Sermon for 3.21.10

This week's Scriptures are here:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent5_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 3.21.10

Let me draw a picture for you. This is a picture of Harry and Sally. They live in our area, they have a reasonably stable marriage, they have a couple of children, they own their own home. Their income is roughly 5 times Arizona’s state average, so they are rich, but they don’t feel rich, because a lot of their money has gone to buy a nice house, two cars, nice furniture, electronics, travel etc. So they are sometimes anxious about money, but they are in no danger of starving. They’ve never been in trouble with the law other than a speeding ticket, their work and family life is proceeding more or less according to the expectations their parents had for them, they are doing what they are supposed to do. There’s not a lot of spare time in their schedule– they are very busy with work and family commitments. But when they can find the time, they do spend time thinking about God. They wonder how God looks at the world, they wonder whether there is some deeper meaning and purpose to their lives, they hope that the fact that they are doing the best they can with their lives counts with God & is appreciated.

If this picture of Harry and Sally sounds like you or someone you know, there’s a good reason for that – according to demographic data, this is a picture of the average family in our surrounding area. And for people who fit this profile, our scriptures today have a lot to say.

Let’s begin with Paul, who writes our letter to the Christians in Philippi today. I always get a kick out of Paul, because he says stuff like, “If anyone has reason to boast, I have more!” Paul says that even before he knew anything about Christ – his life was proceeding very well. he was a law-abiding citizen, very well-educated, respected by everyone, a good church-goer who had everything he needed or expected to have. And yet – he met Christ and decided that the one thing worth more in his life than anything else was the power of Christ’s resurrection. For the hope of Christ’s kingdom and Christ’s resurrection, Paul counted everything else in his life, everything he had to be proud of, as rubbish. He devoted his life to making Christ his own, because Christ made Paul his own. It’s an impressive commitment by a man who already had everything.

Isaiah gives us a more interesting view of what God might say to Harry and Sally. And to understand what Isaiah is saying, you need a little background. Two experiences of exile and homecoming formed the foundations of Israel. The first was their experience as slaves in Egypt – starving, beaten, oppressed, humiliated, murdered – God heard their cry and sent Moses to deliver them. Moses led them through wilderness for 40 years, they came to Promised Land. This Exodus experience took a ragtag bunch of slaves and made them a people.

Less well-known is the second experience, much later after Israel was established as a kingdom – Babylon invaded and carted off much of the leadership of Israel to Babylon. Now this Exile experience was much different than the slavery in Egypt. The people taken to Babylon were the educated leaders – they were not slaves – they had opportunities to do well in Babylon, to get education, to work – some of them rose to high and powerful positions in the new land. For them, the most powerful temptation of Exile was not despair, starvation, torture as it was for the suffering slaves in Egypt. For them, the risk was assimilation – that the comforts and opportunities of Babylon might make them forget who they were as the people of God; that they might adopt Babylon ways, Babylon values, Babylon gods – and give up their heritage as the children of God’s covenant.

Babylon understood something important: the way to kill a people is not to enslave them and make them suffer, but to take away their identity, to rob them of their dream, to replace God’s vision for them with another vision that is comfortable but small, dark and confining.

And if this seems long ago and far away, think of Harry and Sally – busy and comfortable and respected – yet tempted by busy schedules and comfortable homes and by a society that has very little interest in following God – to forget their own heritage as children of God and assimilate to the ways of the kingdom around us, the kingdom that tempts us to think that a comfortable lifestyle and a rewarding career are all we need to aspire to, and that God can be a convenient add-on when we have the time.

