Gospel

Pentecost, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

You are phenomenal.

Did you know that?

The Holy Spirit thinks so.

We think of Pentecost as an event that happened thousands of years ago. We remember vaguely that after the ascension, Jesus’ followers locked themselves in a room and waited. They prayed and prayed and finally the Holy Spirit came down from heaven like fire and changed those people forever. But Pentecost isn’t only a historical event.

Pentecost happens every day. The gift of the Holy Spirit continues to blow through the Church, continues to guide ordinary followers of Jesus like us, continues to animate our life together. So, what does the Holy Spirit do?

In our Gospel of John reading, we see Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit onto his followers, just as the Creator God breathed life into Adam. The world around us constantly tries to deflate us. The breath of God animates and fills us, so we can participate in creating the Kingdom of God.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself walking around, shoulders slumped, as I processed all the #YesAllWomen tweets on Twitter. I don’t know if you followed that movement, but after the Isla Vista shooting, it turned out that part of the cocktail of mental illness and gun violence that motivated the shooter was a deep loathing for women. He saw women as objects to conquer and deeply resented that no women showed interest in being conquered by him.

A day later, one million tweets with the hashtag YesAllWomen flooded twitter. Each tweet recounted a woman’s incident of feeling afraid or dismissed because of her gender. Women recounted instances of being followed, being assaulted, being threatened. The point was no matter whether a woman has been assaulted or not, nearly every woman in this country lives with the reality that she could experience violence. We lock our cars as soon as we get in them. We avoid walking alone at night. We run in the street instead of the woods. We tell people who come on to us that we are married, even if we aren’t, because we know rejection may cause violence. None of this was a surprise to me. The security cameras are one of my favorite features of my gym. I was really grateful when we added flood lighting to the outside of the parish house. I live with the same anxieties other women do every day and don’t think about them much. But something about the veil coming off, seeing the breadth of the problem communicated by hundreds of thousands of women deflated me. Does the world care so little about half the human population that we allow this sort of thing to continue?

But here is the hope of Pentecost. Where the world deflates and demeans us, whether we are men or women, the Holy Spirit fills us up with the breath of God. After all, the remarkable part of the story of Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit descended on everyone in that upper room in the book of Acts—men and women, young and old. And then the first act of the Holy Spirit was to give these followers of Jesus the ability to tell the good news of Jesus’ resurrection to people of every language. Jerusalem was an international city and Jews from many countries were there. Suddenly, people were hearing the good news in their native tongues! They were important. The Holy Spirit wanted to reach out to them where they were. The Holy Spirit didn’t ask them to conform to one way of being, the Holy Spirit connected to these people as their full individual selves. These international Jews didn’t have to become someone else, speak Hebrew or Greek, to be enveloped in God’s love. God loved them right there.

At its inception, the Christian church was an incredibly egalitarian community. This changed over history, but the Holy Spirit’s first concept for us was for all of us to be filled with the breath of God as we worship and serve God together as peers. All of us matter. All of us have work to do for the kingdom. God loves and can use each of us, no matter our age, gender, or ethnicity. All of this is still true, whether the world believes it or not.

Coincidentally, right as all this #YesAllWomen writing was happening on Twitter, Maya Angelou died. No one could accuse Dr. Angelou of being a deflated person. After all, she wrote the lines:

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size

But when I start to tell them,

They think I’m telling lies.

I say, It’s in the reach of my arms,

The span of my hips,

The stride of my step,

The curl of my lips.

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman, That’s me.

That seems like a woman deeply confident in herself, doesn’t it? Well, did you know that Maya Angelou did not speak from the age of eight until she turned thirteen? When she was eight years old she was assaulted by her stepfather. She told her brother, who told the rest of the family and a few days later her stepfather was murdered, probably by one of her uncles. She became convinced that her words had killed him and so she remained silent for five years. The love of God and of a good teacher helped her regain her courage and her ability to speak as she and her teacher immersed themselves in literature.

Maya Angelou’s faith and deep connections with other human beings sustained her the rest of her days. Listen to what she says about her relationship with God:

“I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.”

The Holy Spirit, and a whole lot of love of the faithful adults around her, transformed a frightened little girl into an incredibly courageous adult woman whose writing changed the world and gave many other little girls and women hope that they too, could be courageous. Dr. Angelou became a teacher and cultivated deep relationships with hundreds of students, giving back into the world the love she was given. The Holy Spirit has a lot of loving for us to do in the world. But before we go out to the love the world, the Holy Spirit’s job is to remind us that we are loved. The Holy Spirit picks us up, reminds us that God cares about us, and heals the wounds we have been given by a world that chips away at our souls. The world is not going to change all at once, but if each of us who professes to be a Christian, in Angelou’s words “internalize, ingest” that we are children of God, how God could use us to change the world!

We have huge, societal problems—and we won’t be able to break them down all at once, but with the Holy Spirit’s help, we can make a world a little more like God’s kingdom. This week I got a phone call from a woman named Anna. Anna is a Friends with Flowers volunteer. One of the recipients of the flowers was not able to receive them this week, since they were in the middle of moving to a new home. Anna called me to let me know that she took the flowers to the Cedars, a nursing home. She took them there, because every day on her commute, she passed a cheerful old man who waved at her from his beautiful flower garden. One day Anna noticed he wasn’t there any more. Unlike most of us, who would have kept driving, and forgot he existed within a week or two, she pulled over and asked a neighbor where he was. The neighbor shared that the man with the flowers was a 101 year old WWII vet and former minister, and he was too frail to live alone any more, so had moved to the Cedars. And so, when Anna found herself with these flowers she went to the Cedars and asked for his man, whom she had never met, told him how much his flowers and daily cheer meant to her, and delivered him some flowers from our church.

This seems to me like the work of the Holy Spirit. Do you see how this story lifts up the humanity of everyone involved? Do you see how the bonds of love are strengthened? Do you see how this veteran and this SPIVY member could see the light of Christ in each other’s eyes? So much separates us and dehumanizes us in the world, but if we let it, the Holy Spirit will work within us to chip away at those dehumanizing forces in the world with the light of the Gospel—that all are loved, all are redeemed, all are held in the embrace of God’s love and light. We are all phenomenal—whether we are men or women—because we are loved by a phenomenal God. Amen.

 

If you are experiencing domestic violence and live in the Charlottesville area, please contact the Shelter for Help in Emergency.

Easter 5, Year A, 2014

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A few years ago This American Life producer Nancy Updike’s stepfather was dying. He had hospice care and Ms. Updike was incredibly impressed by the competence of the hospice nurses because she herself felt so helpless and anxious and at loose ends in the face of his death. So, she ended up producing a half hour segment of This American Life that followed hospice nurses at Kaplan Family Hospice House in Massachusetts.

Hospice care workers are a rare breed of human being. So many of us do all we can to fight death, or to ignore death while all day long every day, hospice nurses and doctors help people prepare to die. They face what the rest of us are afraid to face, and they face it with dignity and respect. They become a bridge for patients and their families between this world and the next. They understand the complex physical, emotional and spiritual process of death. At one point on the program a nurse, Patti told the following story:

“Yeah. Or [the patient is] comatose and the loved ones keeps saying, he’s waiting for his brother to get here on Saturday. They’re coming from Florida on Saturday. And I’m, inside, rolling my eyes thinking it’s Tuesday. He’s going to die on Wednesday or Thursday. He’s not going to be here on Saturday for when his brother arrives from Florida. And then the brother arrives at Logan, shows up at the Kaplan House at 12:30, and the patient dies at 1:00. And they say to me, I told you. He just needed Billy to come from Florida. And it’s like, what?”

