyes to see what God is doing in her and through her. And then she opens her mouth and begins to sing – the song that we heard in place of the psalm today – the Magnificat, named for its first line in Latin: my soul magnifies the Lord. The Magnificat helps us see the truths that Mary sees with prophet’s eyes, the reality that God wants us to experience, we who are so often blind to God’s reality: that in Jesus, the mighty have been brought down, the humble have been exalted, the hungry have been fed, rich have been sent away empty. She sings that in Jesus, all of God’s promises to Israel have been fulfilled.

The interesting thing about her song is this: with a prophet’s voice, Mary expresses all these things in past tense: these are things God has already accomplished, not things in the future. Well, we can look around our world and ask ourselves – is this true? The mighty have been brought down, the hungry fed, the humble exalted? One look around our world tells us that God’s reality is not yet our reality. Yet with prophet’s eyes, Mary sees into a deeper truth: that God’s kingdom has already begun to break into our world.

Think of it this way: our present time is the reality most of us can see. Alongside it, parallel, just as real but mostly invisible to us, is God’s kingdom. Every now and then, a window opens up so we can see through. It takes the eyes and voices of prophets to become icons, windows into that reality. Because we are not prophets, most of us are blind to God’s angels, God’s dreams. We must put our faith in the words of other prophets like Mary who can see.

Mary invites us to live as citizens of God’s kingdom, in the age to come and here and now. Mary is describing the truth that a prophet’s eyes can see: that in Jesus, the kingdom of God has already broken into our world, because God has taken flesh. And one day, God’s kingdom will be the reality that all creation lives in: the kingdom Mary sings of – the kingdom of peace, justice and love. It may seem impossible – but Gabriel tells us: nothing is impossible with God.

So what might God be working to bring to birth in us, 2,000 years later? Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says that “Few of our people imagine God to be an active character in the story of their lives.” But 14^th century German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “What is the good if Mary gave birth to Son of God a long time ago, if I do not give birth to God today? We are all Mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.”

Do we think of God as a benign presence that hovers in the background scenery of our lives, kindly hoping that everything turns out all right, patting us on the back with a little bit of comfort now and then? Or do we believe that angels might come to us, ordinary everyday people that we are, making dangerous requests, promising the impossible? Do we believe that God is active in our lives, opening our eyes to greater hopes and deeper realities? Do we believe that Jesus’ kingdom is not only something far off, but a hidden reality that we can see working here and now? Can we believe that God’s visions can become reality for us, if we say yes?

How many of us, like Mary, are nurturing dreams within our hearts? Longings for a world yet unborn, hopes for a time when God’s justice will prevail and God’s people will no longer suffer. Dreams of how God might be calling us, ordinary everyday us, to bring new ways of life to birth. Dreams of how even we might be filled with the Holy Spirit to become God’s prophets, singing God’s hope to the world.

Mary’s song is a song for today, just as much as it was for 2,000 years ago. The dream that brings Christ to birth in this world, the dream of Christmas, is more than a sentimental story of a small child born in a manger. It is God’s story and God’s dream that the prophet Mary sings about today: a dream that transforms this world, that enters into our own hearts and begins to speak through us, that sings us out into the world where we can live God’s vision of a world made right.

God’s true Christmas dream is the new creation that has already become a reality in Jesus. And you and I? We are Mary too. We are ordinary people called to see God’s reality with prophets’ eyes, we are people hoping, praying, expecting a new and better world – a world that has already begun to come to birth in Jesus.

And like the young Mary, we stand, expectantly, hands lifted, bathed in the presence of God – waiting on the threshold of new life; and as we wait, angels hold their breath – waiting, hoping, praying that our answer will be yes.

Sermon for 12.11.11

Scriptures for today are Here

Boyd Lee Dunlop came to live in the Delaware Nursing Home in Buffalo, NY four years ago, age 81, bent and a little forgetful (according to a story in the New York Times on Friday). In the corner of the cafeteria was a dusty old piano that no one had played in ages – out of tune, with several keys missing, and several other keys that just wheezed. Boyd Lee saw the piano and sat down, and in a home where music generally meant the weekly sing-along with someone’s badly played electric keyboard, he played a few chords, then a few more, then he began to coax beautiful jazz melodies out of the ancient piano while nurses listened astonished, learning which keys didn’t work and shortening those notes, elongating the others.