To a people in tempting, comfortable Exile, a people whose best opportunities for the future seem to lie in forgetting their own identity as God’s children, the prophet Isaiah says this: remember how those slaves were brought out of Egypt, across the Red Sea where Pharaoh’s horses and chariots drowned? Remember how God gave them hope and formed them as a people? Remember the miracles God can do? Remember those things! – and now forget them! Because that’s not all God can do! God has more to say that God hasn’t yet said, and God’s rescue of suffering slaves is not the only thing God is about! God is about to do a new thing! And forget the old thing, the slavery thing, because God can do something that is so transformative, so life-changing, that even a people in Exile among the comforts of Babylon can understand that it is worth giving up everything to be a part of this transformation.

What God has done in the past is only a small measure of what God can do in the future, because our God is the God of surprises, our God can lead us through the wilderness, bring water out of the desert, fulfillment out of emptiness, resurrection out of death itself. And nothing in our lives is worth as much as that prize, the prize of being part of the covenant people of God.

Which brings us to Mary and her crazy, extravagant gesture in our gospel today. Just a few days earlier, Mary had buried her brother Lazarus, and after Lazarus was buried for four days in the tomb, Jesus finally came, and called Lazarus forth from the darkness of death into the sunshine of life. All of Jesus’ miracles in John’s gospel are extravagant gestures, but calling Lazarus from death into life is the most extravagant miracle of all, the one that demonstrates Jesus’ power over death itself, the one that convinces Mary that Jesus is not just a miracle worker but someone who carries the power of God, the creative power of calling forth life.

Hearing about this impossible miracle, the rulers in Jerusalem decide that such power cannot be tolerated – God is the ultimate threat to their own power. So they begin to plot to kill Jesus – meaning Jesus will trade his own life for Lazarus’ – an extravagant outpouring of blood, flesh and spirit that is the new and stunning thing that God is doing through him.

Our gospel writer, John, tells us that this dinner party happens 6 days before the Passover, and John also tells us that Jesus died on Passover. So make note – this is the Saturday before Good Friday. The very next day will be Palm Sunday, and Jesus plans an extravagant gesture, entering into Jerusalem. He’s not planning to slip into Jerusalem through back alleys – he’s going to ride a donkey down the main street with people cheering and acclaiming him king. It’s a calculated gesture, planned to get the attention of the authorities, and Jesus knows exactly how it will turn out, with the even more extravagant gesture of pouring out his blood and his life on the cross.

Everyone else there also knows what is going to happen. They are all scared. Mary knows what is coming, and responds with an extravagant gesture of her own – anointing Jesus with oil worth whole year’s wages. If you think of that tax return you just filed, or are about to file, and you think of that income number at the bottom of page one, and you imagine breaking something worth that much money in honor of a guest, you will understand how extravagant this gesture is.

Judas, the thief, responds with more sensible ideas for how it could be used, but Jesus is adamant that the Son of Man has come, not just to give a small amount of money to the poor, but to bring the extravagant outpouring of the kingdom of God to life in this world, light into darkness, life into death – and therefore everything we have is not too much to pour into dream of God. It is the dream that makes us who we are, the dream that forms our identity as children of God, the dream that surprises us constantly with newness of life.

Don’t remember the things of old, says God! I am about to do a new thing!

If we think that God has already done everything that God ever intends to do; if we think that God has stopped speaking to us, that the scriptures are long ago, far away descriptions of the lives of a few strange old-fashioned people; if we think that God might have had much to say to people mired in slavery 3,000 years ago but not much to say to our comfortable world now - our scriptures tell us differently. Our scriptures tell us that God is constantly calling us forth into the extravagant kingdom of an extravagant God who poured out everything he had for us. Our scriptures tell us that the comfortable lives we create for ourselves are nothing compared to the immeasurable value of the prize God has waiting for us. Our scriptures tell us that God’s dream for ourselves and our community is new and fresh and surprising in every era.

And if Harry and Sally can begin to understand the dream God has for them, they can begin to know the hope that resurrection brings to their own lives, and their lives will be transformed. This is our mission at Church of the Nativity – not a mission to create a loving community or to build a beautiful building or to provide lovely worship, though all of these things are important and all of them will happen. Our mission is to reach into our community and find Harry and Sally, to help them dream God’s dream for their lives, to let them know how deeply they are loved. To transform their lives with the knowledge of the extravagant dream of the extravagant God who gave his own life for each of us.

