January 29, 2012

Mark 1:21-28

When Jesus spoke, people listened. When Jesus taught in the synagogue, we’re told, his listeners were astounded , “for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” “What is this?” they asked “A new teaching—with authority!” You can almost hear Marv Alpert’s voice describing a slam dunk by a New York Nick: “With authority.”

I was standing on a vast barren plain on a mid-winter day in South Africa (July!). A geologist was describing how we were at the center of a crater made thousands of millions of years ago when a meteor hit the earth near where we were standing. He went on about rock formations and geological phenomena. I know nothing about rocks, and less about geology. I thought the place looked like a big spot of nothing. But I listened, fascinated. Because our guide spoke with authority. He knew what he was talking about. I wouldn’t have known him from a dentist, but he was introduced as an expert from the university where we were staying. So I trusted. I trusted those who got him to lead us, the whole apparatus of education behind the man, indeed the whole of modern science. Here is one who spoke with authority. So I listened.

What is it to speak with authority? Something “with authority” comes from the author. The author writes the story, and so whatever she says is the case. It’s her story and the world created by her story. It isn’t someone else reporting and interpreting what the author might mean. It’s the author herself.

So when Jesus speaks, it’s not like the scribes. Scribes have a certain kind of authority. I have an affinity with scribes because it’s the kind of authority I work with. Scribes speak from the sources, the books, the scriptures, from what has been written. Is it in Scripture? Is the Scripture in question authentic? Scribes work with footnotes (if they had had them back then).

You know that like most professions, preachers put up with some teasing. Happily, there isn’t a stash of preacher jokes like there are lawyer jokes. But we’re teased nonetheless. One fellow in the locker room at the Y tells me how lucky I am to work one hour a week. Others think that once the church ordained me as a minister, God gave me God’s private cell phone number, so that I have a direct line. Not so. What authority I have comes from the story, from Scripture’s tale. I do not speak as the author. Like every other student, I’m studying and praying to know something of what the author, God, is up to.

Jesus, though, speaks with authority. He speaks from the source itself, what God is up to in creating and sustaining the world. This is quite astonishing. And, I must say, it’s also unsettling. More than that, it’s presumptuous; Jesus presumes to speak for the Author, God.

C.S. Lewis once said someplace that Jesus either is who he claims to be or he’s a cabbage. Jesus is who he claims to be or he’s just another in a long line of wisdom teachers who have a whole lot to say, but who just as well might be off target. But what if Jesus is right? What if Jesus is who he claims to be? Or, given our story, what if his listeners have got it down, that he speaks with authority?

If that’s true, then we listen. Here’s what we don’t do. We don’t first measure Jesus against something else. We don’t weigh his words to see whether they agree with how we understand the world to be put together. We don’t check Jesus’ credentials to see if he is the genuine article. We don’t think: “Well, I’ll listen to Jesus if he makes sense. I’ll listen to Jesus if he lives up to my standard of what God might be saying.” We don’t think, “I’ll listen to Jesus so long as he makes life better for me, or for my world.” No. He speaks with authority.

If he is who he claims to be, then what he says is the truth. Not because we can fact-check it. Not because it fits in with what we know to be true. What he says is truth because it comes from the author, from the One who put this world together and who bends it toward good.

So that when he says “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” you may come indeed and you will receive rest.

When he says to the sinner, “Your sins are forgiven,” they are forgiven indeed, fully completely. When he says that to you, you walk out of here free, lightened. Not because Jesus gives you a free pass on your responsibilities, but because he took them all onto himself, with all the consequences adherent thereto.

When he says “blessed are you when others revile you and forsake you,” you are blessed indeed. That’s the truth.

When he says, “Love your neighbor,” he isn’t kidding. And when his famous parable tells you that your neighbor is the hated Samaritan, you learn what he’s talking about. So that he also isn’t kidding when he says “Love your enemies.”

When he says “The measure you give will be the measure you get,” that’s the truth too, that in God’s kingdom you and I are set here to give, to love.

All because Jesus has announced that the “kingdom of God is at hand.” And that’s the truth too, that something good is breaking out where strangers become friends and the hungry feed and outcast welcomed and even the dead are raised. That’s God’s world and it’s what this world is tending toward. Something good is happening in our world, even when it looks like everything is falling apart. Jesus is telling the truth; it’s from the author’s mouth!

Still, something happens when Jesus speaks with authority. This isn’t like my story of standing on the African plain receiving interesting information. I could file it away and most likely do nothing with it, except have something to say at dinner parties. When Jesus spoke, the demons fled. The man in the synagogue with an “unclean spirit” cries out. In fact, it is the cry of the demons. They are afraid that Jesus has come to destroy them. And he has!

This sounds just strange to us. This is horror movie stuff, the kind of shivery science fiction that teases us in movies and television. But hang with me a bit while I practice a bit of “scribal authority,” looking to some source material. The word demon comes from a Greek word daimon. And daimons weren’t little red devils crawling around inside you. They were  powers, divinities, the presence of something unseen that could get inside you, possess you even. As an artist you could have a daimon that propelled your creativity. We might see it as a kind of passion that gets hold of you. That can be a good thing – a passion for beauty or for justice or for truth. Or it could be destructive – a passion to get drunk on wine every night, or to accumulate wealth at all costs. In any case the daimon shaped your spirit. It could even become “unclean,” impure.

When Jesus spoke, the daimons fled. Things happened.

What’s your daimon? Not a question you’ve been asked lately, I’d wager. I’ll say it another way: what’s got your spirit? What tugs you this way or that? I’ll give you one that’s got my spirit right now, perhaps a rather benign one. The Giants. Come next Sunday evening, if they win, I will be unreasonably happy. Unreasonably, because it won’t change anything of real importance in my world, but I’ll be sure that all is well, somehow. And if they lose, I’ll be disconsolate with all the rest. Again, unreasonably so. The world isn’t worse for the loss. It has my spirit. It directs my energy. I say it’s benign; but such passions can turn ugly. How else explain the kind of violence that often follows sporting events?

What else? It can be a passion for nation that is so strong that it ignores the fact that the nation might be on a wrong track; we’ve seen such nationalisms particularly in the twentieth century as they’ve fostered terrible wars. It can be a dark spirit that gets under your skin, a way of looking at the world as though it is a threat to your existence. It can be a party spirit that catches you in such a way that we divide.

When Jesus speaks, when he teaches, with authority, he pictures God’s way with the world. And that way unsettles because it challenges the daimons, challenges that which tugs at us. And more, when Jesus is around, we begin to change. And we will resist. We resist because we’ve gotten used to the way the world is. It’s always been a bit of a puzzle to those of us who work with people, especially with families, how families that aren’t working, families that are self-destructive, resist change. You’d think anything would be better than misery. But they, like us all, get used to the world as they know it. “Better the devil you know…” So we resist change.

But, and this is a great “but,” resisting or not, the unclean spirit left the troubled man. Jesus doesn’t stand on our resistance. Jesus continues, with authority. And people listen, and follow. People listen, and change touches them, deep within. Jesus speaks with authority because God is changing the world, so that change happens outside, in the tracks of history, and inside, touching the deepest part of the human spirit.

You can see it, bear witness to it. To people who are walking tall today because Jesus’ presence has given them a new spirit, a clean spirit, a human spirit. To a world where God’s kingdom will not be refused as prophets stand up and call us to better ways of being people, to God’s way where we can be people together, in peace, allowing forgiveness. It has happened because Jesus calls and people follow.

This is an amazing something. This week I picked up a new book on Jesus. As the author looked back into the early years of Christianity, he posed this question: “Why did Christians keep on believing , in far-flung places like northern Turkey, eighty-plus years after Jesus had come and gone? What was it about Jesus that they found so compelling? Gentiles in Bithynia had no roots in Jewish Tradition. No cultural reason to harbor an unwelcome, foreign religion. Yet cling to Jesus they did, many of them in the face of death.”

People follow because they hear from an authority they can’t ignore that something fundamental has changed in the world. Here’s something I came across years ago in the Times Book Review: “…the mystery of God’s plots always escapes private detection, being far trickier than fiction where the good end up happy when the covers close”  Followers of Jesus hear from the author how the plot is being written. And it has a good ending. That doesn’t mean that the journey to that end is not fraught with danger, with inexplicable hardships, even with sickness and death – and that sometimes on a scale we cannot imagine. The plot is tricky indeed. But when Jesus speaks, we believe him. We hear from the author!

Of course, this isn’t direct speech. Jesus may not whisper to you any more than he does to this preacher. But in ways that we can’t quite put our finger on, we hear his voice through other voices. We hear it through Scripture’s stories. We hear it as Jesus speaks his parables. We hear it echoing through the tales of God’s guidance of Israel, sometimes as promise, and sometimes as reprimand.

Sometimes we hear Jesus’ voice through the voice of the preacher – that happens! Sometimes he speaks through the voice of a fellow congregant, or a neighbor, or a teacher, or a friend. It is the voice of one who is telling us that all is well.

Do you hear him? Does his voice unsettle your world? That’s not a bad thing. But do you hear him as his voice utters a truth, and that truth sets you free from all the tugs and pulls that tear you apart? Jesus speaks – with authority!

January 22, 2012

Mark 1:14-20

The scene is ordinary, or would be if you lived in a fishing village. Fishermen are in their boats doing what fishermen do, messing about with their equipment. This is difficult work, dawn to dusk work. Enter from stage right a certain Joshua from Nazareth. He stops, addresses a couple of them, and says, “Follow me. I’ve got a different kind of fishing for you to do.” And they do it – on the spot! Jesus offers them a new work to do.

They will become disciples of Jesus. They have received a new vocation. Vocation — the word means “call.” The past week a certain blog that I follow has been having a vigorous debate about vocation. You know blogs. They are the electronic version of newspaper columns. The rather ugly word, “blog,” comes from “web log.” Anyone can do it. And they do. So you get everything to someone’s opinion about his toenails to very bright people reflecting on weighty topics. Then others can respond with either wisdom or crack-pot opinion. This was an intelligent debate about vocation. One reason for the debate is the contention that vocation is a fancy word church people use to dress up the work that you do. So that whatever it is you do, it’s God’s call on you to do it. And people use it to talk about what you “do for a living,” what you do to draw a paycheck. Do we do our work because God calls us?

