State of the Parish Address, 1.29.12

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

When Jesus shows up, things start happening.

That seems to be the message of Mark’s gospel. Where the other gospels tell us in a leisurely way about Jesus sitting on mountains or in boats, preaching long sermons, teaching people how to live, Mark’s story gallops along at breakneck pace, with Jesus hurling himself from one situation to another – teaching, healing, casting out demons. Mark is not interested in what Jesus says as much as what Jesus does. Mark often uses the term “immediately” – immediately Jesus went here, immediately Jesus did this – in today’s gospel, this word is translated as “just then” and “at once.”

In today’s gospel, Mark plunges right into the story – immediately, right in Chapter 1, without taking any time for a Christmas story. Jesus has appeared in the wilderness, been baptized, has been driven out into the desert to be tempted by the devil, and now we see that immediately, the first thing he does in his entire public ministry, is this. He appears in the synagogue, begins teaching with authority, and casts out an evil, unclean spirit from a man, so that everyone is amazed.

We 21^st century Americans are left with a bit of puzzlement at a story like this, because when we hear about things like exorcising demons, we tend to think of movies like The Exorcist, with heads spinning around – and think it’s mythical. But Mark is very clear that this is the first thing Jesus does, and we should pay attention – because the first thing is symbolic of what his whole ministry will be.

What Mark tells us today is that Jesus’ whole message, “The Kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news,” will be framed in terms of Jesus confronting evil. And what is evil? Not simply demons causing heads to spin. Evil is this: where God wants to build us up, evil tears us down; where God wants us to flourish, evil starves us, shrivels us up; where God wants us to grow into the full and glorious human beings we were created to be, made in the image and likeness of God, evil holds us trapped by the worship of false gods, lesser images. And Mark gives a little extra emphasis by calling this demon an “unclean spirit” –something that must be separated from holy society, exiled – and we see that evil is what isolates and separates us from each other.

Jesus brings this man back from exile, reconciles him to the holy community, brings him back into relationship with God and his neighbors. Which is exactly what Jesus promises each of us. Jesus comes to set us free from these evil things that hold us in bondage, to reconcile us to God and each other, to restore us to our true home with God, to establish God’s Kingdom, beginning immediately.

When Jesus shows up, things start happening.

Well, that’s as good a title as any for my State of the Parish Address – when Jesus shows up, things start happening. If Jesus gallops at breakneck pace through Mark’s gospel, sometimes it feels like what we’ve done at Nativity has been like that. In only a little over 5 years, we have seen remarkable things happening. We started meeting in homes, Jesus showed up, and immediately people started joining the team. We launched worship in a school, Jesus showed up, and immediately people found a church home with us. We lost our lease in the school, Jesus showed up, and immediately an angel stepped forward to help. We needed a permanent home, Jesus showed up, and an amazing location became available, along with the dedicated people and resources to make it happen in this coming year.

All along the way, our people, our ministers, our financial support, our growth, have all seemed like miracles, casting out evil, restoring people in our community and people touched by our ministries to right relationship with God, establishing in some small way a corner of the kingdom of God.

When Jesus shows up, things start happening.

This week I received an email from the rector of All Saints Phoenix, the largest church in our diocese, addressed to me and 14 other priests in the diocese. His email asked that the rectors of the 15 largest parishes in the diocese join him in a Lenten appeal for Episcopal Relief & Development. And I thought, wait, what? We’re one of the 15 largest parishes in our diocese? I asked him where he got his figures, and he said he wasn’t sure, but he based it on a quick glance at the mission shares. He also said that if we’re not one of the largest parishes yet, we will be soon, because what we’ve done has been amazing.

So I’m not sure if he’s correct about the figures, but let’s talk about our numbers (which will be in your annual report materials). In 5 years, we have grown from zero to average attendance of 155 in 2011. On Sundays when we have two services, that is, during our program year of August through May, we average 170 each Sunday. From 2010 to 2011, our average attendance increased by almost 20%. We had 352 people in attendance on Christmas, up from 300 in 2010. The number of children enrolled in Sunday school increased from 21 to 33; the number of teens enrolled in youth group increased from 21 to 31 (about a 50% increase in both categories). In 2011, we had 2 marriages, 7 baptisms, 7 adults confirmed, and 23 teenagers confirmed.