Sermon for 3.7.10

Scriptures for this Week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent3_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 3.7.10

What is God’s relationship to us, and how is God involved in our lives? These may be some of the most important questions we will ever ask. There are Christians who will answer this question in a spectrum, ranging from God as a distant being who watches with amusement what we do; to, on the other end of the spectrum, some who say that God controls, plans and engineers every event that occurs, from the butterfly’s wing in Ecuador that causes the hurricane in China, to the next breath you or I will take.

And you have heard this last kind of belief expressed in many ways. How about this? A teenage girl is killed in an auto accident, and it turns out she was text messaging while she was driving. A momentary lapse in judgment that cost her her life. At her funeral, someone makes sense of it all by saying, “God needed another angel in heaven, and so he took her.” To which I always want to say – “God, we need her more than you do! Send her back!” Or, an elderly woman develops Alzheimer’s and becomes very difficult for her family to deal with, but they try the best they know how. Her daughter says, “I know God is doing this to teach me a lesson.” Or, a man loses his job and goes for months looking for a way to support his family. Burdened by worry and guilt, he says, “I am being punished for the bad things I did when I was young.” Pat Robertson believed that the Haitian earthquake was divine punishment for a pact with the devil; Jerry Falwell declared that God allowed 9/11 to happen because America was so full of sin.

These are all statements that try to bring order into a chaotic world. When we are in grief, when we are suffering, when we are full of worries and anxieties, when we can’t see our way ahead because the cloud of confusion that surrounds us is too thick, we comfort ourselves by imposing order on our chaos and attributing these events to God.

But are these statements true? Is this what our Bible tells us? These are the questions asked by our scriptures today. These scriptures are asking us: how is God involved in the ordinary events of human life? And like most scriptures, they don’t give us a straightforward answer – they come at the answer sideways, and we have to work at it to get it out.

In Jesus’ time, people were convinced God was intimately involved in their lives. Because they knew that God was a God of justice, they believed that God would ensure that justice happened to all people – and therefore, people who were blessed in their lives must deserve it, and people suffering from a calamity were sure to have deserved it. Which, if you are a person who is reasonably prosperous, in power or on good terms with people in power, with a rewarding family life, is a comfortable thing to believe – it allows you to be complacent about way things are, because those other suffering people must have deserved it. The unfortunate thing is that the people who are suffering are the ones motivated to change the world – but they have no power to change things. So a world where people believe that everything happens according to God’s carefully engineered plan, is a world where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the sick get sicker, the oppressed get more oppressed.

Jesus has a different way of looking at things. A famous 20^th century preacher said that you should preach with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. That’s what Jesus is doing here. Jesus is the preacher who preaches with the Bible in one hand, and the Jerusalem Times in the other.

In the Jerusalem Times today are a couple of stories everyone is talking about – we don’t know these stories from any other source, but we can guess what happened. Apparently a tower called the Tower of Siloam was under construction when it fell, killing 18 construction workers. And in another story, apparently a group of Galileans had come to the temple to perform ritual sacrifices, Pilate grew agitated with them for some reason and sent soldiers to massacre them in the temple. Everyone in Jerusalem is talking about it and speculating why God would not protect people who were right in the middle of praying, for God’s sake. The only way to push back the fear that arises – the fear that nothing can protect you – is to say ah, but those people are different from me – they’re sinners. Blaming the victims for their downfall is the only way of pushing back the darkness of reality – that we live in an unstable and dangerous world. If God is doing this to those other people because they deserved it, then maybe we are safe.