Patti and other nurses like her know that death is not just physical. Sometimes a patient needs to see someone; sometimes they need a priest to do last rites or to hear a last confession. But even hospice nurses, the closest thing we have to death experts in our culture, can’t know for certain what happens after death. None of us can really, though they sure are marketing the heck out of the movie Heaven is for Real, aren’t they! Scripture does give us some clues about our life after death, but even the New Testament’s messages are muddied. In Paul’s letters he seems to have the understanding that all humans will be raised in a resurrection at the same time. In other parts of the New Testament, heaven is spoken of as a place where we will unite with God.

Even Jesus did not have an easy relationship with death. When his friend Lazarus dies, he weeps. When he faces his own death in the garden of Gethsemane, he prays for release. And so the words we read today from the Gospel of John are not a flippant response to his disciples’ worries, but are rooted in Jesus’ experience of being both human and divine. He knows the grief and fear of death, but he also knows that God has plans for us beyond our deaths. In this passage, his disciples aren’t so worried about their own deaths. They are worried about what they are going to do without Jesus. Our passage is part of a long speech that is called Jesus’ farewell discourse. When I was almost college aged, my dad started peppering me with advice, “Carpe Diem! Don’t pick the sick puppy! Don’t merge with anyone you don’t want to become!” He knew he couldn’t follow me to University of Richmond, but he really wanted me to take the values of our family with me to college. In the same way, Jesus is giving his disciples a framework that they can use after his death, resurrection and ascension. Jesus is reassuring them and giving them marching orders. And while Jesus’ main point is not to describe the afterlife to his disciples, his words do tell us a great deal about God’s plan for human beings after our deaths. Jesus tells the disciples his death is necessary. He has to leave the disciples in order to prepare a place for them. In John, rather than resurrection language, Jesus imagines heaven as a metaphorical place—a place with plenty of room for everyone. And blessed Thomas, ever practical, wants to know how the heck they are going to find that place? If Jesus is gone, does he plan to leave them a map? Detailed instructions? Thomas stands in for us. We want more details! More information! How do we get to heaven? Jesus then reassures Thomas that Thomas has all he needs. Thomas doesn’t need a map, because he is already in relationship with the one who prepares the dwelling places and leads us to the dwelling places.

This verse—I am the way and the truth and the life is often used as exclusionary—If Jesus is the way, then there is no other way, but Jesus isn’t addressing other religions here. Jesus is addressing Thomas’ specific concerns. Thomas doesn’t need anything but Jesus, and even if Jesus leaves, Thomas is going to be okay, because Jesus will be working on Thomas’ behalf. This exchange between Jesus and Thomas is a gift to us.

No matter how many times we ask for a map—when am I going to die? What will it be like? Will I feel pain? Will there be white light? Will I see my family?–we won’t get answers. Those answers are only knowable after our death. What the New Testament does tell us is that God loved us so much that he sent Jesus to live and die for us so we may share in God’s eternal life. And all we need to get there is Jesus, and Jesus has already done the work necessary to get us there. When Jesus reassures his disciples that they will be okay, that he has them covered, we get to eavesdrop and be comforted. As we heard last week, the Gospel of John is also the Gospel in which Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd, a shepherd who chases after every last one of his sheep, who makes sure everyone is tucked safely into the sheepfold. Jesus’ promise to his disciples is his promise to us—he is the way and the truth and the life for us, too. We are his sheep. We are his disciples. While we may face our own deaths with fear or dread, we can also know that even in the midst of our anxiety, Jesus is preparing a place for each of us. We are safe within the sheepfold of his love. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Easter 3, Year A, 2014

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The story of the Road to Emmaus is one of the most touching accounts of the post-Resurrection Jesus that we have.  Two dejected followers of Jesus, devastated by the death of the man they respected, are walking away from Jerusalem, away from the trauma of the Cross.  Alongside them comes a companion who begins to tell them all about the scriptural basis for the Messiah’s life and death.  They insist he comes home with them and as they break bread together their eyes are opened and they realize their companion is none other than the risen Jesus.  You can almost feel the goose bumps rise on your flesh as they realize with whom they have been talking.  The Road to Emmaus story is our story.  Cleopas could as easily be me or (fill in names from congregation) or you.  The journey Cleopas and his traveling companion go on is the journey we go on every Sunday here at church.

We come in, and we too are overwhelmed by the world. We carry with us oil tankers on fire in nearby Lynchburg.  We carry with us horribly botched executions is Oklahoma.  We carry with us all those who lost their lives and homes in the floods this week.  We carry with us 230 kidnapped Nigerian girls.  We carry with us the painful words of rich men, which expose the ugly racism in our country.  We carry with us our own personal losses, failures and disappointments from the week. We carry with us the worries of our friends and families.  We are weighed down.

And yet Jesus comes along side us, even if we are as gloomy as Cleopas.  Just as Jesus shared the word with Cleopas and his friend, we share the word together.  We remember God’s love for his people by reading aloud the words we have been given in Scripture.  We remember God’s faithfulness to Israel, we remember the good news of Jesus’ resurrection.  We share the stories to remind ourselves that the God of the Universe always reaches out to us and asks us to be in loving relationship with him.  We shake off the false realities we hear all week—that our identity should be rooted in how we look or how much money we make or how smart we are—and we are reminded that our identity rests in being beloved creatures of God.  We are no more and no less.

And then like Cleopas, we invite Jesus to stay with us.  We kneel as we confess the ways we have not been faithful to Jesus.  And in our brokenness, we create space for Jesus.  Intimacy cannot exist without honesty.  Just as a friendship is strengthened by moments of vulnerable sharing, our friendship with Jesus blooms when we are most self aware and honest when we are in conversation with him.  We invite Jesus into the homes of our hearts and then suddenly Jesus takes over and invites us to feast with him.

In Cleopas’s home, Jesus took, blessed, broke and gave bread, the same motions he made on Maundy Thursday and the same motions we make here every week.  Breaking bread is something completely ordinary.  Whether it is pouring out the Cheerios to the kids as you get them ready for school or pulling apart an Albemarle Baking Company baguette that you pass around the table for friends, we break bread together daily.  When we make special meal for someone, it is a way we give ourselves, a way we show our love.  In the same way, in feeding his followers, Jesus extends himself toward them in love.

In the Eucharist, of course, we believe we consume the spiritual presence of Jesus–A Jesus who wants to be so close to us that he becomes part of our very bodies.  In his book With Burning Hearts:  A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life Henry Nowen writes,

Jesus is God-for us, God-with-us, God-within-us.  Jesus is God giving himself completely, pouring himself out for us without reserve.  Jesus doesn’t hold back or cling to his own possessions.  He gives all there is to give.  “Eat, drink, this is my body, this is my blood…this is me for you.

It is in this eating and drinking that Cleopas and his friend’s eyes are opened, they recognize Jesus, they recognize that their hearts burn within them from being in the presence of the holy.  And on Sunday mornings, as we gather around the Eucharist table, your heart may burn within you, too.  After all, for a brief moment you are united with the very Jesus who sat at Cleopas’ table.  For a brief moment you are united with everyone in this room as we share the same body and blood.  You remember that you are holy, too.  You remember that the God of the universe chooses to live within you.