I don’t know. What compels you to work? If you’re very lucky, you get paid to do what you love to do. But there are other reasons. You work because you need a job, period. You work because you need to feed the family, or pay college bills for the kids. You work if you can get it. And some jobs are just that, a job and a dirty one at that. The question of vocation provokes the further question, what compels us to be what we’re about.

We’ll get to the good work God has for us, whether we’re being paid for it or not. But for now back to our fisher folk. What compelled them to upset their lives and their families and wander off following a rabbi without portfolio or synagogue? Mark has given us a clue when he has Jesus take the stage and announce: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Repent and believe.

Jesus comes with a compelling vision of a reality that invites followers. This is the great glad news, news so good you’ll leave settled life behind to follow the vision. The “good news” that Jesus announces is not a new teaching about the nature of God, not the notion that God could become human at Bethlehem’s manger. It was not a new religious way of being in the world – how one might overcome the insistent power of human desire and so be liberated from the struggles of the inner life. It was not a secret of how to do an end run around death and set your life for eternity. It was about the kingdom of God.

What did that look like? Mark’s Jesus gives us snapshot on snapshot. It is where you can walk again, walk tall again, because a past that has weighed you down, a past for which you’re fully responsible, no longer obtains. You are forgiven. And so is your neighbor (the guy or gal you aren’t so ready to forgive!). When this Jesus is around, when he speaks, you know yourself released from your past.

What did that look like? Old wounds that have been bleeding so long that the bleeding is normal stop. The blood that’s draining out of you, leaving you empty, is restored. The shame that you’ve been carrying with you, shame for something shameful done to you is lifted.

What did that look like? The unclean, all those who don’t belong in polite society. Indeed, all those who are a clear and present danger to society, those who will harm the innocent, even they are welcomed back. The unembraceable is embraced.

What did that look like? The hungry are welcomed to banquets not only for body, but real banquets that feed the soul. The silenced can speak. I’ve been reading about servants in earlier centuries. They were to be invisible and unheard. When their betters walked by, they were to turn their face to the wall. Not with Jesus. Those who have been robbed of voice now can stand up and say, “I’m here and I have a story to tell and a song to sing!” The disciples followed Jesus because his was a compelling vision that beckoned them forward.

Paul gives us a different sort of picture in his famous (and famously difficult) letter to the church at Rome. Paul’s entire letter to this congregation he doesn’t know – he’s introducing himself because he hopes to stop there on his way to Spain – his letter is to remind the Roman church that they are a mixture of Jew and Gentile. “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you,” he says, “to the glory of God.” His point is that God has overcome our deepest divisions and intends for us to be together. This is the vision of Jew and Gentile together.

This is a crucial vision for us in Bergen County, 2012. We know of the recent spate of anti-Semitic attacks on synagogues of our Jewish neighbors. Quite naturally we are repelled by such acts. But do we understand our own Christian relation to our co-religionists? It begins with the fact that our religion centers not on a Christian, but on a Jew, Jesus. For that matter, Paul remained a loyal Jew, and a Pharisee at that, to the very end. Do we understand that if we read our apostle closely, our job as Christians is not to convert Jews to the Christian faith, as some Christians would have it? I don’t want to make Paul less offensive to Jews than he is; he envisions that Jews will finally recognize Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah. But the Christian response is not to convert the Jew to Christianity, but to live the Christian way as lovingly as possible. It is to live the compelling vision of Jew and Gentile together, even in difference. And, this is the sad part, the difficult part: Christians not only don’t have a record of living that vision, but have provided the historic rationale and even sometimes active support for violence against Jews.

So that there is another reason for heeding Jesus’ call. We not only turn toward the compelling vision. We turn from the route we’ve been taking through the world. That is repentance. As you’ve heard me say any number of times, the term “repent” means simply “to turn around.” I began with the vision because the vision is what one turns toward. We are compelled forward. But we are also turning away from something. We turn away because however we’re living together, it isn’t working. In this political season, my mind travels back to Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter. Reagan asked the American people in effect, “How’s it working out for you?” And the electorate resoundingly decided it wasn’t working out very well and so turned away from the Carter years to, well, to Reagan’s compelling vision of “morning in America.”

We turn toward Jesus’ picture of the kingdom of God and we turn away from a way that isn’t working very well in the world. The way of consumption ends up consuming our own selves. Our way of settling difference ends up killing one another. Despite all our good intentions, politics based on race still works, prejudice still kills. Despite all the effort we put in, we can’t make ourselves over. Whatever it is we’re doing, it isn’t working. So we turn away.

But only as we can turn to something that compels. Nor is this something a distant dream. It has come near, so near that you can see it from here. It has “come near.” You can almost touch it. “The kingdom of God has come near,” Jesus said.

Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re not so sure that we can see it. We’re two thousand years from Jesus and we’re still dying of cancers we don’t deserve, still living in a world of violence, still unforgiven. Best do the best we can with what we’ve got.

Back to our story. Back to the fisher men who left work and family behind. They were to be the disciples, the twelve, whose number reflected the twelve tribes of old Israel. They were to be the torso of the new community, Jesus’ community. And they offer us a picture of the good work that God has for us, God’s church, to be about. They would share with Jesus in his kingdom project. They were to be witnesses of this kingdom. They were to catch a glimpse of what was going on and it was so real that they went out into all the world to tell that story. No, more than that, they went out to point to those places where the kingdom of God has indeed “come near.”

That’s our job, our good work. What it means, I think, is this. That we are to have our eyes and ears sufficiently open to see and hear that kingdom when it comes near enough that we want to reach out and grab it. So listen. Listen to the world around, listen to its music and to its stories. And in the midst of the cacophony sometimes you’ll hear that little voice rejoicing that it knows forgiveness. Listen to your neighbor, to your fellow pew-sitter. Listen to the prayers as they are uttered and hear sighs of thanksgiving and joy. Pay attention and you see life coming alive around you. Pay attention to signs of peace in our world that defy imagination. Pay attention to those who tell you that their wounds have been healed. Listen to those who tell you that in the midst of a grief too heavy to bear, their burden has been lifted. It’s all around. Practice perception.

Still, there is some wonderful things going on in our story. The first is this: the story turns from the high point of Jesus’ great announcement to the everyday scene alongside the lake. The kingdom that has come near, does so not on mountaintops of religious ecstasy, but in the everyday life of business and family. That’s where love and forgiveness and healing and hope happen – where we live our every day.

The second is that this happens in company. Jesus calls not one, but two by two (eventually twelve, and then more). You don’t have to see and hear what’s going on all by yourself. You can’t. We all have different perceptual abilities. Put me down with some colors, and all reds look red to me! I may be tone deaf, but you aren’t. I may not see the delights of the kingdom right now, but you do. So we add our witnesses together. And we have lots and lots of them, for generation on generation, and from continent to continent. The stories are endless, if we put them together. So that our work is not alone, but together.

But from our company we do have this good work not only as we are together as church, but in the lives we lead as well. The kingdom of God reaches into your office, your home, your school room, your factory floor. Wherever you go and whatever you are about, you have your eyes open. You have your work to do, and it will take up much of your energy, most of your time. But you also are a member of the company of the disciples, awake, alert, and ready to follow because something is going on that is so great that we can’t hold back. It’s there for you to see, and to share, and to celebrate. It will compel you.

That’s our good work.

January 15, 2012

John 1:43-51                               FOLLOWERSHIP

Yes, the word is “followership.” And yes, it’s made up. (Diane thought I just misspelled “fellowship.” Reasonable enough given both my handwriting and my spelling). I didn’t make it up though. A really intelligent guy named Anthony Robinson did in discussing how churches have both leaders and followers. What does it mean to be a good follower? I’m thinking of it in terms of today’s Biblical text (and next week’s if you want to peek ahead) where Jesus says to his disciples: “Follow me.” What does it mean to follow Jesus?

So “follow” my thoughts, if you will, as I talk about three people: Greg, Martin and Jesus. We’ll spend most of our time with Jesus, of course, and we’ll hear quite a bit from Martin. But I’ll start with Greg. The Greg I’m pointing to is Greg Toal, football coach for the high school juggernaut at Don Bosco in Ramsey. He was recently profiled in a New Yorker piece. He built a football team that ranks at or near the top in the entire nation. Players come from all over the metropolitan area to play for him (that way he gets the best players; it’s no secret why they hardly ever lose). They come despite the fact that Don Bosco doesn’t have the best facilities. And they know that the competition to find playing time is high. Why do they come?

This is what interests me at the outset. They come because they are willing to follow this coach. They are willing to undergo an extremely difficult regimen. There’s nothing easy about running up and down a football field on feet and hands, rather like a bear. They are willing to do so because of the promise that they will become a top-notch team. More than that they trust that Greg knows what he’s doing, even when they haven’t a clue why they are training the way they are. He, the coach, knows them better than they know themselves. And he knows football, the outcome, better than they do. They know that if they don’t follow the consequences are likely to be failure. So they follow willingly.

At this stage of the sermon, my point is simple. We are ready to follow if we trust the one we’re following and if the promise beckons us to a better future. In this case football championships and more: a scholarship to a top-notch football college.

Martin is Martin Luther King, Jr., the prophet and saint we recognize this week-end. With Martin things get a bit more difficult. We honor him because he called from us certain ideals. But we forget that following him was never easy. He forged a path most of us found, well, foolish. He suggested new rules of conduct, the way of non-violence. Here’s some of what he said:

There was always a problem of getting this method [non-violence] over because it didn’t make sense to most of the people in the beginning.

We had to make it clear that nonviolent resistance is not a method of cowardice. It does resist. It is not a method of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is standing against as the violent resister but he resists without violence.

Another thing that we had to get over was the fact that the nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding.