He played often, every day, so that the sound of jazz piano filled the home. The Times article went on to tell Boyd Lee Dunlop’s story. He grew up poor on the east side of Buffalo, the child of a single mother. One day he saw a dilapidated piano in neighbor’s back yard and said to himself, “I got to play you!”

He got some friends to help him push and pull the piano into his house. He taught himself some chords with a 25-cent lesson book; he took 5 piano lessons for 50 cents each, but quit when the teacher complained he was getting ahead of the lesson plans. By age 15, he was playing gospel hymns in church and jazz melodies in nightclubs, where prostitutes took up a collection to buy him a decent suit.

This was the beginning of a lifetime of playing the piano he loved. He grew up and went to work, and would come home from his shift at Bethlehem Steel, sit down and the piano and play, soot-blackened hands blackening the keys, until one day he said, “What am I doing here?”

He realized that he could do nothing else but his true calling, quit the steel industry and started traveling around the country for a lifetime of playing gigs in smoky bars. Until one day, four years ago, he came to the nursing home, with 50 cents in his pocket.

A photographer was at the nursing home one day, heard Boyd Lee Dunlop playing the old piano in the cafeteria, recorded the sounds on his cell phone, and sent the recording to a music producer friend. His friend agreed that the playing was remarkable, and signed Boyd Lee Dunlop to record his first CD, called Boyd’s Blues.

This is the story of a man who knew from the moment he saw his first piano, what he had been created to do and be.

Today’s scriptures tell us two of the most important things we will ever hear about God, and about ourselves. They address the question, what kind of god is God? And they address the question, who does God want us to be? Who is God? And who are we? These are the basic questions of Advent, and in fact, the basic questions of our lives as Christians.

To these questions, what kind of god is God? And who are we? Two prophets speak. Isaiah opens his mouth and begins to proclaim who he is and what God has called him to do, and as we hear the voice of that calling, we begin to understand more about God’s relationship with the world. Isaiah is a prophet: not a person who foretells the future, but a person who understands how God is working in the world and speaks God’s words. He speaks about his calling in our Old Testament reading today. “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,” says Isaiah, “because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.”

Those beautiful and famous words tell us who Isaiah is: he is the one who is called to speak words of good news, comfort, healing, freedom. Isaiah is speaking to a group of Israelites who are living in disappointment. They have returned from exile in Babylon, exuberant at going back home. But they have found Jerusalem in ruins, have rebuilt Temple but to nowhere near its former glory, they have met disappointment at every turn.

To a group of people living with disappointment, God speaks words of hope. And God’s words, spoken by Isaiah, tell us who God is: God is the God of the Exodus, the God who loves the poor and comforts those who mourn; God is the God of all who suffer and all who have lost all hope. God is the God who brings freedom and deliverance.

Five centuries after Isaiah, the last of the Hebrew prophets arises – John. (Just to be clear – John the Baptizer is the person the story is about; John the gospel writer, not the same John, is the writer of the story.) John the Gospel Writer has a different view of John the Baptizer than the other gospels – in fact he doesn’t call John the “Baptist.” Today’s reading calls John simply a “witness” – this is John the Witness.

And this John the Witness knows just as clearly as Isaiah who he is called to be – he knows he is NOT the Messiah, NOT Elijah or another Hebrew prophet. He is the one who is witness to the light – he sees the light of Christ coming into the world, and he helps open the eyes of others to see this light.

Which tells us something not only about who John is, but who God is. God is the one who sees darkness in our world, and shines light into the darkness. Christ is the light who comes into the world. We are the ones who stand with this light in our midst, and may never know it. We are the ones who need to open our eyes to see what God is doing .

All this tells us who the prophets Isaiah and John are, and they tell us something about who God is. But what about other question: Who does God want us to be?

