Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 16:5-11; Romans 8:31-39; Mark 8:31-38
We have been on our way through the season of Lent for nearly two weeks now. Hopefully the cravings for the things we gave up have lessened somewhat, the caffeine headaches have subsided, and seven o’clock in the morning doesn’t come quite as early as it did. And perhaps, in the spaces left by the things we gave up, or in the intent of the things we have taken on, perhaps we have become more aware of God’s presence on the way with us.
Looking back, Ash Wednesday was for us, as it is each year, a turning point in a very real way. On that day we made a “right beginning of repentance,” kneeling before God and confessing the sins by which we have tried to make our lives our own. Repentance means turning around, literally changing our minds, changing our direction, and setting our self-centered minds and feet and lives on the way of Jesus. It was, Greg told us in his sermon, despite the somberness of the service, actually a happy day. The ashes smeared across our foreheads as a reminder of our mortality traced the same lines once drawn there as a reminder of our new life in baptism.
So here we are, on our way through this season of repentance, looking forward now to Easter when we will fill the spaces left by Lent with Resurrection joy. But today…today we are stopped dead in our tracks by Jesus himself, whose words in the gospel are a reminder that the way we are on leads first to a cross.
It is in many ways a turning point in the gospel of Mark. Remember that Mark has no time to tell birth stories or spout theology – he has Jesus baptized by verse eleven, tested in the desert by verse thirteen, and then Jesus is on his way, preaching, calling, exorcising, healing, cleansing, teaching, performing miracles, a whirlwind of work that by chapter three has those in power, those with authority, seeking his life.
The passage we hear today is at the very middle of Mark’s gospel. Up to this point, Jesus has been demonstrating such power and authority to do the work of God that Peter, in the verses just before where we pick up, has declared Jesus must be the Messiah, the One Anointed by God to save God’s people. Peter and the other disciples had given up everything in order to take on following this Jesus, whose way of unswerving justice and fearless faith seemed certain to upset the balance of power and return the kingdom of the world to the people of God.
Then he began to teach them, Mark writes. He would undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. We know only Peter’s reaction to Jesus words – what of the others? Did some laugh – ha, that’s a good one Jesus, be killed, rise again. Did some nervously clear their throats, glancing sideways at one another to see if they had heard Jesus right. He’s not serious. Is he serious? He can’t be serious. He’s the Messiah….
Peter, bless him, nearly exploded from the effort of turning Jesus’ words about in his head. He pulled Jesus aside and rebuked him – Jesus, no, you’ve got it all wrong. You’re the Messiah. This is not the way to the victory we’ve been working towards. How can you win if you’re dead? Apparently Peter hadn’t heard (and probably wouldn’t have understood anyway) that last part Jesus said about after three days rising again….
Perhaps it was for one heartbeat tempting for Jesus to imagine he could use his power and authority differently, how much easier it would be to take the world by force and not by love. But then Jesus turned and rebuked Peter. Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.
At this turning point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus sets his feet toward Jerusalem, where his cross awaits, and he invites not only Peter and the rest of disciples but all who will listen – including us – to walk that way with him.
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Jesus used the image of the cross not because he was going to die on one but because hundreds of people died on them each year. The road to Jerusalem was lined with crosses, so that pilgrims on the way to celebrate the Passover, the reminder of their liberation from oppression in Egypt, would be reminded also that they were subject people again, now under the power and authority of Rome. The Messiah, Peter and the others believed, was supposed to save them from this new oppression, not be martyred by it.
And now the Messiah was urging them to die as well? In the end, of course, many of them would. Take up your cross would be for many followers, then and in every age since, not a metaphor but a reality.
And yet, to hear Jesus’ words simply as that sort of death sentence is, I submit, to set our minds on human things rather than divine. How can you speak of hope if you’re suffering? How can you win if you’re dead? Taking up the cross, before it is a way of suffering and death, is a way of living. It is, in fact, the way of life – not just eternal life, but life here and now, life as God has always desired human life to be, a life devoted to loving, healing, and reconciling.
The way Jesus lived – unswerving justice, fearless faith – set the love of God above all else, above all other power and authority the world could set against it, above even the power of death. The way Jesus lived measured success not by power gained but rather by power shared, indeed, by power poured out for those the world considers powerless. Paul would write that Jesus poured himself out, that Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
God does not want or need our blood. But God does want and need us to pour ourselves out for the world, to set the love of God above all else. Taking up our cross is not a call to martyrdom – it is a call to life, to taking up our place in the Body of Christ, praying as Jesus did that God’s kingdom will come and God’s will be done. It is a call that can stop us dead in our tracks.
For our minds are of course set on human things. We wrest in this world whatever power and authority we can in order to survive first, and then, to live comfortably….And we are relatively powerful people here, powerful by virtue of our education, our resources, our relationships, our freedom, our belonging to a community. Giving up power in this world, if you’re not trampled by people who want it for themselves, is certain to earn a few laughs – ha, that’s a good one, giving yourself up – or some nervous throat-clearing and sideways glances – surely you’re not serious. Are you serious? How can you win if you’re dead?
John Calvin, who took up his cross during the Reformation, such a turning point in the history of those who follow Jesus, offered the world this rebuke, perhaps more scathing now than it was those hundreds of years ago. He wrote, “We are not our own; therefore, neither our reason nor our will should predominate in our deliberations and actions. We are not our own; therefore let us not propose it as our end, to seek what may be expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own; therefore let us, as far as possible, forget ourselves and all things that are ours. On the contrary, we are God’s; therefore let his wisdom and will preside in all our actions. We are God’s; towards him, therefore, as our only legitimate end, let every part of our lives be directed.”
Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. Taking up our cross means losing the life in which our power and authority comes first. It means taking on God’s kingdom instead of our own. Taking on God’s way instead of the world’s. And God’s way, unlike the world’s, is not, in the end, about suffering and death, or do we also, like Peter, not hear that last part Jesus said about rising again….
Let the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus. Let us set our mind and feet and lives on divine things, turning to the cross and taking it up as a reminder to live as though nothing could separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus – neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation. Amen.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Sunday, March 05, 2006
1 Lent B
Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:3-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-13
I had just finished 7th grade when my family went to stay at Kanuga, an Episcopal retreat center near Ashville, NC, for a summer guest period. Our cabin was nestled with others at the foot of a steep hill, along a pathway of pine needles and pebbles and the twisted roots of trees whose green branches twisted overhead. Late every afternoon, about an hour before the dinner bell sounded, it would rain. No, not rain – it would pour. It was a perfect time for sitting out on the screen porch, talking and laughing, shivering just slightly in the damp breeze, counting the long seconds it took for thunder to rumble across the mountaintops.
One afternoon, as it poured, we heard the sound of heavy footsteps crunching through wet pine needles and pebbles and twisted roots. Moments later, a line of young people appeared, trudging along the pathway in front of our cabin, each carrying a large backpack with a sleeping bag tied above or below, each wearing what looked like a clear garbage bag over their heads and packs, with dripping holes for their faces and arms, each singing a song loud enough to rival the pounding of rain on the leaves above.
We watched the strange procession round a corner that continued uphill and out of sight. We figured they must have been from Camp Kanuga, just a mile down the road. And as the sound of their singing faded, I remember very clearly saying to my mom and dad, “They will be wet forever. That will never, ever be me.”
I didn’t think about that day again, until one afternoon, seven years later. It rained – no, it poured, the afternoon I led my first campout as a Camp Kanuga counselor, trudging along the same pathway, catching the eye of a little girl dry on the front porch of her cabin. We were indeed wet forever, or at least all summer.
It didn’t seem at first that I was going to be very good at wilderness living. I had never been on a campout before – the knots and the tarps and the trail-following (straight uphill with your backpack and the backpacks of three wild beasts – I mean, campers – who are crying because there might have been a bee back there) the fire-starting (in the rain) and the stew-cooking…it was all new to me. I was pretty miserable those first few campouts, out there in the wilderness, wet.
I wonder how miserable Noah was, forty days and nights of nothing but wet. We know how miserable the Israelites were, forty years of wandering through the desert wilderness. I wonder if Jesus was ever miserable, even once, forty days in the wilderness, driven by the Spirit, tested by the devil, surrounded by wild beasts, waited on by angels. Mark’s account is so brief he doesn’t even mention that Jesus was fasting. Maybe Jesus couldn’t light a fire in the rain, either. Maybe he didn’t like stew.
Over and over again in our scriptures, the wilderness is a place of testing and temptation, of wild beasts and wrong turns, of too much water or not enough. The wilderness is unfamiliar, unfriendly, and uncomfortable. And forty days or forty years – no matter, forty was simply used to signify a long time, with wilderness stretching as far as the eye could see.
If you looked back, you might see as a tiny speck on the horizon the place where you stood when God called you into the wilderness. Noah and the Israelites and Jesus didn’t just stumble off a pathway of pine straw and pebbles – God called them there. Sent them there. In Mark’s gospel, the Spirit drove Jesus there, drove him out into the wilderness.
I wonder if Jesus looked back, back to the moment when he was still dripping with Jordan River water, when God had said, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. It had quite possibly been a moment of revelation, or at least deep affirmation, for Jesus. You are my Son, the Beloved. But then immediately, Mark tells us, immediately the Spirit drove him out…was God’s voice still echoing over the water as the wild beasts closed in and the devil began dreaming up temptations?
We know the longer story so well, the words that Satan whispered those forty days – Jesus, you could break your fast, you could control the world, you could command the cosmos. And we know how Jesus resisted, wrenching his very human eyes and ears and heart away from what tempted him, and repeating over and over that God was all he needed.
