Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

"Do not be afraid." Doesn't every angel in the Gospels say this as a greeting? Jesus even says it a few times, particularly after his resurrection when he has a body like unto the angels. Then again I think creatures of spirit have a lot less to be afraid of than bodily creatures.

One example of the justifiable fear involved with having a body is made terrifyingly clear when you contemplate that bragging about sexually abusing women is no barrier to being voted leader of the so-called free world.

And that's just one example of the many unchallenged threatening messages our enemies have put out there. Messages that are in fact designed to strike fear in the least of these who Jesus identifies with, who in fact Jesus says, what you do to them you do unto me! So not just our enemies, but Jesus' enemies!

Fear is the enemy's tool. Creating a culture of fear is a political tool used to gain compliance or inhibit resistance, well used throughout history. And so when Jesus or angels tell us not to be afraid or greet us saying peace, it is not just comfort, it is to disarm the enemy.

Now in tonight's scripture, the angel does not simply say to Joseph "Do not be afraid" as greeting, but specifies what Joseph should not be afraid of - taking Mary as his wife.

Now I find it interesting how many people think that before Joseph knows Mary was knocked up by the Holy Spirit, he'd be justified in being angry, jealous or betrayed by Mary. The angel does not say, "don't be angry, however, but rather don't be afraid."

Some commentaries suggest Joseph might be afraid of offending the Lord, of not obeying the law, or of bringing scandal upon himself or his family. Now possibly in part to address the scandal, in the genealogy prior to this, Matthew named three women who were sexual transgressors and yet had God's favor or blessing.

Two of these women sexually transgressed in order to survive in a system that was set against them. Given recent political developments, a system set against women - or even more set against women than it currently is, especially if those women are marginalized in any other way - such a system seems close at hand.

To quote Rev. Peter Morales, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, "I pray that the incoming administration will prove to be more humane than its rhetoric and many of its most ardent supporters. I see no evidence that this is the case. None. It is irresponsible folly to act as though we are in a normal transition between administrations. We must prepare to provide sanctuary and resist."

We're going to need Josephs in these coming times. Those who can see and hear God's message - that following the law blindly and fearing scandal play into the enemy's hands. That taking the least of these into your home or heart is the same as taking Jesus there.

Josephs who defy laws and social pressures to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and care for the sick and the imprisoned. Like Arnold Abbott who keeps getting arrested in Ft. Lauderdale Florida for feeding the homeless. Ft. Lauderdale being one of 31 cities in the US where feeding the homeless - feeding Christ! - is illegal.

As I've said previously, it is in resistance that I find Hope. The sanctuary movement, where churches are harboring or are setting up to be able to harbor those who have been threatened with deportation, the folks I'm in touch with who are preparing to take women and other people with wombs to legal and safe clinics in Canada should Roe v Wade be overturned, there are folks advising trans people on how to get their birth certificate changed before it's too late and I'm sure there are those who are planning on resisting the registration of Muslims - I plan on finding them soon.

The discipline of Hope is putting Hope into action. Rather than worry how this situation could have happened, find a way to help those who have been threatened. The response to the enemy's use of fear is not to go into denial, it's to find Hope in some kind of action. Perhaps not all of these precautions will be necessary, perhaps the ones that are necessary won't even succeed. Yet we Hope that working towards helping even one of the least of these is helping Jesus himself.

It is one of the great paradoxes of Christian life that we need Jesus' help in order to help Jesus. As Paul reminds us, we can do all these things, but without love it's all just a bunch of noise. I have personal experience working with the homeless and it's the kind of work that can burn you out quickly if you're not taking care of yourself or getting support.

Part of the charism of the Order of Jesus Christ Reconciler is to be that support. Especially for those who find tending to Jesus through the least of these is resisted within their local church or even in their denomination. As always though, I recommend contemplative prayer and meditation to strengthen your relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let me also remind you that in Advent, we look forward not just to honor the incarnation, but also to look forward to the Kingdom of God fully manifested. No one knows the day or hour and it can seem a long way off and it may not even look like what we imagine it will look like. Let us find hope in the idea of it, though. That as much as our efforts to ease the suffering of the least of these may seem like a drop in the ocean, keep faith that we work for a time when all who enter the Kingdom care for each other in the presence of God.

Questions for discussion:
Tonight I've talked a lot about where I find hope in times when despair seems reasonable. In our discussion tonight, I certainly invite your responses to that, but also I'll provide some more personal questions to stimulate discussion.

1) If an angel told you do not be afraid, what fear that you have would come to mind?