Those are pretty amazing numbers for a parish that didn’t exist 6 years ago, that meets in an office building without permanent signage, that is pretty hidden away and hard to find. But people do find us, because when Jesus shows up, things start happening.

But of course, what we do at church isn’t about numbers. It’s about mission. People. Our mission is to transform people’s lives with the love of God in Jesus Christ. And we believe that’s God’s mission too. Someone wise once said, God’s church doesn’t have a mission. God’s mission has a church. We are that church, empowered by God to be the agent of God’s mission.

We get an idea of how we are accomplishing God’s mission by looking at numbers of people involved in ministry here. Your annual report materials will show a list of the number of people involved in various ministries at Nativity – and by our count, there are roughly 861 separate ministries going on here. In our Outreach area alone, which gives service to those in need, over 5,000 lives were touched last year by things Nativity people did. Hungry people were fed, homeless people were given a place to live, children were given an education, houses were remodeled, Christmas presents were given – lives were transformed.

When Jesus shows up, things start happening.

But it’s not time for us to rest and congratulate ourselves – we have an exciting mission still ahead of us – and I, for one, can’t wait to get started on it. Certainly our building project will take huge amount of energy this year – I am grateful for help of Bob Christopher, Art Graf, Bill Deihl, and the other Building Committee members. But we can’t concentrate on a building as reason for existence – God’s mission is why we exist.

I have been thinking and praying about our ministries and mission. I believe we have great strengths in areas like worship and outreach. And I believe that in the coming year, God is calling us to work to develop 5 areas of mission.

First, if we are going to transform lives, our first priority in the coming year is to reach more people with the good news of what Christ is doing at Nativity. George Hartz will be leading the effort to let people in our new neighborhood know about our presence, and we invite you to join him in this project. He has some great strategic ideas for how to reach new people.

The second priority is to build on a strength we already have – children and youth ministries. We have 64 kids now registered, and a very lively and active youth group. We need to build on these strengths, increasing the depth and creativity of our offerings for children, giving our teachers extra resources to help young minds learn about Jesus’ love for them. This will be a priority for me in the coming year.

And we also need to help our terrific youth reach out to other young people in our community. Klayton Chew, our Director of Youth Ministries, will be graduating from college in May and applying for a full-time job in the business world, so he intends to move back to an assistant youth leader position. We are fortunate that our diocese has a program intended to give partial funding for a full-time youth leader for four years. We intend to apply for this program and hope to call a Youth Ministry Apprentice, a full-time person with significant responsibility for meeting new kids outside of church. We are in an amazing position of strength in this area, and we can help our kids, and others, grow spiritually, socially, emotionally, and in their involvement with the church, by making our youth program even stronger.

The third priority I see is to deepen our opportunities for adult discipleship and learning. It is our calling not only to get people in the door so they can come to know Jesus through our worship, but also to help them grow as disciples through learning and service. This area will be a challenge for us this year, as Wayne Whitney, our Pastoral Intern, will be going on to another assignment after this summer, and at this point we do not appear to have the budget to replace him. I am hoping to develop a corps of lay leaders for small groups that can enjoy short-term small group commitments to learn and build community. Our Spiritual Practices Small Group Study is a pilot program for this initiative.

The fourth priority I see is this – pastoral care of those inside and outside our church. We have strong, dedicated healing ministries, prayer leaders, LEMs. We also have five people now involved in the Community of Hope International program, which is a one-year training program to help them learn skills of listening and pastoral care. I believe this program gives us the opportunity to reach more people. We will have more people available for visitations, and we will be able to start lay chaplaincy programs with places like assisted living centers and hospitals. David Smith will be leading this effort as administrator of the COHI program.