The wilderness was a test. The Greek word, in fact, that we heard translated “to tempt” also means “to test,” and there is an important difference between those two meanings. Temptation tries to make us fail in our conviction that God is all we need. But a test tries to find out just how far and against what odds we can keep our conviction that God is all we need.
Mark’s account doesn’t tell us in so many words, as Matthew and Luke do, whether Jesus passed the test. But in the very next verse, nearly as immediately as he was driven into the wilderness, Jesus is striding right back out of it, proclaiming the good news of God and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.’
In the gospel of Mark, the wilderness only appears to go as far as the eye can see. Forty does not mean forever. It may rain the whole time you’re there, but there is a rainbow at the far end. And though it looks for all the world like God shows Jesus into the wilderness by the front gate, then walks around to the rainbow-lit back gate to wait with the angels for Jesus to make it through, Mark’s spare words suggest that the angels Matthew puts at the back gate were actually present with Jesus throughout his test. God was in the wilderness with him. Indeed, Jesus himself was God in the wilderness with us.
The thing is, I don’t think Jesus so much left the wilderness as he just exchanged one wilderness for another. The cities of Galilee would, in the end, be no safer than the sands of the desert. There were still wild beasts – I mean, religious leaders, skeptics, even, sometimes, friends – on the prowl. Jesus would face temptation again, in the beautiful garden of Gethsemane that was for one anxious night a wilderness. Jesus would pass that test, too, even though it looked to the beasts and to the best like he had failed.
The wilderness tested Jesus, as it had tested the Israelites, as it continues to test us. In the wilderness, we are stripped down to the very essentials. And the essentials are these: God made us, God loves us, and God keeps us. That is enough for us as we go about the work we were called to do back at the front gate, when we were dripping with baptismal waters. God is all that we need. Nothing else. Everything else is a temptation.
It’s a jungle out there, the saying goes. We live all the time in the wilderness, full of temptations and tests, wild beasts and wrong turns, too much water or not enough. Because we fear we won’t survive, we pack on as much gear as we possibly can – not just the backpack, the sleeping bag, the clear garbage bag for when it rains, but the tent, and the grill, and the cooler, and the GPS,….all proof that we can make it just fine on our own.
The season of Lent offers us an opportunity to be stripped down to the essentials. Forty days of wilderness living, not without God but rather in an intentional effort to understand just how near to us God is each and every day. The Israelites discovered that nearness in their wilderness living, convinced as they were that they had been left to die among the wild beasts. They encountered God in wild and strange and unexpected ways – water from a rock, bread from heaven. It took forty years for them to understand that all they needed was God, and suddenly the rainbow-lit back gate opened up into the Promised Land.
We don’t need all that gear. We are more able than we think we are to live out who are called to be. I certainly learned that in the wilderness of the mountains of North Carolina. I may never win on Survivor, but I can light a fire in the rain. I may never win the Nobel Peace Prize, but I can comfort a homesick camper and carry her backpack for her.
So are we more able than we think we are to live out who we are called to be in our baptism. It’s a jungle out there, but God is with us in the wilderness, ready to meet us in wild and strange and unexpected ways as we go. Jesus himself is the food and drink that nourishes us. And the only thing that is forever, as the psalmist says, are God’s compassion and love, which are from everlasting. Amen.
I had just finished 7th grade when my family went to stay at Kanuga, an Episcopal retreat center near Ashville, NC, for a summer guest period. Our cabin was nestled with others at the foot of a steep hill, along a pathway of pine needles and pebbles and the twisted roots of trees whose green branches twisted overhead. Late every afternoon, about an hour before the dinner bell sounded, it would rain. No, not rain – it would pour. It was a perfect time for sitting out on the screen porch, talking and laughing, shivering just slightly in the damp breeze, counting the long seconds it took for thunder to rumble across the mountaintops.
One afternoon, as it poured, we heard the sound of heavy footsteps crunching through wet pine needles and pebbles and twisted roots. Moments later, a line of young people appeared, trudging along the pathway in front of our cabin, each carrying a large backpack with a sleeping bag tied above or below, each wearing what looked like a clear garbage bag over their heads and packs, with dripping holes for their faces and arms, each singing a song loud enough to rival the pounding of rain on the leaves above.
We watched the strange procession round a corner that continued uphill and out of sight. We figured they must have been from Camp Kanuga, just a mile down the road. And as the sound of their singing faded, I remember very clearly saying to my mom and dad, “They will be wet forever. That will never, ever be me.”
I didn’t think about that day again, until one afternoon, seven years later. It rained – no, it poured, the afternoon I led my first campout as a Camp Kanuga counselor, trudging along the same pathway, catching the eye of a little girl dry on the front porch of her cabin. We were indeed wet forever, or at least all summer.
It didn’t seem at first that I was going to be very good at wilderness living. I had never been on a campout before – the knots and the tarps and the trail-following (straight uphill with your backpack and the backpacks of three wild beasts – I mean, campers – who are crying because there might have been a bee back there) the fire-starting (in the rain) and the stew-cooking…it was all new to me. I was pretty miserable those first few campouts, out there in the wilderness, wet.
I wonder how miserable Noah was, forty days and nights of nothing but wet. We know how miserable the Israelites were, forty years of wandering through the desert wilderness. I wonder if Jesus was ever miserable, even once, forty days in the wilderness, driven by the Spirit, tested by the devil, surrounded by wild beasts, waited on by angels. Mark’s account is so brief he doesn’t even mention that Jesus was fasting. Maybe Jesus couldn’t light a fire in the rain, either. Maybe he didn’t like stew.
Over and over again in our scriptures, the wilderness is a place of testing and temptation, of wild beasts and wrong turns, of too much water or not enough. The wilderness is unfamiliar, unfriendly, and uncomfortable. And forty days or forty years – no matter, forty was simply used to signify a long time, with wilderness stretching as far as the eye could see.
If you looked back, you might see as a tiny speck on the horizon the place where you stood when God called you into the wilderness. Noah and the Israelites and Jesus didn’t just stumble off a pathway of pine straw and pebbles – God called them there. Sent them there. In Mark’s gospel, the Spirit drove Jesus there, drove him out into the wilderness.
I wonder if Jesus looked back, back to the moment when he was still dripping with Jordan River water, when God had said, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. It had quite possibly been a moment of revelation, or at least deep affirmation, for Jesus. You are my Son, the Beloved. But then immediately, Mark tells us, immediately the Spirit drove him out…was God’s voice still echoing over the water as the wild beasts closed in and the devil began dreaming up temptations?
We know the longer story so well, the words that Satan whispered those forty days – Jesus, you could break your fast, you could control the world, you could command the cosmos. And we know how Jesus resisted, wrenching his very human eyes and ears and heart away from what tempted him, and repeating over and over that God was all he needed.
The wilderness was a test. The Greek word, in fact, that we heard translated “to tempt” also means “to test,” and there is an important difference between those two meanings. Temptation tries to make us fail in our conviction that God is all we need. But a test tries to find out just how far and against what odds we can keep our conviction that God is all we need.
Mark’s account doesn’t tell us in so many words, as Matthew and Luke do, whether Jesus passed the test. But in the very next verse, nearly as immediately as he was driven into the wilderness, Jesus is striding right back out of it, proclaiming the good news of God and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.’
In the gospel of Mark, the wilderness only appears to go as far as the eye can see. Forty does not mean forever. It may rain the whole time you’re there, but there is a rainbow at the far end. And though it looks for all the world like God shows Jesus into the wilderness by the front gate, then walks around to the rainbow-lit back gate to wait with the angels for Jesus to make it through, Mark’s spare words suggest that the angels Matthew puts at the back gate were actually present with Jesus throughout his test. God was in the wilderness with him. Indeed, Jesus himself was God in the wilderness with us.
The thing is, I don’t think Jesus so much left the wilderness as he just exchanged one wilderness for another. The cities of Galilee would, in the end, be no safer than the sands of the desert. There were still wild beasts – I mean, religious leaders, skeptics, even, sometimes, friends – on the prowl. Jesus would face temptation again, in the beautiful garden of Gethsemane that was for one anxious night a wilderness. Jesus would pass that test, too, even though it looked to the beasts and to the best like he had failed.
The wilderness tested Jesus, as it had tested the Israelites, as it continues to test us. In the wilderness, we are stripped down to the very essentials. And the essentials are these: God made us, God loves us, and God keeps us. That is enough for us as we go about the work we were called to do back at the front gate, when we were dripping with baptismal waters. God is all that we need. Nothing else. Everything else is a temptation.
It’s a jungle out there, the saying goes. We live all the time in the wilderness, full of temptations and tests, wild beasts and wrong turns, too much water or not enough. Because we fear we won’t survive, we pack on as much gear as we possibly can – not just the backpack, the sleeping bag, the clear garbage bag for when it rains, but the tent, and the grill, and the cooler, and the GPS,….all proof that we can make it just fine on our own.
The season of Lent offers us an opportunity to be stripped down to the essentials. Forty days of wilderness living, not without God but rather in an intentional effort to understand just how near to us God is each and every day. The Israelites discovered that nearness in their wilderness living, convinced as they were that they had been left to die among the wild beasts. They encountered God in wild and strange and unexpected ways – water from a rock, bread from heaven. It took forty years for them to understand that all they needed was God, and suddenly the rainbow-lit back gate opened up into the Promised Land.
We don’t need all that gear. We are more able than we think we are to live out who are called to be. I certainly learned that in the wilderness of the mountains of North Carolina. I may never win on Survivor, but I can light a fire in the rain. I may never win the Nobel Peace Prize, but I can comfort a homesick camper and carry her backpack for her.