This was tough stuff. The normal order of the day is to fight fire with fire, violence with violence. You don’t get anywhere unless to use the power of force, ultimate force if necessary. Remember that King’s way didn’t last so very long. Black power soon followed, and it had its own logic, its own attraction. That’s still the case. Martin’s way just seemed impossible.

Still, impossible as it seemed, many followed. They followed because they trusted something about Martin. They had heard the message somewhere. Yes, it was Gandhi. But it was also Jesus, somehow. And so they marched. They marched even against the fire hoses and the police dogs. Against those who spat at them and called them vile names.  They marched peacefully even when death reigned. They followed.

And in the following they learned something. They learned that there was another power, the power of what King called, following the New Testament, agape love, love that is understanding, creative, that has the best interest not of self but of the neighbor, including the neighbor who doesn’t like you much, their good at heart. They learned, as King put it, that “there is something in the universe that unfolds for justice.” For Christians that is the God of Jesus and of Israel, that holds true in any case. But this is the point: you learned that not because someone told you that, but because you marched, you followed, you entered that place of impossibility.

And you were, if you were with King, on the way to the promised land.

Still, we are not here as followers of Martin Luther King – at least that not the reason we’re in our pews on a Sunday morning. We’re here as followers of Jesus (as was Martin). We were baptized. What does it mean to follow Jesus?

Consider Nathanael from our story in the gospel of John. A certain Philip had attached himself to Jesus of Nazareth and invited Nathanael to join in following. Nathanael hesitates. He isn’t so sure. Philip invites him to “come and see.” Take a gander. So far I’m with Nathanael. He’s going to check this Jesus fellow out. Can he commit himself to this stranger? Check before you buy, before you put that much of yourself into it. But something happens. It turns out that this rabbi, this teacher, knows Nathanael. He doesn’t just know about him. He knows him. Something happens.

That’s the beginning of our discipleship, our “followership.” It isn’t that we measure Jesus. We aren’t like the voters in the primaries going on right now. Voters listen to the candidates. They – we – measure the candidate against our own political and social commitments. We’ll follow. But we’ll follow whoever is leading us the way we think we should go. It’s up to us!

Here’s the deal. We may think we’re following our own gyroscope, our own internal directional system, our internal GPS. But of course we don’t. We got it somewhere. We learned it from our parents, or from the culture, from somewhere. And, we confess as believers, our gyroscope is flawed, fatally. It leads us places that we don’t want to go. Follow your own star and pretty soon you’re following your star, all by yourself. The problem is that we don’t know ourselves all that well. Who does know us? Well, the one who entered our skin, who got down deep, so deep it’s beneath our feelings, our drives, our impulses, our hopes, our dreams. It is this Jesus, who is both the very image of the God who created us, and shares fully in our human reality.

So he beckons us to follow. Not first to scope out, to judge whether or not Jesus is worth following. Because this following begins not with our heads, not with our brains, but with our feet. A student followed a rabbi because the rabbi, the teacher, knew what you need to do to learn and so to live. It is a “thinking with your feet.” Our friends Greg and Martin knew that – the football players just did it, went through the exercises, followed the patterns of the plays. The marchers marched.

There’s a wonderful phrase out of the Psalms where the Psalmist prays: “Be a lamp unto my feet.” To his feet, not his brains. Show me where to walk. So the believer just followed, did. Later understanding might begin to dawn. It’s like the old joke about the young man who remarked that as the young man turned from say, twenty to twenty-two, that his father had learned a whole lot in those two years! Well, of course, the father’s wisdom is just getting through because the young man is walking into life and so the light is dawning.

We’re into the season of Epiphany, the coming of the light. The season follows the birth of the Messiah, for it is Jesus the light of the world. It isn’t as though Jesus switches on the light in our brains and we can finally see that the secret of the world is about Jesus. This isn’t about a sort of special religious knowledge that you get when you sign on with the Christian faith. It is about a light that dawns when you follow. So that the “lamp unto your feet” shows you where to put your feet as you walk step by step.

Listen to Jesus’ exchange with Nathanael for a moment. After Jesus amazes Nathanael because our disciple has run into someone who really knows him, and so utters a confession: “You are the Son of God, the King of Israel.” But that’s not where Jesus wants him to be. No. Follow me, follow me, come along, and you’ll see greater things than these. Follow. Just come. And what did Nathanael see? If we follow the gospel of John, Nathanael will see a number of signs, beginning with a Jesus who turns water into wine at a wedding, who welcomes the sinful outsider into his company, who heals diseases and forgives sin and feeds the hungry and raises the dead. Nathanael walks into a new world.

He goes a way he could not have found on his own. And in walking after this Jesus he finds himself in a new world, a wondrous world. He wouldn’t have chosen this way because he didn’t know it was there. He didn’t know that this was his delight because he didn’t know himself. But he was invited to come along, to walk this journey.

That’s what’s up when we follow. We don’t know where Jesus will lead us, but we follow. In fact, Jesus may lead us, Jesus does lead us, into places where we would not choose to go. But it is only there that our eyes are opened and we see the wonder opening before us.

Lately I’ve been re-reading some things by and about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian of the first rank in the first half of the twentieth century. With a number of German compatriots, he ran up against the Hitler regime. In fact, he would be arrested in connection with a plot to assassinate Hitler, and would ultimately be executed, just a few days before the camp where he was imprisoned was liberated. Early in the war he was invited to teach at Union Seminary, just a few miles from here across the Hudson River. He had the opportunity to ride out the war safely. But his conscience would not allow him to do so. No, more, he followed Jesus’ lead as he returned to his own people, there, finally, to be killed. He would not have chosen the way that led to prison and to death. He was no masochist. But listen to what he wrote a friend:

Please don’t ever get anxious or worried about me….I am so sure of God’s guiding hand that I hope I shall always be kept in that certainty. You must never doubt that I am travelling with gratitude and cheerfulness along the road where I am being led. My past life is brim-full of God’s goodness, and my sins are covered by the forgiving love of Christ crucified. I am most thankful for the people I have met….

Being led this road, following, brother Dietrich could see something he could not have seen or known otherwise.

So here’s the challenge for you, for us. Can you follow, and so “come and see”? It may be this: do you take the time to pray? Take time out of your day? You may feel nothing. You may gain nothing. You may think you’re lifting words into a great silent void. Do you spend time with Scripture? You may get nothing from the verses, not at first. But follow. You may be led into places you haven’t known and don’t want to go. But follow.

It’s a challenge for the church. We so like to forge our own way. But of course we aren’t. We’re following all the time. The only question is who are we following? Whose guidance directs our paths? Is it Jesus? If it is, Jesus may lead us in strange places. Jesus, for example, doesn’t care very much whether we’re filling our churches or not. He may care a lot about whether we are truthful with one another, whether we welcome the lost and the least. He may care that we give not of our plenty, but of our poverty. I do know that following Jesus means quieting the insistent voices in our own heads and hearts.

But if you follow the promise is clear: “you will see greater things.” Let Martin, who followed Jesus, have the last word, or almost the last word. It is the day before he was killed and he was speaking to a rally in Memphis. At the end of his speech he mentions that there have been some threats on his life. Then these words. You’ve heard them:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

And I don’t mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

“I just want to do God’s will.” And he’s seen greater things. He’s seen the promised land.

Follow and you will see greater things. English poet W.H. Auden ended his great Christmas oratorio with these words:

He is the Way.

Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

Jesus said it: “You will see greater things than these.” Follow Jesus; you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

New Year’s Day has always seemed a melancholy holiday. Perhaps it is because

we’re “holidayed out” with the food, the parties, the cheer.

it’s the beginning of that long, cold stretch until spring breaks.

it’s back to work, to the old life.

too much football.

But I think there is something deeper. The New Year reminds us of two things: that life is transient. Another year is past and we’re a little older, and so much we haven’t accomplished. So we write resolutions! And it also notes the circling of the years, that we go round and round and come out at about the same place. Those two thoughts don’t cohere logically, not exactly, but life doesn’t follow the canons of logic. So we look back. If it’s been a good year, we’re sad it’s over. If it’s been a difficult year, we’re still sad. New Year’s Day is waking up to the reality that time marches on, or circles around.

So think with me a bit as we dip first into that old book that is shelved with what Biblical scholars call “wisdom,” the strange and wonderful book of Ecclesiastes. You’ve heard the verses read this morning, “For everything there is a season.” The book is a long meditation on life’s transience, and whether there is meaning to be found in life. The writer proposed an experiment. He tries everything to see whether that will give meaning and purpose: wealth, fame, success, learning, family. But when it comes down to it, death finally takes it all away. And his conclusion is melancholic: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

Then, sometimes, he steps back and sees within life’s journey a series of times, seasons, times for joy and times for sorrow. God has put us here, even given us the sense to search out the future. But we finally cannot fathom what we’re about. So, carpe diem, seize the day, enjoy the moments you have.

Not a very satisfying conclusion. It leaves us in the circle of the seasons. And the Bible is about something much more profound. There are different ways of viewing our life in time. One, very ancient, is to see life as a circle. We relive what has gone before in a great cycle of the seasons of years. We recapitulate birth and growth and death – and one hopes, rebirth for the new season. Human wisdom looks to the great myths that recapitulate reality. We are caught in the great cycle. Many religions reflect just that reality, and one of the greatest, Buddhism, has as its promise to help the human get off the merry-go-round and enter the place of nothingness.

Christian faith, on the other hand, is one of the religions for which history is crucial. That is, tomorrow is not a repeat of yesterday. We are moving from past to the future. We measure our years. Today we begin the year 2012 Anno Domini. (I use the term “anno domini” intentionally. It is more polite to use the term “Common Era,” and I would usually use that. But “anno domini” denotes that we are measuring the year from something, from the time of our “Lord” Jesus. And he was/is an historical figure.).

Christianity is one of those religions, I said. So are Judaism and Islam. I’ll return to what makes the Christian faith unique. But in all instances it has to do with the fact that God gets involved with our human life. And God does so because God is “going somewhere.” History has a goal, an end. There is a future that draws time forward.