But Jesus says no – that is not the God we worship, and that is not how God is involved in our lives. God is not the punishing judge who makes sure everyone gets what they deserve, and who might visit vengeance on us at any moment – if he were, then we might protect ourselves forever by rigidly adhering to a godly code of conduct and obeying all its rules. Yet Jesus knows that we all break the rules. And Jesus is here to tell us that we are all sinners, just the same as those poor massacred people in the temple, and just the same as the construction workers – we can’t protect ourselves from their fate by pretending we are better. And we can’t excuse ourselves from reaching out to help those in need, either – by pretending that those who are suffering deserve what they are getting. We have an obligation to help.

Because the truth is, we all in some way deserve the same fate – we all have sinned and fallen short of God’s hope for us. We’re no different from those Galileans, or those construction workers at the tower, or the teenage girl killed on the freeway, or earthquake victims in Haiti. But there is good news, and the good news is, God’s mercy is as strong as God’s judgment – and so God was not the one who willed death upon them. Visiting vengeance on sinners is NOT how God is involved in our lives, any more than God is involved by rewarding those who obey the rules.

Remember our opening question: how is God involved in our lives – is God a judge who makes sure everyone gets what they deserve? Jesus says no – that’s not it. Then he tells this story of a fig tree – unproductive – gardener begs for one more year to give it nourishment and help it bear fruit. So God is the gardener who nourishes us and protects us and keeps on giving us second chances.

But if you really want an example of how God is involved in our lives, look at our Old Testament lesson today: the call of Moses. Moses had grown up in Pharaoh’s palace in Egypt, but he had seen an overseer mistreating a Hebrew slave. In a fit of anger, Moses’ passion for justice rises up and he murders the overseer. He becomes a fugitive from justice and has to flee for his life.

So today, here is Moses in the wilderness – a fugitive from justice, a man busy with ordinary work of raising a family, tending his business. A man whose once-consuming passion for justice and freedom has been tamped down to no more than a glowing spark in his heart – something perhaps he remembers with anguish in the dark of the night, something he tries to forget as he has tried to forget his whole past in Egypt. And yet that little spark has not died. And in the middle of his everyday world, something happens. We don’t know what it is that he saw as a burning bush. But in Moses’ heart – the wind stirred, the voice of God spoke as that great and mysterious I AM stirred the embers of his heart to life. And once again his passion for justice woke up and he was called to action.

And when he began to question himself and to question God, to ask how in the world could he do this thing God was inspiring him to do and who in the world would ever believe that he had the right to do it – God said only one thing: you can do it, because I will be with you. And that promise of God’s – I will be with you – was enough to free a nation.

If you want to ask the question – how is God involved in our lives – I think this is how. I don’t think God is a punishing parent, ready to visit revenge on sinners. I think God is the one who created us and knows what is in our hearts. I think God is one who never forgets us, no matter how we try to forget him. I think God is the one who calls to us in the middle of our ordinary, busy days, reawakening the hopes we thought we had forgotten; stirring to life embers of passions we had buried in the busyness of our lives; calling us to new ministries and new ways to make a difference in our world.

And if we start to ask the question of God: how in the world can I do these things you are calling me to do? God has one simple answer for us: you can do it, because I will be with you. I will be with you as you do the things you didn’t think you could do alone. I will be with you as you awaken a passion for justice and mercy in our world. I will be with you, nurturing and encouraging you, as you grow into the image and likeness of God you were created to be; bearing the fruit that I know is in you; living the reality of the kingdom of God on earth.

We want to impose order on this chaotic world, we want to think that life always makes sense and that people always get what they deserve. Yet God is not so easy to categorize – God is something far more mysterious, the great I AM whose name we can never truly understand. We cannot know God’s thoughts or plans – but we can know something better. As Frederick Buechner said: “God doesn’t reveal his grand design. He reveals himself. He doesn’t show us why things are as they are. He shows his face.”

How is God involved in our lives? God is involved as the one who loves us, who calls us, who stirs us to action in his name.