The fifth priority is stewardship of what we have, ensuring careful fiscal responsibility. I do not want to be in a position of having the financial tail wag the church dog – I want to make sure we have adequate finances to answer God’s call to mission. I don’t have to tell you that building a new church facility is a huge financial commitment. Many, many thanks to all of you who have been such committed supporters of this project. Art Graf, our treasurer, will tell us more in the annual meeting about where we stand financially; we are in solid shape with some challenges ahead. Building is a big commitment, and it is also an act of faith. We will not let ourselves get into an irresponsible position. But we will also not be so timid and cautious that we cannot grow. We need to take the step of building to answer God’s call to reach new people, transforming lives with the love of Jesus Christ.

And the reason to reach new people is not to meet our financial obligations, The reason is that we are called to join God in God’s mission – because God’s mission has a church, and that’s Nativity. We are the church Christ calls to join in God’s mission. And I believe that what we do will truly transform lives.

Because when Jesus shows up, things start happening.

Sermon for 1.15.12

Scriptures for Today are Here

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra made the news this week when someone’s cell phone kept going off during a performance of Mahler’s 9^th Symphony. Apparently every time the orchestra would get to a particularly quiet and moving moment in the music, suddenly in the darkness the sound of the iPhone Marimba ringtone would sound. And finally, for the first time in the orchestra’s history, the conductor stopped the orchestra. He turned around, pointed at a man on the front row, and demanded that he turn off the cell phone.

We’ve all had times when cell phones have gone off inconveniently, including me. But my favorite time was this: at a small meeting here at the church, we opened with prayer. We all closed our eyes, bowed our heads, and I began: “God, we know that you have a special call for each of us ….” And right on cue, BRRRIINGG! We all burst into laughter, and as the person hastily left the room, cell phone in hand, we called after him, “Be sure and let us know what He says!”

Let’s face it, most of us will never hear God’s call that directly! But the question posed to us by our scriptures today is, how do we hear the call of God? There are a few people out there who will hear God’s voice like the boy Samuel does in our Old Testament lesson today – in the silence of the night, calling our name. But many of us will hear the call of God within the community of faith. And Episcopalians have long recognized that hearing God’s call requires both of these elements – time alone with God, listening for God’s voice, and time with the church community, testing our call with other people who can see us better than we see ourselves and listening to their voices. This is why people interested in ordination can’t just decide it for themselves. They have to go through a process of meeting and praying with other people who exercise the gifts given to the church community – listening and discerning God’s voice the best they can.

But discernment of God’s call doesn’t just apply to ordained people. It applies to people exercising lay ministries as well. Every one of us has a call from God, and answering that call will help God build us into the people he created us to be.

So for each of us, how do we learn to distinguish God’s voice from our own? I think that our Old Testament lesson about the boy Samuel shows us two things. Hearing God’s call requires time alone, praying and listening, and it requires community.

So let’s talk first about time alone: is this something each of us makes time for? Do we pray each day, and not just pray by talking, but by listening too? Many of us find praying difficult, partly because it’s hard to make our minds concentrate, and partly because we are intimidated by the idea of trying to find the right words. The poet Mary Oliver writes about trying to find the right words for prayer:

It doesn't have to be


the blue iris, it could be


weeds in a vacant lot, or a few


small stones; just


pay attention, then patch


a few words together and don't try


to make them elaborate, this isn't


a contest but a doorway


into thanks, and a silence in which


another voice may speak.

A silence into which another voice may speak: praying is a matter, not just of talking to God, but of listening for God’s voice too. All of us are different, and different prayer practices work better for some of us than for others. This is why we are offering our Spiritual Practices Study in small groups – so that you can learn different ways of praying and listening for God’s voice, and decide which ones work best for you.

The second part of listening for God’s voice is what the old priest Eli did for Samuel: provided the voice of the church community, helped Samuel learn to respond. Samuel has been brought up within the temple, he is steeped in the worship, stories, and traditions of his people, and all those things help him hear the call of God as he is lying in the dark sanctuary where the lamp has not yet gone out. Yet an older person, suffering from lack of vision yet still with the experience to know how God speaks, helps him learn what to do. And Samuel becomes the next leader of Israel, a transitional leader, who eventually finds and anoints David as king of Israel.