So we read from the book of Revelation, of the great vision of what is to be. It is the vision of the new Jerusalem, of a time when God will make all things new. It will be a time when weeping and sorrow become a distant memory. This is but a glimpse, but it is sufficient to point us forward, to remind us that God is going forward. We are not on a great treadmill, grinding out year after year, needing to find what meaning we can in the few years we have with one another.

So what has that to do with us as we rub our eyes and wonder what it means that we’re ready to enter another year, what would have sounded so improbably a couple decades back, the year of 2012? Let me note two things from the Biblical record. The first is that God’s involvement with history raises the importance of the ordinary. By that I mean the ordinary kind of life that you and I lead. This is not the story of mythic heroes, of gods and goddesses, of kings and queens and nobles. This is about ordinary human beings, about stumbling, bumbling types. Marilynne Robinson wrote this in last weeks Times Book Review (Robinson is an accomplished novelist, teacher, and one of the most trenchant Christian essayist going): “The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes.” She sees the root of this all in Scripture’s story. I’ll put it a bit more theologically: Jesus died for you, for ordinary you. Not for you when you’d become a saint, but “when we were sinners.” This invests our ordinary lives with significance. The takeaway as we gather on New Year’s Day is this: the births we welcomed, the loves we fell into, the new vocations we attempted, the deaths that did us in, all of this in our little lives are of eternal significance, because they are part of history, of God’s history.

The second thing from the Biblical record is this: surprise. History comes with the new. “I make all things new,” God says. And the new cannot be predicted. We don’t live out the predictable. No one predicted Jesus’ birth, not the way it happened, not precisely. No one predicted the Messiah as he came. That’s why his own “received him not;” this was not how a Messiah was supposed to look. History is a surprise. That’s true in our ordinary lives. Could you have predicted what happened to you, to your family? And it’s true in history.

So as we gather today, we can’t know what will happen tomorrow. We can trust that God will be with us. We can’t know that it will all be good. In fact, we know it won’t all be good. But it will be different, and I guarantee, it will be a surprise.

All that said, I return to the wisdom of the Preacher (that’s the name of the author of Ecclesiastes) and the well-worn phrases that there is a time for every purpose, “a time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted,” etc. I want to suggest that if we see our lives, our ordinary lives, within the context of God’s history, we can pause and enjoy the importance of today, today as it stands between past and future. As Christians, we can view the past as redeemed, the future as promise, and so the present as full.

I’ll unpack that a bit for us. The past is redeemed. That means on the one hand that the past doesn’t hold us in its grip. What’s done is done, that’s for sure. And when we’ve done wrong, when we’ve gone wrong, we’re condemned to live with the consequences. The past holds us prisoner. But Jesus’ coming makes a new history. He died for our sins. That’s an easy shorthand for the awesome reality that God took on the full weight of where we have gone wrong, as individual persons and as societies. But if the past has been redeemed, then even the evil of the past becomes past. It is no less evil. It is no less condemned. But it has been consigned to the past. Now, it is our past, so that it makes up part of our own history. But it is now past history, and we rejoice because we are freed and we know the slavery from when we’ve been liberated.

The upshot is this: we can see our past for what it is. It isn’t all bad, of course. In fact, much of it has been a blessing: the loves, the sacrifice, the delights, they’re all part of our ordinary histories. But we can observe that past with objectivity. We can thank God for the gift that was and for the forgiveness that was too.

That’s our past. But there is also a future. It is filled with promise. We don’t know the exact contours of how the promise will work out. In fact, we may be led through dark valleys, through a difficult wilderness. And yet God holds out the promise of the kingdom where all shall be well. God’s promise is to be there before us. This isn’t just wishing on a star, by the way. If we review our lives, and the lives of others, we see promise fulfilled in new and surprising ways. So we live forward. We make our plans, knowing that our plans can be knocked all akilter.

Here’s the point, at least for this morning. Because we know the past as redeemed, and the future as promise, we can enter the present fully. The present is filled. It may be a time for birth, or a time for death.  It may be a time for embracing, or even a time to refrain from embracing. A time for love, and a time for hate (hate? Yes, a time to hate the sin and evil that destroy all that is precious and right). But the time is full because the God who was with us in the past and the God who promises to be with us in the future is the God who is with us in the present.

The time is full because the Spirit draws us together in this place. God is with us as we are with one another. So we have walked together this past year. We can pause together, for we have walked together. We’ve lived through surprises, new turns, new possibilities, difficult seasons. We have sung together and prayed together. Sometimes we have fought together. And forgiven one another. There have been times to weep and times to laugh. Times to throw stones, and times to lay them down.

And this, I suggest. We can enjoy the present. We can even “take pleasure” in our toil. We can take courage where we are, to live fully each day that we have, because we are in the hands of God, who with us in our past, and with us in our future, is with us each day. As we’ll sing it: “God of our life, through all our circling years, we trust in thee.”

There is a dark side to Christmas. It’s not all light and joy. We know that. Not every Christmas morning dawns bright. You’ve no need to be told that. It’s the Christmas when your marriage hasn’t been going well; or even ending. The Christmas when one child or another is absent either in body or in spirit. The Christmas when you know that next Christmas will likely be celebrated without someone who makes the holiday truly holy for you. OK. We know that. No need for reminder.

More importantly, though, the story that forms our Christmas knows it as well. Scripture’s story is not about how our world is really quite alright if we just see it rightly. The dark side is right there in our story. Most famously, perhaps, it’s there in Matthew’s telling, where report of the birth of a possible Messiah provokes Herod to truly awful and violent response: the killing of all boys under the age of two who had the misfortune of being born in Bethlehem. But it’s there in Luke’s beloved story as well. When the young couple bring the child to the temple for his “presentation” some days following birth, the old prophet Simeon remarks to Mary, “A sword will pierce your heart.” This is birth into a world of sorrow, the sorrow of the untimely death of her child. This is real. It is our reality. It is the reality of the darkness.

So John, as he opens his gospel with those marvelous lines, his version of the Christmas story, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” the opening notes end with this marvelous chord: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The light shines in the darkness, yes, but the darkness has not overcome it. This little light still shines.

Two stories, then, and a question for you. Both stories come from doodling on my computer the past week or so, wool-gathering perhaps as I walked around with Christmas in the other half of my brain.

The first from a Dutch blog. It was the story of a young handicapped man who first learned what Christmas was about as he lived with a minister’s family and tasted something of the warmth and light of the holiday. He had a friend, his first close friend. But that friend knew that he was sick and would die. And he did. Then our young hero asked in desperation: “Just what is so special about Christmas? It is very nice, but death happens anyway.” Darkness. The pastor, a quiet and loving man, worked with a group of handicapped kids. So he gathered them around and asked them: “What is so special about Christmas? Can you help young Gunther here know what it is about?” They gave several answers. One young lad got it almost right: “Because God send his Son to earth.” Yes, the pastor said, that’s true. But how does that help our friend Gunther?” Then a little girl climbed on a chair and declaimed: “Because there are flaws everywhere!” Or I could translate it as well, “Because everything is broken somehow.” That’s about right: this is light that shines through the flaws, the brokenness. The light that shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

The second story as I was sitting in my easy chair early one morning. I get up early to swim. As usual, I don’t want to go. My head is filled with the “to-do” list for the day. And the list for Christmas seemed overwhelming – some things had come up that I hadn’t expected. So I wasn’t in a very good mood. It was dark not only outside, but in my soul as well. Not seriously. But wearily. As I often do at that hour, I open my email to see what has come in overnight. One of my friends is forever forwarding things to me. I don’t always open them; my box is too full of pressing matters. But this morning I opened this one. It was a video of a guy in California who took some of those time-lapse photographs, these of flowers opening up. You’ve seen them. But they stunned me that morning. They filled my little world with utter and sheer beauty. They were light, light in the darkness. Now lest you think I’m stretching things, listen again to John’s words: “[The Word] was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” That little light, born in the child of Bethlehem, that light is the same light that shines through all creation. Through little kids who tell the Christmas story. Through flowers that blossom. Through the sun that rises every morning. It is a light that is life.

Now to my question to you, to us: what light did you see this morning? Was it in the eyes of your beloved? Was it the sound of your grandchild – even if over the ‘phone? Was it the strain of a song? What happened today that was light, the littlest light? As our gospel goes on to say about the one we call John the Baptist, it is not the light. But whatever it is, it gives witness to the light. To the light that shines in the darkness, the darkness of all the world. And the darkness has not overcome it. And it will not overcome it.

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled.” We know the story. It’s tonight’s story. Those opening words, words that set our ears in anticipation are not, however, simply a plot device to get Joseph – and consequently Mary – from northern Palestine to Bethlehem where the real action takes place. That little sentence packs power. It is the power of the state. With one stroke of the pen, the Caesar put the entire world in motion. This is about a census, and about taxation. This is about who calls the shots.

And Luke the evangelist is very clear that the story he’s about to tell is a tale of a power struggle. Who, finally, holds power: Caesar or Jesus? That question hovers over the entire New Testament. And it begins with our story.

But already in our story we see this to be a very odd sort of contest. It isn’t contested by the conventions that characterize what we know as power struggles. This isn’t done with brute strength –  the size of an army, the power of the pocket-book, political leverage, in short of power in the way we’d know power. Caesar has accomplished a great deal. He has united the known world into an economic colossus, a civilization that enjoyed a real peace, an administrative state that more or less worked. Rome worked because it knew how the world works.

The announcement in our story that a Savior (a title usually reserved for the Caesar, by the way) is born, the Messiah, the Lord, is made by a shadowy figure to a few shepherds on a hillside in an insignificant province at the edge of the empire. Now, while this could be the beginning of a ripping good tale about a hero who would grow up to leads slaves to revolt, or who would command an army of liberation, or who had the political skills and the social imagination to attract the kind of following that could topple Rome, we know that such is not to be the story. Something else would happen.

This is the beginning of something like an “occupy Rome” movement. Now I don’t intend to claim the current “occupy” movement for Jesus. Nor will I (nor can I) draw direct parallels between Jesus and whatever is going on with whatever this is that has caught the imagination of so many people in so many places. Still I suggest that the “occupy” movement helps us to see what Jesus is about.