Sermon for 2.7.10

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi5_RCL.html

When I picture scenes like the one in today’s gospel, the pictures that come to my mind are the pictures from my old children’s Bible when I was 8 years old. In that Bible, as I recall, the boat was about 5 feet long, a little dinghy, and a very clean Jesus in white robes was talking to a mostly clean Simon, also in white robes. But it seems that my mental picture is wrong. Archaeologists recently found a first-century boat near the Sea of Galilee, a boat that must have been a lot like Simon’s.

The boat measured 26.5 feet long, 7.5 feet wide, 4.5 feet tall – most men were about my height, 5’5” – so this is a tall, large boat for them. Which makes it interesting to think – how many hundreds of fish would it have taken to fill this boat so high it was in danger of sinking. And what would it have taken for a businessman to walk away from a property like that? Remember that these were poor people – the owner of a boat like this would be a substantial businessman and property owner in his community, respected and prominent enough to have a license from Roman authorities to fish in Caesar’s lake. Simon Peter is a respected and prosperous businessman – and yet he has an encounter with a carpenter and leaves everything behind to start a new life. It takes an earth-shattering experience to do that to someone – to turn someone’s life upside-down so thoroughly that they leave it all behind. It takes an experience we call “conversion.”

Conversion is a word that we don’t use too often in the Episcopal Church – a word that may bring to mind pictures of televangelists sweating on brightly lit stages. For me, it reminds me of a church camp I went to as a teenager. Imagine this camp, on the banks of a creek that here in the desert, we would call a full-fledged, canyon-cutting river – 100 degrees outside and 100 percent humidity – dripping wet, no AC anywhere, hot as blazes. The church part of this camp would happen in a huge white tent with straw on the ground, metal folding chairs, and enormous noisy fans failing to cut through the heat. We would sing some songs, have a prayer, and hear a really long speech about how the speaker was a terrible sinner, then he found Jesus. Around me, kids hearing these speeches would burst into tears and go down to the front of the tent to give their lives to Jesus and be saved. But try as hard as I could to start crying, I couldn’t think of any big and dramatic sins – and that conversion experience never happened to me. The weather outside was hot, but the church services left me cold.

Which stayed with me for a long time as I struggled with the question: what does it mean to be a Christian? Are there different ways to experience conversion? What is conversion for a person like me, and like many Episcopalians, who never has a dramatic emotional conversion experience, but whose life is more of a gradual growing in Christ? What helps me is to think about that boat. Because Simon Peter has an encounter with Jesus that is different from those dramatic emotional experiences. Not that I would ever take anything away from the people who found Jesus in that tent – I just think there are other ways to think about conversion – and to me, the boat is the key.

Today we watch how conversion happens to Simon Peter: fisherman, respected community member, strong provider for his family, owner of a substantial property. This is not Simon’s first experience with Jesus. In the gospel of Luke, we find Jesus first entering Simon’s house and healing his mother-in-law – Jesus enters into Peter’s personal and family life and transforms it. Then Jesus comes to the lake and teaches from Simon’s boat. So second, Jesus enters into Simon’s business and commercial life, the area from which Simon takes his identity, his place in world – a fisherman/businessman. Then Jesus, the novice, the carpenter, makes one more move – he tells Simon to launch out into the deep water – convinces him to take a risk – tells him to do what makes no sense and try what has already been tried.

And Simon is transformed in every possible way by what happens. So many fish are caught that the boats are almost swamped. A miracle happens. But the miracle isn’t the fact that there are suddenly fish in the sea. The miracle is what happens to Simon. In pushing out into the deep water, Simon has made a decision to trust the word of a carpenter who knows nothing about fishing; he has acknowledged that he is standing in presence of a power he has no control over; he has realized that there comes a time when ordinary expertise and everyday hard work cannot provide true abundance.