At the very moment Cleopas’ eyes are opened, Jesus disappears.

Isn’t that strange?  For three years, Jesus’ followers hung on his every word, but they never really “got it”.  They were in his presence, but did not have full intimacy with him.  And now, the moment his followers understand, he vanishes.  They do not need his physical presence any more.  His spiritual presence is with them, in the communion they shared.  In his absence, they can have deeper intimacy with him than they did three years in his presence.

The same holds true for us.  We do not need the physical Jesus with us, because we have the gift of the Holy Spirit, who enables deep communion with Jesus and the Father.  The spirit descends on this table and transforms our wafers and port into the real, spiritual presence of Christ.  And that presence lives within you, giving you strength and courage to go out into the world.

We don’t get to stay in the safety of this sanctuary.  We are called to go back into the world.  After their encounter with Jesus, Cleopas and his friend run right back to the dangerous world they were fleeing.  They run back to Jerusalem, find their friends, and tell them the incredible news of Jesus’ resurrection.

At the end of every service here, you hear a dismissal.  Sometimes it is “Go in peace to Love and Serve the Lord!”  Sometimes it is “Go forth in the name of Christ!”  Whatever we dismissal we use, the message is the same.  You can’t stay here.  You must go back into the world, with all of its challenges and loss.  But you do not go into the world alone.  You go with the presence of Christ within you.  And Christ will give you the courage and wisdom you need to face the world with grace and love.  You are a now a Christ-bearer.  You have good news to share.  Go, and may Christ be with you.

Amen.

 

This structure of this sermon is heavily indebted to Nowen’s With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life, quoted above.

Palm Sunday, Year A, 2014

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During our Lenten program the last few weeks, I’ve been helping Daniel and Audi with the kids as they prepared to sing for you all today!  One day, when Daniel was leading a conversation about Palm Sunday, one of the children raised his hand and said something along the lines of, “Why do the same people who cheer Jesus on then go on to murder him?  It’s creepy!”

He is absolutely right, the events we read on Palm Sunday are super, super creepy and deeply unsettling.  How do the same human beings go from shouting Hosanna to their king to screaming “Let him be crucified!” And it raises an even more unsettling question.  Does the same conflict lodge in our hearts?  Would we so easily betray our God?

I like to think of this as The West Wing versus House of Cards problem of the human condition.

Stay with me.  For those of you who don’t know, The West Wing was a drama written by Aaron Sorkin which aired on NBC from 1999-2006. House of Cards is currently in its second season and can be found on Netflix.

Both shows are about United States politics and both have quite a bit of focus on the Presidency and the President’s staff.

But the two shows have very different points of view.  The West Wing is largely about the importance of serving the country.  Episodes focus on inter-personal relationships, yes, and there is plenty of romance, but the characters seem genuinely invested in passing policy to make the country a better place.

The fictional President Bartlett was committed to bettering the country even if it hurt him politically.  At one point, when he is about to make a controversial decision, his chief of staff, Leo, gathers the staff and says the following:

We’re gonna lose a lot of these battles, and we might even lose the White House, but we’re not gonna be threatened by issues; we’re gonna put them front and center. We’re gonna raise the level of public debate in this Country, and let that be our legacy.

He then asks each of the staff if that sounds all right to them, and they each reply

I serve at the pleasure of the President of the United States.

And not only did characters focus on big, arching policy, they were even interested in the little guy.  Every so often the show would focus on some average citizen who had a specific problem or concern.  The most moving of which was probably when Toby was approached by the police because a homeless man who had been wearing a coat Toby had donated to charity had been found dead.  Rather than simply distancing himself from this stranger, Toby begins to learn about him, and ultimately fights for him to be buried with military honors, when he discovers the homeless man was a veteran. Plots almost always brought the human stories of policy to the forefront.

Even the main characters were shown to serve their country sacrificially.  C.J. Crane gave up a half million dollar salary as a PR flack in California.  Sam Seaborne walked out of a lucrative law firm. Ainsley Hayes gave up becoming a powerful player in Republican politics to serve as a lawyer in a democratic administration, because she believed it was the best way to use her gifts to serve the country.

The West Wing presents a really positive view of humanity.  It shows the hopeful, optimistic, cooperative, joyful parts of our soul that we see displayed by Jesus’ followers on Palm Sunday.  Jesus’ followers have seen the face of God and they are ready to celebrate and honor God.  Unfortunately, humanity is more complicated than the picture presented on The West Wing and on Palm Sunday.

House of Cards, the Netflix political drama, presents the other extreme of humanity.  The main characters are Frank Underwood and his wife Claire.  When the series begins, Frank is majority leader of the House of Representatives.  Like President Bartlett he is a Democrat, but the resemblance ends there.  Frank’s only goal is to accrue power.  And he’ll accrue power using any means necessary.  He bribes, he lies, he has affairs, he blackmails, he even has people killed.  All so that he can move up the chain of power.  At one point he turns to the camera and says, ““For those of us climbing to the top of the food chain, there can be no mercy. There is but one rule: hunt or be hunted.”  There is a plot thread about a piece of policy, but the content of the policy doesn’t really matter to Frank.  All that matters is that he can manipulate the situation so that he comes out a winner.  There aren’t very many good hearted people in the show.  Those that are usually end up losing their jobs or their lives.

Honestly, I’m not sure Herod and Pilate rose to the level of Frank Underwood’s villainy.  But they were part of the political machine that was so interested in power and status quo that they were willing to kill God to keep their thrones.

Most actual human beings fall somewhere in-between the worlds of The West Wing and House of Cards.  We are more like the crowd in Jerusalem.  Excited about God one minute, and another minute willing to turn our back on Jesus if it means we can gain more power, money or even more comfort.

We seek to serve the common good, until it makes more sense for us to go into a career that will pay off our student loans.

We care about the downtrodden, but we buy our jeans from companies that force their employees to work in dangerous conditions.

Someone even recently shared with me that their seminary classmates would steal books others needed for papers.  These are SEMINARY STUDENTS!

We are a mixed up people!  We want to follow God, but just can’t seem to stick with it.  How many of you abandoned your Lenten resolutions?  I know I did!

How does Jesus react to this change of mood in Jerusalem?  Does he try to run away when things go south?  No.  Does he turn to the hostile mob and yell at them for their betrayal?  No.  Jesus stays the course.  Jesus continues to love humanity, even in the face of our betrayal.  He calmly journeys to the Cross even with full knowledge of how fickle humanity can be when it comes to loving God.

He knows that we are The West Wing people who will join the Peace Corps and volunteer at soup kitchens and he knows that we are House of Cards people who will betray those closest to us, who will be unforgivably selfish.  He knows all of this about us, probably even before Palm Sunday.  He’s probably learned about it from watching his disciples, from living with a family, from being human.  He’s probably learned this about us from reading Scripture.  Abraham was a hero and a liar.  Moses was a brave leader and a murderer.  King David delighted in the Lord and had his lover’s husband killed.  Scripture is full of the contradictions of human beings.  Jesus has probably felt these contradictory impulses rise in his own spirit, and turned to his Father for help.

In fact, this conflict we have, of being lovingly made in God’s image but also spectacularly sinful, is why God became incarnate in Jesus in the first place.  And even when Jesus experiences this awful tension, he does not abandon us.  He walks toward the cross.  He stays true to himself.  He obeys his Father, because we cannot.