A theme that runs through today’s scriptures is the theme of vocation – calling. Like Boyd Lee Dunlop the jazz piano player, who knew the moment he saw his first piano, “I got to play you!”, and made that a lifelong calling, these prophets know clearly their own calling, clearly and without doubt. And these prophets who have spoken God’s words and transformed the world, speak also to us in our lives. They speak to us of who God is, and they speak to us of who God calls us to be: people who live to transform the world in God’s name, people who yearn to shine God’s light into the darkness of this world.

There is a story about Basil the Great of Caesarea, a saint and bishop of the 4^th century. When the Roman emperor Valens became displeased with Basil and sent a messenger, Modestus, to threaten him with exile, torture or death if he didn’t submit to the emperor’s will, Basil stood firm. When Modestus exclaimed that he had never known anyone to act that way before, Basil answered, “Perhaps you have never met a bishop before.”

What if you and I could make people exclaim with amazement at our determination to do God’s will and live God’s way? What if you and I could understand God’s calling in our lives so completely that others would say that they had never seen anyone act that way before? I have a dream that our church community could smile and say simply, “Perhaps you have never met a follower of Christ before.”

Make no mistake, it is sometimes difficult to understand God’s calling the way Basil did – so deeply and joyfully that no one can sway us from it. It is sometimes difficult to act in accordance with God’s will, even if we believe we know what it is. But I believe that God calls each of us to a vocation, a particular calling. So as Christ-followers, we help do the things Jesus, Isaiah and John did: humble the proud, exalt the lowly, feed the hungry, free those who are captives of sin and oppression, and shine God’s light into a world that too easily slips into darkness.

We may do these things through music, through prophecy, through teaching, through organization, through outreach, through hospitality – whatever the gift is that God has given us. And I think we begin to discover our calling as we think about what we love. As Boyd Lee Dunlop loved the piano, saw it and knew, “I got to play you!” each of us also has things that draw us – something we can’t NOT do. Wherever we go you can’t NOT – assume leadership of a group; speak the words of God; care for children; make things with your hands; etc.

Christian author Frederick Buechner said that each one of us is called to a vocation, and asked how we can identify that vocation, he said this: “Your vocation is that place where your deepest gladness and the world’s deepest hunger meet.”

Boyd Lee Dunlop has a vocation of playing the piano, bringing beauty and joy to the cleanser-scented halls of dilapidated nursing home. We all also have a calling that comes out of our unique gifts and talents and life experiences; And we each have passions, needs that the world has that God has brought to our attention in a very special way. And where those two things meet is our vocation – and that is the place where we can give God’s gift to the world.

As you are doing your Christmas shopping, think about one more gift. As Jesus brought the gift of himself to us on Christmas Day, pray, think, ask: what is the gift of yourself the world is waiting to receive?

Sermon for 12.4.11

Scriptures for today are Here.

Some years ago, I read a story –a personal reminiscence by a man who had been an American soldier in World War II. He saw a lot of battle in Europe, a lot of darkness, cold and pain. He couldn’t believe he had survived – but he found himself on his way home at last – and the night before he was to get on the ship home to America, in London, he went to see the musical Oklahoma!, which had just opened there. He described what it felt like to sit alone in the theater as the lights went down, to sit in complete darkness with strangers all around, in silence, waiting. And then a light slowly began to dawn on the stage, sunrise on a cornfield, and the chirping of birds began to sound, and some notes of music began to play. And as day dawned, a man rode out of the cornfield on stage into spotlight, began to sing: Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, Oh What a Beautiful Day. And the soldier sat in the dark in the theater with tears running down his cheeks – because he had suddenly realized that in a world that for years had been only darkness, cold and death, that light was dawning and peace had come. A beautiful new day had dawned, he was alive, and he was going home.

Think of our gospel passage today as the sudden dawning of light in darkness. Think of the people of Mark’s time as sitting in a theater, wishing the lights would come up, tired and hurting and worn out, not sure what to expect. And then a spotlight comes on, and a man strides out of the wilderness. And Mark begins to proclaim: a whole new day has come: the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

I think this is a fascinating beginning to a gospel that is also fascinating. Unlike other gospels, Mark does not begin with a Christmas story or theological background about who Jesus is. Mark just plunges right in, with an adult John the Baptist arriving on stage. John arrives out of darkness and silence, to a people living in fear and despair.