It began this past September almost unnoticed. A few protestors began to gather around Wall Street to raise consciousness about economic inequalities in our present world. It seemed like the normal run of anti-globalist folk, the type who often show up at world economic forums. They caught our romantic interest because they camped out, showed signs of a different way of organizing themselves. But they caught on. I’d say that their ideas spread, but it hasn’t been clear just what ideas they are intending to spread, other than the firm conviction that our economic systems are tilted toward the well-off, toward the now famous “one per cent.” Still, against all odds, and with little power, with hardly any organizational skill, they spread. It struck me most when I ran across “occupy” encampments in two modest-sized Dutch cities a month or so back. The movement began to “occupy” our thinking, our imagination. Perhaps it’s true, I don’t know, but it may be so that something may have begun that cannot be stopped. It may be like what we are now calling the “Arab Spring,” something had gotten into the air. And all those who run the world, who know how to pull the levers on how the world works, can do nothing to stop it. I don’t know. And that’s scarcely what I’m on about this evening.

But this is true. What the angel announced to those few shepherds began something that would occupy Rome, slowly but surely. It would outlive Rome. And it brought about something quite new and fresh and different. And like the “occupy” movement it did it against all the rules. It did it without a program, without a strategy, without meeting Caesar toe to toe. In fact, when push came to shove, when real power responded, it would use all legal means to destroy this Jesus and his movement. We know that the story that begins so charmingly this evening will lead to the gruesome hours of that Friday at Golgotha. Still we gather, joyously gather, because we also know that Caesar and his henchmen in Jerusalem did not have the last word.

No, Jesus begins to occupy Rome as his story catches on. As the kingdom where lepers are welcome and where those who’ve lost their way have been given a new home begins to touch lost souls. As his followers, strangely strengthened in their weakness, discover the power of forgiveness, as something new begins to burn within their hearts, a fresh way of being in the world begins to take hold and spread. And within three centuries the Caesar’s descendant at the head of Rome would be baptized in the name of this same Jesus. And something has been launched into history that has changed everything. Including the fact that you and I are here this evening. And that even those who don’t give two cents for this Jesus are still going crazy about a holiday that gives them a sense of good cheer, even if they don’t quite know what the cheer is about, at base.

The “occupy” movement is about taking space. It is about claiming a space. It says to the powers that control “you don’t own everything.” It intends to say: “We are here. We are real people. And we’re not going anywhere.” The jury’s still out on that, of course.

But the jury’s not out on Jesus and that his movement has occupied our world. It’s occupied our world. The church has spread just everywhere with the Jesus-story. But it isn’t just an institution, the church, caught as we are in our own set of rules, our own games of power and influence. It’s Jesus in the world as music sings of what he is about, as the entire Western world was built on the influence of who Jesus is and what Jesus was about. We can remark on secularism all we will (for good or ill) but we cannot gainsay the fact that Jesus has occupied our world.

He has occupied our imaginations. Each year our children re-enact this story. They vie for the coveted roles. And so Jesus gets into their heads, into their thinking. This same Jesus has gotten into the imaginations of Christians of all stripes and sorts, from snake-handlers and holy rollers to the stately processions of the Orthodox. But not only of the religious. Jesus gets into the imaginations of those who aren’t particularly religious but who have been caught up by the dream of his kingdom, of the hope for a different kind of world. Jesus occupies our imaginings.

He occupies our hearts. He has gotten under our skin, to deeper places, where we long and hope and pray. Again, this goes deeper than our religious selves. Someone the other day told me of how this Christmas season some folk go into stores like Wal-mart and anonymously pay off the layaway that others have set aside, so that when they come to make their final payments, they discover that they’ve been given a gift from someone whose name they’ll never know. This is the Jesus who is grace and truth getting into our hearts. This Jesus occupies our hearts as we are lifted from our despair, from our self-absorption, from our aloneness, from our fears. This Jesus occupies our hearts as we open ourselves in a love and gratitude that welcomes the world even in its darkest hours.

This Jesus occupies our politics. I don’t mean that he dominates our political discussion, although it’s true that some political sorts try to hitch Jesus to their star. I do mean that we live differently since Jesus. The whole human rights bit emerges from the Jesus who welcomes all, who died for all. They were gathered in churches in Eastern Germany, praying, and the wall fell. They prayed and preached in South Africa, and apartheid fell. This Jesus occupies our world.

Caesar controlled the world; he played the game the very best. Jesus simply showed up. But get this: you don’t hear much about Caesar today. You can see his head on some coins, a statue or two remain. All that’s left of Rome are some pretty spectacular ruins, but ruins they are. Some monuments to engineering, old aqueducts that still criss-cross Europe. And a legal heritage of some significance. That’s about it. Rome went the way that all empires have gone, and every empire will go.

But I know this. Tonight the name of Jesus is on the lips of villagers in Mali and Malawi. Tonight the orthodox will lead processions in honor of this Jesus. Tonight evangelical kids will sing praise songs in the name of this Jesus. Tonight even those who think they have left Jesus behind will crowd churches because something of Jesus still tugs at their souls. Tonight women and men will stand tall because Jesus was born. Tonight someone will have dared to risk love because the “Lord is their shepherd.” Tonight we dream dreams of an impossible peace where the lion lies down the with the lamb, and where little children play in streets no longer dangerous because this Jesus has occupied not only Rome but our whole world.

And tonight we do nothing but gather and sing and pray because this is all God’s doing. This is God at work in our tired and dark world. This was God at work when “Quirinius was governor of Syria.” This is God at work with no army, with no strategy that looks anything like a plan to us. This is God at work, not forcing matters, not twisting arms, not arguing us into conviction. This is God at work, announcing the birth of a child, a Savior, God’s beloved Son, Jesus. This is God at work right now, bringing something new, perhaps dangerous, certainly different. And wonderful. And the angel says to you, and me, too: “Don’t be afraid. I bring you really good news. It will make you jump for joy.”

All we do is wonder at what God hath wrought.

Blessed Christmas to you all.

Luke 1:26-38

Early on I learned how much fun it is to give Christmas. My family was far from well-off, but every December each of us had enough to go to Algona, the nearest town with any number of shops, to buy presents for everyone else in the family. No wish lists for us, we had to exercise our imagination as we anticipated the delight of the receiver, appreciative of course of our clever gift. We remind our children that it is more blessed to give than to receive; we know it anyway, that it’s surely more fun.

Receiving – now that’s another story. We don’t always do so well on the receiving end. The stories we read from Samuel and Luke today, are about receiving – and its difficulty. Hear the prophet: “…the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house.” This is gift. God gives; we receive.

There’s a backstory. You may recall that David had built Israel and Judah into something like a nation among nations. It was a long slog as David had to fend off many enemies, potential and otherwise. But now the empire is secure. So he proposes to build a house for God, a temple fitting the God of his people. He is at the stage when he can endow the future; this is his gift to God.

No, God says, you are not going to build a house for me. I will build a house for you. But notice that “house” here has more than one meaning. It isn’t that God will drop David into a castle with hot and cold running water, a hot tub in every bedroom, and a view from every window. No, “house” meant something like the “house of Windsor,” or for those of us with some Dutch still in us, the “house of Orange.” House meant dynasty. Were we to have read our story a bit further we would have heard the promise explicitly: “your throne shall be established forever.” Forever. From God’s mouth to David’s ears.

And therewith a problem. Or it would become a problem. Perhaps the most central problem to trouble Old Testament writers. Because it would become clear a few hundred years hence that a son of David no longer would sit on the throne. It didn’t matter that they had a good run; several centuries is a long time in world history. The British Empire didn’t last that long. But the promise wasn’t for a long time. It was “forever.”

So the Bible struggles with the promise. God promised. And it apparently didn’t happen. Some gift. Some people (many people?) think of the Bible as a book where all the pieces fit together like a well-built puzzle. We miss the Bible in conversation with itself. I said that too mildly. The Bible contests itself. It is a sustained argument. It is a wrestling of voices. And it wrestles with the promise.

What about a God who promises much but doesn’t deliver? God promises to hear your prayers. So you pray, perhaps desperately. You aren’t asking for something for yourself. And to all appearances God is not home, or not listening. God has promised a kingdom of peace; and we lurch from war to war. What about it? If you ask that question, know that you are not alone. The Psalmists will ask that same question with you.

But return to David’s offer, David’s gift of a permanent home for God. God’s answer: “A house to live in? I haven’t lived in a house from day one. A tent, that’s been my house. I have no permanent home. I, like you, am a nomad. And you’ll put me in a house?”

Hang with me because this is about giving and receiving. David, the giver, has things under control. As the giver he is in a position of strength, of delight. And more. If he can build God a house, then God is on tap, so to speak. God is where God can be accessed. God has an address to which you can go.

It’s a deep religious impulse – to build sanctuaries to the holy. You can find them in what some religious folk think of as holy places. Sometimes they are thought of as “thin spaces,” places where the division between this world and the spiritual world has grown “thin.” Where heaven touches earth. Or we’ll build our cathedrals to the holy, places that have become sanctified, places where God has met us along the way.

But, and here’s the point, but it is where we decide that God can be accessed. We have built a house for God. It is our gift. We have decided.

No, God says. I’ll build a house for you. I’ll build it. Fine. Terrific gift, God. But it didn’t happen, did it?

Well, roll the story forward to an anonymous room somewhere in northern Israel, about a thousand years later. A thousand years! A young Jewish girl appears, thinking of her upcoming marriage. Suddenly she’s scared out of her wits by the appearance of an angel. Don’t think for a moment that this is an ordinary occurrence! That’s why it frightened her. But if that was strange, what this odd creature told her was stranger still: “You will conceive and you’re going to have a baby boy. And he, he will grow up to take over the throne of David and will reign over the house of Jacob (Israel).”