This way of responding to God is an everyday experience in the church community, and it doesn’t have to happen through a voice in the darkness – hearing the voice of God can happen through ordinary interactions. Someone will come to us and say, I’ve seen you relate to people in touching and beautiful ways – have you thought about working with newcomers? Or, you have a healing and comforting touch – would you like to visit the sick? Or, you have a passion for helping the poor and suffering – would you like to take on a particular outreach ministry? You love children – would you like to teach? The people who come to us and ask us these things often see things in us that we never knew were there – this was the case for the first priest who called me into lay leadership in the church. But also, they have a gift for helping us articulate desires of our own hearts, the yearnings that may be expressions of God’s voice speaking to us. and this, I think, is one of the most important gifts of a church community – helping us to hear the voice of God through worship, prayer, service, calling.

I think it is vital for us to understand why the church community exists, because I would say most people in our world don’t – They Like Jesus, But Not the Church (as the title of a recent book puts it). There’s a YouTube video that went viral this week, with millions of hits and many, many young people sharing it with their friends – called Jesus > Religion. Watch it here. In this video, a young, hip-looking poet named Jefferson Bethke gives a long rap-like rant about religion, starting with the line: “What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion: – and continuing with claims like:

“I mean if religion is so great, why has it started so many wars
/ Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor …." and

“Now back to the point, one thing is vital to mention
/ How Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums
/ See one’s the work of God, but one’s a man made invention
/ See one is the cure, but the other’s the infection”

There are so many points made in this video, both good and bad, that it would take hours to unpack them all properly. But even if none of us here agree with what he’s saying about religion, we need to understand that there are lots of people who do agree. And if we’re going to minister to our community, to reach out to our world with the love of Christ we believe in and live by, if we’re going to invite others to come and see what we have found here, we need to understand why God calls us into church communities, and what church is all about.

So we can easily dispose of some tired old claims atheists like to trot out. Have people started wars over religion? Yes, and people have also started wars over communism, democracy, territory, power, money, slavery, land grabs, power grabs, money grabs, and on and on. Human beings are sinful – that is one of the foundational beliefs of our religion – and it takes God to set us free from our own tendency to sin.

Has religion built great churches? Yes. Has it failed to feed the poor? No. Christians have done huge amounts of charity work for two millennia. As the largest religious group in the world, Christianity may be the most potent force for loving others the world has ever seen, and all because people have heard the call of God in their church communities. Christians have done great work also to establish justice in the world – such Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate this weekend – who helped to finish the job of setting people free in this country – working through what he called “The Beloved Community.”

So when Jefferson Bethke says: “Religion might preach grace, but another thing they practice
/ … See the problem with religion, is it never gets to the core /
It’s just behavior modification, like a long list of chores”
- I have to say, don’t criticize religion for not helping the poor, then also criticize it for saying that religion involves behavior modification. We do believe that Jesus changes our lives, and that includes living differently, behaving differently, loving differently, than we otherwise would. Christianity IS something you do, not just something you believe.

Bethke continues: “Now I ain’t judgin, I’m just saying quit putting on a fake look
/ Cause there’s a problem
If people only know you’re a Christian by your Facebook
/ I mean in every other aspect of life, you know that logic’s unworthy
/ It’s like saying you play for the Lakers just because you bought a jersey.”
 Well, no one would agree more than Jesus – we need to live as Christians – people need to be able to see it in way we live and the way we care for each other. Christianity is not something you do in secret – it is a way of life.

It is abundantly clear from the gospels that Jesus did not come to abolish religion. He says he came not to abolish, but to fulfill, the Law and the Prophets. And Jesus took very intentional steps to create a community of faith – which we can see bits of in today’s gospel. All 4 gospels tell us that the first thing Jesus did when he decided to launch his ministry was not to go out to the mountain and start preaching, but to call a group of disciples who would be future leaders of his community. And I think Jesus did this very intentionally because he knew that we can hear the voice of God in community much better than we can individually. These leaders would learn by following Jesus and listening to him, but they would also learn from each other, like Philip and Nathanael. And after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the community they formed with each other helped them keep their faith strong and to make disciples of others. They formed a community of faith that has passed down the news of Jesus through 2,000 years. If Jefferson Bethke knows anything about Jesus, it is because other people in the worldwide community of faith have showed him and told him about Jesus.