Jesus did not abandon the crowd at Palm Sunday.  Jesus did not abandon the crowd on Good Friday.

Jesus does not abandon us, either.  Whether we are at our most Christlike, selfless and giving, or whether we’re completely horrible and greedy, Jesus walks alongside of us.  But Jesus doesn’t leave us where we are.  Jesus beckons us to follow him, to walk the path he has laid for us, to celebrate our relationship with him by living into our best selves.  And he gives us the Holy Spirit to strengthen our resolve and to give us peace.

We invite you to join us on Jesus’ journey this week, as we remember our rejection of God, and God’s triumphant defeat of our apathy.  The story of Holy Week is your story, your story of betrayal and redemption, a story more exciting than any television drama.  Don’t miss out.

Amen.

(Quotes from The West Wing found in Nathan Paxton’s wonderful article, “Virtue from Vice:  Duty, Power, and The West Wing.)

Lent 3, Year A, 2014

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God was doing something new.

Thousands of years before Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, the Samaritans and Jews had fallen out.  The Samaritans are the descendants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Jews are the descendants of the Southern Kingdom of Judah.  At one time, they had been united with a common Torah and understanding of God, but over the generations, they pulled further and further apart.  The Jewish community added other Scripture, like the Prophets to their canon.  The Samaritans intermixed with the various peoples that conquered them.  The Jews worshiped in Jerusalem.  The Samaritans worshiped at Mt. Gerezim.  Jews went out of their way to avoid Samaria.

But not Jesus.  God was doing something new.

Jesus goes out of his way to walk through Samaria.  And then when his disciples are off trying to find some lunch, Jesus walks right up to a Samaritan.  And not just any Samaritan.  He walks up to a woman.  And Jesus doesn’t walk up to a woman Samaritan at some appropriate place.  Oh no, he goes right up to that Samaritan woman at a well.  Now, that would be like Jesus walking into a restaurant, finding the single lady at the bar, and sidling up right next to her.  If you’re familiar with the book of Genesis, the well is where love happens.  It’s where sparks fly, where marriage proposals are made, where first encounters happen.

But Jesus doesn’t care about convention.  Because God is doing something new.

This poor Samaritan woman gets a bad rap.  When we hear that she’s had five husbands, we think to ourselves, “Oooh, that hussy!”  But Jesus never says that she has sinned, and never offers to forgive her.  For all we know she could have been widowed five times.  Or been left because she was barren.  All we know is that her life has been hard.  Defying all convention, Jesus decides to engage her in a profoundly spiritual question.  He describes himself as someone who can provide living water.  Instead of dismissing him, the Samaritan woman is intrigued and begins a theological conversation with him.

God was doing something new.

The woman starts to suspect that Jesus is something special—maybe a prophet?  But she just doesn’t know how to resolve this fundamental difference between Jews and Samaritans.  She reminds Jesus that his people worship in Jerusalem and her people worship at Mt. Gerezim.  How can this fundamental division be resolved?  Is one place right and one place wrong?  Even if Jesus can provide her living water, what are the long term implications?  The Samaritan woman is very practical.

What happens next is where Jesus blows the Samaritan woman’s mind.  The Samaritan woman will go on to be a legend. In the Orthodox tradition she is called St. Photine—the luminous one—a woman who converted many, many people.  So what does Jesus say to her?  What is so utterly life changing?

Imagine going back in time two hundred years from now.  Imagine sitting down with your great-great-grandparents and explaining to them that in the future, you won’t need to be in the same room with a person to talk with them.  In fact, in the future, you can be anywhere in the world, pick up a plastic box, stare into it, and have a live conversation with someone you love.  Mind blowing right?  No longer are we bound by physical presence.  We can relate to each other wirelessly.

Well, God was doing something new and similar.  Rather than having a certain place be people’s link toward him, rather than making people choose between Jerusalem and Mt. Gerezim, God was going to do something new.  God was going to be liberated from the constraints humans had put on him.  Instead of being worshiped at Jerusalem, God was going to be worshiped in “spirit and in truth”.

The geographic and biological boundaries that had separated Jew from non-Jew were going to be erased.  No longer would God belong to one people or one place. Living water would not just be offered to women like Mary, but women like Photine as well.  Living water will be available to everyone, those who fit in and those who don’t.  Those who have had easy lives and those who have had difficult lives.  Those who have never married and those married five times.  The living water doesn’t just lie still in its cup.  Living water bubbles up, overflows, and blesses all kinds of people.

God was doing something new.  And God is doing something new.

The church is always changing.  We started out as small groups of people meeting in people’s homes in the middle east and now we have congregations large and small scattered all over the world.  You all have seen your own fair share of changes over the last few years.  You have two new priests and half your lay staff has overturned in the last year.  There are kids in church now and the music is a little different and I’m sure Eric and I have different liturgical, preaching and personal styles than you are used to.  That kind of change can be exciting, but it can also be unnerving.  Church is a place where a lot of us feel safe, so when it starts to feel unfamiliar, we feel uneasy.

The larger church is going through changes, too.  In some ways, it feels like we’re at the end of an era.  We are talking about downsizing our national church offices and even possibly moving them out of New York.  The College of Preachers closed, the Alban Institute just announced it was closing, and even the Virginia Seminary Chapel burned down a few years ago.

I’ve seen two reactions to all this national change.  One is to try to put the Episcopal Church in hospice care and mourn what it used to be.  Mourn the loss of our power and social standing. Mourn the loss of our buildings, some of which need to be closed.  Mourn the loss of what felt familiar and comfortable.

However, I’ve also seen people who believe that God is doing something new.  Church is not the center of our culture any more.  Suddenly, rather than being part of the fabric of society, the church exists on the margins of society.  Right where it was two thousand years ago, actually!

God is doing something new, but not something that hasn’t been done before!

In our own diocese, St. Paul’s in Richmond is experimenting with doing things in a new way by hiring a priest, the fabulous Melanie Mullen to be what they call a downtown missioner.  Melanie’s job isn’t to drum up membership or serve the poor from within the walls of St. Paul’s.  Melanie’s job is to be in the community, get to know neighborhood non profits and businesses and individuals and then learn how the people of St. Paul’s can serve them.  Her job is to bring the church into the world.

Like Jesus’ living water, the people of St. Paul’s, Richmond are experimenting with bubbling up and over the line of their property and into the world around them.

We are blessed to worship a God that continually offers us a cup of living water, even in the midst of change.  Where is living water bubbling up in our community?  How is God blessing us? What gifts and energies are we being called to pour over our walls into our community?

May we, like the woman at the well, shine the light of Christ into the world.

Amen.

 

Lent 1, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

When you were a small child throwing a fit did your mother ever point to a well-behaving child and say, “Look how nicely Johnny is behaving?  Why don’t you behave more like Johnny?”  Poor you!  Unfavorably compared to someone who wasn’t even your flesh and blood! You probably carried on with your fit, thoroughly unimpressed with Johnny.  We do this all the time—unfavorably comparing our bosses to other bosses, spouses to other spouses, our selves to other men and women.

We pull Jesus into this, too.  We read the temptation story and think, “Ah, man, I should be better at resisting temptation. Why can’t I just be more like him?”  We read Jesus’ time in the desert as a kind of morality play.