I will build you a house. The house of David will continue through this little girl. But pay close attention because two things are happening here. On the one hand God is providing David’s house. But on the other hand something else is happening. This God whose home was in tents, this God who refused David’s offer to build him a house, this God now takes residence. But he takes residence where? Within Mary’s womb, as cells begin to divide, in the blood and the mucus that make up the human womb. This is God as a human zygote forms, them embryo. This is God in the very small, the tiny, the vulnerable. This is what we call in fancy theological language, “incarnation,” en-fleshment of God. This will be Jesus, a little boy running to his mother crying, a little boy watching in amazement as tadpoles turn into frogs in the pond in the woods. This is God in human form. God makes God’s home within the human, already within the young girl Mary.

This of course makes no sense. Oh, we can make sense of it if we were to think of God’s Spirit abiding with us. We have hints of divinity, moments that seem drenched with meaning. In this season we talk rather glibly about having the “Spirit of Christmas,” a sense of peace or love or joy or delight. As believers we have the picture of the baby Jesus in our heads, even the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth in our hearts. But that’s not what stopped Mary, and it isn’t what stops us if we’re paying attention. Mary’s response to the angel’s announcement? “How can this be?” This isn’t possible.

And she’s right. It isn’t possible. So we’ve often slipped over this bit with some embarrassment. We can’t fit this into our brains. It makes no sense. But something important is happening. This will be God making a home within. It isn’t as though God will search out a new Moses or a new Elijah or a new David. This will not be God’s man, the saint or hero who comes to save the day. This will be a full human – born just the way you and I were born. And also fully God. In this child. Impossible.

Not just difficult, mind you. This isn’t God doing something that we might have done if we had the brains and the brawn, the know-how and the resources. This is God at work, and with God all things are possible. Even the impossible. Even God taking up residence in the womb of a young teen-age girl. Impossible. We can’t build that house because we couldn’t have imagined it to begin with, let alone do it. You can’t do the impossible.

And what is Mary’s response? “Here I am, let it be with me according to your word.” Let it be with me. This is the opposite of David’s proposal. David takes charge. David will be in control. David will put God in God’s place in the temple. Mary says “let it be,” let it happen as you say. Mary’s response is to receive.

It is to stand aside at the surprise. To live in a new wonder. But it is more. Because this is happening to her and within her. This wonder is going to change her. Among other things, it takes away any plans she has for a wedding, for all the excitement that goes with her big day. And more it will reshape her body, and as the boy is born, reshape her life. We know how the story will go: it will bring great sorrow when she is forced to watch her firstborn die a criminal’s death. Still, “let it be.”

Over the centuries Mary has stood as a symbol for the church. That’s been a bit difficult for us Protestants to swallow. We don’t have statues to Mary in our churches or on our lawns. We rather think there’s something suspect going on – it has something to do with “Hail Marys” about which we have scarcely a clue. There are important differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics over how Mary is understood. But the Biblical witness is clear: she is the mother of our Lord Jesus. And she does give us a pattern of response, right here in our text. This is what our texts are telling us today: not David’s response, “I’ll build you a house, God,” but Mary’s, “let it be with me according to your word.” Let it happen to us as you will God.

This is not us building a church for God, but God taking residence in this humble reality, this human collection that is the church, folk who can hardly get out of our own way, churches that can’t pay their bills and that don’t know what to do or where to turn next. God takes up residence in the unlikeliest of places, impossible places.

Here’s where it hits, I think. As good and honest followers of Christ, we want to build God a house. But God says no, I’ll build you a house. We look around, we look at the future, and we think, “It’s not possible.” There is no way forward.

No. The church’s response is “let it be.” It is to stop all our frantic running about, all our dreams and schemes and listen. Pay attention. Let it be. And you will hear the voice of the Savior calling. It will come as we listen to Scripture. It will come as we pray and as we sing. It may come in quiet voices, voices of children. If you’re quiet enough, you may hear the cry of the child.  It will be impossible. And yet it will come.

And when the impossible has happened, when the impossible become possible – and it has with the birth of the child Jesus – other impossibilities begin to unfold. You can live into a world of forgiveness. You discover that ancient enemies can feast together. Those who have been silenced, told to be quiet, receive a voice. Those who have been told all along that they don’t count, or they count only as they can produce, hear a new voice – their ears are unstopped when they hear Jesus call. Those whose knees are bent with the weight of life they’ve been carrying now can dance a jig. All because God is at home in our midst, as one of us and one with us. And we stand at the edge of the impossible.

Can you do it this Christmas? Can you find those few moments where you can slow down enough, stop running long enough to take Mary’s words on your lips and receive? To know that this is not about what you can give, what is within your control, but what you receive? “Let it be.” It’s the gift of a new world, an impossible world, and impossibly good world. Because it is God with us, Immanuel. God’s home is here. Right in our midst. Can we let it happen?

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

No, this is not the next installment of the Janssen’s saga with our artificial Christmas tree (although my plans to put the tree up without frustration ran afoul again this year!). The tree in this sermon is not a Norway Spruce nor Scotch Pine, but an oak: To those who mourn: “they may be called oaks of righteousness.” The oak as another Christmas tree. Stay with me.

But we need to take a step back first. Notice that we have been in the prophets this Advent, Isaiah in particular. He’s the prophet most often read the season of Christmas and Advent. “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” That’s from Isaiah. And the tale usually told goes something like this. The Old Testament prophets predicted the birth of Jesus. The guess what? Jesus was born. Prediction – event. Isn’t that neat? The prophets “prophesied” the coming of the Messiah. In its crudest form, some will argue that just this correlation of what the prophets predicted and what happened “proves” that the Bible tells the truth.

Except that prophesy doesn’t work quite like that – at least not in the Bible. Prophesy isn’t divine fortune telling, as though God peers into the future and tells the prophets to leak a bit of the news to keep Israel’s collective chin up. Prophesy does concern the future. It is a truth about the future. But it isn’t that God knows exactly what will happen and occasionally let’s us in on the secret, but that God calls from the future. What that future will be is a surprise. After all, history has yet to unfold with its surprises, its odd turns, its zig-zag course.  After all, we humans act unpredictably. It is the truth about the future because God awaits in the future. We don’t know exactly what that looks like until it happens. Jesus was a surprise. It was only later, looking back that believers could wonder: “Ah, that’s what God was saying through Isaiah when he told us that someone would emerge from the ‘stump of Jesse,’ that one could be born whose name is ‘Emmanuel, God with us.’”

I’m getting to those oaks. The Isaiah we read this morning is prophecy. And it is about the future. But there’s no mention of a birth. This is not about the “little Lord Jesus.” It is about what this child would grow to become. It reminds us that we are waiting not simply for a birth, not even for the coming of the presence of God in human flesh – as incomprehensible and wondrous as that would be. It is about something more. This one who is born will be Messiah.

And what, asked one of our confirmands last week, what is a Messiah? That student gets an “A” for the day because that is a very good question. The word comes from the Hebrew, mesach, which means simply “anointed.” As kings or priests are anointed. So it’s about a king. But it is a special kind of king. As it was whispered among the prophets, it was a king who would bring God’s kingdom of freedom, liberation, peace, justice, well-being, a people in covenant with God and so with one another, with him it’s swords into plowshares. The word “messiah” would be translated into the Greek, Christos, or Christ. The Jesus born in the stable would be confessed as the Messiah, or the Christ, the anointed one.

And this is what he would be about: he would say, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me [Messiah, hear?].He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This is Jubilee! You’ve heard of the Jubilee. It was the year instituted in the Torah, the fiftieth year (which is the year following seven weeks of years). On that year all slaves are released. And on that year all debts are cancelled. So get your mortgage on year 49!

Now, if you were to keep your finger in your Bible at this place and turn to the fourth chapter of Luke, there you would meet Jesus as he makes his first public appearance (according to Luke). He stands up in the synagogue and it is this text that he is given to read: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me…” And then Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This is what Jesus came to be about: the kingdom of God. The coming of Jubilee.

Which is economics, dear friends. The Bible is filled with economics! Occasionally I hear folk in the church who say that they want to keep politics out of religion (or religion out of politics). I get it. But to mix politics and economics, the faith and where we put our money! That is much more explosive. We’re cutting much closer to the bone. Remember Bill Clinton’s campaign slogan – “It’s the economy, stupid!” We can disagree about a lot of issues, passionately even. But we can all see what taxes take out of our paycheck; we all know when our child can’t get a job out of college – or we can’t get a job when we’re over fifty-five.

But there you have it: the Messiah will be about economics. “For I the Lord love justice; I hate robbery and wrong.” Well of course, God doesn’t like muggers and bank robbers. But get real. This is as much about corporate abuse as it is about the poor drug addict thieving to afford his next fix. Which one, do you think, acts in such a way that leaves children without health insurance? Which one has moved all the jobs out of town? Which one has engaged in the kind of trade that does nothing to produce anything and does a whole lot to ruin local economies? So the Messiah comes to care in such a way that those left behind are made strong. Not where the strong are made stronger. Not where the winners are given prizes. But where those who mourn shall be called “oaks of righteousness.”

The oaks. They, not the pine tree, not even the artificial pine sitting in our family room, the oaks will be the symbol that the Messiah has come. It’s another kind of Christmas tree altogether.

I like trees. I may be drawn to them because I grew up on those great stretches of farmland in the Midwest. There trees took up space better put to growing corn. So I enjoy so much living in places like Glen Rock with the variety of trees. Some of them are beautiful to see. Others are majestic monuments to the plant family. And given our recent storms, we know how tragic it is to lose trees – not only dangerous to life and property, but the trees themselves have been sort of silent and grand companions of our common life.

Still, there is something about the oak. And the oak stands at the other end from the pine.

Years and years ago when one of our daughters was in about first grade, she was to play an oak tree in her school play. We all remember her lines because we memorized them with her. “Here I am being an oak, doing what oak trees do best: growing leaves, dropping acorns and watching the world go by.” That was it. But that’s the oak. Leaves to offer shade, cool in the heat of the day. Leaves that will turn color and brighten the autumn sky. Fruit, new life, acorns, food for the local fauna as well as life for the next trees. And witness to the world around.