2) Can you find a Christian hope that might address that fear, either in how you observe people living out Christian values or in scripture or tradition or in a personal encounter with Christ?

3) What actions do you see as a disciplined way of acting out of that hope?

• First reading
  • Isaiah 7:10-16
• Psalm
  • Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
• Second reading
  • Romans 1:1-7
• Gospel
  • Matthew 1:18-25

Psalm 12

1Help me, Lord, for there is no godly one left;
the faithful have vanished from among us.
2People tell lies to each other;
they use smooth words but speak from a double heart.
3May the Lord cut off all lips that flatter,
and the tongues that speak boastfully
4those who say, “With our tongue we will prevail;
our lips are our own; who is lord over us?”
5“Because the needy are oppressed, and the poor cry out in misery,
I will rise up,” says the Lord, “and give them the help they long for.”
6The words of the Lord are pure,
like silver refined from ore and purified seven times in the fire.
7O Lord, watch over us
and save us from this generation forever.
8The wicked prowl on every side,
and everyone prizes that which is worthless.

Sermon for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God.” I like the seeming contradiction seeing God in one’s flesh even after the skin has been destroyed. Job seems to have wrapped his mind around something that doesn’t make sense on the surface.  

 

In similar mind bending matters, tonight Jesus tells us that the children of the resurrection will be like the angels. Paul tells we will obtain the glory of Christ. And of course like a lot of mystical language, it loses something important if you take it too literally. I’m reminded of how often John’s Jesus rolls his eyes at people taking what he says too literally. But there is a profound truth being spoken of, and the clue to it is in the last few words. God is the God of the living. That in Moses’ time, Jesus’ time, and ours, Abraham and Issac and Jacob are alive to God now.

Now honestly, that thought is one to pray on and let wash over you and not pick apart intellectually, because we cannot even begin to fully know the mind of God. Christianity, does not and cannot make sense to us because it tells us about God, who is not only beyond time, but beyond being. Beyond being that is until the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus. 

When the apostles saw the resurrected Jesus, they did not recognize him at first. He seemed both corporeal and incorporeal. The resurrected Jesus was different. Through the resurrected Jesus, we get a glimpse of God’s actuality. An actuality breaking into the world, that wasn’t part of this world before. God who was uncreated now shared something with the created world, was in turn took on something of the actuality of the created world through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. 

For now, we see this through a mirror darkly, and quite frankly the mirror has seemed very dark lately. For this actuality breaking in is not just the promised resurrection, but about the manifestation of the Kingdom. And in times like these, the Kingdom can seem very far away. In times like these one can take the long view and think what life was like in the first century versus what life is like now, and that we even know that there’s a lot of injustice now, means some breaking through has happened. But that is trying to see God’s actuality in the world, in the dark mirror itself.

Because look how far we’ve come may be a source of hope, but it doesn’t help at all when you’re sitting with a black mother who is weeping for fear of the danger her son is in just for walking down the street. No, our hope is not in the created world, it is in the actuality Christ revealed to us. 

Hope in the Kingdom, in God’s actuality, takes work though. It’s not something we can measure or verify through experiment or any of the ways we can learn about the created world. It takes prayer and contemplative practices and ritual. Like the ritual we participate in earlier tonight - Joshua’s baptism.

Tonight, Joshua entered the actuality we’ve been talking about, ritually, mystically, sacramentally entered into Jesus’s death and resurrection, and inherited Christ’s Glory. We all renewed our baptism, spoke the words we spoke or were spoken for us, when we entered that actuality. This is where our hope lies, in that we have already entered into God’s actuality.

So I’m putting forth three main points to begin our theme that we’ll be following through into Advent, the theme of hope as virtue and promise. Three of perhaps many reasons why hope is a virtue would be, 1) That it can be hard to find hope in the world, 2) That our hope is in an actuality we cannot fully grasp, and 3) That hope takes time and effort and participation with others who have entered into God’s actuality through Jesus Christ. 

  

• Job 19:23-27a and Psalm 17:1-9  • 
• 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17  • 
• Luke 20:27-38

  

Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Tonight’s Gospel can sound rather harsh. It uses language that is problematic in light of the racism and myriad other oppressions which are the fabric of the society we live in. But we need to remember that Christ speaks of another reality altogether than the one we live in. Whether that be the historical/cultural reality of first century Palestine, or the Kingdom of God, it is not the reality of our society. 

We pray every Sunday, and likely many other days as well, for God’s kingdom to come, for God’s will to manifest on earth. That’s God’s will though, and not our will. I think often in the U.S. when we glorify our freedom, we mean exercising one’s will without impediments. And that’s certainly not an option for many, many people in the U.S. But I question that definition of freedom to begin with. I’d like to explore that with you for a bit before we get to tonight’s Gospel.