And Simon’s first response is fear – he falls on his knees and says he is a sinful man. He is not confessing a series of wrongdoings so much as he is expressing the reality that next to God, no human can measure up; he has realized he is not God. But it turns out that realizing that he is not God, but that God’s power can pour through him to create a miracle, is all that is required to make miracles happen.

Simon knows that in response to the new truth of God’s presence with him, that everything must change. He leaves his boat and his business and his life behind, and he strikes out after Jesus on a life’s journey that will end upside down on a cross. Simon changes his life: Jesus tells him that from now on, he will be fishing for people.

Now this may not seem like an attractive mission – it may bring to mind the picture of people hooked and dragged up onto a deck against their will, gasping for breath. For Episcopalians, it may bring to mind the image of a sweaty televangelist on a platform scaring people with images of a fiery hell into swearing allegiance to a theology they don’t understand and a God who frightens them. But the word Jesus uses is not the same word as hauling dying fish out of the water that gives them life – the word Jesus uses means “Taking people alive.” Jesus is telling Simon that he will be rescuing people out of the life-denying water where they are drowning and bringing them into life-giving air, God’s air, God’s life.

Simon has allowed God to enter every part of his life, his personal life, his business life – Simon has trusted God to lead him into the risky deep water, and Simon has emerged with a new identity, through which God’s power will pour into the world, and from which many other people will be brought into new life.

So what does this mean for you and me? If we look at that boat of Simon’s, that boat he left behind, this whole story of Simon’s conversion could be kind of scary. A lot of us own big boats, a lot of us would have a hard time leaving them behind. But I am wondering whether that is what Jesus is calling us to do, after all. Jesus did ask Simon to leave everything behind, and he asks the same of some people today – but he didn’t ask everyone to leave the place where they were. I think today’s story shows us that God’s power can work in us in whatever boat we’re in. God can come to us in our ordinary personal lives, our homes; and God can come to us in the most prosaic of business occupations; and God’s power can call us into deep water to work through us to bring abundant life to all those around us.

If you’ve ever looked at yourself and thought – I’m not a saint, I’m not particularly holy, there aren’t great things I can accomplish for God – well, you’re in the same boat with Simon Peter. God comes to us where we are; and God makes it possible for us to bring life-transforming grace and love to those around us; and God keeps on changing, converting us throughout our lives. At the end of today’s story, Simon’s conversion is not complete. He will keep on making mistakes and doing things wrong. He has many changes ahead of him: Jesus will change his name, to Peter, and Jesus will change his outlook on life, completely on its head. Peter’s process of change will not end until his life ends – conversion is a lifelong process of reorienting himself to God and God’s hopes for him and for the world.

Which brings me back to the question: what is conversion for us? I can answer a couple things conversion is not: it’s not an emotional experience, necessarily – though it can be. It’s not something that takes sinful people and makes them perfect – sadly, we will keep on making mistakes throughout our lives.

What conversion is, is a different question – and I can’t answer what it feels like (which is different for everyone), but I might have an idea of what it looks like. Conversion is a process that can take a lifetime. Conversion means living our lives as though we expect God to show up any minute, displaying his stunning power to bring miracles to life. Conversion means cleaning our homes and doing our work and raising our children and doing our community activities – all with the same expectation – that God is going to show up too, and that God’s power will be at work in us and through us, every moment of the day.

Conversion means living with the realization that though we are sinful people, though we always fall short of the hopes God has for us, though we will never be so old and so good and so wise that we will stop making mistakes, that still through all our imperfections, God will be working through us, bring the power of the gospel to life in our lives. Conversion means that every day, we pray and work and discern and ask ourselves: how does God want to work through me today, right here, in the boat that I’m in right now?

Sermon for 1.24.10

SERMON NOTES FOR 1.24.10

Our body language says much more than our words – so experts in communications tell us. People who are truly masters at communicating with others – famous orators from Ronald Reagan to Martin Luther King Jr. – share one interesting trait. It’s that their body language is perfectly aligned with the words they say. Their body language communicates to us honesty and conviction. And our body language can transform the world.