By the time John the Baptist began his preaching and baptizing, the prophets in Israel had fallen silent for hundreds of years; one foreign emperor after another had conquered Israel; the gap between rich and poor was ever-widening, the worship of God continued in the Temple, but the Temple rulers were notoriously corrupt; the Roman conquerors were harsh and merciless rulers who would torture and crucify anyone who caused a disturbance. The ordinary people of Israel must have wondered if God had forgotten them.

Out of this darkness, suddenly light begins to shine – not center stage, in the Temple, where people would have expected God – but off to the side, in the wilderness, away from the capital where important things happened. And the hero doesn’t take the stage, not yet – we see the forerunner, the herald, the one who will proclaim what the story will be about: and John begins to preach: Prepare the way. The images in this story are familiar to Israel: wilderness, prophets, river Jordan. Moses had led the people out of slavery into the wilderness, and Joshua (after whom Jesus is named) led them across river Jordan into Promised Land – a new day.

What John tells the people is that another new day is dawning. And what they must do, as they wait for God to act, is to prepare themselves, with repentance, – a word that in Greek doesn’t just mean feeling sorry for what they have done. The Greek word is metanoia, and it means a turning point, a change in life, a whole new mind – John is telling them to begin looking at the world differently. With their repentance, they will prepare to learn a whole new way of living, guided by the One who is coming, who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.

I’ve said this before: in any Bible passage, you can interpret it on three levels: the level of the story itself; the level of the writer; and the level of our lives today. So let’s talk about the second level, what did the author intend? We are entering lectionary Year B, when we will read a lot of Mark’s gospel. Mark is the earliest of the four gospels, the first to be written, between 65-70. Mark actually invents a whole new form of literature – he is the first to decide that story of Jesus should be written, and he calls it a “gospel” – which simply means good news.

What is going on in Mark’s world that makes it necessary for him to invent a whole new literary genre? A lot: 30-35 years before, Jesus had died and been resurrected. The disciples’ hopes were crushed when he died, but were awakened with new hope when he rose: they underwent metanoia, a whole new way of seeing the world. The resurrection meant a new light dawning in the darkness of a world of death. Resurrection helped them understand that Jesus had come not to conquer earthly empires, but to bring light in darkness, a new heaven and a new earth – to usher us all into a new way of life, resurrection life that begins now.

The earliest disciples believed that Jesus would return any day to bring his kingdom to fulfillment. But the years go by, and Jesus doesn’t return, between the years 60-70 major events happen that turn the fledgling Christian community upside down. Leaders begin to die: James – leader of church in Jerusalem and brother of Jesus, is martyred in 62; Peter and Paul were both martyred in Rome around 64-65.

A shocked Christian community is living through other cataclysmic events too. Rome, where Mark is probably living, burned in 64; in Jerusalem, a rebellion in the years 66-70 will end with mass starvation, the Temple destroyed, the Jews scattered all over the world. For the disciples, the world is falling apart, Jesus is not coming back anytime soon, the generation of eyewitnesses to his life are dying off, beloved leaders are being martyred.

In a situation like this, many small cults withdraw into themselves, wait for the end, focus inward. But if you decide not to withdraw and stay an inner-focused cult, you have to figure out how to adjust to a new world, how God is working in new ways, how to undergo metanoia, how to begin seeing the world with new eyes, new life. The only reason for Mark to write down the events of Jesus’ life in a new gospel form is because he realizes there will be future generations who need to know about Jesus: a revolutionary change in expectations, metanoia.

So Mark sits down to write a gospel, and writes a title across the top of the page. And the title is not “The Gospel according to Mark” – that name comes later. The title is “The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” That first line is not a complete sentence– it’s the title of the whole gospel. The whole gospel, the story of Jesus’ life, is the beginning of good news.

Mark’s gospel ends strangely, it doesn’t really end at all (and I’ll talk about the ending in a later sermon). It just sort of ends with a dot dot dot … because, for Mark – the story continues. The gospel according to Mark, the whole story of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, is only the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Because that story continues, down through history, by the power of the Holy Spirit. It continues through one metanoia after another, through the upheavals that inspired Mark to write his gospel, through change after change in Christian history.