Loki, the villain in the Avengers movie, in his declaration of himself as ruler of Earth, gives a speech about humans ultimately wanting to be ruled. Like a lot of well written villains, he gets at a truth, however twisted his version of it is. The one line in particular that has something to it is this, “The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity.” And this truth is especially true for Americans I think, as our sense of freedom is tied up in individualism.

The great irony of the American myth of individualism is that it is, in and of itself, a socially constructed ideology that we operate out of collectively. It only works if enough people buy into the illusion. And so there’s great social pressure to buy into it. And maintaining that illusion I believe does diminishes our life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity.

And while I’ve never had much of a will to power, my life had been bound up in a mad scramble for identity. Without going too deeply into it, my madcap adventures with questions about who I am and the social pressures involved and my uneasy relationship with identity politics can diminish my joy greatly. 

Not that any of this changes who I am, but the scramble around it is the issue. And in truth it was only when I began a process of surrendering my will to God’s that I found any peace in this and understood not how I saw myself, but rather how God sees me.

 

I call the surrendering of will a process, because it’s neither an easy thing, nor perhaps something any of us can fully accomplish. And there are so many reasons and temptations to take one’s will back, especially if exercising one’s will without impediments is how your culture describes freedom.

I can’t remember all the Greek right now, but I do remember that a lot of Paul’s language around freedom, redemption and salvation was in terms of being bought out of slavery. And yet he refers to himself as a bond-servant of Christ. Timothy, James, Peter, and Jude all describe themselves as slaves of Christ as well. So it ends up sounding as if Christ has bought us for Himself, and we’re to find freedom in that. 

And this may seem like a contradiction, but I’d like to point out that Christ is God, and that we’re not talking about being bond-servants to another human. And in fact, given that we are totally dependent on God for our very existence, that God is in fact our creator, any idea that we don’t belong to God anyway is false. So in buying us, Christ brought us back to our right relationship to God. Christ did more than that, too, made us friends and heirs as well, but it is in the context of slaves that I comment on tonight’s Gospel.

“We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”

Now the word worthless is honestly I word I have struggled with as feelings of worthlessness and despair actually keep me from doing what I ought to do. When I hear worthless in the context of God, a God who I have experienced as loving and merciful beyond anything I could hope for, I use it as a reminder of the fact that I have in no way earned God’s grace. I am not any more or less worthy of God’s grace than anyone else. 

The word slave, as I have indicated above, has to do with our complete and total dependence on God in the first place. Nonetheless, we have been given the will to go against God’s will. Christ Jesus gave us an example of what it means to align our will with God’s. And yet, even as I say this, even though I know better, my cultural warning lights and bells are flashing. Submission is weakness they tell me, any submission!

Now, without getting to far off the track here, I should mention the contradictory message that if you are a lesser class of human, if you are a POC or a woman or poor, etc. you are expected to know your place. And face consequences if you don’t. But cultures and societies often have mixed messages, and it’s the message that submission is necessarily weakness that makes me react to tonight’s Gospel as very very harsh.

In truth it takes great strength for one to submit one’s will. I’m not talking about letting someone walk all over you. I’m not talking about having a crushed spirit. I'm definitely not talking about giving up the fight for your legal rights. I’m talking about earnest, deep, loving, and voluntary surrender - to God. One cannot do it without cultivating a complete and utter trust in God. One of my professors at divinity school asked the question, “What would you be able to do if you had no fear?” It’s that level of trust I’m talking about, a level of trust that I believe can only be achieved through dedicated prayer and deep meditation. If I had no fear, I could easily do God’s will as I understand it. 

I often think I don’t have that kind of trust or faith. This brings me to the bit about faith that the slavery passage is coupled with tonight. Now I know people who read the passage as a criticism of not having enough faith. I can’t make a tree jump into a lake, so I must not have even a mustard seed of faith.

I think that interpretation is backwards, at least as it’s presented here in Luke. The apostles are asking for more faith, and Jesus is telling them they have all the faith they need. Now it’s possible that these two passages in tonight’s Gospel are unrelated and yet it was the pairing that made me see this take on the passage about faith.

Perhaps Jesus is illustrating that they have enough faith with the slavery sayings. Just do what you are asked to do, what you ought to do, with the attitude of a slave, full submission. Remembering that dedicated prayer and deep meditation are part of what you ought to do. You’ll likely find you had all the faith you needed.   