I’ve recently been reading a fascinating book on world transformation: The Year That Changed the World –by Michael Meyers, about the year 1989. Meyer was Newsweek’s editor for Germany and Eastern Europe from 1988-1992, and he had the privilege of witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Iron Curtain. One of the fascinating things about the book is the part that body language played in this drama of world transformation. He tells the story of how a wink and two shrugs changed the world.

Miklos Nemeth, Hungary’s prime minister, with a small group of advisers, played a vital but very quiet role in the end of the Iron Curtain: they believed it was time for communism to end. In this belief, Nemeth was joining with millions of people who had begun yearning for freedom, believing it could happen – there was a spirit, perhaps caused by Gorbachev’s glasnost, perhaps caused by economic troubles, perhaps caused by a new generation of people hoping for a new way of life – whatever caused it, it was the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, that animated millions of people.

Caught up with this spirit, the zeitgeist of the age, Nemeth decided to open Hungary’s border with Austria, and let Hungarian people travel freely. Nemeth went to a Warsaw Pact Summit in early 1989, explained his plan, and came under withering attack from the other Eastern European leaders present. Sitting across the table from Gorbachev, the new USSR leader and champion of glasnost, listening to the other leaders shouting at him, Nemeth glanced at Gorbachev – and Gorbachev winked. Gorbachev winked, as if to say, “I know these guys are a bunch of clowns.”

With that, Nemeth knew he was home free – Hungary could do what it liked, and the USSR would not interfere. A wink from Gorbachev, and Hungary dismantled the Iron Curtain: body language.

Meyer goes on to tell the story of two shrugs that brought down the Berlin Wall. On November 9, 1989, in East Germany, at 5:00 p.m., official Gunter Schabowski stopped by the president’s office on way to a press conference and asked – anything new to report? The President, Egon Krenz, handed him a press release that was planned for the following day. It said that (under pressure from the Hungarian decision) East Germany’s borders would be opened and people allowed to travel freely. Officials had planned this carefully, with strict rules – there was a visa requirement, only a 30 day stay abroad would be allowed, family members must stay behond – but none of this was explained in the press release, or to Schabowski.

Schabowski read the press release to the press corps and the room was electrified. When would this take effect? someone asked. You can still see the press conference in YouTube clips – although it’s in German you can understand what is happening. Schabowski looks puzzled at the question, puts on his glasses, shuffles through some papers, tries to figure it out. Then – body language: he finally gives a shrug – soforth, he says – immediately.

East Germans who saw it on the evening news began to gather at the Berlin Wall. The border guards had been given no instructions. Meyer, standing in East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie where thousands of people are gathering, watches a border guard in his little enclosure making phone call after phone call, trying to get instructions and failing to reach anyone. Finally, the commander gives a shrug – body language – and says “Open the gates.” And with that, the gates were opened – and the Wall came down. On the strength of one Soviet wink and two ineloquent German shrugs, the world was transformed overnight. It’s all about body language.

Our body language says a lot more than our words, when we act as the Body of Christ. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians talks about who we are as Christians: more than just a collection of individuals forming a club or even a community. We are a body, a system, an organism –all interdependent on one another. It’s not that the poor need the rich, not that the earthquake victims in Haiti need the aid of their American brothers and sisters – it’s that every Christian needs every other Christian – we all have gifts to give each other. Every member of this church, this Body of Christ, is dependent on every other. Each of us has gifts that are vital and unique; this Body cannot accomplish its mission without the gifts of every member.

And, like every organism, we speak with our bodies as well as our words. The Body of Christ has many well-known words. But actions speak louder than words – our actions, our Body language tell the world what our true mission is. Too often, the Church’s actions have told the world that its mission has to do with things like holding onto power, creating structures of authority. But if we want to know what our true mission is intended to be, if we want to know what kind of world transformation Jesus is truly calling this Body to be God’s instrument in achieving, we should look carefully at today’s Gospel.