So let me ask you, why are we part of a community of faith? What makes religion an important part of our lives? Why is this worth doing, why not follow Jesus alone? Sure, you can admire God’s creation on the golf course; you might even pray there. But what can you do in the community of faith that you can’t do there? You can worship in community, you can share in the sacraments, you can learn from the wisdom of other followers of Jesus. You have a community that prays for you when you’ve lost the ability to pray. You have a group of people that can help you hear the voice of God.

Most of us are not going to hear Jesus’ voice like a cell phone ring; most of us will hear God’s call from other people who say: that voice you’re hearing, that desire to do something more, that wish to know God more completely, that pull to do something new with your life – that is the voice of God.

Because the most powerful thing about being called into a community of faith is the idea of being part of something bigger than you are – being one member of a Body of Christ that can change the world – being a follower of Jesus, who knows us each better than we know ourselves, and has a call for each of us.

As Mary Oliver says: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Sermon for 1.18.12

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

There’s nothing like being a parent for the first time – because nothing prepares you. Before our oldest daughter Sarah was born, Tom and I prepared exhaustively. We read books, we took classes, we got advice from other parents. We knew about every possible childbirth issue and we were sure we knew what to expect – and sure enough, everything went fine with the birth.

But the surprise came the next morning, when the doctor came in to release me and the baby from the hospital. He grinned at us cheerfully and said: “Well, the easy part is over. The hard part is the next 21 years.” And Tom and I just stared at each other blankly – because how could anything top the drama of a child being born?

That afternoon, we dressed Sarah in footie pajamas and a little knit hat, wrapped her up carefully in 7 or 8 blankets, nestled her into her state-of-the-art child safety seat, and took her home – and I remember walking into the house, all prepared with cribs and cute baby equipment and plug covers and child safety locks; sitting down with Sarah on the couch, looking at her, looking up at Tom. And together, in unison, we looked at each other and said, “Now what?”

Because it suddenly occurred to us that we thought we had prepared everything we could possibly prepare, but we had no idea how to be parents.

And for the last 20 years, we’ve done what every parent has ever done – figured it out as we went along, taught her what we were taught, hoped she learned some things we couldn’t teach her, helped her grow up as best we could, and most of all, just loved her. Because that’s the whole point of being born, isn’t it? It’s not about all the preparation that led up to the birth, the work on creating a family that can nurture a child, the nutrition, the gathering of supplies. Those are all important – but the whole point of the birth is, now what? What is going to happen during the course of this precious new life? How is the child going to live into the promise of perfection, the day she was born?

As we read the story of Jesus’ baptism in our gospel today, the question that baptism points toward is – Now What? This baptism is the very first event in Mark’s gospel – Mark’s version of the Christmas story in a sense – the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, the moment when his identity comes clear, the opening of the trajectory of his life. And from this moment of baptism, we can look backwards to see all the preparation that has brought Jesus to this moment, but more importantly, we can look forward to understand what his baptism is pointing toward – what it will mean for Jesus, and what it will mean for us.

Looking backwards, this scene from Mark’s gospel evokes some deep truths, some vital events in Israel’s history that every listener would have understood. First, at the most basic level, the ritual of baptism points to cleansing and purifying rituals that would have been familiar to every Israelite. John takes this simple and repeatable act within Judaism and re-purposes it as a one-time ritual symbolizing repentance and forgiveness of sins – which is a direct challenge to the power and authority of the Temple in Jerusalem – because the Temple has a monopoly on ritual acts taken to ask for forgiveness. John circumvents all this and says that the Temple apparatus is not necessary. For forgiveness of sins, what is necessary is repentance and baptism, and the past will be wiped clean, life can begin again, anew – with a second birth.