So are we more able than we think we are to live out who we are called to be in our baptism. It’s a jungle out there, but God is with us in the wilderness, ready to meet us in wild and strange and unexpected ways as we go. Jesus himself is the food and drink that nourishes us. And the only thing that is forever, as the psalmist says, are God’s compassion and love, which are from everlasting. Amen.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
7 Epiphany B
Isaiah 43:18-25; Psalm 32:1-8; 2 Corinthians 1:18-22; Mark 2:1-12
The number one excuse I’ve heard from people who really didn’t want me to ask them to be youth group volunteers is “I just can’t think up all those games.” And with names like “Gargoyles,” “Pandemonium,” “Sardines,” and “Poop Deck,” I can understand how the games might sound a little too intimidating, or at least a little too messy, to coordinate.
Well, I’m going to let you in on a youth ministry secret, armed with which, like it or not, you will all be qualified to be youth ministers. Here it is: all games are no more than variations on tag. That’s all you need to know. So, you’re it – who’s leading youth group tonight?
It’s really true – it’s all tag, perhaps with elements of catch or a scavenger hunt mixed in. “Gargoyles” is the local favorite, and it’s a perfect example. In this game, teams search for pieces of disassembled flashlights that have been hidden throughout the darkened buildings. Their goal is to reassemble a flashlight and then use it to defeat the gargoyle or two (usually the youth leaders) who has been trying to keep them from finding the pieces. If a gargoyle tags you, you are frozen – paralyzed – until another member of your team unfreezes you. The first team to reassemble a flashlight and shine it on a gargoyle wins the game. See? Mostly tag, a little scavenger hunt, and maybe some catch when you’re cornered by a gargoyle and you toss your flashlight pieces to a team member….
Back when I was in junior high, my youth minister discovered New Games. That’s what the book was actually called – New Games, and there was something different about them. There was no tag, no catch, no scavenger hunt, no teams – most of the time, these games were about the whole group trying to do something or get somewhere. New Games were about problem-solving, trust, collaboration, and the great stories that set them up. They were a little intimidating and a little messy, but a lot fun. “Magic Shoes” is a perfect example. Here is the story: Your group is trying to reach a wise man on the far bank of a river of boiling green slime. The wise man has given you a pair of magic shoes that can adjust to anyone’s foot size and allow you to walk across the river safely. But, each person in your group can wear the shoes only once to cross, and the river is too wide to throw the shoes back to the other side. How will you get everyone across?
If a group was really good at these games, the youth leader would change the story up a little to make it more challenging. For example, perhaps only one person in the group would be allowed to speak. Or you might have to pretend that three people in your group are blind (so they have to keep their eyes closed), that two have broken arms (so they can’t use them), or that two are paralyzed….Now how will you get everyone across?
What about this story. Your team is trying to get to a Healer deep inside a house packed with people. The door is blocked, and so are the windows. All you have is a mat and a rope, and one of your team members is paralyzed. How will you get to the Healer?
At this point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus is no longer a new thing. Lots of people had heard about what he was doing and saying, what excitement he was stirring, and so they came from all over to see him whether he was on a hillside, on a city street, or even, this day, in his own house. The crowds that spilled out of his doors and windows surely expected something dramatic – some great healing or miracle or teaching.
But Mark says Jesus was simply speaking the word to them, and I wonder if they weren’t beginning to yawn when they noticed a little dust drifted down from the ceiling into Jesus’ hair. Suddenly, chunks of mud and plaster and straw were falling all around him, and he stepped back just in time for a ceiling timber to dislodge and as the dust cleared, there was a man on a mat looking nearly as surprised as the crowds that he was there.
The man was clearly paralyzed, and as if the drama of his arriving wasn’t enough, I imagine the crowd braced themselves for the dramatic healing they had come to see. Instead, Jesus said to the man, Son, your sins are forgiven. Well, this was a new game! To the crowd, it didn’t look like anything at all. To the scribes, it was blasphemy.
According to the law, there was a specific system of repentance and sacrifice that had to be made before one could merit forgiveness, which, in the end, only God could grant. Who can forgive sins but God, the scribes wondered (which was, of course, Jesus’ point exactly). In their eyes, Jesus had just ignored that whole system and had himself granted forgiveness before demanding repentance, as though forgiveness were a gift instead of a reward. This was a new game.
Or was it? We know that the law was being rigidly applied during this time, often paralyzing both those who enforced it and those who could scarcely live up to its standards. But surely those same faithful – scribes and ordinary folks – knew well the psalms, which said that God has not dealt with us according to our sins, but has put our sins as far away from us as the east is from the west. And happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sin is put away! And they also knew well the stories of their ancestors whom God had forgiven time and again, always inviting people of faith back into Covenant relationship, whether they had just slipped away forgetfully or stomped out angrily. God, abounding in steadfast love, never seemed tired of forgiving.
So what was so new, so surprising about Jesus’ words that day? Theologian Sarah Dylan Breuer suggests that then, as now, it sounded like a new game because we just don’t get the rules, no matter how many times they are explained.
God, who created us, loves us not in spite of who we are, but simply as we are. Do you hear the difference? God loves us simply and exactly as we are, knowing full well that we are sinners (which means, literally, people who miss the mark of saying yes to God) who will repeatedly slip out of our relationship with God even in our good moments, and stomp out in our worst moments. No matter. God’s game now is the same as it was way back when God’s love overflowed and created that Covenant relationship in the first place, a relationship to which God has always said yes even in the face of our most vehement no’s.
Do we get it? Do we still not perceive?
Usually we don’t. Glimmers, maybe, when we realize that our relationship with God has carried us, mat and all, through a difficult, or even paralyzing time in our lives. But usually we seem as convinced as those scribes that we have to earn God’s love, earn God’s forgiveness. That God loves us and forgives us our sins when we repent, after we repent, because we repent, because we say the right prayer or do the right penance or make the right amends. You’re sorry? Oh, okay, then I can forgive you. It’s how we usually go about forgiveness with one another, right?
No, Jesus showed them that day. With God, our sins are forgiven even before we ask, even if we never ask, even if we never realized we needed forgiving in the first place. Our sins are forgiven. God has let them go. It sounded like blasphemy to the scribes, a charge that would eventually nail Jesus to the cross where life in relationship to God appeared to have been ended once for all. Until, in the first light of Easter morning, God did a very new thing, and Jesus himself showed us that not even the sin of the cross could keep God from loving us and forgiving us and inviting us back into relationship again.
God has let go our sins – we are already absolved. But our sins will continue to paralyze us if we are not able to confess them, to acknowledge our inability to stay in relationship with God without God’s help and grace and love and forgiveness. Frederick Buechner writes that we do not confess anything God doesn’t already know about. But while we hold on to our sins, they are an abyss between us and God. When we confess them, Buechner says, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.
We can confess our sins because they have already been forgiven. We can engage in reconciliation because we are already transformed. We can amend our lives because they are already made new. We can walk because we have been healed. Forgiveness is not restoration to what we were before – it is newness of life, and it carries with it a charge to walk, to walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.
So is this really a new thing? As surely as God is faithful. As surely as God made us and has always loved us. God’s love for us is as old as the mountains and as new as each morning, each moment, each breath in which we respond to God’s yes, you are forgiven, with our own yes, thank God, I am, and trembling we lay down our sins and find that we can move and stretch in ways we never imagined possible.
Of course life is not a game, although it often seems like we are caught in an endless game of tag, running to catch up with deadlines or expectations or goals, an endless scavenger hunt for success or happiness or peace or health that eludes us. But there all along, in the intimidating, messy middle of our stories, surrounded by the rubble of our lives, there stands Jesus, looking on our brokenness and offering God’s forgiveness, that transforming gift of love that heals the very deepest kind of hurt, that gift that restores and renews our relationship with God. Around us stand one another and whole the communion of saints, the rest of our team, who have walked in love to carry us through prayer and witness and encouragement to the Healer when we can’t find the way ourselves.
When we get there, let us confess our sins against God and our neighbor, not to walk away unburdened but to walk away in love. Not to be the same old person we were but to be a new creation. Not to earn forgiveness but because we are already forgiven, for Almighty God has forgiven us of all our sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, God has strengthened us for all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, God will keep us in eternal life. Amen.
The number one excuse I’ve heard from people who really didn’t want me to ask them to be youth group volunteers is “I just can’t think up all those games.” And with names like “Gargoyles,” “Pandemonium,” “Sardines,” and “Poop Deck,” I can understand how the games might sound a little too intimidating, or at least a little too messy, to coordinate.
Well, I’m going to let you in on a youth ministry secret, armed with which, like it or not, you will all be qualified to be youth ministers. Here it is: all games are no more than variations on tag. That’s all you need to know. So, you’re it – who’s leading youth group tonight?
It’s really true – it’s all tag, perhaps with elements of catch or a scavenger hunt mixed in. “Gargoyles” is the local favorite, and it’s a perfect example. In this game, teams search for pieces of disassembled flashlights that have been hidden throughout the darkened buildings. Their goal is to reassemble a flashlight and then use it to defeat the gargoyle or two (usually the youth leaders) who has been trying to keep them from finding the pieces. If a gargoyle tags you, you are frozen – paralyzed – until another member of your team unfreezes you. The first team to reassemble a flashlight and shine it on a gargoyle wins the game. See? Mostly tag, a little scavenger hunt, and maybe some catch when you’re cornered by a gargoyle and you toss your flashlight pieces to a team member….