  

• Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 and Psalm 37:1-9  • 
• 2 Timothy 1:1-14  • 
• Luke 17:5-10

Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Wealth, power and status do not belong in the Kingdom of Heaven. I’ve said this before and tonight’s Gospel is another example of this, particularly emphasizing status. Yet quite frankly, other than in a remembering to check your privilege sense, none of us here this evening have all that much status. And I expect that not many of us desire to seek it, though only God knows what’s in a person’s heart, so I’m not going to get into that. What I’m going to get into, what stood out to me in the Gospel as I read it this time, is what Jesus had to say about repayment or reward.

 

Before we get to what Jesus said, I want to make clear what Jesus did not say. “You’ll get your reward in heaven” is a concept that has been wielded as a weapon of religious abuse. Jesus never said, “Do nothing to defend yourself or better your situation because you will get your reward in heaven.” He never said, “God wants you to suffer hear on earth so you earn your reward in heaven” Nor did he say, “Love your neighbor instead of yourself.”

That last one reminds me of the saying, “there’s no such thing as altruism” which is usually followed by an example of how there is some selfish motivation behind helping anyone. So what? I mean, Jesus is not saying don’t be selfish in tonight’s Gospel. He’s actually suggesting a very selfish motivation. The question here isn’t do you want to be rewarded, the questions is what kind of a reward do you want to get? Not when do you want your reward, but rather do you want an earthly reward or a heavenly one?

Now I confess in my personal piety, I’ve fooled myself into thinking that I’ve rejected reward and punishment as motivations.  I must admit I’ve been rather self-righteous about it at times. What I’ve confused with reward and punishment in general, is the specific wielding of promises of Heaven and threats of Hell as ways to control people, or as a very twisted moral compass. There are moral arguments in the Bible, the Golden Rule is a moral argument for example, one rooted in empathy. “Do it or God will punish you” is not a moral argument, though.

So in rejecting Heaven and Hell as motivations (which in my case motivated me in the wrong direction, the more I worried about the afterlife, the worse my behavior was) I instead embraced “We love because God loved us first.” I sought out connecting to God’s love for me in prayer and meditation and reflection on the Gospels. This led to my actually falling in love with Christ. And while I don’t think I ever saw that as altruistic, I think I was blind to loving and being loved as a reward in and of itself.

Perhaps this is what Jesus was getting at when he said his yoke was easy and his burden light, despite the suffering that is inevitable in leading a Christian life; inevitable, by the way, not demanded. The first commandment love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength is its own reward.

Now I have said, but really had no right to say, that living out this love will inevitably lead to loving one’s neighbor as oneself. There is still effort and work to do to get there and so we need a second commandment to summarize the law. What I can say is that having felt the love of God, and spending time with that, actively seeing yourself through God’s eyes, it is much easier to see others as God sees them. We can transfer the feeling onto others. We cannot see into their hearts, but we can see the image of God in us all; even in those who cannot repay us for inviting them to our banquet, cannot repay us for our kindness, who in fact may be incapable of loving us back. 

It is true that Jesus refers to a future reward for this behavior, at the time of the resurrection, but I believe that the being blessed, the actual righteousness (as opposed to self-righteousness) is a present reward; the reward of loving and being loved by God. And certainly I look forward to the beatific vision, of seeing God “face to face” so to speak. But why deny yourself the reward of living in God’s love, of having a love affair with God here now as much as possible? For it is possible. Like any relationship it takes work. Prayer and meditation and reflection on the Gospels is work, but the rewards are great. And while they happen on earth, they are not earthly rewards.

We can make all the earthly changes we want, but without love, without God, as Paul has told us, it is empty and just a lot of noise.  Soon we will be participating in an enactment of the Heavenly Banquet. We will be feasting on God’s own self. We will be participating as the body of Christ. This all came about from God loving us so much that God became us, so that we are not just in the image of God, but God’s own flesh and blood. This is here now, both earthly and heavenly.

• Sirach 10:12-18 or Proverbs 25:6-7 and Psalm 112  • 
• Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16  • 
• Luke 14:1, 7-14

Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” said the Lord. And don’t we store up treasures on earth to the point that we’re making the earth inhabitable for ourselves. Tomorrow all our lives will be demanded of us. But that does not mean we shouldn’t eat drink and be merry, just not in the way we usually think of eating drinking and being merry.

Outside the context of the Bible, I’ve heard “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” used to mean a couple things: One is basically party like there’s no tomorrow, another is let’s celebrate now, while we have a respite before facing something rather gloomy. I’m not advocating it in either of those ways. I believe both of those ways betray a specifically American outlook on consumption. Consume with abandon, and consume to make ourselves feel better.