Taking the meaning a step deeper, the fact that this baptism takes place in Jordan River brings to mind for Israelites the triumphal entry of the Israelites into the Promised Land. Moses had led them out of slavery and had died, and had turned over leadership to a new leader, Joshua, who parted the waters of the Jordan as Moses had parted the waters of the Red Sea and led them to their new home. Jewish people hearing this story of Jesus’ baptism for the first time would have understood intuitively that Mark is telling them that a new Joshua has arisen, who is leading them to a new place of Promise – emphasized by the fact that Jesus’ name, in Hebrew, IS Joshua – a name for heroes, meaning “God Saves.”

But here, instead of the waters being parted, it is the heavens that are torn apart as the Holy Spirit comes to rest on Jesus. The people are not coming to live in a new place, in a new way. It is God himself who is coming out of the heavens to rest on Jesus, the Son of God who is making his home among us, and who will make the everyday reality of our life right here the new Land of Promise.

Behind that story lies one more, still deeper and further back. Many peoples and cultures have creation stories that involve water. The Hopi people, for instance, tell of worlds before our world, that were destroyed by fire and flood; and of a Creator Woman rescuing the Hopi people from flood and making them boats in which they floated to safety, until they finally emerged into new creation from a certain spring at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Other cultures have similar stories of our world emerging from creation water.

Our Old Testament lesson points the way to this truth also: the Bible tells us that in some deep and mysterious way, all of creation comes out of water. We read this morning, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” ‘Wind’ is same word as ‘Spirit’ in Hebrew – so we understand that into this brooding, wet, windy, Spirit-filled silence, the voice of God speaks the words of creation – and life bursts forth.

Perhaps underneath those stories of creation lie some deep truths. Not only the scientific facts of our earth, that tell us that life emerged from water. But the fact that each of us were held in our mothers’ wombs, suspended in water, before we were born, emerging from a world of water into a world of earth and air.

As Jesus stands in the Jordan River, as he emerges, dripping, from the water, as the Spirit of God descends upon him, we see that what is happening to him is no less than a moment of new creation, new birth, new life.

Which is where we come back to our original question – Now What? Because the point of new birth is not the preparation, but the life to be led after the birth. For Jesus, the key to Jesus’ baptism is this voice that declares he is God’s Beloved Child. Jesus’ own Belovedness becomes the key to understanding everything he does. Because, for any child, the experience of being loved by a parent, or some other mentor, becomes the foundation of our ability to love others in turn. Because Jesus is loved, he is able to give love away freely on the cross, and love becomes the whole meaning of his life.

Jesus’ baptism points the way to our baptism, a new birth for us too. Someone recently asked me, what are the minimum beliefs required to be a member of our church? And here’s the answer: there are no minimum beliefs. We only ask people to be baptized, which is full initiation into the church. There are some other procedural things to become a member of Church of the Nativity, but there’s no quiz on beliefs. And sure, the church has basic beliefs, all spelled out in the Nicene Creed. It’s not that the beliefs aren’t important – they are, and I believe them. But we don’t ask people to be 100% certain of those doctrines to be members – as Queen Elizabeth I said in helping to settle the conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, “I will not make windows into men’s souls.”

We’re all on a journey where we are traveling toward more knowledge of God. There’s a story of Billy and Ruth Graham driving along a highway somewhere, when they came to a long stretch, maybe 20 miles, that was under construction. So of course they had to slow down and creep along. When they finally came to the end of the construction, there was a sign, and Ruth Graham pointed to the sign and said, “That’s what I want on my tombstone when I die.” Billy Graham looked at the sign and it said, “Construction Complete. Thank you for your patience.”

Baptism is the beginning of a lifelong journey of growing into the new birth God has given us in baptism. I tell parents who are baptizing their babies – when they are born, physically, you don’t expect them to understand everything about how to live. What you do is accept them into your family and promise to feed them, love them, cherish them, teach them what they need to know to become wise and strong and caring adults, who are ready to take their place in the world.

It takes a lifetime to grow into the promise of our birth. And the same is true for our rebirth, our baptism – it takes a lifetime to grow into. A lifetime of accepting our belovedness, a lifetime of learning to love others.