Back when I was in junior high, my youth minister discovered New Games. That’s what the book was actually called – New Games, and there was something different about them. There was no tag, no catch, no scavenger hunt, no teams – most of the time, these games were about the whole group trying to do something or get somewhere. New Games were about problem-solving, trust, collaboration, and the great stories that set them up. They were a little intimidating and a little messy, but a lot fun. “Magic Shoes” is a perfect example. Here is the story: Your group is trying to reach a wise man on the far bank of a river of boiling green slime. The wise man has given you a pair of magic shoes that can adjust to anyone’s foot size and allow you to walk across the river safely. But, each person in your group can wear the shoes only once to cross, and the river is too wide to throw the shoes back to the other side. How will you get everyone across?
If a group was really good at these games, the youth leader would change the story up a little to make it more challenging. For example, perhaps only one person in the group would be allowed to speak. Or you might have to pretend that three people in your group are blind (so they have to keep their eyes closed), that two have broken arms (so they can’t use them), or that two are paralyzed….Now how will you get everyone across?
What about this story. Your team is trying to get to a Healer deep inside a house packed with people. The door is blocked, and so are the windows. All you have is a mat and a rope, and one of your team members is paralyzed. How will you get to the Healer?
At this point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus is no longer a new thing. Lots of people had heard about what he was doing and saying, what excitement he was stirring, and so they came from all over to see him whether he was on a hillside, on a city street, or even, this day, in his own house. The crowds that spilled out of his doors and windows surely expected something dramatic – some great healing or miracle or teaching.
But Mark says Jesus was simply speaking the word to them, and I wonder if they weren’t beginning to yawn when they noticed a little dust drifted down from the ceiling into Jesus’ hair. Suddenly, chunks of mud and plaster and straw were falling all around him, and he stepped back just in time for a ceiling timber to dislodge and as the dust cleared, there was a man on a mat looking nearly as surprised as the crowds that he was there.
The man was clearly paralyzed, and as if the drama of his arriving wasn’t enough, I imagine the crowd braced themselves for the dramatic healing they had come to see. Instead, Jesus said to the man, Son, your sins are forgiven. Well, this was a new game! To the crowd, it didn’t look like anything at all. To the scribes, it was blasphemy.
According to the law, there was a specific system of repentance and sacrifice that had to be made before one could merit forgiveness, which, in the end, only God could grant. Who can forgive sins but God, the scribes wondered (which was, of course, Jesus’ point exactly). In their eyes, Jesus had just ignored that whole system and had himself granted forgiveness before demanding repentance, as though forgiveness were a gift instead of a reward. This was a new game.
Or was it? We know that the law was being rigidly applied during this time, often paralyzing both those who enforced it and those who could scarcely live up to its standards. But surely those same faithful – scribes and ordinary folks – knew well the psalms, which said that God has not dealt with us according to our sins, but has put our sins as far away from us as the east is from the west. And happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sin is put away! And they also knew well the stories of their ancestors whom God had forgiven time and again, always inviting people of faith back into Covenant relationship, whether they had just slipped away forgetfully or stomped out angrily. God, abounding in steadfast love, never seemed tired of forgiving.
So what was so new, so surprising about Jesus’ words that day? Theologian Sarah Dylan Breuer suggests that then, as now, it sounded like a new game because we just don’t get the rules, no matter how many times they are explained.
God, who created us, loves us not in spite of who we are, but simply as we are. Do you hear the difference? God loves us simply and exactly as we are, knowing full well that we are sinners (which means, literally, people who miss the mark of saying yes to God) who will repeatedly slip out of our relationship with God even in our good moments, and stomp out in our worst moments. No matter. God’s game now is the same as it was way back when God’s love overflowed and created that Covenant relationship in the first place, a relationship to which God has always said yes even in the face of our most vehement no’s.
Do we get it? Do we still not perceive?
Usually we don’t. Glimmers, maybe, when we realize that our relationship with God has carried us, mat and all, through a difficult, or even paralyzing time in our lives. But usually we seem as convinced as those scribes that we have to earn God’s love, earn God’s forgiveness. That God loves us and forgives us our sins when we repent, after we repent, because we repent, because we say the right prayer or do the right penance or make the right amends. You’re sorry? Oh, okay, then I can forgive you. It’s how we usually go about forgiveness with one another, right?
No, Jesus showed them that day. With God, our sins are forgiven even before we ask, even if we never ask, even if we never realized we needed forgiving in the first place. Our sins are forgiven. God has let them go. It sounded like blasphemy to the scribes, a charge that would eventually nail Jesus to the cross where life in relationship to God appeared to have been ended once for all. Until, in the first light of Easter morning, God did a very new thing, and Jesus himself showed us that not even the sin of the cross could keep God from loving us and forgiving us and inviting us back into relationship again.
God has let go our sins – we are already absolved. But our sins will continue to paralyze us if we are not able to confess them, to acknowledge our inability to stay in relationship with God without God’s help and grace and love and forgiveness. Frederick Buechner writes that we do not confess anything God doesn’t already know about. But while we hold on to our sins, they are an abyss between us and God. When we confess them, Buechner says, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.
We can confess our sins because they have already been forgiven. We can engage in reconciliation because we are already transformed. We can amend our lives because they are already made new. We can walk because we have been healed. Forgiveness is not restoration to what we were before – it is newness of life, and it carries with it a charge to walk, to walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.
So is this really a new thing? As surely as God is faithful. As surely as God made us and has always loved us. God’s love for us is as old as the mountains and as new as each morning, each moment, each breath in which we respond to God’s yes, you are forgiven, with our own yes, thank God, I am, and trembling we lay down our sins and find that we can move and stretch in ways we never imagined possible.
Of course life is not a game, although it often seems like we are caught in an endless game of tag, running to catch up with deadlines or expectations or goals, an endless scavenger hunt for success or happiness or peace or health that eludes us. But there all along, in the intimidating, messy middle of our stories, surrounded by the rubble of our lives, there stands Jesus, looking on our brokenness and offering God’s forgiveness, that transforming gift of love that heals the very deepest kind of hurt, that gift that restores and renews our relationship with God. Around us stand one another and whole the communion of saints, the rest of our team, who have walked in love to carry us through prayer and witness and encouragement to the Healer when we can’t find the way ourselves.
When we get there, let us confess our sins against God and our neighbor, not to walk away unburdened but to walk away in love. Not to be the same old person we were but to be a new creation. Not to earn forgiveness but because we are already forgiven, for Almighty God has forgiven us of all our sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, God has strengthened us for all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, God will keep us in eternal life. Amen.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Thanksgiving for the Life of Meck Melton
Isaiah 25:6-10; Psalm 23; John 14:1-6
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Jesus’ words are meant for comfort, but they also confound. Our hearts are troubled, anxious, grieving, broken. How could they not be? There is a space in our lives that was not there before, a distance between us and Meck.
The disciples’ hearts were troubled that day because Jesus had just told them that he would not always be with them. At least, that’s what they thought they heard him say. They imagined the space that Jesus would leave, and as they wandered anxiously, fearfully, through that vast space in their troubled hearts, they did not hear him say that his death would forever close the distance between us and God.
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going?
Thank goodness for Thomas, who was more than once brave enough (because he was troubled enough) to tell Jesus that this kind of comfort was confounding. Lord, we do not know the way where you are going. How can we know the way? Thomas was dreaming of what we all dream of when there is an impossible distance to cross – dreaming of a way from here to there. A way to not lose what we think is being lost. A way to not be left behind. A way to believe that the journey of life is not ended in the valley of the shadow of death.
Thank goodness for Meck, who would more than once, indeed, who with his whole life would tell us that we, like Thomas and the rest of the disciples, were hearing Jesus all wrong. Jesus wasn’t going anywhere that he wasn’t going to invite his disciples, including us, to follow. And he wasn’t going to send his disciples, including us, anywhere that he wasn’t prepared to go first.
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places, Jesus promises, and I go to prepare a place there for you. The journey of life is not ended in the valley of the shadow of death but is begun anew in the light of Jesus’ resurrection, and we will dwell, remain, abide with him in the house of the Lord forever. That where I am, you may be also, Jesus promises.
But these words, too, might be confounding and of little comfort if it were not for our broken hearts, where, in the light of his life among us, Jesus prepared a dwelling place for God, as if to say, that where you are, I may be also.
God dwells with us here and now as surely as we will dwell with God eternally. That is comforting, even in the valley of the shadow of death. We see more clearly the way, the truth, and the life, when we let the light that already dwells in us shine through the seams and cracks and broken places of our hearts. From some, like Meck, that light pours out. By his kindness, his tender love and care for his wife and family and friends, his courageous work for justice, his tireless commitment to community, his faithful leadership in Christ’s body, the church, by these things and more, Meck knew the way that Jesus was going.
Though our hearts may be anxious and grieving, let them not be troubled. Jesus dwells with us even in this valley, now shot through with resurrection light. Amen.
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Jesus’ words are meant for comfort, but they also confound. Our hearts are troubled, anxious, grieving, broken. How could they not be? There is a space in our lives that was not there before, a distance between us and Meck.
The disciples’ hearts were troubled that day because Jesus had just told them that he would not always be with them. At least, that’s what they thought they heard him say. They imagined the space that Jesus would leave, and as they wandered anxiously, fearfully, through that vast space in their troubled hearts, they did not hear him say that his death would forever close the distance between us and God.
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going?
Thank goodness for Thomas, who was more than once brave enough (because he was troubled enough) to tell Jesus that this kind of comfort was confounding. Lord, we do not know the way where you are going. How can we know the way? Thomas was dreaming of what we all dream of when there is an impossible distance to cross – dreaming of a way from here to there. A way to not lose what we think is being lost. A way to not be left behind. A way to believe that the journey of life is not ended in the valley of the shadow of death.