We consume to an alarming degree here in the U.S.  Some time ago, it was calculated that if the rest of the world consumed at the level we do here, it would take the resources of 5 and a half earths to fulfil the demand. We are using a criminal amount of our fair share of God’s bounty. I rather imagine this statistic is even higher now.

George Romero’s second “living dead movie,” Dawn of the Dead, is deliberate social commentary on consumerism. Most of the film takes place in a shopping mall. The living dead, who are commonly referred to as zombies in later films of this type, hover around a mall due to -as one character muses- “some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

The small band of folks who are not dead manage to hold up in the mall, thinking initially that it’s a great place to hold out in. All the mod cons are available to them, and they set up house. But soon the emptiness of an existence of pure consuming begins to dawn on our protagonists. One says, “I'm afraid. You're hypnotized by this place. All of you! You don't see that it's not a sanctuary, it's a prison!”

This movie came out in 1978, when Carter was president. This president became hated by many the next year, because he warned us that we were overconsuming and rationed gasoline. There was such a strong reaction against slowing our consumption that people flocked to Reagan’s unsustainable economic theories. And the mad consumption continued.

And one of the most frightening things about consumerism is how easily it absorbs any resistance to it. A while back I started hearing of a movement to simplify. Clearly some folks were reacting to our overconsumption and like the folks in the movie, saw it for the prison it is. Shortly after the people who were promoting this lifestyle got public attention, a magazine showed up in the supermarkets, called “Simplify.” The magazine was full of things you could BUY in order to simply your life. It’s insidious!

So, let us ask ourselves, where are we a little mad in our consumption? What are the earthly treasures we store? My weakness is books, yours of course may be entirely different, but let’s use books as an example. At the community we have 16 floor to ceiling bookcases full of books, plus a few smaller bookcases and boxes of books in the closet and down in the storage locker. We’re actually going to have library hours soon. And while I do believe books are good things and valuable, I know also that I horde them.

Now a great many of these books are religious books and I genuinely believe they help me to store treasure in heaven; they help me know and love Jesus better. And certainly while I need to cut down on my book consumption, I wouldn’t eliminate books entirely. The question is where is my treasure? In the books themselves, or in the knowledge they bring? Or even in the joy they bring? I’ve seen how joy can be contagious. When I’m sharing with joy about a story I read or say, a horror movie I watched, I’ve seen others find joy in my joy.

Which brings me back to enjoyment of earthly things and how that can be different than storing up treasures on earth. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” Which is a combination of two phrases in Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes is a rather gloomy cynical book, as we heard tonight. The first is the one that mentions being merry, “Therefore I praised joy, because there is nothing better for mortals under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be joyful; this will accompany them in their toil through the limited days of life God gives them under the sun.”

You see the author of Ecclesiastes sees the emptiness in toil and labor for the production of abundance, what the rich man in Jesus’ story fails to see. The rich man sees eating, drinking and being merry as something to be done after abundance has been achieved. The author of Ecclesiastes sees it as taking joy in things. Joy in fact that carries over into the labor itself. This is a joy independent of results. Results are transitory, they do not last.

Paul in First Corinthians quotes the other saying from Ecclesiastes, the one without merry in it. He quotes it while talking to people who are doubting the resurrection of the dead. “If the dead are not raised,” Paul says (and here he quotes) “‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” The author of Ecclesiastes asserts that there is no joy in the land of the dead. Paul insists there is joy that abides, because Christ has proved the resurrection of the dead.

I personally cannot doubt the resurrection because Christ is always present for me in the breaking of the bread. Though I must admit, that assurance of the resurrection doesn’t always bring me joy, for we are now still toiling through the limited days of life God gives us under the sun. And as I’ve put forth rather strongly tonight, the world is a mess, and we keep making it worse. But I will tell you this, without joy we are our toil is vanity.

I’ve said before that I believe Hope is a virtue because it does not come easily. As Christians, we attach Hope to the implications of the resurrection. That Hope also includes a belief in the promised coming of the kingdom here on earth. And we should rejoice in that. But more than that, I believe in these dark times of trouble and despair, we have a responsibility to lift each other up. We are the body of Christ here now under the sun. In that way the resurrection is here now and present.  Let’s find our joy in each others company. Soon we will eat and drink God’s very self, let’s be merry doing so.

 The Texts:

• Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23 and Psalm 49:1-12  • 
• Colossians 3:1-11  • 
• Luke 12:13-21