With each change, God acts in a new and unexpected way, through people who learn to see the world with new eyes, again and again, through new actors who come onto the stage and introduce new ways of thinking by the power of the Holy Spirit: all working in ways that will continue the good news of Jesus Christ. Right down to the present day, when more change and upheaval is happening.

I don’t have to tell you that the world is changing, almost faster than we can keep track of. Our church is changing along with it; the church’s position in society, its way of doing things, what we believe about our mission. And each of us, in our personal lives, have also been through huge changes and upheavals. Sometimes those are good changes, like the birth of a child or a move to a warmer and sunnier climate. But sometimes they are disturbing and disorienting changes: the loss of a relationship, the death of someone we love, terrible challenges and difficulties.

When these things happen, I believe God is calling us to undergo metanoia once more, to look at world with new eyes, to look for how God is working in new ways. Here’s what I find exciting: what God did long ago in Jesus was an entirely new thing, a movement that would change the world. But it was only the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

That story hasn’t ended yet; Jesus’ earthly life ended with a dot dot dot. Because the story continues with us – we are the disciples who are writing a new book in Christian history. We are the ones figuring out how to live in a new world, preparing for new ways of following Christ. We are the ones whom God is calling, right now, to repentance, to metanoia. Metanoia is not something you can decide to do for yourself; it is a gift God gives you. But you can prepare yourself for metanoia, you can open your hearts to it.

We are called to cleanse our hearts, to prepare for new things God is doing. We are called to prayer and worship and service and love of neighbor. These are all acts that will open our eyes and open our hearts to the continuing drama of Christ who has come and will come, and is always coming, into this world. Because a new light is dawning, and the curtain is going up, and it is our turn to take our place in the continuing story, the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Sermon for 1 Advent 2011 - 11.27.11

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

If you came to my house, and you went to the closet under the stairs – that closet with the sloping ceiling, slanting to a narrow point at the back – and if you opened the door, what you would want to do is to stand back with hands at the ready, in case it all came tumbling out on you. And assuming it all stayed in place, you would need to start pulling things out.

You would pull out the vacuum cleaner, and the bag full of wrapping paper scraps for every possible occasion – because you never know when you might need a one-foot square piece of sunflower-print paper (slightly crumbled). You would start sorting back through layers of Snook family history. Old Halloween costumes, craft supplies for crafts not yet complete. Posters made for school projects, explaining fine points of biology and literature. The box of my old elementary school papers, artwork, and photographs that my parents decided would be better gathering dust at my house than theirs. Boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations. Supplies for goldfish and birds we no longer have.

And after you got all of that out of the closet, you would be almost to the back. And there you would see it: under the shelves at the very narrowest back part of the closet, gleaming and white and still looking new: my bread machine: relic of a Christmas long ago, when I was sure what I wanted more than anything else was a bread machine.

I had gone to a friend’s house, she had made fresh bread, the house smelled divine, the bread she made was delicious – and she explained that she just dumped flour and water and yeast in, and the machine did the work, and I decided that even I could do that. I think I actually used it once or twice, and the bread it made was wonderful. But somehow it got put in the back of the closet, and never used again.

And I think back on that bread machine, and I realize: it wasn’t the machine I wanted at all; and it wasn’t the bread either. What I wanted was the smell: the smell of bread baking. Smells can take you back in time in a very immediate way – more than just a memory, a smell connects your brain to experiences, to feelings. I think that humans must have some ancient primeval gene connecting the smell of fresh bread with the love of our mothers.

That smell of bread baking reminds me of my mother, who in my childhood every now and then would bake fresh bread, the old-fashioned way, without a machine, dusting the countertop with flour, plunging her hands in, kneading and rolling and kneading again. My sweet, kind, generous mother, who could easily have bought Wonder bread at the grocery store, but who every now and then wanted to do something special for her family. It reminds me also of her mother before her, who taught her how to do it: my smiling, cheerful, hardworking grandmother, who was a farm wife in the Depression and who knew how to do things the hard way.

What I was longing for, all those Christmases ago, was not bread, it was the feeling. The feeling of being with those wonderful women, of being surrounded by family, of being loved in that very particular way. I was longing for that feeling of love.