But the temptation story is not one of Jesus’ parables.  It is not a morality play.  The story of Jesus’ temptation is an epic battle between good and evil.  The temptation story is not a sweet PBS Saturday morning cartoon intended to teach our children morals.  The temptation story is The Lord of the Rings, Rocky, Star Wars.

Jesus is on an epic quest to save humanity.  Humanity is enslaved.  Not by each other, but by death and by sin.  No matter what humans have done, they have not been able to get out of the grip of these evil powers.  Death vanquished every human.  And sin wrapped its claws around people, too.  Sin ruined people’s lives, isolating them from each other and from God.  Jesus is going to go into the world and save humanity from both sin and death, but first he has to get ready.

Jesus has been baptized and is about to enter into his public ministry.  But before he makes any speeches, before he meets his first disciple, he needs to get ready.  In any epic battle movie worth its salt, you get a training montage.  Hermione leads the Hogwarts students in drills Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Yoda trains Luke in The Empire Strikes Back.  Mr. Miyagi teaches Danny “wax on, wax off” in the Karate Kid.  All these “heroes “needed time to prepare.

In Jesus’ case, it is the Spirit who leads him into the desert.  The Spirit doesn’t stick around and shadow box with Jesus or make Jesus run laps.  The Spirit disappears and leaves Jesus alone.  For what Jesus needs to get him through his ministry isn’t physical strength, but spiritual strength.  Fighting the powers of sin and death will take every ounce of integrity and steadiness that Jesus has.  After forty days of prayer and fasting, the Devil, also described as the tempter, shows up.  Now the Devil isn’t particularly hostile here, in fact, he’s almost friendly.  After all, the Devil just wants what is good for Jesus, right?  If Jesus is really the Son of God, he should enjoy the perks!

First the Devil tempts Jesus to turn some stones into bread.  After all, Jesus has been fasting for weeks!  And if he is God, he surely has the power to make himself some food.  But Jesus roots down into Scripture and reminds the Devil that the only food he needs for his mission is the word of God.

The Devil gets really tricky with his next temptation—since Jesus used scripture to deny the Devil the first time, the Devil throws Scripture back at Jesus.  He tempts Jesus to leap off a tall building, telling him that Scripture says angels will protect him.  But Jesus resists the temptation to take a foolish risk and again roots himself in Scripture.

Finally, the Devil tries to make a bargain with Jesus.  He offers him power and wealth and land and all Jesus needs to do is worship him.  But again, Jesus finds within himself the discipline and Scripture he needs to resist.  The Devil flees, defeated.

This story gets sin just right, doesn’t it?  Sin isn’t a bully, at first.  Sin sidles up to us and seduces us.  Have you all been following the story Kevin Roose published in New York Magazine?  He has just published a book called Young Money.  He got to know eight young Wall Street brokers, followed them around and explored their world.  On one occasion he snuck into a secret society event and saw all kinds of crazy skits in which the richest men in the world mocked the 99%. At one point he started filming and was thrown out once they realized he was a journalist.  He didn’t get beat up.  The people who kicked him out got extremely friendly and tried to bribe him into not telling the story.  What a great metaphor!  Sin tells us we deserve it, that it won’t really hurt anyone.  Sin lures us in until it has us firmly in its grasp.

Sin is tricky and insidious and offers us things that appear good.  For Jesus to really minister to the people of the world, he had to go through that experience.  He had to know what it was like, how hard it is, to resist temptation.  Jesus had to learn who he was as a savior.  Was he going to use his power to physically strike down evil?  Did he need to become big and strong and throw his authority around?  No, his authority was rooted in total obedience to his Father.  Jesus would show his power by his humility, by compassion, by wisdom.  His power would be rooted in his deep understanding of Scripture in light of his loving relationship with his Father.

Jesus uses that deep knowledge of Scripture and connection to his Father when he recruits his disciples, preaches to his followers, heals the sick, casts out demons—in short, in every part of his ministry.  Jesus takes this experience all the way to the cross.

Jesus’ ultimate battle with sin and death doesn’t involve him sword fighting the Devil or heroically flying a spaceship into the heart of an alien spacecraft.  Jesus’ final battle has him face our sin and rejection and walk right toward us.  Jesus continues to walk towards us until we kill him.  And then he rises and keeps walking toward us.

In the movie Blood Diamond, a father has lost his son, who has been kidnapped and turned into a child soldier.  When he finally finds his child, the child is pointing a gun at the father’s companion.  The father recognizes the boy and starts to speak with him.  He walks toward him, calls the boy by name and tells him about his mother who loves him and the wild dogs who wait for him.  He describes his home, the place where he belongs, all the while walking towards this boy and his raised gun and then the father says,

 I know they made you do bad things. You are not a bad boy.  I am your father, who loves you.  And you will come home with me and be my son again.

The boy drops the gun and the two embrace.

For generations our sin and the power of death kept us separated from our God.  But God knew we were more than our sin.  He knew that sin enslaved us, keeping our true selves locked away.  And so he sent Jesus, who battled for us.  While it appeared for three days that sin and death won, on that third day Jesus rose from the dead and claimed us for his own.  His was the final word, the final victory.  Death and sin are still present, but they no longer hold dominion over us.  They cannot keep us from God.

A mere five days ago, I preached to you about Lenten practices and how they draw us closer to God.  But the really important message for you to hear is this:  Nothing can separate you from the love of God.  Not your worst sin, not the worst sin someone does to you, not the death of a loved one, not your death.  You can start and break 100 Lenten practices and that will not make God love you less or lessen the power of his victory.

God wins the battle, full stop.

Amen.

 

Epiphany 6, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

In the name of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Last Sunday and the next three Sundays Eric, Jordan and I are pleased to offer a sermon series entitled, “For the love of God.”

After hearing today’s Gospel you may be thinking to yourself, “Sarah must have drawn the short straw!”

Today’s Gospel reading is one of the most painful we have.  This reading has been used to ostracize people from their communities, to shame abused people from leaving their spouses, and make people wonder if they were really loved by God if they continued to have angry thoughts and lustful feelings.  My grandmother was not allowed to take communion in the Catholic church the final forty years of her life because her marriage to my grandfather ended.  She became isolated from the church she had loved.

What is Jesus doing here?  Where is hanging-out-with-the-sinners Jesus?  Where is Jesus-loves-me-this-I-know-for-the-bible-tells-me-so Jesus?  We may be tempted to throw out these verses.  We may prefer to just live with a warm and fuzzy Jesus who does not ask too much of us.  But the truth is, Jesus does ask something of us.

In the Sermon on the Mount, which precedes this passage, Jesus has just said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Part of loving God and following Jesus means we should be hungering and thirsting for righteousness. Yes, we are forgiven of our sins through Jesus’ death and resurrection, but even as we screw up and are forgiven over and over again, the arc of our lives should be an arc that moves toward righteousness.  And by righteousness, I mean living like Jesus wants us to live.

The first thing to note is that to Jesus, the assumption is that his followers live in community.  People at the time lived with extended family, with servants or in the homes of the people they were serving.  They didn’t live in isolated suburban or rural houses like we do.  People lived in community. So, for Jesus, living a righteous life, rooted in God’s love means learning how to live in community.

Love your neighbor as yourself could be the overarching theme of our passage today.