Thank goodness for Meck, who would more than once, indeed, who with his whole life would tell us that we, like Thomas and the rest of the disciples, were hearing Jesus all wrong. Jesus wasn’t going anywhere that he wasn’t going to invite his disciples, including us, to follow. And he wasn’t going to send his disciples, including us, anywhere that he wasn’t prepared to go first.
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places, Jesus promises, and I go to prepare a place there for you. The journey of life is not ended in the valley of the shadow of death but is begun anew in the light of Jesus’ resurrection, and we will dwell, remain, abide with him in the house of the Lord forever. That where I am, you may be also, Jesus promises.
But these words, too, might be confounding and of little comfort if it were not for our broken hearts, where, in the light of his life among us, Jesus prepared a dwelling place for God, as if to say, that where you are, I may be also.
God dwells with us here and now as surely as we will dwell with God eternally. That is comforting, even in the valley of the shadow of death. We see more clearly the way, the truth, and the life, when we let the light that already dwells in us shine through the seams and cracks and broken places of our hearts. From some, like Meck, that light pours out. By his kindness, his tender love and care for his wife and family and friends, his courageous work for justice, his tireless commitment to community, his faithful leadership in Christ’s body, the church, by these things and more, Meck knew the way that Jesus was going.
Though our hearts may be anxious and grieving, let them not be troubled. Jesus dwells with us even in this valley, now shot through with resurrection light. Amen.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
4 Epiphany B
Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 111; 1 Corinthians 8:1b-13; Mark 1:21-28
“Don’t use words too big for the subject,” C.S. Lewis once warned. “Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
Perhaps had Lewis ever taught A.P. English, it would have been something like the class I was in my senior year of high school. “Don’t use words too big or too broad or too vague for the subject,” I can hear my teacher, Mr. Pell, warning. “Don’t say ‘the poem is great’ when you really mean ‘it’s as though the poem were written just for me’.” In fact, we weren’t allowed to use the word ‘great’ in class at all. Mr. Pell challenged us to say precisely and creatively what we meant, instead of ‘how’s your day? great…’ or ‘what did you think of the poem? great…’ He actually charged us twenty-five cents every time we said the word….well, you know, and on the last day of school he emptied the jar of change and went out and bought a new thesaurus for the classroom.
Words are so very significant. It’s amazing, don’t you think, that this jumble of shapes in black and white, this stream of sounds shaped by breath and lips, these words carry meaning across the space between people, whether on paper or through the air. Words carry meaning across that space allowing us to participate in one another’s lives and in the life of the world.
It’s easy to take for granted the meaning of words in our own language, until we come across a word we don’t know, or a new meaning of a word we thought we knew, or are forced to substitute words by English teachers. How very measurable that space between us feels, though, when we are surrounded by people speaking a language we do not know. And how very startled we are to learn meanings of words in different languages that seem to convey so much more than our own words do. For example, in Hebrew the word dabar means both ‘word’ and ‘deed’, such that to say something really is to do something. It was used especially to signify the creative word of God: Let there be light, and there was light.
Words are so very significant. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures, the Greek word logos is used in place of dabar. Logos also means both ‘word’ and ‘event’, and in Greek philosophy it signified the principle of coherence undergirding all of creation. In the gospel of John, Jesus is called logos, the Word of God. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
This morning’s gospel reading is from Mark, and although he does not use the word logos, he does show us in this first story of Jesus’ public ministry that Jesus’ words and action speak for God because Jesus is God.
The reading begins with Jesus teaching in the synagogue, speaking with such authority that the people were astounded. But Mark doesn’t record a single word of that teaching; instead, he records the Word in action. Jesus rebukes a man with an unclean spirit, speaking with such authority that the unclean spirit leaves the man and the people were amazed. What is this? A new teaching – with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him. To say something really is to do something.
This gospel reading is not about Jesus’ ability to astonish and amaze crowds. It is not about his knowledge of or insight into holy scriptures, which is what was taught in the synagogue. It is not about exorcism. This reading is about who Jesus is, this light that has come into the world and who, in the season of Epiphany, we are taught to see more and more clearly.
Mark chooses his words carefully. The people were astounded at Jesus’ teaching, for he spoke as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Scribes in the synagogue were not mere copyists – they were biblical scholars, charged with reading and interpreting scripture. Their authority was derived from their lifelong study of God’s holy word, as read and interpreted by the generations of scribes that came before them, and the generations before them.
But by the time of Jesus, the teaching of the scribes had become in many places rigid, binding, highly protective of the identity of the Hebrew people as God’s chosen people. They were in the promised land, but so were the Greeks, whose government and gods ruled the day. Out of….fear? Forgetfulness? Self-preservation? A need for control? the religious establishment put their trust in the word of God to define who they were (and who was not one of them).
But that’s not what the Word of God is for. In Jesus Christ, the Word of God was revealed to be not a ‘what’, locked up in parchments and memories, but rather a ‘who’, a living and breathing Word with a face like ours but a power beyond even our imagination. Nothing about Jesus was bound by any word, any knowledge, any establishment – in this very passage he’s healing someone of an unclean spirit on the Sabbath! Jesus is not bound by any word.
In Jesus Christ, the Word of God was revealed to be more than just a tradition, an ancient story of God speaking in the lives of a chosen people. Jesus was the Living Word, moving with us through time and space and skin and bones. Jesus was the Living Word, through whom God spoke love and lived love. To say something is to do something.
Mark does not make clear whether the man with an unclean spirit was possessed by demons or by that same fear or forgetfulness or sense of self-preservation that possessed the scribes. In either case, the distance between the man and the Word of God was measurable – they weren’t speaking the same language. Jesus’ casting out of that unclean spirit is considered by many to supply the meaning behind every miracle of healing he will perform. To make the blind to see or the lame to walk is great, but to heal our rigidity, our fear….to cast out the things that bind us, that keep us from hearing the Word afresh….to make us ask again and again in wonder, What is this? A new teaching, a new life, a new creation, a new spirit….that is astounding, it is amazing.
So how do we tell the world of the meaning of this Word in our lives, the Word spoken through the prophets, the Word made flesh? We can be so like the scribes, bound tightly to the stories we’ve always been told (or have always told ourselves), rigidly defining who we are and who we aren’t, who others are and who they aren’t, desperately reaching for what little control of life we can have. We can be so like the man with the unclean spirit, possessed by fear and a multitude of other things that separate us from God and from others.
But we are also the Body of Christ, part of a new story along that ancient trajectory of the love of an almighty and everlasting and creative God. The pattern of death has been broken, the boundaries of salvation have opened wide the gates, the distance between heaven and earth has been crossed, and we are united one to another as living members of that Body, of that Word.
Another of my favorite writers, Madeleine L’Engle, tells the meaning of the Word in her life like this. She suggests that we are like our mother earth, in constant revolution, always moving or we will die. If the earth were not in revolution, there would be no days or nights, no new mornings, and we would suffocate as the very air we breathe and everything else not firmly attached to the ground would drift away. But the revolution that sustains us is not reckless – it does not fling us into unknown space – because we are also on a trajectory around the sun, a path that does not falter around a source that does not waver. Madeleine writes, “As I understand the beauty of the earth’s dance around the sun, so do I understand the constant revolution of the community of the Son.”
What is this? A new teaching – with authority! In Jesus, the Word of God is as new as a baby who is both God and human, and as ancient as the first day of creation. The authority with which he speaks is that of one who is made of flesh and blood and of almighty and everlasting, with no measurable space in between. The healing he offers is that of driving out those things in us that refuse to hear the Word of love spoken since let there be light.
In the words of our own Saint Paul, let us now give glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever. Amen.
“Don’t use words too big for the subject,” C.S. Lewis once warned. “Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
Perhaps had Lewis ever taught A.P. English, it would have been something like the class I was in my senior year of high school. “Don’t use words too big or too broad or too vague for the subject,” I can hear my teacher, Mr. Pell, warning. “Don’t say ‘the poem is great’ when you really mean ‘it’s as though the poem were written just for me’.” In fact, we weren’t allowed to use the word ‘great’ in class at all. Mr. Pell challenged us to say precisely and creatively what we meant, instead of ‘how’s your day? great…’ or ‘what did you think of the poem? great…’ He actually charged us twenty-five cents every time we said the word….well, you know, and on the last day of school he emptied the jar of change and went out and bought a new thesaurus for the classroom.
Words are so very significant. It’s amazing, don’t you think, that this jumble of shapes in black and white, this stream of sounds shaped by breath and lips, these words carry meaning across the space between people, whether on paper or through the air. Words carry meaning across that space allowing us to participate in one another’s lives and in the life of the world.
It’s easy to take for granted the meaning of words in our own language, until we come across a word we don’t know, or a new meaning of a word we thought we knew, or are forced to substitute words by English teachers. How very measurable that space between us feels, though, when we are surrounded by people speaking a language we do not know. And how very startled we are to learn meanings of words in different languages that seem to convey so much more than our own words do. For example, in Hebrew the word dabar means both ‘word’ and ‘deed’, such that to say something really is to do something. It was used especially to signify the creative word of God: Let there be light, and there was light.
Words are so very significant. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures, the Greek word logos is used in place of dabar. Logos also means both ‘word’ and ‘event’, and in Greek philosophy it signified the principle of coherence undergirding all of creation. In the gospel of John, Jesus is called logos, the Word of God. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
This morning’s gospel reading is from Mark, and although he does not use the word logos, he does show us in this first story of Jesus’ public ministry that Jesus’ words and action speak for God because Jesus is God.
The reading begins with Jesus teaching in the synagogue, speaking with such authority that the people were astounded. But Mark doesn’t record a single word of that teaching; instead, he records the Word in action. Jesus rebukes a man with an unclean spirit, speaking with such authority that the unclean spirit leaves the man and the people were amazed. What is this? A new teaching – with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him. To say something really is to do something.