What are you longing for, this first Sunday of Advent? The holiday season has officially begun, the Thanksgiving feast has been shared, the Black Friday crowds have stormed the stores. The shopping frenzy escalated on Friday to the point where 9 Wal-Marts reported violence, including fights, a shooting, and an incident where a woman pepper-sprayed the competition to get her hands on some electronics.

Somehow I don’t think this is why Jesus was born in a stable.

And even for those of us who didn’t darken the door of any stores on Friday, many of us are creating Christmas lists, desperately searching for ways to fulfill the Christmas wishes of the people we love (or are obligated to buy for).

And yet, I have to think, those items on our Christmas lists aren’t really what we’re longing for at all – we’re longing for something else entirely.

So what are you longing for? Are you longing for a better job, are you longing for the presence of someone you love, are you longing for healing, longing for relief from stress and worry? Are you longing to go back in time and see someone you loved a long time ago, or do something differently than you did the first time? Are you longing to skip forward to the future and see how something you’ve already set in motion is going to turn out? Are you longing for new relationships, new emotions, new hopes? Are you longing for the world to become a better place, for wars to end and poverty to be defeated and diseases to be healed?

Are you longing, quite simply, to be loved?

This Advent season, that begins today, is the season of longing. It’s the season when we recognize that we have a longing for a perfection we never quite achieve, a certain empty place even in the most contented life. I am convinced that all of our Christmas buying frenzy is our way of attempting to address this emptiness, this longing, this recognition that things are not quite right in our lives, that we have not reached perfection yet. Few of us would say that a bread machine, or any other Christmas gift, would make our lives complete. And yet we always hope that we might come one step closer to filling that empty place in our hearts.

Advent is the time when God says to us: wait. Wait, hope, expect, pray. That empty place in our hearts is a place that ultimately, only God can fill. Jesus came to us as God’s gift of God’s own self, the gift that fills our longings. The promise of Christ is the promise that he has come to us to bring perfect love to birth; AND he will come again to bring his kingdom to completion: that kingdom where the world will be made right again, where suffering will cease, where people will learn to walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us.

In the meantime, the time of waiting for God’s Kingdom, when the world is still imperfect, when our hearts are still longing – that is, that time between Christ’s first and second coming, when we will almost certainly live our entire lives – during this time, our calling as followers of Christ is not only to seek Christ who came long ago, not only to wait for Christ who will come again, but also to look for how Christ is entering into the everyday events of this world today, to look for how Christ’s kingdom is even now breaking into this world – and to JOIN CHRIST in that work.

Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians today, counsels the church in Corinth to wait, with longing hope and expectation – the same way we are asked to wait today, in Advent season – adopting spiritual disciplines of waiting, hope, prayer, worship, community, generosity. All of these things are grounded in what Paul points out: the discipline of gratitude – recognizing God at work in our lives, and understanding the grace God has given us. In our spiritual state of gratitude, we realize that God’s grace comes with spiritual gifts that allow us to do what God has done, to pour ourselves out as gifts to the world, to join God in his kingdom work of bringing love to birth.

I am convinced that all our striving to buy the perfect gift for everyone, that activity we spend so much time and stress on every Advent season, is merely our way of diverting ourselves from our true longings. I think what we really long for is the gift of love. And I think the best way to experience the gift of love is to give it.

So what if we adopted God’s kingdom as our gifting project this year? What if we decided to devote our Advent season to giving the gift of love? Honoring Jesus with the gifts we give? By finding out what Christ is doing, and joining in?

You can do this by giving to help those in need – our Advent outreach fair next Sunday will give you an opportunity to find out about the many ways we help people in need here at Nativity, and if you wish, to make a donation in honor of someone on your Christmas list.

You can do it also by being or becoming a steward – giving money to God’s work – here at Nativity, in our ongoing operations and mission work, and in our building project. The ultimate purpose of everything we do here is to spread Christ’s love, and when we join together in community, we are joining God’s work.

And, you can give the gift of yourself to the people you love – not trying to satisfy their heart’s longings with mere presents, but giving your time, your words, your service. What would it mean to give dinner at your home to someone who is lonely? What would it mean to do a few household chores for someone who has little time to do it themselves? What would it mean to write a Christmas letter to someone who has meant a lot to you, letting them know how much you appreciate them?