So – for us who have been baptized in his name – Now What? Jesus asks us all to listen carefully, on this Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, this day on which we all remember our own baptisms. Listen carefully to what God is saying to each of us in our baptism: You are my Child, the Beloved: in you I am well pleased. You are loved by God: the love of God that was poured into Jesus at his baptism, is the same love that has been poured into us by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are forgiven, we are healed, we are reborn into new life. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are given the ability to pour that love into the world, loving others as we have been loved.

So it’s a simple question, really, but it’s a question that I invite each of you to think about this week. It’s the question of all of our lives as Christians – what happens now? How should we live into our baptism, the new birth we have been given? How are we called to love world as God loves us?

Now that we have been baptized, now that we have been reborn into new life, now that we have been given new birth as children of God – Now What?

Sermon for New Year's Day 2012

Over the Christmas holiday, we had family in town, so we took them to visit the Musical Instrument Museum. There are big rooms for each continent on earth, and they give you a set of headphones, so as you walk up to the display for each country, you see someone playing music on a video screen, and your headphones pick up the sound as you walk up to it. So, we learned about music from all over the world, and I noticed different concepts of time in music.

Some musical cultures, like our Western tradition, have fairly defined notions of time in music – time signatures that give predictable rhythm and tempo. Others, noticeably Asian cultures, don’t have a time signature that’s recognizable to Western ears – the music seems to meander and at its own pace. It’s very interesting to listen to music that obeys a completely different set of rules than you’re used to hearing.

Even for us westerners, good musicians learn how to transcend time. Jeanne Person, professor of spirituality at General Seminary, tells this story about a metronome, a very irritating object that music students use to help them keep time: “I remembered my own metronome, a small, mechanical one in a rectangular red case that helped me, when I was a young musician, to learn tempos as I played Czerny piano exercises and Bach organ fugues. Usually, the metronome would reveal my weakness, as I failed to keep tempo, to live up to its demands, to be perfect. One day, a new piano teacher … stopped me as I pounded through a Bach piece, striving for faultlessness. He took my hands in his, tenderly. “You must love the piano,” he said. “Love the music.”

Which is as good a way as any to think about the two kinds of time the ancient Greeks recognized: they had two different words for time. One was chromos: the kind of predictable, measurable time a metronome keeps track of, or a clock, or a calendar. Chronos is the kind of time that says, this is New Year’s Day, and every New Year’s Eve makes me wonder why we should celebrate the fact that the clock changed from 11:59 to midnight – as it does every single night. Chronos time is not something to celebrate, in my view – it’s simply a mechanical measure.

But it’s the other kind of time that we remember in our lives – the kind of time that you are living when you “love the music” – and it’s what the Greeks called kairos time. Kairos time takes place within chronos time, but it feels different: you say, it’s time for me to make a change in career, it’s time for me to apologize to my mother, it’s time for us to build a new church. Watches and calendars can’t tell you about that kind of time – that kind of time, kairos time, lives in your heart.

Kairos time, in a sense, is God’s time. If New Year’s celebrates mere chronos time, then the Christmas season (which we are still in) celebrates kairos time. When God takes action to enter our world, God’s Kairos time has entered into our dull chronos time, and the world is eternally altered as a result.

In fact, my favorite Christmas poem recognizes that fact: BC:AD, by the British poet U.A. Fanthorpe:

This was the moment when Before


Turned into After, and the future's

Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.



This was the moment when nothing


Happened. Only dull peace


Sprawled boringly over the earth.



This was the moment when even energetic Romans


Could find nothing better to do

Than counting heads in remote provinces.



And this was the moment


When a few farm workers and three


Members of an obscure Persian sect


Walked haphazard by starlight straight

Into the kingdom of heaven.

In Jesus, God's Kairos time entered our chronology so decisively that our whole way of measuring time had to change. We point to Jesus' birth as the fulcrum of all human time - everything before was BC, everything after was AD, and all of time in the western world revolves around that moment. At that moment, the moment of Jesus' birth, the clock ticked on and the world looked no different - but at this moment, God took decisive action to enter our world - and eternity came crashing into chronology.