This gospel reading is not about Jesus’ ability to astonish and amaze crowds. It is not about his knowledge of or insight into holy scriptures, which is what was taught in the synagogue. It is not about exorcism. This reading is about who Jesus is, this light that has come into the world and who, in the season of Epiphany, we are taught to see more and more clearly.
Mark chooses his words carefully. The people were astounded at Jesus’ teaching, for he spoke as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Scribes in the synagogue were not mere copyists – they were biblical scholars, charged with reading and interpreting scripture. Their authority was derived from their lifelong study of God’s holy word, as read and interpreted by the generations of scribes that came before them, and the generations before them.
But by the time of Jesus, the teaching of the scribes had become in many places rigid, binding, highly protective of the identity of the Hebrew people as God’s chosen people. They were in the promised land, but so were the Greeks, whose government and gods ruled the day. Out of….fear? Forgetfulness? Self-preservation? A need for control? the religious establishment put their trust in the word of God to define who they were (and who was not one of them).
But that’s not what the Word of God is for. In Jesus Christ, the Word of God was revealed to be not a ‘what’, locked up in parchments and memories, but rather a ‘who’, a living and breathing Word with a face like ours but a power beyond even our imagination. Nothing about Jesus was bound by any word, any knowledge, any establishment – in this very passage he’s healing someone of an unclean spirit on the Sabbath! Jesus is not bound by any word.
In Jesus Christ, the Word of God was revealed to be more than just a tradition, an ancient story of God speaking in the lives of a chosen people. Jesus was the Living Word, moving with us through time and space and skin and bones. Jesus was the Living Word, through whom God spoke love and lived love. To say something is to do something.
Mark does not make clear whether the man with an unclean spirit was possessed by demons or by that same fear or forgetfulness or sense of self-preservation that possessed the scribes. In either case, the distance between the man and the Word of God was measurable – they weren’t speaking the same language. Jesus’ casting out of that unclean spirit is considered by many to supply the meaning behind every miracle of healing he will perform. To make the blind to see or the lame to walk is great, but to heal our rigidity, our fear….to cast out the things that bind us, that keep us from hearing the Word afresh….to make us ask again and again in wonder, What is this? A new teaching, a new life, a new creation, a new spirit….that is astounding, it is amazing.
So how do we tell the world of the meaning of this Word in our lives, the Word spoken through the prophets, the Word made flesh? We can be so like the scribes, bound tightly to the stories we’ve always been told (or have always told ourselves), rigidly defining who we are and who we aren’t, who others are and who they aren’t, desperately reaching for what little control of life we can have. We can be so like the man with the unclean spirit, possessed by fear and a multitude of other things that separate us from God and from others.
But we are also the Body of Christ, part of a new story along that ancient trajectory of the love of an almighty and everlasting and creative God. The pattern of death has been broken, the boundaries of salvation have opened wide the gates, the distance between heaven and earth has been crossed, and we are united one to another as living members of that Body, of that Word.
Another of my favorite writers, Madeleine L’Engle, tells the meaning of the Word in her life like this. She suggests that we are like our mother earth, in constant revolution, always moving or we will die. If the earth were not in revolution, there would be no days or nights, no new mornings, and we would suffocate as the very air we breathe and everything else not firmly attached to the ground would drift away. But the revolution that sustains us is not reckless – it does not fling us into unknown space – because we are also on a trajectory around the sun, a path that does not falter around a source that does not waver. Madeleine writes, “As I understand the beauty of the earth’s dance around the sun, so do I understand the constant revolution of the community of the Son.”
What is this? A new teaching – with authority! In Jesus, the Word of God is as new as a baby who is both God and human, and as ancient as the first day of creation. The authority with which he speaks is that of one who is made of flesh and blood and of almighty and everlasting, with no measurable space in between. The healing he offers is that of driving out those things in us that refuse to hear the Word of love spoken since let there be light.
In the words of our own Saint Paul, let us now give glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever. Amen.
Monday, January 23, 2006
3 Epiphany B
Actually, this was my report at the Annual Meeting on 3 Epiphany B
Mark 1:14-20
When I asked Greg what I should talk about that wasn’t already covered in my written report, he suggested I reflect on what it has been like to be the Curate at St. Paul’s this past year. Now, most non-Episcopalians and more than a few Episcopalians smile politely but curiously when I tell them that I am a curate. It’s one of those funny old church words that actually no longer appears in our prayerbook or in the Constitutions and Canons of the Episcopal church, but many bishops still place their newly ordained priests as assistants in congregations much like this one, and they call us curates.
The word ‘curate’ is drawn from the Latin curatus, which means “entrusted with the care of something.” Originally, the curate was the priest in charge of a geographical area, called a ‘cure’, and he was entrusted with the care of the souls living within that cure. In fact, the word ‘cure’ is related in derivation to the word ‘care’. Over time, the priest in charge became known as the rector or vicar, and the name curate was given to assisting priests.
You know how funny old church words go – we don’t like to give them up, so that newcomers find themselves having to learn a new language when they join the Episcopal church. Where else does the curate wearing a chasuble remove the burse and veil from the chalice and paten before receiving the ciborium from the acolyte?! Last weekend, I attended a conference at Gray Center for priests who are newly ordained, as well as priests who have recently moved to a new parish. The conference leader wrote the words ‘cure’ and ‘curate’ up on the board, noting how they were related, and how those of us at the conference were thus related, all of us taking up new responsibilities, new challenges, new relationships, new journeys.
The next morning, another word had been added to the board, in a different handwriting – ‘c-u-r-i-o-s’. ‘Curios’. It was added anonymously, but I think in good humor and with some insight. Every now and then, when I have to explain my funny old church word job title, when I’m walking up the 23rd Avenue sidewalk before church wearing layers of vestments, when I tell yet another person that no, I’m not a nun, I feel like I belong in curio cabinet, odd and on display.
We all get that feeling sometimes, though, right? When our lives as people of faith, and particularly as Episcopalians, take us in a different direction from the lives of people around us? What a lovely collection of curios we are!
On the last morning of the conference, another anonymous contributor completed the list on the board: cure, curate, curios, curiouser and curioser.
These of course are the words Alice says, deep inside the rabbit hole filled with things labeled “Drink Me” and “Eat Me”. Alice marvels, “This is getting curiouser and curiouser!” as she samples the fare and finds herself growing and shrinking and growing again. Just as she thinks she has gotten the hang of things in Wonderland, a new surprise awaits around a corner or up a tree or at a tea party table.
It’s kind of like being a curate….this Wonderland is filled with people and with things and experiences that call out, “Read Me”, “Study Me”, “Pray Me”, “Pray with Me”, “Visit Me”, “Knit Me”, “Teach Me”, “Hear Me”, “Help Me”, “Preach Me”. Some days I try these things and I get the results I hoped for; some days I don’t. Some days I grow; some days it seems like I shrink. But every day I learn, and every day I discover something new. Just when I think I’ve got the hang of things, a new surprise awaits around a corner or up at the altar or at a bedside or at a vestry meeting.
I looked up the word ‘curious’, and found that it, too, is derived from the Latin word for ‘care’. ‘Curious’ today means ‘eager to learn,’ and it can mean ‘odd or strange,’ but an archaic meaning of the word is ‘extremely careful’. Eager to learn, a little odd (maybe!), extremely careful….curiouser and curiouser is a good description of the life of a curate!
But not just a curate. We are all in this wonderland together, a collection of curios, just trying to get the hang of things before we round the next corner. In a little while we will hear the story of Simon and Andrew, James and John, just getting the hang of a fisherman’s life when around the corner comes Jesus calling out “Follow Me”….and like Alice, they were just curious enough to try. Some days it was everything they hoped for; some days it wasn’t. Some days it seemed everything was going to be okay; some days it didn’t. Some days it was easy to be a disciple; some days it was very, very hard. So it is with us, with Jesus’ disciples in this time and place. “Follow Me,” he offers, and we’ve been just curious enough to try.
I may be the funny old church word ‘curate’ around here, but as much as this is my cure, so have I found myself to be yours. Indeed, we are all in the care of one another, and as disciples of Jesus Christ, all the world is our cure. In this curious, odd, strange year filled with construction dust and growing pains, waves and wind and driving rain, life together has not always been easy. Sometimes it has been very, very hard. But always at the center of our life together is Jesus again, calling “Eat Me,” “Drink Me,” and we kneel side by side to receive what we already are – the Body of Christ.
As the curate, I plan to keep learning this year. Sometimes I will feel fulfilled, and sometimes I will feel frustrated. But at every St. Martha’s Guild and every Senior High Bible Study, at every Prayer Shawl meeting and every budget meeting, at every Healing Service and every Morning Prayer, at every hospital visit and every home visit, I will learn about caring for the soul of another, and I know I will learn how my soul is cared for as well. St. Paul’s has curates because St. Paul’s is full of curates.
The call to discipleship is a call to holy curiousity, the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works. In this year may we be curiouser and curiouser together, turning new corners, eager to learn, and full of care. Amen.
Mark 1:14-20
When I asked Greg what I should talk about that wasn’t already covered in my written report, he suggested I reflect on what it has been like to be the Curate at St. Paul’s this past year. Now, most non-Episcopalians and more than a few Episcopalians smile politely but curiously when I tell them that I am a curate. It’s one of those funny old church words that actually no longer appears in our prayerbook or in the Constitutions and Canons of the Episcopal church, but many bishops still place their newly ordained priests as assistants in congregations much like this one, and they call us curates.