First, Jesus tackles anger.  The crowd following Jesus knows they aren’t supposed to murder anyone, but Jesus contextualizes Scripture for them to enlarge their responsibility.  Jesus wants to get underneath the law, to help his followers understand the heart and the meaning behind the law.  As human beings, Jesus wants us to be in respectful relationship with each other.  We are not to be angry with each other, or even insult one another.  Jesus is probably not very happy with the comments sections of the internet, political ads, or any episode of Real Housewives.  More seriously, this means Jesus does not condone any type of abuse—either physical or emotional.  Jesus longs for his people to be in relationship with each other, to face conflict with dignity and compassion.

You may not be aware of this, but every week our liturgy lives out a principle of reconciliation.  The exchange of the Peace is not just a chance to take a seventh inning stretch and check out what your neighbors are wearing.  The Peace happens after confession, but before the offering, so you can live out this verse in Matthew:  “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you,  leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” The function of the Peace is for you to reach out to people who have hurt you or people whom you have hurt, so you can present your offering to God with a clear conscience. The peace is intended to maintain a healthy community, where reconciliation is part of our weekly experience.

And while murder and adultery may seem only distantly related, the prohibition against each comes from this same preservation of community.  While a prohibition against holding onto anger can protect the harmony of a community, Jesus’ prohibition against lust and divorce protects the weaker members of the community.  Remember that Jesus was speaking to particular people in particular contexts.  In the time, only men could initiate divorce, and if they did, their former wives were often left in real trouble—without income, without a support system.  I don’t know what Jesus would say to us in our context—we can divorce each other without leaving each other penniless and powerless—but at the very least, Jesus would want us to treat each other with dignity and respect.  I am certain he would allow my grandmother to have received communion those last 40 years.  On the other hand, sexual harassment or abuse, adultery, abuse of power—these can really damage people and the Christian communities in which they live.  These violations can shatter not only the relationship within a family, but can destroy the bonds of trust within the entire community.

And if you weren’t already feeling overwhelmed, Jesus goes on to say that his followers shouldn’t swear or make an oath promising something.  We should just say yes or no and let our answers stand for ourselves.  Does that mean we are disobeying Jesus every time we swear in as a juror?  What about when we click on those terms of service agreements websites make you affirm?  Sheesh!  The culmination of things we are not supposed to do in this passage is enough to make us afraid to step outside our door for fear of disappointing God!

We live in tension as Christians, between law and Grace.  There are certain rules we are expected to follow, but in a modern era we have to think about them really carefully since some make sense in our context, but others make less sense as we learn more and more about the world.  And even if we sort out all the rules we should follow, our minds rebel.  Our neo-cortex may understand that being angry at someone is bad for our souls and our community, but our limbic system is ready to throw a punch!  In the same way, we know in our heads that it is a bad idea to look up that high school sweetheart on Facebook, but sometimes a little online flirting seems easier than facing the challenges in our marriage.  Growing into a Christian who can learn to let go of anger and lust takes time, discernment, and a lot of prayer.

We are all going to make mistakes.  We are all going to find ourselves attracted to someone we shouldn’t be, or unable to let go of an insult.  We may find it easier to be a bully than to admit vulnerability.  But God’s grace is still for us.

God came to earth in the form of Jesus, because he knew we were incapable of living perfect lives.  God’s grace still applies to us, even when, especially when, we are unable to live up to God’s commandments.  We are forgiven, over and over again.

However, we are also given the Holy Spirit.  And that Holy Spirit is what enables us to grow and mature over time. The Holy Spirit gives us the courage to look at ourselves honestly and to keep trying our best, even when we make mistakes.  Christian maturity is not a sprint—we won’t live perfect lives until we are united with God after our deaths.

In a counterintuitive way, our mistakes can be avenues to deepen community and our relationship with God. When we start to understand that everyone around us is broken, and imperfect, it’s a lot easier to be forgiving.  When Ra leads weekly yoga on Mondays, she often says something along the lines of “Offer compassion to yourself and others.  Everyone is doing the best they can with what they know and where they’re from.”  We are in this struggle of life together.  That’s really Jesus’ point here.  He knows we need each other and he doesn’t want us to blow this amazing gift we have in each other.  He doesn’t want us to become fragmented and distant and untrusting.  He wants us to be real with each other and to take joy in each other and to help each other grow.  He wants us to practice forgiveness with each other.  He wants us to practice being friends with appropriate boundaries.  He wants us to practice protecting weaker members of the community.  He wants us to practice honesty and trustworthiness with each other. The Christian Community, the church, is one of the biggest gifts God gives us.  In an ideal world, the church is a place where people from all different walks of life, all interests and political views, can come together and form a new family.  And when you have such a diverse group of people trying to figure out how to love each other, we need boundaries.  We need rules, so we can all be on the same page.  And so, just as God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments, Jesus gives us the gift of an expanded view of the law, a law that reaches all the way down deep into our hearts and reminds us that God is not interested in our obedience, so much as he is in our hearts.

This Valentine’s Day Weekend, the best gift you can give God is to do your best to love your community, knowing that you are surrounded by the grace and love of the God who made you.

Epiphany 1, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Every once in awhile, I wish the Gospels had a really good novelist as an editor.  I want someone to send this manuscript back to its writers and say something like, “Interesting story, but the motivations of Jesus are unclear.  Why does he want to be baptized if he has nothing for which to repent? Why does John resist?  How does Jesus feel when he gets in the water?  Your use of detail is insufficient, please expand.”

The authors of the Gospels are just not interested in giving us all the details.  They are not interested in thoughts, feelings and motivations.  They are telling us a theological story, not a psychological one.

So we’re left with this very brief description of a momentous event.  Jesus’ baptism was so important that each of the four Gospels have an account.  Matthew’s is the longest, and is an expanded version of the baptism in Mark.  The version in Luke is extremely similar to the one in Mark.  And in the gospel of John, we don’t see the baptism take place, but John the Baptist refers to it.

After Jesus is baptized, a dove comes from the heavens, and rests above Jesus’ head.  This dove floating above the waters evokes the Spirit moving above the waters in the Creation story.  God is creating something new.  Some major change is coming.

This supernatural moment is important because by this time in Jewish history, God had pretty much stopped showing up in momentous, visible ways.  When we read the Old Testament, God appears all the time in dreams and visions, even occasionally allowing someone to catch the briefest glimpse of him.  But God had not revealed himself in that way in a long time.  For God to break into our world, to a send a message, however brief, was heart poundingly exciting.

In the three synoptic gospels, the dove is accompanied by a voice from heaven.  In Mark and Luke that voice speaks directly to Jesus, but in Matthew the voice speaks to everyone within earshot.  “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Two thousand years later we hear that statement and we think, “Aw, isn’t that nice.  God’s giving his son a little pep talk!  I bet that made Jesus feel awesome!”  But if we keep in mind that the writers of the Gospels are interested in making a theological statement, we take another look at what God says about Jesus.  That short sentence is extremely loaded.  It evokes Psalm 2, which reads:

I will tell of the decree of the LORD:

He said to me, “You are my son;

today I have begotten you.

The Psalms are associated with David, and the Messiah is supposed to come from David’s line.

The sentence also evokes Isaiah 42:1

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,

my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

I have put my spirit upon him;

he will bring forth justice to the nations.

In Isaiah, this describes the suffering servant.  Jesus being linked to the suffering servant is really important.  When Jews pictured a Messiah, for the most part they imagined a mighty warrior.  The suffering servant in Isaiah was just a character of his time, not an archetype for a Savior.  But in one little sentence, God begins making the link for people that this Messiah is going to be different.