It would mean not trying to fill the emptiness in our hearts with mere things. Not trying to say “I love you” with a mere bread machine, or a tie, or a shirt, or something else that might end up at the back of a closet. But instead, doing what Jesus did – joining Jesus in his mission: pouring our love into the world.

Because this Advent season, and every season, I believe that what we are truly longing for is Christ. Christ who has come, Christ who will come, Christ who is always coming to us, to bring the gift of himself: the ultimate gift of love.

Sermon for All Saints 2011

Scriptures for today are Here

Years ago, when we were younger and living in Texas, Tom and I used to take a vacation each year to the Big Bend Country – the part of Texas where the Rio Grande curves in a kind of elbow – a mountainous, desert country. It’s not so different from the desert mountains around here, except for the fact that it is right on the border between Texas and Mexico. In the Big Bend Country, you travel through a vast, empty national park on the US side, so there’s no real difference between the desert on one side and the desert on the other – the only way you know where the border is, is by the river, the Rio Grande.

One day, Tom and I were out hiking in the park, and we saw a trail that led down to the river. The river was just a small, gentle stream, and there we found an old Mexican man with a raft. He didn’t speak English but we managed to communicate; $1 each to go across. So we paid the money, and he poled us across to the other side.

On the Mexican side, we walked up the riverbank, fended off the children trying to sell us pretty rocks for a dollar, and walked up a dusty path to a tiny town, where we sat on the porch of a rickety restaurant and ordered the only things they had on the menu: borracho beans with fresh-made tortillas and Dos Equis. We sat on the porch, swatted flies, listened to the ceiling fan and the recorded conjunto music, and watched what little activity took place on the dirt main road of this tiny town. And then, after awhile, we decided to walk back down to the river and cross back over to the U.S. side. **

I don’t know if it was because it was a different place, or a different era, but there in the Big Bend Country, there were no passports, no checkpoints, no guards. The border was thin and porous, hardly recognizable as a border at all.

The ancient Celts, living in Britain and Ireland long before Christianity came there, recognized certain places as “thin places,” border crossings between heaven and earth. Somehow at these places, they felt the borderline was thin and porous, and the spirit world could pour through at any moment. So they built shrines at those places, and later Christians built churches and cathedrals and graveyards on top of the old shrines. And I’m told if you go to those places, sometimes you can feel the border between heaven and earth crack open just a little bit, and feel the presence of God.

The Celtic people also recognized certain times of the year as border crossings, such as the three-day harvest festival when they remembered their ancestors. Later Christians baptized and made this festival our own in our three-day festival of Halloween, All Saints and All Souls, all three of which happened this past week. And today, we are observing All Saints Day.

All three of these days in a way take us down to the border crossing between heaven and earth; they help us to look at questions of life and death. Halloween does this in kind of a parody – dressing up as the things we fear – monsters and ghosts, and the living dead, vampires and zombies – to somehow shake our fists at death, laugh in its face, proclaim life instead. All Saints was originally the time when the Roman Catholic Church remembered saints and martyrs, who they believed were able to skip Purgatory and go straight to heaven; and All Souls was the time when they remembered all the faithful departed, and said masses for ordinary dead loved ones.

For us Episcopalians, we’ve never believed in the idea of Purgatory, which is found nowhere in the Bible; though we do remember many people as saints, heroic examples of witnesses and martyrs for the faith. We also recognize that there are many faithful people, quietly living lives of devotion to God and service to others, and it is up to God to recognize their quiet sainthood; so we don’t make that much distinction between All Saints and All Souls Days. We believe that it is up to God to bring all of us, as God’s children, into God’s home: that country that waits for us beyond the final boundary of death.

Which is a faith that is beautiful and true, and I believe it. But we should not make the mistake as Christians of thinking that the whole goal of our life of faith is to escape from this life into a better life on other side. Chrstian author Brian McLaren (Everything Must Change) states, "More and more Christian leaders are beginning to realize that for the millions of young adults who have recently dropped out of church, Christianity is a failed religion. Why? Because it has specialized in dealing with 'spiritual needs' to the exclusion of physical and social needs. It has focused on 'me' and 'my eternal destiny,' but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, poverty, and dysfunction”, i.e., life on this side of the border between life and death. McLaren asks, "Shouldn't a message purporting to be the best news in the world be doing better than this?"