The word ‘curate’ is drawn from the Latin curatus, which means “entrusted with the care of something.” Originally, the curate was the priest in charge of a geographical area, called a ‘cure’, and he was entrusted with the care of the souls living within that cure. In fact, the word ‘cure’ is related in derivation to the word ‘care’. Over time, the priest in charge became known as the rector or vicar, and the name curate was given to assisting priests.
You know how funny old church words go – we don’t like to give them up, so that newcomers find themselves having to learn a new language when they join the Episcopal church. Where else does the curate wearing a chasuble remove the burse and veil from the chalice and paten before receiving the ciborium from the acolyte?! Last weekend, I attended a conference at Gray Center for priests who are newly ordained, as well as priests who have recently moved to a new parish. The conference leader wrote the words ‘cure’ and ‘curate’ up on the board, noting how they were related, and how those of us at the conference were thus related, all of us taking up new responsibilities, new challenges, new relationships, new journeys.
The next morning, another word had been added to the board, in a different handwriting – ‘c-u-r-i-o-s’. ‘Curios’. It was added anonymously, but I think in good humor and with some insight. Every now and then, when I have to explain my funny old church word job title, when I’m walking up the 23rd Avenue sidewalk before church wearing layers of vestments, when I tell yet another person that no, I’m not a nun, I feel like I belong in curio cabinet, odd and on display.
We all get that feeling sometimes, though, right? When our lives as people of faith, and particularly as Episcopalians, take us in a different direction from the lives of people around us? What a lovely collection of curios we are!
On the last morning of the conference, another anonymous contributor completed the list on the board: cure, curate, curios, curiouser and curioser.
These of course are the words Alice says, deep inside the rabbit hole filled with things labeled “Drink Me” and “Eat Me”. Alice marvels, “This is getting curiouser and curiouser!” as she samples the fare and finds herself growing and shrinking and growing again. Just as she thinks she has gotten the hang of things in Wonderland, a new surprise awaits around a corner or up a tree or at a tea party table.
It’s kind of like being a curate….this Wonderland is filled with people and with things and experiences that call out, “Read Me”, “Study Me”, “Pray Me”, “Pray with Me”, “Visit Me”, “Knit Me”, “Teach Me”, “Hear Me”, “Help Me”, “Preach Me”. Some days I try these things and I get the results I hoped for; some days I don’t. Some days I grow; some days it seems like I shrink. But every day I learn, and every day I discover something new. Just when I think I’ve got the hang of things, a new surprise awaits around a corner or up at the altar or at a bedside or at a vestry meeting.
I looked up the word ‘curious’, and found that it, too, is derived from the Latin word for ‘care’. ‘Curious’ today means ‘eager to learn,’ and it can mean ‘odd or strange,’ but an archaic meaning of the word is ‘extremely careful’. Eager to learn, a little odd (maybe!), extremely careful….curiouser and curiouser is a good description of the life of a curate!
But not just a curate. We are all in this wonderland together, a collection of curios, just trying to get the hang of things before we round the next corner. In a little while we will hear the story of Simon and Andrew, James and John, just getting the hang of a fisherman’s life when around the corner comes Jesus calling out “Follow Me”….and like Alice, they were just curious enough to try. Some days it was everything they hoped for; some days it wasn’t. Some days it seemed everything was going to be okay; some days it didn’t. Some days it was easy to be a disciple; some days it was very, very hard. So it is with us, with Jesus’ disciples in this time and place. “Follow Me,” he offers, and we’ve been just curious enough to try.
I may be the funny old church word ‘curate’ around here, but as much as this is my cure, so have I found myself to be yours. Indeed, we are all in the care of one another, and as disciples of Jesus Christ, all the world is our cure. In this curious, odd, strange year filled with construction dust and growing pains, waves and wind and driving rain, life together has not always been easy. Sometimes it has been very, very hard. But always at the center of our life together is Jesus again, calling “Eat Me,” “Drink Me,” and we kneel side by side to receive what we already are – the Body of Christ.
As the curate, I plan to keep learning this year. Sometimes I will feel fulfilled, and sometimes I will feel frustrated. But at every St. Martha’s Guild and every Senior High Bible Study, at every Prayer Shawl meeting and every budget meeting, at every Healing Service and every Morning Prayer, at every hospital visit and every home visit, I will learn about caring for the soul of another, and I know I will learn how my soul is cared for as well. St. Paul’s has curates because St. Paul’s is full of curates.
The call to discipleship is a call to holy curiousity, the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works. In this year may we be curiouser and curiouser together, turning new corners, eager to learn, and full of care. Amen.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Christmas Eve (Midnight)
Isaiah 9:2-4, 6-7; Psalm 96:1-4, 11-12; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-20
It is both humbling and heartening to be reminded every so often that the best sermon material comes not from a three-year seminary education but, rather, from life with a five-year-old little boy.
We were sitting at the dinner table a few nights ago, talking about Christmas, when Little Charlie said, “You know what I like best about Jesus’ birthday?” Now, my husband and I have really tried to give Jesus and Santa Claus at least equal time when it comes to Christmas. But in fact, most of Little Charlie’s Christmas books tell the gospel story we just heard a moment ago. There are a couple of books about Santa Claus, and Charlie loves his toy reindeer, but he also has a toy nativity set, so we thought we were getting the message across.
“You know what I like best about Jesus’ birthday?” I prepared myself for prime sermon material, a theological gem of the sort only children can produce. “You know what I like best about Jesus’ birthday?” he said. “We get all the presents.”
Oh well. To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah! God-with-us is with us, earth is shot through with heaven, and Charlie gets a Spiderman bike out of the deal. Not a bad deal, I guess, for him. But it was certainly not that gem I was hoping for.
Of course he’s just five, when it’s hard to look past the presents under the tree. Baby Jesus has to compete with cookies and stockings and jingle bells for his attention. Christmas means so many different things in his life – it does in all our lives, right? I'm afraid Baby Jesus still has to compete with cookies and stockings and jingle bells and a thousand other things for my attention. The trick to balancing them seems as delicate as the balance between divinity and DNA wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.
And then it hit me. I know that Little Charlie meant exactly what he said, and why not – there are presents in our house with his name on them, and he knows it’s not his birthday. It’s Jesus’ birthday, and here’s where he might be on to something after all, the little inadvertent theologian. It’s Jesus’ birthday, and we get all the presents.
It’s Jesus’ birthday, and we get the extraordinary gift of God coming to live among us as one of us, in all our ordinariness, so that we can one day come to live with God. It’s not a bad deal at all.
I think that part of what makes it so hard to balance Christmas is that we make the Christmas story into something like a fairy tale, befitting, we imagine, the birth of a Prince of Peace. The holy child lies in a bed of sweet hay as his parents bend over him serenely. Angels populate the skies and burst into song without warning. Shepherds appear in bathrobes, carrying softly bleating lambs in their arms. A silent night in the little town of Bethlehem.
By this time on Christmas Eve – how long is the list of things you’ve accomplished so far this week, and how much is left to do tonight – by this time we need the fairy tale birth, the warm glow of starlight filling the stable, the little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay.
The truth is, of course, the real story was as far from a fairy tale as our own lives are. The occupying government was imposing heavy taxes to pay its army to keep the peace. A baby was born to travel-weary first-time parents, a hundred miles from home. The only available shelter was a stable for pack animals, and the only available crib was their feeding trough. I doubt the smell in that stable could have been described as sweet. Just as the pain and fear of childbirth was subsiding, a group of strangers arrived demanding to see the baby. They weren’t royalty or wise men or even helpful neighbors, but shepherds, bleary-eyed from keeping watch at night, picking bits of grass and leaves from their hair. Shepherds weren’t known for their dependability or their manners, but there they were, claiming that angels had told them, of all people, that this baby was the Savior of all people. This is the real story into which the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace was born.
For some people, all of Christmas takes on a sort of fairy tale glow. They have happy memories of family and friends, deeply significant traditions, special meals, and favorite gifts. For others, the experience of Christmas is set more in shadow. There are sad or angry or grief-filled memories of the season, strained relationships, and long stretches of loneliness.
The truth is, we all arrive at the manger with burdens, doubts, anxieties, and disappointments. We are all tired when we get there. We all arrive short one tradition or one friend or one family member. Life simply is not a fairy tale. This is the real story into which the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace is born.
Jesus, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, is born in a noisy, smelly stable. The good news of great joy for all people is announced to a shifty band of shepherds. What an intersection of stories is held in that manger filled with dusty, scratchy hay, filled with the extraordinary Love of God for this ordinary world.
British actor Rowan Atkinson paints a charming picture of that intersection of stories through his on screen character, Mr. Bean. Mr. Bean is the quintessential thirty-five-year-old five-year-old, for whom life is simple, centered on himself, and full of possibilities. In the Christmas episode, Mr. Bean stumbles upon a nativity set in a store window, and he can’t resist bringing it to life. Sounds like a five-year-old five-year-old I know!
The camera narrows in on the nativity set, and we hear Mr. Bean’s delight as we see his hands playing with the figures in the set. It starts out like the fairy tale version. Mary and Joseph lean over Jesus and sing to him. The cow moos, which fetches a gentle “shhh” from Joseph. A shepherd arrives with at first just a few sheep behind him, but Mr. Bean must have found the basket marked “twenty for the price of one”, because suddenly, there are sheep flying in from all directions. He backs a truck up to load the sheep, and as it drives off, a toy dinosaur peers over from behind the stable and Joseph gives a fierce “shhh”. A robot rolls over to see the baby, who is promptly airlifted out of the mayhem by an angel with a magnet attached. This is at least something like the real, ordinary, wild story into which the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace is born. All of that, all those wildly diverse characters, all those stories intersecting with the story of Emmanuel, the story of God-with-us.