But oaks. In contrast to the pine, or even to the elm, the oak hangs around for a long time. The oak has staying power. It sends roots deep. Its limbs spread out to become a genuine place. Swings are hung from its limbs. You throw the blanket down for a picnic. As the years go by, the oak gnarls and turns. It bears scars of life. A couple has scratched their initials in a branch. A limb is gone where lightning struck.

And still the oak stands. It is a symbol of steadfastness. You can count on the oak. It will be there through the changing seasons. Majestic, steadfast, beautiful even as their trunks twist and turn, refreshing in the summer, glorious in autumn, stolid in winter, filled with promise in the spring.

And “they will be called oaks of righteousness.” Who? Those who mourn! The very people who have lost all purchase on life. When you mourn you are the opposite of an oak. You can barely hold yourself together; you don’t know if you can make it another day. So how oaks? Because the Messiah has come and instituted a new economy where debts are cancelled, where balm is poured over the brokenhearted, where instead of being told of how little account you are, you are given the employee of the month parking place. Where you are no longer held down by a system that exacts every last bit of energy you’ve got, but where a song is put in your heart and on your lips. It will be a new economy.

If we hear this prophet rightly, he will change how our expectations are shaped this season. For we are no longer simply waiting for the birth of a child. We aren’t engaged in a great charade, putting ourselves back in the crèche where the baby Jesus will magically appear once again to the kind of delight we have when babies are born. No. We are expecting a Messiah. And more. We aren’t simply expecting a person. We are expecting a kingdom, a new world, a new world order if you will. Because, get this: it isn’t about Christ after all. It’s about what Christ brings, what God is about, and that is to establish this new world where God’s love, justice, obtains.

That gets us back to those oaks. For in Christ God is about giving you back your life, in setting you up in a world where  you become like trees beside rivers of living water (to hear the first Psalm in a new way). It is in a world where you will be called “oaks of righteousness.” Where, in short, you become a righteous person. Which doesn’t mean just a jolly nice person, nor a religious person, but a “right” person, a person who stands firm. To borrow a Yiddish word, you become a mensch. A mensch is a person of integrity. A person who does the right thing for no good reason other than it’s the right thing to do. A mensch doesn’t raise her finger to see which way the wind blows before she takes her stand. He stands firm even if it costs him what he will not lose. A mensch can be rough around the edges, but lives life to the full, knowing that the full life is one where love gives itself away. The mensch grows tall and strong because he lives in a world where the Messiah has come – and will come again.

But he has come. The prophesy is not an empty promise. We have heard him say it, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me.” And more, the oppressed have heard his voice and they have stood up and said, “I am a man; I am a woman.” They have stood up and said it because this same Jesus died to make them free and human. They have said it because this same Jesus has released them from their imprisonment to the notions of this world that they don’t count, or that they count only as they can provide goods for others. They have said it because this Jesus healed up wounds so deep they could only fester until this Messiah said “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden.”

Nor is it only that this Jesus appeared who sang the prophet’s song. Yes, he did. But as he touched the wounded, as he told the crippled to “rise up and walk,” as he called to you and me, he made “oaks of righteousness.” You’ve met them. You can name them. Maybe others can name you. I can. They are those who have been wounded by life, who have walked through the valley, and still carry on. They are the touchstones, the local saints, the oaks who have seen the troubles, and still give shade, comfort, who are steadfast.

But let me complete the prophet’s sentence. They will be called “oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.” They – and you – are the glory of the Lord! These fragile humans, these mothers and fathers, those who mourn as those who are their very love are rent from them, these fragile ones are God’s very glory. So that when you hear that magnificent chorus from Messiah, “And the glory, the glory of the Lord, shall be revealed,” that’s what being sung about. Not angels flitting across the sky. Not a heavenly light-show. Not a spectacle. But human beings who can stand tall, who have been saved from self-ruin, humans whose love is steadfast, whose word is their bond, who live in the new economy where men and women can grow and flourish and God is honored. Christmas is for this!

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Ezekiel 37:1-14

Dry bones. Very dry bones. Are you tired of Lent? This past week, a colleague dropped into a chair next to me, and with a sigh announced, “I hate Lent.” When asked why, he replied that he just wasn’t into the “mea culpa” thing. All this guilt, all this sin. For him the faith is about joy and delight, and Lent was a season that wrung out his soul. He’s not unlike a woman in my last parish, a tenor in our choir, who couldn’t stand Lent either. For her it was all those songs in a minor key, “dirges,” she called them. Tired of Lent?

It’s a “dry bones” time. And as I began to think this sermon through about ten days ago or so, I thought that the text was telling me, the preacher, to urge you all, “dry bones” to come to life. That this text is about death—Lent. But no, the text is about life, good news that as dead as we get, deader than a door-nail (the bones were very dry), God calls preachers, and others, to speak a word that will be life. “I will put my spirit [my breath] within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil.” This is God’s breath, breathing in you and through you.

It’s about being out of breath. It begins in the valley of the dry bones. It is about what sucks the life out of you. One of my ministerial colleagues puts the question like this: “What drains you?” he asks. What is it in your life that takes your energy and doesn’t renew it? There are tasks – we all have them – that are jobs that we do because we know we have to do them. But we have to work up the energy to do them. As someone remarked, “There are bathrooms to be cleaned in every job.” You may be about some tasks that take a great deal of energy, but you never notice because it gives you life: watching your grandkids, say; or painting; or gardening; or, for some, preparing income tax forms. What sucks the air out of your life?

The story of the dry bones is something like a vision or a dream for the prophet. But it’s about a real history. It’s God’s nation that has been cut off from its life. It had been uprooted from its land, the soil in which it was planted. Judah had not only been defeated, its cities destroyed, its land plundered; its elite had been taken off to live in a strange country, Babylon. There is no more nation. Jews still live, but they’re the walking dead. Bones, dry bones. No flesh and no breath.

Is that us? A number of us have been listening to the prominent Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann this Lenten season. He is nothing if not provocative. And he calls ours a “culture of death.” It is a culture where the many produce wealth for the few, and at a high cost – for the many. It is an economy that thrives on the production of weapons; a society in which you are measured by whether you count in celebrity or productivity. If not, you are considered useless, and hence disposable. Did you read the story of the bodies of the dead women found off Long Island. It turns out that they were bodies of women working as prostitutes; but no one missed them. They’re disposable – nobodies.

I said that Brueggemann is provocative; and you’d have to engage with him to argue back. But I repeat what my friend asked: “what’s draining us?” And I venture to answer that it has something to do with our need to produce, to be productive. We produce and produce even more, and we do it until we drop. Dead. Dry bones. It’s in our language. I say that my time, even my vacation time, has “been productive.” And mean that as a good thing. We long to be “useful”. We must accomplish something. We can even say that of our worship! “It’s been productive.” As a pastor I have heard older people tell me from the day I was ordained that they feel they might as well die, they aren’t any “use” any longer. So we work and we work. We live 24/7, three hundred sixty-five days a year.

We do it because we have to do it. We have to do it do it not simply to keep the wheels of commerce moving – or to buy our way out of recession. We do it because we have to put food on our table, keep the kids clothed, to say nothing of getting them into the right school, so they can get into the right school, etc., etc. We do it because we’re part of a society that doesn’t know another way.

And to stop? To suggest that life can be had with less? That you count just because you breathe? That life is not about getting what you deserve because you’re earned it, after all? That there is another way besides that of violence and greed, of winning and losing? That sounds like just so much romantic trifle. That’s not the real world. The real world is about life and death; and it will kill you.

We know that. You know that in your bones. What’s our response? I’ll tell you my response. When I feel my soul being sucked out, I want to escape. When’s vacation coming and I can get to the shore, or to the lake, or to that table on the edge of a square in Amsterdam? Is retirement close enough that I can hold out and still have something left? Or, our great religious out: heaven, a genuine rest, awaits when the trials and troubles of this life end.  That’s the final escape.

Tired of Lent? It sounds like I just dragged us back into it. Except that Ezekiel’s story is about life. Life now not in escape. Because the life that comes is not something that we can devise. The exiles trapped in Babylon couldn’t plan their way, or pray their way, or work their way out of their death. Dead is dead.

What happens is that God is going to do something. That’s the Biblical story, my friends. That this God is not a distant notion, a sort of Someone beyond the edges of what we can know and see. This God is going to do something.

And it’s not about escape. In fact, it is about the opposite of escape. God says it clearly. “I’m going to put my breath in you, and I’m going to put you on your own soil, your own land.” This is no escape to a nether world. The story isn’t that ours is a difficult life, but there’s a better life waiting. There is life waiting. But not in some nebulous future, perhaps when we die. It begins here and now. It is in the body – that’s what all that flesh coming to bone is about; and the breath into the body. And it is on this earth. “I will place you on your own soil,” which is back in Judah.

Here’s something of what I mean. Charles Austin is a retired columnist for the Bergen Record. He is also an ordained Lutheran minister. I’ve always enjoyed reading him, perhaps because I read him as a sympathetic colleague. This past week he was writing about the controversy over the placement of the unidentified remains of the victims of 9/11. He writes that what is important about ourselves, the “me” that makes me “me” somehow transcends the body. The body “shuffles off this mortal coil,” that sort of thing. If there is any “me” that has value, it’s what constituted the relationships, the memories, the shared experiences, etc. of this life. Austin has it half-right. There is more to “me” and you than can be contained within the brackets of birth and death. But he is dead wrong that the body is unimportant. As a Christian he’s wrong. God breathes new life into the bones, adding flesh to those bones, and setting us to live and work in a world that will include heaven, but never excludes the earth. We expect a new heaven and a new earth, but it is still this reality.

I repeat. This is something God does. And God does it as God’s breath wakens us through speech. First a bit of biblical/theological vocabulary. Like Reader’s Digest, I’m going to “improve your word power.” There’s a play on words going on in this text. Because the word in Hebrew for breath, ruach, is the same word for “spirit.” It’s what God blew into Adam’s nostrils on the first week of creation: God’s breath, or Spirit. So when the prophet speaks, God’s Holy Spirit puts flesh to dry bone and breathes life into a people who have run out of breath, so much so that they aren’t even corpses any longer. They’re only bones scattered on the killing fields of the cultures of death.