Well, the answer is yes – Christian faith should focus our eyes on this world too. Because if our lessons for today make anything clear, it is the fact that the life of the Body of Christ takes place here on this side of the border as well as in the heavenly court; it takes place now, in this moment, as well as in a future hope. The Christian life is not only about escaping suffering into the beautiful vision of the heavenly city in our lesson from Revelation today, where we will hunger and thirst no more, and every tear will be wiped from our eyes.

The Christian life is also about working to alleviate hunger and thirst here, to wipe tears from the eyes of people who are suffering now: taking our life of sainthood seriously here. It is about becoming a community grounded in love, the love that God has given us (as 1 John says) – “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God.” What we will become, the communion of saints that lives through eternity, has not yet been revealed, but children of God is what we are. And because God loves us, God gives us love to share with others.

In fact there is something beautiful and true about this fact: that in the earthy reality of our lives right here, in places of suffering and anguish as well as times of joy and laughter, Jesus is here, loving us, making our life holy.

I believe this is what Jesus is talking about in our gospel lesson today, one of the most famous passages in all of Matthew’s gospel, known as the Beatitudes (“Blessed”). The original Greek word translated here as “Blessed” is “Makarios,” which means “happy.” Jesus seems to be saying not so much that God will bless you in your suffering as that happiness comes in the midst of suffering – you are “happy” now. This doesn’t seem to make sense – we all know that suffering is real, and it is hard to find happiness in the midst of it. Yet Jesus seems to say with no irony, Happy are the poor in spirit, happy are those who mourn, happy are the meek.

And to me, this seems the opposite of truth, it almost seems to promote a Pollyanna style of faith. But the truth is, of all world religions, Christianity may be the one that is most realistic about suffering, because we worship a Savior who suffered . We worship a Savior who chose on his own to cross the thin and porous border between heaven and earth, to leave the place where there are no tears, to come to a world where suffering, hunger, thirst, death are everyday affairs.

In 2006, the rock star Bono, lead singer of the band U2, spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, a famous speech that has been quoted thousands of times: “God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so…. But the one thing we can all agree -- all faiths, all ideologies -- is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”

I think this is what Jesus means when he says to the sick, suffering and poverty-stricken folks who crowded around him in the hills of Galilee to watch him heal and to hear him speak, Happy are you when you are poor in spirit. He is saying more than just the kingdom of heaven will be yours someday. He is also saying, the kingdom of heaven is among you now. He is pointing to his own presence, for the kingdom of heaven comes to us in the person of Jesus, the one who loved us so much he came to be among us. The border has already been crossed, the barricades have already come down. The kingdom of heaven has already leaked across the border into this world. And it is here among us; it is here IN us. It is what empowers us to live as saints in the world.

It is in the name of the God who crosses all borders, that we live our lives as baptized saints and citizens of God’s kingdom. Making choices, crossing borders to be with others who need our help. Because he is here with us, we make the choice to be with them. And we know that someday a new border crossing will open up for us. And we will be with him, God’s beloved children, every tear wiped away.

So, on All Saints and All Souls Days, we remember all Christians who have died, and give thanks for their lives. Because we believe the promise of Jesus was true for them, and will one day be true for us, that as we make that final border crossing between earth and heaven, that our Lord will be there to greet us, welcome us, and pole our raft to the other side – where there is no crying, no sighing, but life everlasting.

** Years after we crossed the Rio Grande at Boquillas, I happened to be listening to Robert Earl Keen one day and I realized that he had crossed the Rio Grande at the same place. There couldn't possibly be another crossing just like it. He sang about it in his song "Gringo Honeymoon" - click the link to hear his amazing, fabulous song. He had the same experience we did, except -- we didn't rent the donkeys (too expensive); we didn't meet the cowboy who was running from the DEA; and we sadly didn't hear the crusty caballero play the old gut-string guitar.