God’s words also evoke his own words to Abraham.  When he instructs Abraham to bring Isaac on the near fatal walk, he says, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”  We can’t help but hear those instructions when God refers to Jesus as his beloved son.  Where God spared Abraham’s son, God’s son will not be so lucky.

Each of these men, Abraham, David, and Isaiah were critical players in God’s salvation history.  He used each of them to further define his relationship with humanity.  God makes a covenant with Abraham that he and Abraham’s descendents will belong to each other.  They will be God’s people.  He will be their God. God makes a covenant with David, too, that kings of David’s line will be the rightful kings until the Messiah comes..  Isaiah was a prophet who urged the people of Israel to return to keeping their side of the covenants they had made with God.

Each of these men, and the covenants made with or defended by them, is a key part of God’s history with humanity. For God to reference them as he introduces his Son, demonstrates that Jesus is part of the same salvation history.  Jesus is deeply connected to these men who have come before him in faithfulness to God.  But God also distinguishes Jesus by so clearly announcing their relationship.  Jesus is not just another human in relationship with God.  Jesus is God’s flesh and blood.  His son.  Jesus is the same substance of God.  And yet, Jesus chooses to immerse himself in the same baptism as ordinary humans, to identify with us completely.  To immerse himself in our experiences, our sorrows and joys.

Today we’ll celebrate baptisms at the 10:30 and during the Celtic service.  While the voice of God may not break through our roof, and we may not see a dove flying in, we do know that the Holy Spirit will be present.  Baptisms are not merely our culture’s version of a baby naming ritual.  Baptisms are a leap of faith, the beginning of a new stage of life, a response to that Jesus who so confidently accepted his own baptism and role as our savior.

Baptism is a reminder of the Covenant that God makes with us through Jesus.  No longer are we bound by sin and death, but through Jesus we are set free and invited to live new lives.  When we say yes to life with God through Baptism, we are letting go of our old ways of life.  No longer are we bound by our accomplishments, keeping ahead in the rat race.  No longer are we defined by cruel words that have been spoken about us.  No longer are we do we need to surround ourselves with people who do not have our best interests at heart.    No longer do we need people to be impressed by what brand we wear or what car we drive.  Baptism frees us from the need to gird ourselves with earthly things, because now we are joined with Christ.  Now we are bound to love and service; humility and patience.  We have moved from darkness into light.

Today, as we renew our own Baptismal vows, we are invited to remember that the Holy Spirit remains with us, and even if we’ve slipped back into old ways of life, the Spirit still dwells within us, ready to help us walk back towards the light.  God’s covenant with us will not be broken.  God’s beloved Son has made sure of that.

Thanks be to God.

 

Christmas Eve, Year A, 2013

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

No matter my level of Christmas cheer, there is a moment in every Christmas pageant when I am instantly filled with joy.  Whatever the reason, every year, when small children dressed in angel wings run up to the stage and shout to the frightened shepherds:  “Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth!”  a huge smile lights up my face.

The children of course, aren’t actually angels.  They are ordinary children who fight with their brothers and sisters.  Their haloes are crooked.  Their wings get into the eyes of the angels behind them in line.  Some years they push and shove and jockey for position.  They are holy and ordinary in an entirely charming way.

According to the Gospel of Luke, God used angels prominently in the incarnation.  An Angel of the Lord appears to Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father.  The angel Gabriel appears to Mary, to invite her to bear God’s son.  And, of course, The Angel of the Lord and a band of angels appear to shepherds in the fields, announcing the arrival of the Messiah.

Biblical angels don’t belong on earth.  They are not sweet and cute like our pageant angels.  They are huge and winged and shiny.  They belong to another kingdom, where glowing with the Lord’s presence is less terrifying.  Nevertheless, angels broke through whatever space/time barrier separates us from heaven.  They burst into our reality, terrifying the humans that witnessed their majesty.

The host of angels came to us in an unusual way. They did not swoop in to a group of priests, or at the temple, or even to the King. The host of heaven revealed itself to ordinary shepherds. The transcendent broke into the ordinary.

This juxtaposition of divine and ordinary is the heart of the incarnation.

God could have remained in heaven, relating to his creatures via a distance.  Instead he chose to become a creature.  He chose to be limited by gravity and time and flesh.  He traded the infinite for the finite.  He became ordinary.

This collision of the divine and the ordinary can’t help but change what it means to be an ordinary human.

In this Gospel, when Mary first is confronted by the Angel Gabriel she exclaims the Magnificat, a hymn that marvels at how God turns everything upside down. Mary has a deep understanding that in choosing her, an ordinary girl, to bear God into the world, God is changing the rules completely.  He lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry.  The ordinary becomes sacred.  The insignificant become significant.

The angels are not announcing a Jesus who is visiting as a tourist, taking in the curiosities of having skin and feet and limited points of view.  The angels announce that everything has changed, our categories are irrelevant.  The holy is here, born to an ordinary girl.

My husband picked up a nativity scene at Ten Thousand Villages this week that depicts the Holy Family as a Peruvian family riding a bus.  I love it because it captures the heart of Christ’s birth in a modern context.  If the incarnation happened now, Mary would probably be the kind of girl who rode a bus.  She probably wouldn’t be American. She certainly wouldn’t be rich.  Mary would be an ordinary girl.

News Anchor Megyn Kelly grabbed media attention this month when she insisted both Santa and Jesus were white.  This is easy to laugh about, but it shows how people who have power—white Europeans and Americans—through art and media have remade Jesus in our image.  He becomes more Swedish than Middle Eastern.  We subtly imply that holiness has to look like us.  We are fine with Jesus being ordinary, so long as he is our kind of ordinary.

Theologian James Cone has written that “God is whatever color God needs to be in order to let people know that they’re not nobodies, they’re somebodies.”

God came to earth and made nobodies, somebodies.  God came to earth to make the ordinary holy.  God came to earth so that children of every color and nation could be in relationship with him.  God’s incarnation in Jesus makes holy our ordinary experiences, whatever our skin color or our income.

Andrea Elliot of The New York Times has written a series of articles exposing New York City’s homelessness problem, by following one child—a middle school girl named Dasani.  The story is incredibly bleak. Dasani’s parents are terrible money managers, their room in a homeless shelter is shared by mold and rats, no one in the family feels safe.  But the story is also incredibly powerful because by shining the light on Dasani, we get the rare opportunity to get to know a young, poor girl.  The Marys of our world don’t get screen time.  You just don’t write thirty page stories about a girl like that.  But Elliot captures this girl—her drive, her desire to do well in school, her hunger, her exhaustion, the love she has for her family.  Elliot focuses our attention on a single girl, and reminds us that children like Dasani should matter to us.  Children like Dasani matter to God.

Our outreach team works their tails off to provide for families around Christmastime not because it is a sweet thing to do, but because they know that we are the hands and feet of Jesus.  By buying Christmas gifts and packaging up Christmas hams and vegetables we are shaking our fists at the powers in the world that tell us that there are some people who don’t matter.  By walking alongside our neighbors in need we are proclaiming that their lives are holy. When we celebrate Eucharist in a nursing home or a prison, we are proclaiming the power of God’s love for ordinary, even marginalized people. When we travel halfway across the world to make relationships in Nzali, Tanzania, we are celebrating that all humanity is united by one miraculous birth two thousand years ago.