Jesus’ first sermon is what many people call his “mission statement” – he quotes from the prophet Isaiah and says, today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. The words that Isaiah said so long before have now become more than words – they have been embodied, they have taken shape and are being lived out in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. And the mission of that embodied Christ is this: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

Christ’s mission is a mission that brings together words and action; it is a mission that proclaims the good news of God embodied in Jesus Christ, and it is a mission that puts those words into concrete and measurable action, in opening the eyes of the blind, giving freedom to those who are oppressed, to give the good news of God’s salvation to the poor and the hopeless. It is Christ’s Body language in the world, as Jesus’ body language put his mission into practice – in healings, teachings, compassion for the poor. And this is your mission and it is mine, as members of the Body of Christ.

St. Teresa of Avila said: Christ has no body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out upon the world. Ours are the feet with which he goes about doing good. Ours are the hands with which he blesses his people now. Christ has no body on earth but ours.

We are the Body of Christ, and in this Church of the Nativity, in the year 2010, this mission of Christ is our mission: Christ’s body language is ours. The Holy Spirit is the zeitgeist that animates this Body of Christ, the Holy Spirit anoints us for God’s mission here on earth. And we have started to accomplish this mission, here at Nativity –through our words and actions, through education, outreach, service to community, our love for each other – we are proclaiming and doing the work of Christ. I invite you to stay after this service for our annual meeting and consider with us, how Christ is calling us, his Body here on earth, to carry out his mission, here, today.

But first- one more story from The Year that Changed the World. Just a couple of weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, came the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia – the Velvet Revolution, engineered by Vaclav Havel. Meyer was there too – and he tells the story of a rally in Letna Park, Prague.

Snow began to filter down, lightly at first and then more thickly. A horse-drawn cart left the park, decked out with banners and the wings of angels, and the people began to follow. One by one, the half million at Letna joined hands and in single file began to walk toward Wenceslas Square, more than a mile and a half away, scarcely saying a word in the gently falling snow. For me, this was the moment [the Velvet Revolution was won]. To this day, I can hardly remember it without tears. The rickety old cart with its angel wings, the bells on the horses. The people following, always hand in hand. It was so gentle, so strong and irresistible. Of course I followed, too. The procession slowly wound its way through the paths and woodlands of the park, now covered in white. It snaked down the medieval streets behind the castle and then into the square in front of the darkened presidential palace…. For hours the procession passed. Half of Prague joined the human chain. From the castle it wound down the steep hills into Mala Strana, past the great baroque cathedral, its ornate spires lit in the snowy night … through the narrow streets of Old Town and finally into Narodni Street, where lit candles marked the [savage massacre] of November 17…. And still the procession came, everyone swinging their arms skipping, happy, joyous. The first of the marchers had reached Wenceslas Square … while the last still waited patiently at Letna, high in the snowy hills. Hand in hand, they bisected the city. Hand in hand, they drew a line. Here, on one side, stood the people, on the other their oppressors. This was the moment. Everyone had to choose. From above the city, I looked out at Prague, lighted and luminous in the snow, its people dancing. O silent night. O holy night. Never in my life have I seen anything so beautiful. I doubt I ever will again.

Brothers and Sisters, we are the Body of Christ. We are the Body God has created here, to stand in the dark and the cold, between this world’s people and its oppressors, between God’s beloved children and the forces of evil that keep us from our true humanity. We follow the savior who proclaims freedom to all who are oppressed – oppressed in body, mind or spirit – oppressed by economic circumstance or physical illness – oppressed by spiritual emptiness or simple yearning for a deeply meaningful life. We are the ones whom God has sent, to proclaim good news to all the world. And we are the ones to whom Christ says, today: the Spirit of the Lord is upon us – because God has anointed us to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.