Why? Because the God who doesn’t live untroubled splendor far beyond the anguish of this world does not intend that the Babylons and the Assyrias, the Romes and the Londons, the Americas and the Russias, and whatever empire might be on the rise will have the last word; not if the product of their power is more dead bodies. Not if they are cultures that do not give pride of place to the last and the least, the broken and the lost, the poor and the down and out. Because this God intends life for God’s creatures, and for that life to be lived in the beautiful and magnificent creation that God’s voice called out at the very beginning.

So God says to the prophet, “Prophesy to these bones.” Which is short-hand for “speak the word, be the mouthpiece for my very own voice.” This is God saying to the dead, to bones that don’t have ears, after all, “I am going to blow my breath into you and you are going to live again.”

Now if that sounds odd to you, like just the sort of things that Biblical prophets dream – I know that you dream them too, but we tend to discount dreams as nightly phantoms – if that sounds odd, consider. Consider how we speak each other to life. For me it was a birthday, a week-day, and I’m tired and the voice I hear is my wife singing happy birthday to me. And then my granddaughter calls me and sings me my birthday. Calling me to life. Who has called you to life?

It’s what we do every Sunday morning with our children. In this place. That stand up and we prophesy to them. We give them God’s blessing. No matter what the world says to them. No matter how beaten down they might become. Hear this: “You are God’s beloved child. With you God is well pleased.” This is what God says to you – and then sends you to work in a world that demands production. But now your life is not determined by the quotas, by the numbers, by what you can show for yourself, by what you have “done lately.”

It’s Jesus who speaks this life to you. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he says. Can you hear him?

The world says: produce and you will be rewarded.

Jesus says, “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”

The world says: Grow up and live as responsible adults and then you can enjoy life.

Jesus says: “Let the children come to me for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

The world says: You get what you deserve.

Jesus says: “I forgive you.” And “pray like this: forgive us our debts as we forgive

our debtors.”

The world says: An eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. Better to get even.

Jesus says: “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.”

The world says: “Blessed are you when others says all sorts of good things about you.”

Jesus says: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of things against you falsely.”

The world says: “To the victor goes the spoil.”

Jesus says: “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.”

The world says: “You only go around once. Grab all the gusto you can get.”

Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life.” And he says “I have come to bring life and that abundantly.

A few weeks back I included a poem by Mary Oliver in our weekly enotes. It’s entitled “Maybe.” It’s subject is Jesus’ sermon on the mount and it includes these lines:

Maybe, after the sermon,

after the multitude was fed,

one or two of them felt

the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight…

When Jesus speaks, does your “soul slip forth”? Does something come alive inside you? Are you freed for the moment from a culture that is draining the soul out of you, or perhaps led you to forget that you had one? Can you hear a voice, perhaps at the edge of your consciousness, perhaps beneath your consciousness? Or maybe you only notice that others are hearing something? This is God breathing into you God’s own Spirit, and you are catching God’s breath. And in the midst of a life that seems more Lent than anything else, you might come alive. And know that the friend I mentioned at the outset is right. It is about joy and life. God enters this world of death and brings life. That was God’s intention all along. And God will not be frustrated. Thanks be to God!

I Samuel 16:1-13

We love to imitate success. You can take it to the bank. Advertising executives do. Imitation: it’s behind this morning’s story about God’s choice of a new king for the tribes of Israel and Judah.

First, the fuller story. When the freed slaves had finally made it to the Jordan after their long detour through the wilderness; after Joshua “fit the battle of Jericho,” and the motley crew had carved out a place in the land of promise, they settled down. Sort of. They were no more than a loosely connected collection of tribes. They had no central government, no central shrine, nothing that could be called a social infrastructure. When threatened by an outsiders, the tribe in danger would send out an SOS, usually to the nearest tribes, and they formed a sort of ad hoc defense pact.

It took time, but after a while, wiser heads looked around at neighboring peoples. Their neighbors had a better system; or so it seemed. They had centralized government. They had a king. So the freed slaves put their heads together and decided that they wanted to be a nation like other nations. “A king,” that’s what we need, “a king.” So they put the request to God’s prophet. This didn’t please God one bit; the freed slaves trusted more in the old systems, the very empire that had been their master, more in those systems than they did in God. But God acceded to their request and they got a certain Saul as king. Still, God reminded the people, be forewarned. A king may bring you prosperity; but the king will also bring taxation and will conscript your sons to do battle. Which, after a couple kings, is precisely what happened.

In any case, we come to our story and we hear God engaged in an exchange with God’s prophet, Samuel. King Saul has been a disappointment. So it’s time to find another who will replace him. Samuel is sent to Bethlehem, to the landholder Jesse. God will choose the next king from among Jesse’s sons. And here’s where the story gets interesting. Jesse brings his sons out one by one for an audition for the prophet. Samuel sees one after the other, each looks better than the last; they surely meet the criteria to be king-in-waiting. But no. None of them fits. The last one has paraded before Samuel and he’s run out of candidates. But no, there’s still another, the youngest, the least, who is taking care of the sheep.

And that’s the one. That’s David. We know about him; stories will be written about David, heroic legends. The story is startling – if it still has the power to astonish us. It startles because it’s about a God who doesn’t choose the way we’d choose – the way that any self-respecting people would choose. Even if we take the story’s delightful comment that this David is one good-looking guy, a guy who would win any current election, even if we think that Samuel’s wait was worth it, even then we know that David will turn out to be profoundly flawed. He may be a hero; but he became a terrorist (or freedom fighter), a father who raised a family that defined dysfunctional, an adulterer who would murder to cover up his lustful dalliance.

As I began to think through the story this week, I thought the sermon would be about how God chooses unlikely people to do God’s bidding. Which is true; and the Bible tells that story over and again. But beneath that story is one more profound still. It is that God differs from our expectation. This God is not like the gods the world has known; nor is this God like the God that we, even today, think we worship. This God eludes our imagining. This God doesn’t fit. Good thing. Because that’s to our salvation.

It’s there already in whom God chooses. Theologian David Bentley Hart has written an entrancing book entitled Atheist Delusions. He takes his readers back to the era of the earliest church. He notes that that church welcomed all sorts and conditions together: beggars, prostitutes, small businessmen, cripples, women, and even some nobility. This arrangement was almost impossible to imagine. Because that’s not how the gods had put the world together. That such people, including the Messiah, Christ, himself, even had standing as persons, would not, could not, have registered in that era. It was a revolutionary idea, and it was because the God who is present in the face of Jesus the Messiah doesn’t conform.

Here’s what I mean. A guy who uses the locker just down from me at the “Y,” insists on giving me literature from the Bible study he attends. Perhaps he thinks I need help with my sermons. He may be right; I can use all the help I can get. He handed me a sheet the other day taken from some nineteenth century divine and it was about God. God, this tract said, has no limits: there are no limits to the power of God, nor to the wisdom of God, nor to the grace of God, nor to the goodness of God. Pretty standard stuff, and I wouldn’t disagree with any of it. Except that such is how we think of God. God is the one who meets all the standards of perfection, as we measure goodness. And we worship such a God; or more correctly we worship such an idea of God. Which is, of course, idolatry. And we worship that idea of God because it fits what we want, or need, God to be.

But God is more elusive than that. We all tend to come to church – that includes us ministers – to meet the God who blesses the best of the way things are. (In fact, the most dangerous form of that is the God who meets our religious, or pious, notions of God).

Instead, God eludes our imaginings. And Lent reminds us of that awesome and saving reality. On the cover of a book given to me by my friend, the theologian Bram van de Beek, is the picture of some graffiti found on the Palatine hill in Rome. It pictures a jackass hanging on a cross. The caption goes: “Alexamenos worships his God.” This is clear ridicule of Christians. My friend Bram remarks that the graffiti unintentionally speaks a profound truth. Because this is a symbol of God’s presence in the world, of who God is. This is a god who is, in the eyes of the world, ridiculous. This is a weak God who allows himself to be crucified on a cross. That’s who God is. Not the God of power and might, the God who blesses a world where the spoils go to those who can claim power.

And this would turn the world upside down. All has changed. God freed the slaves; God came in the presence of the Messiah. The last and the least now count; they have, as Bentley Hart puts in his book, they have faces. To the extent we still live with the God who chooses the winners of the world, we’re living in an age that is past. It clings tightly, so tightly. Our more evangelical sisters and brothers would say that the devil is still tugging away, and they’re right. It’s just that the “devil” is far more sophisticated than some personal figure who exists in some shadowy place. But all has changed.

This supper is a feast of that reality. Who is God? God is in the crucified one who is present at the center of this meal. Where is God? God is in the breaking of the bread, in the shattering of the charm of the present arrangement. In this supper we “proclaim Christ’s death,” because this death is the dying of the old order, the threshold of the kingdom of God.

When our Reformed church was debating the acceptance of the Belhar Confession as a new confession for our church, a number of folk objected to the phrase in the fourth paragraph that says that God “is, in a special way, the God of the poor.” What about the rest of us? What about those of us who can’t be measured among the poor? Is God partial? Well, the Biblical answer is yes. But yes in a “special way.” God is the God of the broken and the lost; God doesn’t conform. What those who argued missed – and what I miss every day – is that we are all impoverished. My resistance comes because I don’t want to be impoverished. Of course not. But then the gospel is not about what is “of course.” The gospel is the great glad surprise that just there, just where we have nothing, where we have lost our way, just there God meets us – as the broken and ridiculous one on the cross.

How often do we approach God like the disciples in our gospel story? They asked their question about the man born blind and asked it wanting to get a handle on God. Where did things go wrong here? Something must have gone wrong. God must conform to our notion of how things work, to the “of course” of this world. Jesus upends their understandings. God doesn’t conform to our ideas of right and wrong. No, God will be glorified through this man, as Jesus enters his world and he sees again. God meets us in our blindness, where we lose our way. God does not conform. And that’s the best news I could hear this morning. Because if God did conform we’d all be lost, this world a cold bit of stone circling the sun. But God doesn’t – and that’s to our salvation, to the salvation of the whole world and more!