The good news of great joy is for all people – moms, dads, shepherds, kings, five-year-olds, thirty-five-year-olds, ninety-five-year-olds. We all belong in that nativity scene – in this nativity scene right here – so many real, ordinary, wildly diverse characters, so many wishing-it-were-but-knowing-it’s-not-a-fairy-tale lives intersecting with one another and with God, intersecting because of the gift of Jesus Christ, a baby in whom was both all of who God is and all of who we are.
I don’t know if it says something about Mr. Bean or about Little Charlie that they play with nativity sets the same way. Charlie’s toy nativity came with all the proper figures to tell the sweet fairy tale version of the story. But it wasn’t long before his procession to the manger included, just behind the wise men and their camel, a pair of matchbox cars, a whole herd of plastic dinosaurs, the pilot from a toy airplane, and a little stuffed caterpillar with rainbow stripes and a bell in its tale. Best of all, keeping a silent, respectful, towering watch over the entire scene, was Batman. It’s something like the real story….
….Everything important to Charlie was there – all the things that he loves. That’s what Christmas is about for God. Everything important to God is caught up in a single story – all the things and all the people God loves, all of our stories meet in the person of Jesus Christ. Ours are the real stories into which the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace is born. Ours are the stories Jesus walks into, with all our hopes and dreams and anxieties and fears and disappointments, with all our ordinariness. Ours are the stories to which he offers an extraordinary new life. We get all the presents.
I suppose the Baby Jesus might have liked a Spiderman bike if someone had given one to him on his birthday. Can you imagine him peddling around his driveway, like so many of us did when we were five? That’s part of what makes this present we receive on Christmas so special – through Jesus Christ, God knows deeply and personally what it’s like to be us. We’ll keep telling Charlie that that’s the real story of Christmas, it’s not just a fairy tale. And one day we hope he’ll discover that Jesus is indeed present in his ordinary, everyday life. In hugs and kisses at bedtime, in learning his letters at school, in playing with friends on the playground, in riding his new bike tomorrow morning. Because God met us in the manger, these are the sorts of ordinary places we can all meet God each and every ordinary day of our lives.
So I defer to a five-year-old once again. What does God like best about Jesus’ birthday? I think God likes that we get the very best present of all. Amen.
It is both humbling and heartening to be reminded every so often that the best sermon material comes not from a three-year seminary education but, rather, from life with a five-year-old little boy.
We were sitting at the dinner table a few nights ago, talking about Christmas, when Little Charlie said, “You know what I like best about Jesus’ birthday?” Now, my husband and I have really tried to give Jesus and Santa Claus at least equal time when it comes to Christmas. But in fact, most of Little Charlie’s Christmas books tell the gospel story we just heard a moment ago. There are a couple of books about Santa Claus, and Charlie loves his toy reindeer, but he also has a toy nativity set, so we thought we were getting the message across.
“You know what I like best about Jesus’ birthday?” I prepared myself for prime sermon material, a theological gem of the sort only children can produce. “You know what I like best about Jesus’ birthday?” he said. “We get all the presents.”
Oh well. To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah! God-with-us is with us, earth is shot through with heaven, and Charlie gets a Spiderman bike out of the deal. Not a bad deal, I guess, for him. But it was certainly not that gem I was hoping for.
Of course he’s just five, when it’s hard to look past the presents under the tree. Baby Jesus has to compete with cookies and stockings and jingle bells for his attention. Christmas means so many different things in his life – it does in all our lives, right? I'm afraid Baby Jesus still has to compete with cookies and stockings and jingle bells and a thousand other things for my attention. The trick to balancing them seems as delicate as the balance between divinity and DNA wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.
And then it hit me. I know that Little Charlie meant exactly what he said, and why not – there are presents in our house with his name on them, and he knows it’s not his birthday. It’s Jesus’ birthday, and here’s where he might be on to something after all, the little inadvertent theologian. It’s Jesus’ birthday, and we get all the presents.
It’s Jesus’ birthday, and we get the extraordinary gift of God coming to live among us as one of us, in all our ordinariness, so that we can one day come to live with God. It’s not a bad deal at all.
I think that part of what makes it so hard to balance Christmas is that we make the Christmas story into something like a fairy tale, befitting, we imagine, the birth of a Prince of Peace. The holy child lies in a bed of sweet hay as his parents bend over him serenely. Angels populate the skies and burst into song without warning. Shepherds appear in bathrobes, carrying softly bleating lambs in their arms. A silent night in the little town of Bethlehem.
By this time on Christmas Eve – how long is the list of things you’ve accomplished so far this week, and how much is left to do tonight – by this time we need the fairy tale birth, the warm glow of starlight filling the stable, the little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay.
The truth is, of course, the real story was as far from a fairy tale as our own lives are. The occupying government was imposing heavy taxes to pay its army to keep the peace. A baby was born to travel-weary first-time parents, a hundred miles from home. The only available shelter was a stable for pack animals, and the only available crib was their feeding trough. I doubt the smell in that stable could have been described as sweet. Just as the pain and fear of childbirth was subsiding, a group of strangers arrived demanding to see the baby. They weren’t royalty or wise men or even helpful neighbors, but shepherds, bleary-eyed from keeping watch at night, picking bits of grass and leaves from their hair. Shepherds weren’t known for their dependability or their manners, but there they were, claiming that angels had told them, of all people, that this baby was the Savior of all people. This is the real story into which the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace was born.
For some people, all of Christmas takes on a sort of fairy tale glow. They have happy memories of family and friends, deeply significant traditions, special meals, and favorite gifts. For others, the experience of Christmas is set more in shadow. There are sad or angry or grief-filled memories of the season, strained relationships, and long stretches of loneliness.
The truth is, we all arrive at the manger with burdens, doubts, anxieties, and disappointments. We are all tired when we get there. We all arrive short one tradition or one friend or one family member. Life simply is not a fairy tale. This is the real story into which the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace is born.
Jesus, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, is born in a noisy, smelly stable. The good news of great joy for all people is announced to a shifty band of shepherds. What an intersection of stories is held in that manger filled with dusty, scratchy hay, filled with the extraordinary Love of God for this ordinary world.
British actor Rowan Atkinson paints a charming picture of that intersection of stories through his on screen character, Mr. Bean. Mr. Bean is the quintessential thirty-five-year-old five-year-old, for whom life is simple, centered on himself, and full of possibilities. In the Christmas episode, Mr. Bean stumbles upon a nativity set in a store window, and he can’t resist bringing it to life. Sounds like a five-year-old five-year-old I know!
The camera narrows in on the nativity set, and we hear Mr. Bean’s delight as we see his hands playing with the figures in the set. It starts out like the fairy tale version. Mary and Joseph lean over Jesus and sing to him. The cow moos, which fetches a gentle “shhh” from Joseph. A shepherd arrives with at first just a few sheep behind him, but Mr. Bean must have found the basket marked “twenty for the price of one”, because suddenly, there are sheep flying in from all directions. He backs a truck up to load the sheep, and as it drives off, a toy dinosaur peers over from behind the stable and Joseph gives a fierce “shhh”. A robot rolls over to see the baby, who is promptly airlifted out of the mayhem by an angel with a magnet attached. This is at least something like the real, ordinary, wild story into which the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace is born. All of that, all those wildly diverse characters, all those stories intersecting with the story of Emmanuel, the story of God-with-us.
The good news of great joy is for all people – moms, dads, shepherds, kings, five-year-olds, thirty-five-year-olds, ninety-five-year-olds. We all belong in that nativity scene – in this nativity scene right here – so many real, ordinary, wildly diverse characters, so many wishing-it-were-but-knowing-it’s-not-a-fairy-tale lives intersecting with one another and with God, intersecting because of the gift of Jesus Christ, a baby in whom was both all of who God is and all of who we are.
I don’t know if it says something about Mr. Bean or about Little Charlie that they play with nativity sets the same way. Charlie’s toy nativity came with all the proper figures to tell the sweet fairy tale version of the story. But it wasn’t long before his procession to the manger included, just behind the wise men and their camel, a pair of matchbox cars, a whole herd of plastic dinosaurs, the pilot from a toy airplane, and a little stuffed caterpillar with rainbow stripes and a bell in its tale. Best of all, keeping a silent, respectful, towering watch over the entire scene, was Batman. It’s something like the real story….
….Everything important to Charlie was there – all the things that he loves. That’s what Christmas is about for God. Everything important to God is caught up in a single story – all the things and all the people God loves, all of our stories meet in the person of Jesus Christ. Ours are the real stories into which the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace is born. Ours are the stories Jesus walks into, with all our hopes and dreams and anxieties and fears and disappointments, with all our ordinariness. Ours are the stories to which he offers an extraordinary new life. We get all the presents.
I suppose the Baby Jesus might have liked a Spiderman bike if someone had given one to him on his birthday. Can you imagine him peddling around his driveway, like so many of us did when we were five? That’s part of what makes this present we receive on Christmas so special – through Jesus Christ, God knows deeply and personally what it’s like to be us. We’ll keep telling Charlie that that’s the real story of Christmas, it’s not just a fairy tale. And one day we hope he’ll discover that Jesus is indeed present in his ordinary, everyday life. In hugs and kisses at bedtime, in learning his letters at school, in playing with friends on the playground, in riding his new bike tomorrow morning. Because God met us in the manger, these are the sorts of ordinary places we can all meet God each and every ordinary day of our lives.
So I defer to a five-year-old once again. What does God like best about Jesus’ birthday? I think God likes that we get the very best present of all. Amen.
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