Reading today’s gospel story, you might think that Kairos time is moving fast indeed. Just a week ago we had Jesus as a newborn, and today he’s a 12-year-old boy. In between, we know next to nothing about his life: Luke tells us that at 8 days, Jesus was dedicated in the Temple – the custom for newborn boys. And Matthew tells us that to get away from King Herod, who wanted to kill the newborn King of the Jews, the family fled to Egypt, then returned after Herod had died (which was about 4 BC).

But gospel writers don’t tell us so little about Jesus’ early life because they’re keeping some kind of secret – it’s because they’re telling us kairos, not chronos – they’re not interested in filling in a timeline – they’re interested in God’s moments. God’s time says there is something significant in this event in Jerusalem, when Jesus amazes the priests and scribes with his learning and wisdom. Luke probably wants us to understand that Jesus was gifted with wisdom beyond his years, wisdom that can’t be explained by his country origins. But he also wants us to understand the choices Jesus’ parents made with kairos time.

I think we can discern some very interesting facts about Jesus’ life here. In the 19^th and early 20^th century, it became fashionable for scholars to see Jesus as an illiterate peasant – but this is not true, as you can plainly see by reading today’s story. Jesus was not a peasant – he was the son of a tradesman living in a small town. Joseph was a carpenter – not a furniture maker, but a builder, day laborer. Joseph would probably have walked each day to the nearby Roman city of Sepphoris to work on building the great Roman city there – Herod Antipas’ capital, full of Roman baths, theaters, all the delights of Roman civilization.

As Jesus reached the age of 8 or 10, old enough to hold tools responsibly, he would have been expected to be about father’s business, help support his family. Yet this gospel story tells us that he claims a different Father’s business. He claimed God as his Father, and the Temple discussions of God’s laws as his business.

This was possible because Jesus’ parents made sure he had time for something else than working for a living – he had an education. Jesus learned how to read, how to study scripture, how to discuss God’s words at a very high level. Granted, he was Son of God – naturally gifted for this work – but his parents must have paid a rabbi in Nazareth to give him reading and scripture lessons, sacrificing not only the cost of education, but also foregoing some income that he could have brought into the family.

So the Jesus we picture as a country bumpkin would really have been literate and very well educated for a Jewish boy – all gospels are clear about his intellectual gifts and his ability to hold his own against the most distinguished scholars. And this is true for him because the adults around him made his religious education a priority – and because they did this, he changed the world.

The Son of God is not a 12-year-old child today: but our world is full of young people whose lives are brimming with God’s possibilities. These are children and youth whose whole lives are before them, who are in the prime years of learning their place in the world, developing their God-given talents.

Yet fewer and fewer of these young people have any exposure to faith. The fastest-growing religious demographic in the US is the “nones” - those who claim no religious affiliation at all – 12% of the US population. And 25% of young people are “nones.” Even Evangelical Christians are failing to keep their young people in church – a majority of them drift away when they grow up, which researchers David Campbell and Robert Putnam attribute to the politicization of religion.

These “nones” are not atheists – 93% of the nones believe in God or a higher power. They are simply people who don’t know what to believe – they dabble in different things – Buddhism, Catholicism, Sufism, New Age. But with no faith tradition, they are left with no solid foundation, no religious community, no spiritual discipline or tradition to fall back on when life gets hard. And studies in Britain show that 94% of children raised without faith will never have it – it’s much harder to help adults develop a relationship with God.

Growing in faith is a lifelong process that for most humans, as for the Son of God, needs to begin in childhood, needs to develop in young people the habits of faith and the conviction of God’s love, and the willingness to reach out and love others as we love ourselves – if they will ever have these gifts.

If you want to know why we’re building a church – this is why. It’s partly for us who are here in this room – we love our church community, we want it to grow. But it’s mostly for the generations who are now children, and for the generations to come after them. Their lives will be changed because of the priority we are giving them.

And if you want to know why we put time and budget money and effort into our children’s and youth programs, this is why. Growing in faith begins when we are young, when our minds are open, when our hearts are ready for God.Because God’s time is now; kairos time is here; and we are the ones whom God calls to bring the news of God’s love to a new generation. God’s love comes bursting in on us, in God’s time, in the form of a child who was loved and made a priority by his parents, and would grow up to become our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.