Whoever you are, whatever your circumstances, your life is holy.  You may think you don’t matter.  You may think you are too young or too old, too rich or too poor, too jaded or too tired, but God has chosen to make your life holy.  And your life isn’t just holy that hour a week you spend in church.  Whether you’re washing the dishes, or walking the dog; typing up a report at work or in the middle of a boring meeting; on the phone with a friend or going for a run—your ordinary life is sacred.  Because before those angels burst onto the scene, the God of the Universe quietly became an ordinary human being.  A human being who presumably had chores and a job..  A human being who had sore feet and stomach aches and who cried and laughed.  Jesus was one of a kind and he was just like us.  Jesus was completely divine and completely human.

Jesus was born and he lived his life and he died and he was resurrected for you. And for the woman who cleans your office, the man who delivers your mail, and the women who made the shirt you’re wearing today.  Jesus was also born for people you will never meet, whose lives are so different from yours you cannot comprehend their experiences, as they could not comprehend yours.

It seems unlikely that any of us in this room will have the gift of a visit from an angel to wake us up to the miracle of our humanity.  So really all we have is moments like these—prayers and candlelight and hymns we’ve sung a hundred times.  We gather together to remember who we are, and whose we are.

And this is who we are. We are people who remember a poor girl who was brave enough to let God in.  We gather with her at the manger and marvel that the very God who created the universe now has tiny baby toes.  We tremble as we consider the risk he’s taking.  He takes this risk for no good reason other than his love for us.

And so we become his, completely ordinary, completely holy, completely humbled.

Amen.

 

Advent 3, Year A, 2013

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

John the Baptist came onto the scene in a big way.  He was a bold and unapologetic man.  He wore camel hair and ate weird things like locusts.  His was so charismatic that even though he preached in the wilderness, people traveled miles and miles to hear him.  The message he proclaimed was as bold as he was.

John the Baptist stared people right in the eye and told them to repent. He called them vipers!  He warned people to get their acts in order.  He warned people someone was going to come after him and that person was going to baptize people with the Holy Spirit and with fire!  This man was going to clear out the threshing floor and separate the wheat from the chaff.

This man, of course, was Jesus.

John put himself out there, ignoring social convention, probably losing friends.  Does anyone really want to hang out with a hairy man eating bugs? John took a huge risk, which finally paid off when he met Jesus face to face.

They had a brief meeting in which John baptized Jesus.  Can you imagine John’s excitement?  He is a prophet who gets to actually experience that about which he prophesies!

Unfortunately, soon after he met Jesus, things went downhill for John.

This fierce Jesus about which John told people didn’t materialize.  Well, Jesus materialized, he just didn’t do what John expected him too.  Instead of kicking tail and taking names, Jesus went around healing people.  And John himself got arrested and put in prison.

When in prison, John had lots of time to think.  Maybe he started to get nervous.  Maybe he started doubting his whole ministry.  How ridiculous would you feel if you spent years dressing like a crazy person and baptizing people in the middle of nowhere shouting about this mythical person who is supposed to come restore Israel to its rightful place… and then you start thinking you’ve been scammed?

In any case, he sends a note to Jesus via one of his disciples.  “Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?”  Ouch.

You guys, John the Baptist had a moment of doubt.  John the BAPTIST!  Is there anyone in the bible who sounds more confident and full of faith than John the Baptist?  Every Advent we get at least two weeks on him because he is such a hero of faith.  Yet, even John the Baptist’s faith fails for a moment.

St. Paul’s Church in Auckland, New Zealand puts on these little videos with their kids.  One of them is an adorable Christmas pageant that takes place in heaven as God makes the decision to send Jesus to earth.  In it this little blond boy wearing glasses dressed like an angel keeps saying, “Brilliant!  They won’t be expecting THAT!”

Whoever wrote the script gets the incarnation just right.  John the Baptist was not expecting the Jesus that showed up.  His imagination was too small.  John the Baptist, and many who expected the Messiah, expected someone fierce.  They expected someone powerful.  They expected someone who could overthrow the status quo.  Jesus is fierce and powerful, but in spiritual ways, rather than political ones.  Jesus is not who they expected.

In the Christmas pageant video, the angels keep trying to figure out what God is doing.  When God wants to straighten things out on earth, they assume he’ll send an army of angels.  When they learn he just wants to send one person, they assume he’ll pick someone big and strong.  When they learn he plans to send a helpless infant, they assume he’ll send the baby to a powerful ruler who could protect him.  When they assume he’ll send a normal baby, he tells them instead he’ll be sending the Prince of Heaven, his son.  Every time God corrects their assumptions, the small angel repeats his line, “Brilliant!  They won’t be expecting THAT!”

Jesus rarely meets expectations.  But he certainly exceeds them.  Jesus doesn’t directly answer John the Baptist’s question.  Instead he points to his activities that line up with Scriptural descriptions of what the Messiah will do with his time.  Jesus says, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Jesus’ legitimacy doesn’t come from physical, political, or military power.  He doesn’t need to overthrow a government to start bringing about the Kingdom of God.  In Christ’s incarnation, God shows us who he really is and what his interests are.  In the video the child playing God says, “When the Prince is done, nothing will get between them and my love.”

In Jesus, God comes alongside humanity.  God restores people to themselves and to community.  He reverses deafness and blindness and leprosy.  He changes the narrative about wealth and poverty, reassuring the poor that their poverty is not a punishment. He forgives sins. He even restores the dead to life. He wants people to be able to fully participate in life.  He wants people to be able to fully participate in a relationship with God.

The tables are turned even for what it means to be holy. Prophets have always had an exalted position, but Jesus tells his followers that “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.“  He is not denigrating John the Baptist here.  He goes on to talk about how important John the Baptist is.  He’s just saying Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are so going to change the rules that even the least significant person included in the Kingdom of Heaven is going to have an incredibly special place with God.  Because in the Kingdom of Heaven there is no significant or insignificant.  We are all united with God and therefore incredibly important.

At the same time, we are ALL united with God, so none of us are more important than any other.

This is important for us to hear.  We are so driven in this little part of the world. My favorite example of this recently is the controversy over whether to keep class rankings at Western.  There are so many students pushing to do well that you can have excellent grades and not be in the top ten or even 25% of your class!  These same students are encouraged to play school sports and club sports and do mission trips and develop interesting hobbies.  They are expected to do hours of homework every night while also getting plenty of sleep.  It’s all impossible!  And we who parent and grandparent them aren’t much better with our striving to make more money and dress nicely and volunteer with every board that asks us.  We forget that we are enough not because of what we do, but because of how God loves us.

Jesus turns things topsy turvy for us too, you know.  We expect Jesus to be a certain way.  We excpect Jesus to stay out of the way, mostly, except for when we need a little comfort.  We don’t really expect Jesus to show up when we’re making decisions about our kids’ schedules, or about whether or not to take the promotion, or in the middle of a fight with someone we love.

But Jesus is in our lives, too.  In unexpected ways.  All the time. He calls us constantly to join him in the work of making the Kingdom of God a reality.  He calls us to examine our culture critically and decide what parts of it work and what parts need be rejected for us to live holy lives.  Jesus is intrusive in only the way someone who really loves us can be.  And the angels in heaven are quite possibly looking down and chuckling as they say to themselves.  Brilliant!  They weren’t expecting that!”